After several months recuperation, Chris Claremont is back at work, and his long-delayed run on Exiles is finally underway.

Claremont holds a curious position in the X-Men line at the moment.  Back in the 1980s, of course, he pretty much defined the X-Men.  There were some spin-off books starting to show up, but Claremont set the agenda.  When he returned to the X-books in 2000, he wasn't able to recapture the magic.  But while his stint as lead writer proved brief, he's maintained a presence as one of the team of writers on the line.  In fact, if you count X-Treme X-Men as a core title, he was still writing the X-Men for six years until, with this latest move, he was finally moved to the satellite titles New Excalibur and Exiles.

This, I think, is the best situation all round.  He isn't going to be the lead writer on the X-Men again.  His writing style, based on long-term, rather rambling subplots, is best suited to titles where he has plenty of freedom, and doesn't have to worry too much about what other writers are doing.  But there is still a substantial audience who want to read his stories.  So now he has New Excalibur, the only regular title set in Europe, and Exiles, which doesn't even take place in this reality.  These are titles where he can be left to do his thing, and where Marvel can get the best from him.

There's a degree of formula to Claremont's output, and plenty of familiar features can be found in Exiles #90.  There are the gratuitous sparring sequences.  There's an opening battle scene which turns out to be just a simulation.  There's the usual distinctive cadence to his dialogue.  ("You mean ta lead this team, you gotta think outside your box.")  There's the sudden introduction of Claremont's pet jargon - the Exiles now protect something called "crosstime", which happens to be the term he used in Excalibur in the 1980s.  (For some reason, the alien scientists are now being called "lizards", too, even though they're plainly drawn as mantises, and always have been.) 

And there's his well-established tendency to parachute in a pet character from a series he's worked on before.  So Psylocke shows up out of the blue, and Roma also pokes her head around the door.  Actually, even though she's a pet Claremont character, Roma has an excellent rationale to be in this book: her whole schtick is "guardian of alternate realities."  Psylocke does seem a little forced, though.

So... you know, it's a Claremont book, with all that that entails.  But there are good Claremont books, where he hits his stride, runs through the formula, and has fun telling a story, and there are dodgy Claremont books like X-Men: The End, where the tics were all there, but the underlying story flails around without any obvious direction.  On the strength of his first issue, Exiles is one of the good ones.  It's very Claremont indeed, but that's fine, because that's what you hire Claremont for.  It's bounces along quite happily.  The story sets off purposefully, and seems to know what it's about.  It all seems very cosy and familiar, but in a good way.

It's nice to have him back, really.

Rating: B+

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