Exiles is one of two X-books, the other being New Excalibur, which finds itself in the awkward position of running long-term fill-in stories due to the illness of Chris Claremont.  In theory, Claremont would have taken over from Tony Bedard several months ago, but instead Bedard has had to stick around and kill some time.

In these circumstances, there's not much point trying to start a major new storyline.  So instead, Bedard is just having a bit of fun, and messing about with the format.  The result is "The New Exiles", a gloriously absurd two-parter in which the Timebreakers manage to get rid of the team and go back to running the show themselves.  Faced with a world that (for completely arbitrary reasons) can only be saved by Wolverine, the Timebreakers adopt the time-honoured principle that if Wolverine is great, six of them must be fantastic.  And so we get a new Exiles team who are all-new, and all-Wolverine.

On reflection, considering the book's format, it's surprising that Exiles does so few stories where the heroes meet their own counterparts.  Putting six Wolverines in a room, while gloriously absurd, is also a cute riff on the formula that hasn't been properly done before.  And Wolverine is a good choice for the gimmick, because there are enough oddball variants out there to make a team which is still somewhat diverse.  So we've got the Days of Future Past version playing the "normal" Wolverine, while surrounded by a zombie, a robot, an utterly confused Weapon X and so forth.

This is all good fun, and Bedard manages to work in just enough character moments to give the story a tiny bit of weight without detracting from the silliness.  The main weakness is a wildly underdeveloped villain, Brother Mutant, who seems to change personalities between parts 1 and 2, and is obviously just a plot device to give the heroes something to fight.  We don't really care about him, or his throwaway world, enough for the climax to seem like a big deal.

At the end of the day, though, it's a gimmick story, and the gimmick is strong enough to carry two issues quite happily.  Cute.

Rating: B+

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