EXCALIBUR #123 - August 1998

Lost & Found - The Search Part Two

Credits: Ben Raab (writer), Trevor Scott (penciler), Scott Hanna (inker), Richard Starkings & Comicraft (letters), Kevin Tinsley (colors)

Summary: Excalibur fights the erratic Mimic, who fends off the team’s attacks. Following Nightcrawler’s orders, Douglock uses his techno-organic coils to shock Mimic with electricity. Mimic is stunned into submission, and the telekinetic dome surrounding the Zero Tolerance outpost disappears. The Prime Sentinels escape, with at least one Sentinel expressing gratitude to Excalibur. Meanwhile, Meggan prepares for her wedding to Brian Braddock. She asks Moira if she should reveal to Brian the crush she developed on Nightcrawler during his absence.

Continuity Notes: According to Brian, his Captain Britain powers still haven’t returned. His fear that Meggan would reject him without his powers was the main reason he stayed away from the team for so long.

Review: Excalibur is only a few issues away from cancellation, so Raab has begun to set the stage for the finale. Brian and Meggan are now making real plans for their long-delayed wedding, while Shadowcat tries to reassure a dubious Nightcrawler that Excalibur still has a reason to exist. In-between the conversations, the team gets beaten up by Mimic for a few pages. The fight scene is mainly there to fulfill the action quota, although Raab slips in a bit of characterization for one Prime Sentinel. The unnamed cyborg prevents her fellow Prime Sentinels from killing Excalibur while the team is distracted, condemns Bastion for tricking her into becoming a Sentinel, and renounces her own prejudice as she flies off into freedom. I don’t think anything else was done with this character (years later, Chris Claremont will introduce another sympathetic Prime Sentinel), but I appreciate the attempt to humanize at least one O:ZT participant. The rest of the issue is by-the-numbers action/subplot juggling, although Raab’s dialogue isn’t as awkward as the previous issue, so it’s an easier read.

EXCALIBUR #121 - June 1998

With Friends Like These…

Credits: Ben Raab (writer), Trevor Scott (penciler), Andrew Pepoy (inker), Comicraft’s Kiff Scholl (letters), Kevin Tinsley (colors)

Summary: Moira decides to leave her quarantine, while Douglock unsuccessfully tries to reconcile with Wolfsbane. In Jerusalem, the rest of Excalibur joins Sabra to fight Legion. Nightcrawler realizes that their opponents are actually the ghosts of Legion’s multiple personalities, striking out in anger after losing their host body. With Meggan’s empathetic help, the three personalities are able to cross over to the afterlife. In exchange for their aid, Sabra gives Excalibur a disc she claims has information on Xavier’s whereabouts.

Review: With only a few issues to go, Ben Raab assigns the team two missions that didn’t seem to bother the main titles much. The question of what happened to Legion following “The Age of Apocalypse” was never satisfactorily addressed, which didn’t seem appropriate for the character that initiated the largest X-crossover ever, and just happened to be the son of Professor Xavier. Legion’s death was ignored as soon as it happened, and wasn’t even used on the list of growing heartbreaks that led to Xavier’s transformation into Onslaught. Judging solely on the contents of the books, Xavier was shaken more by the murder of the mutant stranger in X-Men: Prime than his own son’s death.

Since Legion’s multiple personalities were much more than creations of his own mind, presenting them as ghosts makes a certain amount of sense, and bringing in Sabra is a nice use of a guest star. Raab actually posits that Xavier asked Sabra to join Excalibur in the past, but she refused the offer. That’s one way of explaining why one of the Marvel Universe’s unaffiliated mutants rarely appeared in the X-books, although the continuity is a little iffy, since Xavier was never involved in deciding Excalibur’s membership. Raab writes Sabra as rude and arrogant, which I believe is supposed to be her default personality, and it makes her a good foil for the team.

The story closes with Sabra handing Excalibur information on Professor Xavier’s location, which was supposed to be a major mystery at the time. Not that the main titles would ever let you believe it, since the X-Men themselves didn’t seem that interested in finding their mentor. Why exactly Nightcrawler assumes Sabra has that info is unclear, unless Raab is riffing on the idea that Mossad has spies within the US government. She later tells her superiors she was lying, which likely means the next issue won’t bring us anywhere near Xavier. Still, it’s amusing that poor, forgotten Excalibur got around to a story called “The Search for Professor Xavier” a few months before the main titles bothered with “The Hunt for Xavier” crossover.

X-FACTOR #145 - May 1998

Phantoms

Credits: Howard Mackie (writer), Duncan Rouleau & Trevor Scott (pencilers), Jaime Mendoza & Scott Hanna (inkers), Comicraft (letters), Glynis Oliver (colors)

Summary: Greystone learns of the kidnapping of a boy, Micah Leash, whom he believes will grow up to become the overseer of a mutant death camp. The XUE reluctantly goes along with his search for Micah, which leads to them rescuing the boy from a cult. Fixx declares that saving Micah from the cult will change his path, which sates Greystone’s bloodlust. Meanwhile, Forge gives Havok access to a secret base on the condition they never speak again.

Continuity Notes: The future Micah is described as a “betrayer to mutant and human alike…a Hound who wore no collar and no mark.” Half of his face is scarred, presumably by the cult that kidnapped him as a child. Greystone’s mother was killed by Micah, just as Greystone’s powers emerged while receiving his “M” mutant brand. Coincidentally, all of this happened at the exact moment the Summers Rebellion began, which freed the mutant camps.

Now, in the present, we learn that most XUE members have retained their host body’s memories (Fixx appears to be in the body of an amnesiac). Archer inhabits the body of international terrorist Jude Black. Desperate for some kind of family, he calls a woman named Rachel. She wants nothing to do with Jude and hangs up.

I Love the ‘90s: The cult that kidnaps Micah is a new millennium doomsday cult.

We Get Letters: A fan remarks that he hopes the series isn’t cancelled, which is responded with “The rumors are totally false, Mike. By issue #150 the core team will be decided and man, are you going to be happy!” In response to another letter that criticizes the book’s lack of direction, the editors assure the reader, “Don’t worry, though, we have a direction! It will all come to a head in issue #150 so stay with us.” Could you ask for a better demonstration for the mess this book has become?

Review: I wonder if the creative team honestly thought people cared about the XUE characters, or if this was a final, desperate shot in the dark. They’ve become the stars of the book too fast for the move to be a reaction to reader response, so it seems obvious that they were created specifically to be the new leads. Were they created as the saviors of this flagging title? They’re x-treme, they’re from the future, and they all have wacky manga haircuts. Had this been published earlier in the ‘90s, the scheme might’ve worked. By the late’90s, all of this had been done to death, especially in the X-books, and the kind of audience that elevated Cable and Bishop to superstar status wasn’t really around anymore. This issue, they’re given the token “Would you kill baby Hitler?” plot that virtually every time-traveler is assigned, and not surprisingly, Howard Mackie doesn’t bring a lot of originality or emotional resonance to the concept. The inexplicable idea that their time traveling is tied into “host bodies” is also revived, so now we’re expected to care about the XUE and the random identities they’ve assumed. What part of this is X-Factor? I’m sure most readers were relieved that the existing cast wasn’t being subjected to the horrible writing anymore, but did Marvel really think the audience wanted a soft reboot by the same creative team?