Reviewing Chris Claremont can be a frustrating business.  He's the single most important writer in the X-Men's history.  He was one of the writers largely responsible for getting me to buy American comics in the first place.  In his day, his books were great fun.

So, as you can imagine, I really want Claremont's comics to be good.  I want to be as charitable as possible.  But these days his writing is hit and miss at best, and sometimes he misses spectacularly.

X-Men: Die by the Sword is really not good at all.  Now, to be fair, it's not a disaster on the scale of some recent books I could mention.  For the most part, it's entirely readable, despite the typically verbose dialogue.  It bounces along happily from scene to scene.  Claremont still has a whole armoury of vaguely story-shaped devices at his disposal.  But when you stand back and look at it as a whole, it just doesn't make any damn sense.

This may not be entirely Claremont's fault.  The story shows glaring signs of last-minute rewrites, and I'll come to those in a minute.  But none of that alters the fact that it's a bad comic.

Despite the title, this is actually a miniseries co-starring the Exiles and Excalibur.  Both teams are up for an imminent relaunch, with Claremont writing New Exiles and something (most likely Paul Cornell's book) replacing the cancelled New Excalibur.  The remit of this series is to shuffle the characters around and get them into place for the new series.  Fine so far as it goes.

Claremont has tried to hang the reshuffling on the Fury, Merlyn and James Jaspers.  This plot thread has been meandering through his comics for a few years now, and it reflects his understandable appreciation of Alan Moore's Captain Britain stories.  However, just because it worked for Alan Moore doesn't mean that these characters are particularly good ideas for a Chris Claremont story.  Jaspers is a weird comedy stereotype.  The Fury is a mindless robot with no personality.  And Merlyn, at least in this story, is just a generic bad guy.  So we're off to a bad start, with no compelling villain.

To compound that problem, it turns out that there are simply too many characters in the Exiles and Excalibur, most of whom have no particularly good reason to be in this story.  So most of the cast end up standing around politely on the sidelines and being ignored.  A subplot reuniting Longshot and Dazzler, which ought to be a big deal for the two characters involved, ends up squashed into a few panels at the back.

Still, all of this could still lead to a fundamentally sound story.  But with this final issue, things finally degenerate into total incoherence.  It's built around a big fight between Captain Britain and the Fury.  The handful of remaining Captains from parallel worlds stand around on the sidelines, deciding not to intervene because, er... yeah.  Saturnyne is given a speech which tries to justify this, but it makes no sense whatsoever.

Despite that, the big finale is... two other characters charging to the rescue.  So apparently it wasn't so important to let Brian fight the Fury alone after all.  This is one of the most contrived examples of artificial peril I've seen in years.

It gets worse.  The Exiles' excuse for not charging in to help comes when Blink tells them that they need to make a plan first, since the Fury is so powerful.  "We can't just react," she says, "we have to think."  In itself, not so bad.  But then, a whole panel later, Blink unveils a mysterious plan which she attributes to "instinct" and which she "can't really explain."  Then she makes her farewells in the style of a character who's about to be written out.

Blink's inexplicable plan, as it turns out, is to teleport into the battle, throw some javelins at the Fury, and get the hell out of there.  Because although Claremont has spent half the series telling us that the Fury is terrifying, unstoppable and invulnerable, it turns out that you can beat him just by chucking some explosive spikes at him.  This is the point where my jaw hit the floor.

The disjunction between Blink's set-up scene and what she actually does a few pages later is so huge that it screams "re-write."  For that matter, so does the fact that there's a second Fury on the splash page which is never, ever mentioned again for the rest of the issue.

And just to finish things off, everyone agrees that Albion should be the one to rebuild the Corps, thus completing an insanely rapid turn from "demented conqueror" to "villain with honour" to "protector of the omniverse."  It's not an inherently bad idea for the character, but it's done with such speed as to be ridiculous.

Somewhere along the line, an entire plot thread about a character called Rouge-Mort seems to have gone missing, and there's a baffling subplot about the Exiles being watched by unnamed "gods."  This plot has been meandering along for a while now.  By the way, if you didn't know, they're supposed to be Dave and Paty Cockrum, which is why this issue is dedicated to them.  Even though they play no part whatsoever in the story, they're the focus of an epilogue which portrays them as legendary figures representing the foundations of the superhero genre.  What this has to do with anything that has come before is an utter mystery.

The best that can be said for this issue is that the art is perfectly acceptable, that it has some ideas that might have worked if they'd been handled differently, and that Claremont makes a valiant but doomed effort to disguise its essential incoherence.  That, combined with my inherent goodwill towards Claremont, is just enough to drag it out of the D ratings - but only barely.

Rating: C-

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