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THE EXILES #10
(Best of the Week!)
"A World Apart Part Three of Three"
Highly Recommended (9/10)
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Marvel Comics
Writer: Judd Winick
Pencils: Mike McKone
Inks: Mark McKenna, Jon Holdredge & Walden Wong
Colors: Transparency Digital
Letters: Sharpefont
Editor: Mike Marts
Price: $2.25 US/$3.65 CAN |
Winick, McKone and company are going to have a hell of a time topping themselves after "A World Apart," which started strong, built even stronger and ends on the highest note The Exiles has yet achieved. The humor is downplayed somewhat in this issue in favor of solid action, but the strong characterization that has been a hallmark of the book is still there, along with an almost palpable feeling of heroism and sacrifice. One of the things that I like about The Exiles is that it has a lot of freedom
to mess with status quo, whether it's reshaping worlds or altering main
characters, and Winick takes advantage of that to give "A World Apart" a tragic
and powerful ending.
This arc has been full of
surprises, and full of development of the relationships between the characters.
The romance between Blink and Mimic has been played up quite a bit, but this
issue the focus falls on another team relationship, and there's a surprising
revelation about what has happened during the team's downtime. I saw the
surprise coming about one page before it was revealed, and it was a very nice
twist, the kind of thing I'm not used to seeing in super-hero comics. And while
it foreshadowed the dire ending for one of the team members, it didn't give the
whole thing up, which was nice.
The notion of a hopeless fight
is one of those things that brings heroism to the surface, and Winick plays off
the idea of a fight against an angry god very well. There's a sense of almost
suicidal optimism from some of the characters, but you never get the sense that
the fight is going to end with them winning, and with this book, there's
actually no guarantee of that conclusion. Another aspect of the book is its
ability to kill off or otherwise drastically alter the main characters, and
there have been hints in Marvel's advanced press that something dire was going
to happen to the team as a result of this conflict. I don't think it's giving
away anything to reveal that something dire does indeed happen, and the
emotional payoff for that is pretty impressive.
A lot of what makes this issue
work is the action scenes, as an enormous amount of heroes, armed with shiny and
impressive alien technology, take on the imposing figure of Galactus. McKone and
his various inkers are very much up to the task of this large scale action,
whether it's the technology-based opening salvos, the sheer army of heroes
pounding away at Galactus or a lone hero fulfilling destiny by making the
ultimate sacrifice. There have been a lot of opportunities for crowd shots and
new character designs in this arc, and though it was no doubt a great deal of
work, the attention to detail and amount of imagination in the designs pays off
on the page. McKone also continues to show a great deal of strength in smaller
details like facial expressions and body language, and of course the continual
humorous transformations of Morph define the character as much as his dialogue
does.
With all the hype that has been directed at big names like Grant Morrison or major shake-ups like the changes in X-Force, Exiles probably hasn't gotten the
recognition it deserves. But this is a great book, one of the best X-books to
come along in a good long time, and "A World Apart" has cemented it as one of my
favorites.
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