Just when you thought Marvel had finally grown tired of the "New" prefix, here comes New Exiles, the revamped and relaunched version of Exiles.

What monumental change has led the book to start over from scratch?  Um, well, there isn't one, really.  It's still written by Chris Claremont.  It's still about a group of heroes from parallel worlds living in the Crystal Palace and helping to set things right on other Earths.  There's a new roster, but most of them were introduced a few issues back.  And there's new artist, Tom Grummett, but he took over with Exiles #100.

So really, there's not much new about New Exiles.  It's Exiles #101, no more and no less.

That said, there are positive signs in here.  Some of Claremont's recent stories have been all over the place.  We've also had an excessive number of stories about the Fantastic Four.  It's a worrying sign when they show up yet again on page 2, but in fact, it doesn't look as though the story will be about them.  This story uses them in their familiar role as the first heroes of the Silver Age, to establish that it's a world where the superheroes never got off the ground.  The actual story is set a generation later, although we don't get to the meat of it in this issue.

Instead, most of the issue is spent on yet more set-up, fleshing out the relationship between the new Exiles, and giving them a bit more personality.  Even though most of them are based on familiar characters, this is still badly overdue.  At last, there's finally an attempt to define Mystiq's personality, and to mark out Cat as being in some way different from Kitty Pryde.  Several characters take the step from being cyphers (or clones of the originals) to being a little more distinctive.

Artist Tom Grummett has never been one for spectacular images, but he's always been a sound storyteller.  He's clearly trying his best to get away from the tedious and ugly light pink crystals which have dominated Crystal Palace scenes in the past, and he also does a rather good Sabretooth.

That's the good.  But there are still a lot of problems here.  The issue is still riddled with weird glitches, such as Sabretooth announcing the unveiling of new costumes, which then singularly fail to appear in later pages.  There's a clunky scene with Psylocke and Mystiq in which she goes from instinctive distrust to flirtation in the course of two pages.  Psylocke also seems remarkably unbothered about having an explosive bracelet strapped to her arm against her will.  Rogue delivers an excruciating two page monologue which couldn't be further removed from actual speech.  Sage is caught up in a storyline about the Diana Fox persona from Excalibur - a story that didn't work the first time around, and hardly cried out for a reprise.  A sequence with Morph and Cat playing football really doesn't make much sense at all.  And the cliffhanger is so out of context that it's more confusing than tense.

So... plenty of problems here.  But there are some elements here that could work - dump the Diana Fox angle and I could even see some potential in Sage's insanity plot.  Claremont's fanbase will probably see this issue as a positive step in many respects, and it does have a sense of direction that's been noticeably absent from his Exiles stories until now.

Rating: C

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