Okay... it's Sunday night, I've been working half the weekend, I'm short of time, and we're going to race through this week's stuff largely to avoid leaving a gap in the archives.  Don't worry, none of it really matters.  Normal service to be resumed next week.

Exiles is still in the middle of its "World Tour" storyline, and I'm still irrationally irritated by the fact that it isn't called "Worlds Tour."  How can you have a World Tour of multiple earths?  It annoys me quite disproportionately.  Anyhow, the Exiles are still chasing Proteus from earth to earth, partly in order to thwart his evildoing, but mainly so that the readers can enjoy a nostalgia tour.

With issue #76, we finish off a trip to the 2099 universe - or, more specifically, a version thereof.  The previous arc featured a version of the New Universe, and in a cute segue, Proteus makes the trip by possessing Justice.  That allows him to turn up in the 2099 Universe at the point where Justice would have entered as the Net Prophet.  (Yes, they had a character called the Net Prophet.  Don't ask. It was fashionable at the time.)

After the initial phase, which was just a House of M crossover, World Tour has teetered between having a plot and indulging nostalgia.  It's doubtful, for example, whether the New Universe arc really needed a major role for DP7.  With the 2099 two-parter, we're at least dealing with comics that more people remember, and there's actually an objective in mind here: get Spider-Man 2099 onto the team.  (Or, more accurately, a counterpart of him.)

But the plot is a bit flimsy.  Proteus turns up hoping that the people of this unusually advanced world will be able to sort out his "burning through host bodies" problem.  He possesses Hulk 2099, fights the Exiles for a bit... and then just wanders off after deciding that the locals can't help after all.  It gets the job done, I suppose, but it's not a particularly satisfying story.  I always liked Spider-Man 2099, and I'm quite happy to see him join the team - not least because it dilutes this book's quite unnecessary over-reliance on X-characters - but this is really a two-issue rationale to get him into the cast, rather than an actual story.  Everything else depends on your level of nostalgic affection for the 2099 books.

Okay for what it is - namely, an affectionate reminder of how good the early issues of Spider-Man 2099 were - but rather underwhelming on any other level.

Rating: C+

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