New Exiles #4 completes the book's first arc.  Look, it says so, right here in the solicitations.  "The conclusion to the series' first arc", it says.  It's worth stressing, because I suspect it would come as a surprise to a lot of readers.

Now, admittedly, I had been wondering whether New Exiles was going to feature anything remotely different from what we've seen before.  This issue suggests that perhaps it will.  In the past, New Exiles has been the comic book equivalent of Quantum Leap - a handful of regular characters, but essentially a series of separate stories in separate settings.  With this arc, however, Claremont seems to be setting up a world that he plans to return to.  At the very least, I can't figure out what else he might be doing.

This might not be a bad idea.  The Exiles format can get rather repetitive, and the possibilities for hanging out in the Crystal Palace are a bit limited - not to mention that it's an ungodly ugly place, which involves drenching the page in bright pink.  Now that the Exiles are in control of their travels, it actually makes reasonable sense that the series should pay regular visits to their respective homeworlds, and start to build up some stories there. 

So in principle, all this sounds fine.  The problem is that what we've actually had is four issues of set-up with no real plot to speak of.  The recap page speaks volumes: it solemnly recounts that character A went here and met so-and-so, while character B went there and met some other guy, but at no point gives the faintest indication as to why any of this happened, or what anyone was fighting about.

This isn't the fault of the recapper.  The story has simply consisted of the Exiles wandering around this world, meeting assorted characters, and getting shot at occasionally.  The world itself is a garbled and overcomplicated one.  Starting off with the premise of a planet ravaged by disaster back in the sixties, it somehow lurches off to become a story about a hybrid of Wakanda and Atlantis, and then belatedly announces that the human race has terraformed Mars.  Meanwhile, Claremont has slipped back into his habit of hurling under-defined villains at the page, with names like Bloodwitch, Black Dog and Rough Justice.  There's even a Shadowclaw wandering around.

Set-up arcs are all well and good, but they still have to tell some sort of story in their own right.  Go back to Claremont's early X-Men issues and you'll find plenty of stories that work in precisely that way - stories where the point is really to introduce a villain for future use, but which are at least structured around the X-Men overcoming a clearly defined immediate threat.  In comparison, this is just a random string of events with a fight at the end.  It doesn't even serve as a good introduction for new character Gambit, who stands around on the fringes for most of the issue without really contributing anything.

In the wider scheme of things, there may well be some merit to this approach.  But as an opening storyline, it's all over the place, I'm afraid. 

Rating: C

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