I recall that a few months ago, I thought Exiles was a solid but somewhat repetitive book. Oh, how I miss those wine and roses days for this book. After an uninspired and messy two-parter, Chuck Austen begins his fill-in run on this book with a story predicated on two of the worst X-Men series in recent memory, Howard Mackie's Mutant X and Chuck Austen's Uncanny X-Men. Leaving aside that the Exiles crossing into mainstream continuity seems like the last thing the team should be doing, this story goes back to the dull villains from "Dominant Species" and plays out in the same over-the-top, melodramatic fashion that Uncanny X-Men has become known for in the past few months.
It seems to me that if you're a fill-in writer following up the series creator, there are certain expectations for your run. I can't blame Austen for using his strengths as a writer, namely a gig on a high-profile book, to try and draw readers into Exiles (and draw Exiles readers back to his regular gig on Uncanny), even if it's not something I particularly want to read about. What I was kind of taken aback by is that the first few pages of this issue are spent rewriting the premise of the Exiles based on a frankly stupid idea about Havok and his role in the space-time continuum so that this is more of an Uncanny X-Men story than an Exiles story.
Actually, pretty much everything I don't like about Uncanny X-Men currently is to be found here. Nonsensical, random characterization? Check. Over-the-top melodrama and dialogue? Check. A plot that swerves all over the place with no rhyme or reason? Check. Lame villains, lamer costumes and uninspired artwork? Big ol' check.
Part of what drew me to Exiles in the first place was the artwork of Mike McKone, and I actually didn't mind most of the work done by Jim Calafiore either. But Clayton Henry's work here is substandard, even in light of the ugly costume designs he's been saddled with and the sheer number of characters Austen has written into his script. The characters all have a similarity of appearance (really, sans colors and costumes, I defy you to tell Havok and Mimic apart) and nothing in the way of expressive emotion, and the backgrounds are mostly nonexistent, with the occasional flash of something like the medlab only serving to highlight the lack of backgrounds elsewhere.
Really, upon opening the issue and seeing the Timebroker (little early to be pulling out the book's big gun deus ex machina, especially when Austen doesn't seem to get his enigmatic style) explaining that Havok was some sort of nexus of realities, I figured it couldn't get much worse from there. But it did, as the book quickly falls back on the cliche of evil twins and then brings back Maximus Lobo, one of the lamest villains to appear in X-Men since Nanny and Orphan made their way into these pages. Run away from Exiles. Run away until Marvel gets around to running the rest of Judd Winick's scripts, at least.
