Product Description

The British mutant team's earliest incarnation is still trying to find its feet, only to fall headfirst into the Inferno! Meanwhile, Mojo's first batch of X-Babies escape to Earth, but Excalibur has much worse doppelgangers to deal with before the Cross Time Caper commences! Guest-starring the New Mutants! Featuring dinosaurs, demons, rock stars and royalty! Collects Excalibur #6-11 & Excalibur: Mojo Mayhem

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #665155 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 200 pages

Customer Reviews

Developing chracters
This volume collects Excalibur (v.1) # 6-11 and Mojo Mayhem. All are written by Chris Claremont, and the artwork is by pencillers Alan Davis, Arthur Adams, Ron Lim, and Marshall Rogers, and inkers Paul Neary, Josef Rubinstein, Terry Austin, and Bob Wiacek.

The first couple issues crossover into the X-Men Inferno event, and while Excalibur isn't key to understanding Inferno, reading Inferno helps to understand what's happening in Excalibur. Phoenix responds to the psychic distress call of her "brother" Nathan Christopher Summers, and the rest of Excalibur follows, but they all get trapped by the chaos of New York before they can help with the major event. Claremont uses his oft repeated plot trick of having one or more of the characters getting corrupted, in this case Meggan and later Captain Britain, and the team is forced to fight each other.

After the battle, while still in New York, is the character development issue where Meggan deals with her empathic shapeshifting identity crisis (she tends to look like what people want her too, so how does she get to know herself?), Captain Britain's powers seem to be fading, Kitty deals with the loss of yet another friend from her X-Men days, Nightcrawler steals the X-Men's old jet (not knowing that the X-men are actually still alive) and Phoenix checks in on her baby brother.

Then, back in England the dimension hopping story that's been building since issue #1 (in Excalibur Classic vol. 1, 'natch) comes to a head as Hauptman Englande leads a Nazi version of Excalibur into our dimension to retrieve the Nazi Moira MacTaggart and Callisto. This of course has gets a big reaction from Kitty Pryde, who is Jewish. This story also sets up the next volume "The Cross-Time Caper."

And in Mojo Mayhem the newly cloned X-Babies rebel against Mojo and escape to Earth. They turn to Kitty Pride for help, and together they try to manage a cross country trip while being pursued by Mojo's newest agent . . . the Agent! He can look like anyone and if you sign the dotted line, he owns you body and soul!

Excalibur is the lighthearted spinoff of the X-Men line, and these stories are plenty of fun, but don't expect anything epic. The character development is good, but in signature Claremont style it can take years before a concept is resolved. The Alan Davis/Paul Neary artwork is some of the best in the business, and my personal favorite from this period in Marvel history, but they only illustrated three of the six regular issues collected here. The Lim/Rubinstein and Rogers/Austin artwork isn't bad, but by comparison it seems a bit lacking. It's always nice to see Arthur Adams illustrating the Mojoverse characters he help create in the original Longshot miniseries, and to this day nobody can draw Mojo like he can.

If you're looking for a stand-alone story, this isn't it. But if you enjoy comics from the era of single issue stories with dangling subplots, when you could pick up and enjoy a single issue, but long term readers were also rewarded, then this is a good example of the time. Also, if you're planning on picking up the other Excalibur Classic volumes, then this is definately an essential prelude to the third volume.