Excalibur is part two of Marvel's return to Claremont for the X-titles, and I have the same mixed feelings I had for his Uncanny X-Men, without the warm nostalgia for Alan Davis and built-in affection for the characters. Still, Excalibur, reusing a fan favorite Marvel series name for no reason easily discernible in reading the book, has a good premise, with Professor Xavier moving from advocate of the dream to elder statesman, taking on the daunting task of rebuilding the destroyed mutant nation Genosha. This first issue sort of lays out where Xavier is mentally these days and where Genosha is at physically, and it's this stuff that is pretty gripping, but then the second half of the issue is full of Claremont-ian cliches and dialogue, including the sarcastic ghostly form of a dead friend and several completely forgettable mutants whose role in the story seems forced and artificial. But then the book finishes off with a genuine surprise, something that shouldn't have dropped my jaw as much as it did but certainly got my attention.
Genosha is one of those concepts that I liked from the first, and though it has certainly been the center of some terrible stories, it has also provided a lot of neat ideas that fleshed out the world of Marvel as different and interesting. The transformation of Genosha from mutant-driven slave nation to mutant terrorist nation to mutant paradise and then into 9-11 parallel of terrorist destruction has been an interesting one, and having Xavier rebuild an entire mutant nation winds up looking like a well-planned culmination of his character up until this point. Claremont and Lopresti spend most of the first half of this book exploring both characters (Xavier and Genosha) through their history to their modern point, and it's a good, continuity-light overview of what brought them here. It's surprisingly light on the overblown dialogue as well, and honestly, if I didn't know better, I'd think that someone other than Claremont had written the first half, because it features a lot less of the unreal speech-ifying and stiff, overwritten dialogue that I've come to expect and gives a real sense of the disappointment and worry that is driving Xavier at this point.
And then we get to "Oh! That so totally -- hurts!" wherein Xavier apparently turned into a sixteen-year-old girl as written by Claremont. At this point, the story goes off in the direction I'd expected it to. Moira McTaggart turns up as a "ghost" of Xavier's subconscious to provide a sarcastic counterpoint to his inner monologue, and the talking starts overwhelming the art again. Then there's an attack by some of the most C-grade of mutant villains and intervention on behalf of a couple of new, and fairly uninteresting, characters whose motivations are completely unexplored and unclear. They come out of nowhere because it's convenient to the plot, and like Moira, their role seems to be solely to prevent Xavier from just examining the situation on his own for the entire issue. I understand the difficulties of writing an issue-long monologue, but given how strong the early stuff is, I think the book would have been better for it.
This book had a bit of mini-controversy surrounding it when the Powers-that-Be at Marvel removed Igor Kordey from the book to replace him with Aaron Lopresti. I'll be honest, fully half of my interest in this book came from the notion that Kordey was going to be bringing his work to it, and I'm disappointed not just in Marvel but in the fans who never got into Kordey's unusual, less mainstream but undeniably beautiful style. (Those who also enjoy Kordey's work can see what Excalibur #1 might have looked like HERE, and thanks to Paul O'Brien for the link.) That said, Lopresti is a good artist who has been waiting a long time to break into the big time, and he certainly does a nice job here, with the exception of one key moment near the end that was unclear on first read-through. The opening splash of Genosha is spectacular in showing the devastation of the nation, and the work on the characters reminds me a great deal of Gary Frank's work on Midnight Nation and Supreme Power. Lopresti and Adams have brought their "A" game, and while I'm disappointed that Kordey didn't get his shot at this book, I can't say that I'm disappointed in the artwork.
The big question at the end of Excalibur is "what is the book going to be about?" Claremont provides a big surprise at the end, and I hope that he's got a good explanation in mind for how this new partnership came to be and how it relates to the events of Morrison's New X-Men, but as long as he does, this seems like a natural partnership to rebuild the nation. The question I have is, can Claremont write a book about the rebuilding of a mutant nation, exploring things like the politics and the construction and the laws and that sort of thing, or will this be a book that is mostly about mutants in costumes fighting each other, with the rebuilding of Genosha as little more than backdrop? Based on the first half of the book, I have some hope, and based on the second, I have some doubts. I guess we'll see in a few months which one wins out.
