Excalibur #21-25Issue(s): Excalibur #21, Excalibur #22, Excalibur #23, Excalibur #24, Excalibur #25 Review/plot: Well, if we can make it through this, we have survived the Cross-Time Caper. I thought this was the one that might break me. I may be a husk of the man i was before, but i did get through it. I know that some people like the alternate reality stuff. To me it's a waste of a story, so having it go on for an entire year just drives me crazy, and the fact that Claremont for the most part does not seem to have anything to say about the variations we are seeing just compounds that. That may change with these issues, but not for the better. Days of Future Past was an important story not because it was cool to see old Wolverine or Magneto teaming up with the X-Men or an adult Franklin Richards, but because it showed a (or perhaps "the") future that was awaiting the X-Men if they failed to make Professor X's dream a reality. The more we see other realities and visit pirate world and Marvel Crossover world and anime world and all the other nonsense, it dilutes what made Days of Future Past special and important to the X-mythos. I bring this up because Claremont goes back to the Days of Future Past well in these issues, and indeed poisons it. Ugh, ok, in issue #21 Excalibur have landed on a world where Captain Britain is Crusader X and Nightcrawler is a Prussian spy working for the Red Skull. Also, America is still a colony of England and while Captain America is trying to fight a clean revolutionary war, Iron Man has allowed his expediency to turn him evil and he's allied himself with the Shadow King, who is running the Hellfire Club. And also Kitty Pryde is Courtney Ross... ...and Archangel is a girl. The above paragraph reads like something generated by a game of Madlibs. The Shadowking thing, though, may have greater significance. If speculation seen in various comments on this site and elsewhere are to be believed, Claremont was building the Shadow King up to be the X-Men's biggest threat, responsible for much of what's been going on in their book for the past year or so and was leading up to the idea that the Shadow King was putting the world on the path towards Days of Future Past. If this was true, especially the latter part, it was extremely wrongheaded. Days of Future Past is a story of human persecution of mutants, with the "evil mutant" role being to show what will happen if more militant mutants aren't stopped from interfering with Professor X's dream of human/mutant integration. An evil mutant shouldn't in any way be behind the government's persecution of mutants because it completely ruins the metaphor. And frankly a psychic boogeyman has little place in the X-Men's corner of the Marvel universe beyond a flashback demonstration of Professor X's first encounter with an evil mutant, and maybe a fight with the New Mutants since fighting second tier X-Men bad guys is within their remit. Otherwise, leave the bodiless psychic embodiments of evil to Dr. Strange. I probably should have saved that rant for the Muir Island Saga, but his prominence here at a time when Claremont is building him up in the main X-Men title caught my attention (and it's not like i have anything else to latch onto with these stories). Claremont uses him as part of a rehash of the Dark Phoenix saga, with Mastermind - through Emma Frost, who like Selene is a sex slave of the Shadow King's (and... gross, Claremont) - trying to convert Jean into a Shadow Queen. This attracts the attention of Rachel Summers, who arrives in time to find Jean dying. She goes after the Hellfire Club, and it's then that we learn that in her Days of Future Past universe, the Hellfire Club was responsible for the death of Professor X. And there too they were really pawns of the Shadow King. And then something about Mojo? Like, what is all this crap? Why are the Hellfire Club involved in Rachel's Days of Future Past storyline? What's Mojo doing here? Why did Rachel have the Phoenix Force, which she didn't claim until she came to the real Marvel universe? The answers to these questions are mostly lost to time, but they can't be good. The Special Editions that are referenced above are eventually published as True Friends in 1999, but it doesn't answer these questions; it only shows how the Shadow King knew about Rachel Summers since before her parents were born. Anyway, whatever, Excalibur stop the immediate threat but have to move on. The next two issues are drawn by Alan Davis, and i was kind of hoping that the reason the Cross-Time Caper got extended was because Alan Davis got delayed in drawing an awesome conclusion that brought some meaning to this whole thing. But that's not the case at all. Issue #23 is a Judge Dredd pastiche... ...where Nightcrawler is a Judge/Justicer, and Magik is Dr. Strange, and Moon Knight is the Hulk and a turnip farmer. I might have made some of that last sentence up but you'll never know. Magik becoming a sorcerer supreme and irredeemably evil might have been an interesting insight into Claremont's take on the character, but the end of the story explicitly curtails any such speculation. It doesn't matter what was going on with you. You were a bad guy and i fought you and now the story's over. For the conclusion of the Caper (#24), Opal Luna Saturnyne just plucks Excalibur out of the timestream and has them hang around in her dimension for a while until Widget is repaired. There's no ending here; it's just, "it's time to go home now". During the previous issues, back on regular Earth (which i nearly missed was the case), Nigel Frobisher allies himself with Jamie Braddock to take over Vixen's crime gang. And Kitty Pryde, who returned to regular Earth in the previous arc, checks up on the Warwolves. Then, in #24, while the rest of Excalibur are in Saturnyne's dimension, Kitty is celebrating her 15th birthday with Sat-yr^9, her alternate universe duplicate. Actually, the idea that they are alternate universe duplicates is not clear, and in fact they are described as being "one in the same" in "all the ways that truly matter". Further complicating things is the fact that Sat-yr^9 is posing as Courtney Ross, who she is also a dead ringer for, and the story doesn't even reference Excalibur #5 where Sat-yr^9 replaced Ross. She's just described as being Ross here and there's no hint of anything else in these issues. I mention these things (and point out the lack of footnotes in the References) in part because it seems like more and more Claremont is writing for a dedicated audience that has been with him from the beginning. As fun/silly adventure stories with an "event" banner, the Cross-Time Caper might have been a jumping on point for new readers. And while i don't know what sales numbers were at the start, the Statement of Ownership in issue #23 (the first for the series) shows that the numbers were phenomenal. So probably we had a lot of new readers. It doesn't seem to be hurting sales, but it seems like a lot of this stuff would have been kind of confusing, and i bet a lot of people had no idea that there was anything sinister about "Courtney" in this story. It does put a whole different twist on things. The idea is a My Fair Lady kind of thing where Ross convinces Kitty to stop moping for her lost friends and get her hair done and fly to Paris in a private jet to hang out with the elite. I dunno. If i were trapped in another dimension, i would hope you would go try contacting Dr. Strange or Reed Richards instead of going jetsetting. Doesn't seem like a Kitty Pryde move to me. But of course if we can assume that Sat-yr^9 is manipulating Kitty in some way, it's a whole different thing. Kitty's story ends with her failing to get into Oxford, and therefore agreeing to go to a finishing school to further refine herself. Back in Saturnyne's dimension, the one wrinkle is that Saturnyne had earlier tried to have Phoenix arrested because she's such a threat to the multiverse. So there's a lot of silly hijinx about disguising Rachel as Kitty... ...which mostly seems to be set-up for a weird and mean-spirited knock at John Byrne. In the end Saturnyne lets Rachel go without a fuss. Any examination of Rachel as the Phoenix seems therefore to be shunted to the final issue of this arc, which is not a part of the Cross-Time Caper (although the cover jokes about how long it was). Unfortunately, Alan Davis could not be with us for this Galactus issue, so we have Chris Wozniak's version. The idea is that Galactus has come to the conclusion that the Phoenix is a threat to his existence. It's not clear why he's acting on that at this particular moment, especially since the group had been away for so long. I guess it was just on his to-do list. Or maybe he was waiting until he sensed her again, but in that case he sure shows up the moment they're back on Earth. Anyway, Rachel obviously isn't going to go without a fight. The art above actually looks pretty good, but that's less the case with the Watcher. Important to note that Galactus only wants to liberate the Phoenix from the body that it's in. That suggests that it's not so much that Galactus sees the Phoenix as a threat as he sees it merged with a human as a threat. Which, considering Dark Phoenix, is fair enough. It might have been nice to see Galactus describe what the Phoenix actually is independent of a human. We will get a kind of explanation for that in this year's Fantastic Four annual, but that explanation won't really jibe with the idea that it's not a threat to Galactus in its pure form. And that's sort of my problem with this story. This is potentially an interesting confrontation, and it should be elucidating. But even beyond the fact that what happens here doesn't get a definitive explanation, this is happening in Excalibur. I've seen a lot of fans point to this issue, usually as an objection to something that's going on with the Phoenix. But i'm pretty sure it's never been referenced in another story. We're kind of in backwoods territory, or rather Claremont is probably operating without having cleared things with the Gruenwald/DeFalco faction. Anyway, since it's not guaranteed that Rachel would survive any separation process (even if she would submit to it), Excalibur choose to oppose Galactus. Galactus says he won't be responsible to what happens to them or their world, which seems to violate Galactus' longstanding vow to leave the Earth alone. Galactus deploys some protoplasms to deal with Excalibur. One interesting thing that comes out of it is that the group seems to be coming to a consensus that Nightcrawler is the team's leader. During the battle, Rachel and Alistaire Stuart wind up together and two things of note occur. One is that Rachel shows that she knows that Alistaire has feelings for him, which she thinks is sweet but doesn't reciprocate. The second is that they find more alternate universe versions of themselves seeping in from other dimensions in the basement of Exalibur's lighthouse (which we've seen before), and it's observed that in all their alternate universe travels they've never seen an alternate version of Rachel. The rest of the team fights the random monsters that Galactus has deployed. More observers show up to the fight. First Roma. And then Death. Seeing the Vertigo version of Death among its various incarnations reminds me that that the version of Death here seems less evil and more "the natural way of things" than the version appearing in Silver Surfer (and, for that matter, the Fantastic Four annual back-up that i mentioned earlier, but we'll get to that soon). Rachel seems to have an easier time with Nova than Jean did with Firelord. Meggan tries fighting Galactus by draining all the power from the Earth, which is probably as notable as anything else going on here. It may be a little too much for her to fight Galactus, but she nonetheless seams extremely powerful, well beyond how she's usually used. Doing 75% of that for a minute or so to dropkick Dr. Doom across the Earth seems well within her capabilities if we're going by this. But Rachel realizes that neither she nor Meggan nor anyone else can fight Galactus without destroying the Earth. So she gives up. But pulling the Phoneix from Rachel starts causing the stars in the sky to disappear. All the various cosmic beings hanging around then lecture Galactus on why he can't do what he's doing. But note again that this is all about separating the Phoenix Force from Rachel. "That child is Phoenix... You can no more divide her spirit from flesh than you can life from death". But of course we know that the Phoenix has been separated from Phoenix before; it was in Jean Grey first, after all. So what are we saying here? Maybe the Phoenix Force just doesn't want to be separated from Rachel? It's too late, and it's permanently bonded with her, and whatever Galactus feared is potentially going to happen? I don't know, and we're pretty much reached the end of Claremont's run (one more issue after next issue's fill-in, and then Kitty's Girls' School From Heck a little later) so we won't be exploring this any more. The Phoenix has always been a bit of a weird fit for the X-Men. As a cautionary tale for a mutant's powers going out of control, it made perfect sense and was completely in-theme. As an actual cosmic entity, it became more problematic, and when the power was transferred over to Rachel it got even weirder, and then Inferno muddled things up further. In hindsight it might have made more sense to eliminate the Phoenix Force during Inferno, or even during this story, to get Rachel back to being "the mutant from the bad future" without any cosmic baggage. That said, this issue in and of itself provides some intriguing hints and at least feels a lot more relevant than the twelve issues of Cross-Time Caper that came before it. Statement of Ownership Total Paid Circulation: Average of Past 12 months = 317,320. Single issue closest to filing date = 292,300. Quality Rating: D+ Chronological Placement Considerations: Pushing this back in publication time a bit to make it easier for Excalibur appearances that take place after they return from the Cross-Time Caper. References:
Crossover: N/A Continuity Insert? N My Reprint: N/A Inbound References (12): show CommentsFnord, I don't see how Alt-Emma and Alt-Selene being sex slaves is any different than the usual crap Claremont pulls. Posted by: Michael | May 14, 2015 8:30 PM Was this the first use of the phrase "Ultimate Extinction" in connection with Galactus? Posted by: cullen | May 14, 2015 8:53 PM I think what Claremont had in mind about Rachel being inseparable from the Phoenix force is another nod toward Rachel not being a Summers at all, but a virgin birth from the Phoenix force. He's ten years ahead of George Lucas with this awful idea. But I wouldn't blame Claremont for the Cross-Time mess and these lackluster issues, just as Louise Simonson probably isn't to blame for Judgment War or the Ravens nonsense. I think there's a huge amount of editorial constraint being imposed by Harras. Claremont, seemingly forced to keep Excalibur sequestered from the MU that matters, deals with this by planting hints about things that might happen in the main continuity: evil Illyana, Kitty becoming Saturnyne (Claremont executes a variation on this years later with Sage/Tessa becoming Roma's replacement), the Judge Dredd riff on mutants being outlawed, the Shadow King fomenting a war, and SK being the secret ruler of the Hellfire Club. These issues are the first time Farouk is referred to as Shadow King, by the way, and its largely a reference to Hellfire Club nomenclature. My impression is that Claremont wanted SK to trigger the events that would lead to DoFP, but he wouldn't necessarily be the archtect of the entire scenario--though at times CC hints in that direction. What may be as bad or worse than SK being responsible for DoFP, though, is Claremont's apparent intention to retcon From the Ashes and the Dark Phoenix Saga so that SK was behind one or both. (There's a slim possibility that Claremont always intended From the Ashes to have a secret tie to Farouk--who sort-of returns in NM concurrently with the Uncanny storyline--but sticking SK into Dark Phoenix or other early Hellfire Club / Council of Chosen stories would seem pretty egregious.) Posted by: Walter Lawson | May 14, 2015 10:59 PM @Michael (and fnord12): There’s a point about Claremont’s recurrent use of slavery and rape and child abuse that no one here has quite pinpointed. I don’t think he uses those motifs deliberately for political or social commentary, and I don’t think it happened entirely because he imported large chunks of Anne McCaffrey and Marion Zimmer Bradley into the Marvel Universe (pretty shrewd of him to do that, too, because there was a large potential audience for Marvel superheroes among SF readers who liked McCaffrey and/or Darkover yet didn’t see anything at Marvel that was inviting them in until Chris came along; but I digress). The reason that Claremont goes back to slavery and abuse and rape and all that so often is that his fundamental obsession as a writer is power and control and domination. That’s what his stories are all about. Male or female, it’s always about who wins by not being beaten down by the other side, who can be more dominant and assertive and determined. In a Claremont story, the hero doesn’t win because of superior power or a clever trick but because she or he had the drive to not give in. That’s obviously a central preoccupation for him. So when it comes to issues of control and dominance and power, naturally sexual abuse and rape imagery are going to be part of his repertoire. It’s much more uncalculated for him precisely because that’s his natural theme, whereas it would be less forgivable in another writer who wasn’t so preoccupied with themes of personal power and was deliberately choosing to write a rape scene just to make a political statement of “rape is bad and this is how I illustrate this bad guy is bad, because he’s a rapist.” It’s an area that does make me uncomfortable in comics, because I don’t think it should be played with, and too many male writers fall into that “good liberal” thing of wanting to make a statement when it’s not their statement to make. It bothers me less in Claremont’s work than it does from other writers because of how it fits into the entirety of his work, and the unforced and instinctive way he heads in that direction. But it’s worth bearing in mind that only Claremont can take advantage of that exemption. I don’t think the rest of us can tread lightly in that area. @Walter: I think Claremont's later claims that Rachel was the immaculate conception of Jean and the Phoenix was his usual sleight of hand, and he intended to pull a fast one by eventually revealing Wolvie as the father. The back-up in Uncanny X-Men Annual #14 is so obvious a clue when the first person Rachel takes her boyfriend from the future to meet is him. Posted by: Nathan Adler | May 15, 2015 5:47 AM Nathan, the problem is that Claremont often has his female characters turned into "sluts" through some sort of mind control, and implies that part of them enjoys it. We'll see a particularly creepy example of this when we get to Uncanny X-Men 265-267, where it's implied that part of Lian Shen likes being the Shadow King's sex slave. "Women enjoy being raped on some level" is a lot worse than "rape is bad and this is how I illustrate this bad guy is bad, because he's a rapist". Posted by: Michael | May 15, 2015 7:55 AM @Michael: I beg to differ re: Rachel. It was hinted by Claremont more than once, but the most blatant occurred in Uncanny X-Men 384, where Tullamore Voge attacked Phoenix (Jean) and Wolverine on the Astral Plane and turned them into hounds briefly. Voge is a slave trader, and he told Jean and Logan that their offspring would have a skyrocketing, extreme price on the slave market. In the background there are illusionary images of Logan and Jean in... intimate poses. As you may know, Rachel was the best hound… period. Ahab considered her to be his “favourite hound”. Her telepathy made her such a superb tracker that Rachel became the prototype for the hound program. Aside from her telepathy, Rachel may have also been the best hound because if Logan is her father, then she may have inherited his animal keen senses, which is a useful ability for tracking, especially familiar scents, since she often led Ahab to her friends and family to be killed by one of his energy harpoons. The previous hint lies earlier in Uncanny X-Men Annual #14, when Ahab turned Cyclops (and Sue Richards) into his hounds, to track down Rachel. Cyclops was unable to find her. This surprised Ahab, who always thought that hounds can easily track down their blood relatives. This hint does not necessarily allude to Wolverine being Rachel’s father, though it does hint that Cyclops is not her father. Then there's the lead back-up I mentioned. But I'd also throw in the example of Logan gutting Rachel in Uncanny #207. Logan’s teammates saw it as him appointing himself the keeper of the X-Men’s conscience. But isn’t it a perfect painting of a child walking in her father’s footsteps while her father is desperate to prevent her from making the same mistakes he did? Why did Logan respond so strongly to everything Rachel went through, while Cyclops was barely affected? The ol’ “Scott’s lame” theory doesn’t explain enough. Why did one man respond on an instinctive level to Rachel while the other barely noticed her as “the new girl”. But now? Now there’s no question. Most recently, in Uncanny #451, Rachel says about Logan, “I called him ‘Old Man’, Bishop... because in the best sense of the words... that’s what he is to me.” Posted by: Nathan Adler | May 15, 2015 8:37 AM Whoa, Galactus must have been juicing up on steroids! He's WAY taller than he's even been portrayed before! Was this a sign of the excess of the 90's to come? Also, Kitty turned 15 here, just like I did. That solidified my crush on her (of course, being drawn by Alan Davis also helped). Somehow she's seemed to have aged much better than me over the years since :( Posted by: Bill | May 15, 2015 11:49 AM Well, when Galactus was dying, Reed pointed out that he had shrunk down in size, and that his size must be variable based upon his energy level. (I'm paraphrasing from memory, so I hope that is accurate.) So maybe here he had arrived after recently consuming a particularly energetic planet. Posted by: Erik Robbins | May 15, 2015 12:32 PM That also appears to be Thanos-Death and War Is Hell-Death(which Claremont also wrote) on that page. Claremont should probably be happy that Neil Gaiman never noticed this; when Cary Bates used Gaiman-Death and another avatar of Death in "Captain Atom", Neil reportedly got angry and declared there was only one version of his Death, period. Posted by: Mark Drummond | May 15, 2015 8:08 PM Um, that's really not Gaiman's Death. His death is a little goth girl. The Death in that picture looks closer to Gaiman's Dream though. Posted by: Max_Spider | May 15, 2015 8:57 PM This would be the first instance of offspring of Wolverine not having claws. Posted by: Vin the Comics Guy | May 15, 2015 9:09 PM Because Gaiman is a petty hypocrite like that. Posted by: Thanos6 | May 15, 2015 9:33 PM All right, when did Neil Gaiman get angry about the Captain Atom thing? Anything you can link to? Posted by: JP | May 15, 2015 9:43 PM @Max_Spider, i believe that is Chris Wozniak's rendition of a goth "girl" (or woman). Posted by: fnord12 | May 15, 2015 10:00 PM The story is per Cary Bates in the recent Back Issue #79. Posted by: Mark Drummond | May 15, 2015 10:02 PM Well, I just looked it up. The "petty hypocrite" said he wasn't mad about it, called the CAPTAIN ATOM issue "a fine comic", and merely voiced his opinion that in trying to incorporate Death more tightly into the mainstream DC Universe, the story had missed the mark a bit. He also says he never required people to ask his permission to use Death after that, but to this day most writers do anyway. Posted by: JP | May 15, 2015 10:03 PM Here's the verbatim piece from Back Issue #79: "The three-parter in Captain Atom #41-43(May-July 1990) was overshadowed by a mini-controversy that erupted over Bates and {Greg]Weisman's use of Gaiman's Death. While the Black Racer had been the book's personification of death, this story went a step further by also including Nekron and the female incarnation recently seen in Sandman. 'It's a big concept.' she declared. 'There's room for more than one of us'. Posted by: Mark Drummond | May 17, 2015 11:19 AM It's interesting that that Back Issue is saying that without any caveats. Back in 2011 Brian Cronin CBR reached out to Gaiman and got a much milder reaction. See here (and click through to CBR). Of course we don't know if Gaiman's reaction was different at the time. But as JP says, this is all pretty off topic for this entry. I imagine Gaiman was interested in establishing the rules for Death in DC's cosmology, and a nod to the character in a Marvel book probably would have been understood as just an homage. Posted by: fnord12 | May 17, 2015 11:29 AM In his 1994 interview with The Comics Journal, Gaiman mentions Chris Claremont stopping by his house for a visit at some point. He also tells a funny story of how his son Mikey basically made Claremont tell him the entire history of the X-Men. (From memory) "I'd be walking by and there's this ten year old boy saying 'so explain to me about adamantium claws.'" It's almost certainly an homage to Gaiman's Death, and blame Chris Wozniak's art (and Marvel's legal department) that it doesn't look better. I don't know about the "Captain Atom" appearance, but Gaiman's never minded homages, and in 1990 he was making his overtures to DC that he deserved more of a creator's share in the property, which included all of the Endless (except Destiny) so although he prefers to be given approval on such things, I'd think any testiness on his part would come from it being in the middle of his attempt to gain control of his characters. Control, I might add, that Claremont was never given over his characters. Just to, you know, not be totally off-topic. Posted by: ChrisW | May 17, 2015 12:27 PM I did find a statement from Gaiman himself in Amazing Heroes #185(11/90): Posted by: Mark Drummond | June 22, 2015 5:24 PM I had dropped Excalibur by this point, as the Cross-Time Caper just seemed like an endless excuse to prevent Kitty, Kurt and Rachel from rejoining the X-Men, so a couple of things that seem odd here. Kitty turns 15? I guess that means everything since X-Men #166 has happened in the space of a year. That's one hell of a year. Also, Rachel says here that Xavier was killed by the Hellfire Club. I have a pretty distinct memory of Rachel remembering the death of Xavier - it must have been in New Mutants because I remember the Senkiewicz art. Does this explanation ret-con what we saw previously? Posted by: Erik Beck | October 1, 2015 12:10 PM You're right in that it makes no sense that Kitty turns 15- from the time Scott and Maddie first have sex to the baby Nathan's birth it has to be 9 months. How old is baby Nathan supposed to be at this point? Posted by: Michael | October 1, 2015 9:42 PM @Erik Beck: Not necessarily. If the Shadow King was part of the Hellfire Club as Magneto said, then he could have used the Club connections to expose the school to the Army as recalled/ depicted by Rachel in New Mutants #18. As I recall, the SK was supposed to be behind the DOFP pulling the strings, so he could have bragged to Rachel at any point before she came back in time, thus she would blame the Shadow King and not his tools. So, no ret-con as far as Claremont's stories go;) Posted by: Nathan Adler | October 2, 2015 3:13 AM Ah, but Nathan (and Michael), IIRC, she was just a kid in the NM flashback. Here she's in costume and at least a late teen. It makes it seem like she was pulled to this scene immediately following Xavier's death and that doesn't work at all with the previous scene. Either way you cut it, I'm thinking Claremont forgot about the previous scene in NM. Posted by: Erik Beck | October 2, 2015 6:35 AM Claremont being inconsistent about continuity? THAT'S NOT TRUE! THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE! Posted by: ChrisW | October 3, 2015 4:17 PM It's worth noting that a lot of the key characters int his era have been manipulated by Mojo; Psylocke over in X-Men got bionic eyes from him, and Rachel here has been mucked with as well. Claremont generally uses Mojo as a spoof of his editors and of media executives, but he's also supposed to be some kind of warped "anti-life" force that can kill the Earth just by hanging around long enough. Possibly Claremont is suggesting that Mojo and the Shadow King are similar entities, either literally or simply int he sense that both of them are forces that oppose free will and life itself. (Paging Jack Kirby!) It's worth noting that Claremont likes this theme of "sides" related to order and chaos, free will and freedom: he used it in Thor Annual #9 with Odin and Dormammu, and he uses something similar in his "Fall of the Mutants" story with order and chaos as necessary balanced opposites in a "game" that never ends. (Paging Jim Starlin!) Posted by: Omar Karindu | November 8, 2015 9:36 AM "Why are the Hellfire Club involved in Rachel's Days of Future Past storyline? What's Mojo doing here?" In UNCANNY #189 Selene-controlled Rachel has a fever-dream where she's tortured by the worst fears from her memories, "real or imagined", and there we see Hound-Rachel burning in some very literal hellfires and then breaking off in a very Hellfire Club appropriate costume that as a Phoenix-y sash. So, either the Hellfire Club has to be understood to have had their hands in the hound process in her timeline, OR this alternative timeline can be written off as a fevery nightmare she herself induced when she seemingly jaunted the train here which collects her more tormentous pre-Excalibur experiences into a nonsensical jumble of false memories. Posted by: Teemu | November 8, 2015 11:59 AM Mind you, Selene did quite expertly turn von Roehm into a hound of hers in #208... Posted by: Teemu | November 8, 2015 12:10 PM #21 and #22 are the only issues of this first run of EXCALIBUR that I like. The rest of it was okay, but I'm not a fan of Technet, the Warwolves, the Crazy Gang, Jamie Braddock, and other Marvel UK/Otherworld material as other people are. As a teen, I got the book until Claremont left with #34 and then got odds and ends issues here and there. But now I look back and don't think much of it at all. Posted by: Andrew Burke | July 15, 2016 9:53 AM Justicer Bull appears to be named after Emma Bull, lead singer of Cat's Laughing, a band Claremont liked that appears in Mojo Mayhem and the Arcade issues of Excalibur. Posted by: Walter Lawson | November 27, 2016 4:35 PM I'm deliberately ignoring Kitty turning 15 here (as I'm sure many of you do as well) and just assuming Claremont either forgot what her exact age was supposed to be or overdid Marvel time. As we know, Marvel's version of compressed time is 4 publication years = more or less 1 in-universe year (there are variants, but that's the one I decided to stick with). UXM #166 was released way back in '83 so that means around two years should have passed in Marvel since then. And as Michael notes, there's the Nathan problem (out of many other chronological considerations). Let's just assume Kitty actually turned 16. Now I hope her next birthday issue doesn't blatantly mess things up again. Posted by: Nate Wolf | September 8, 2017 2:37 PM Nate, it's an odd mistake for Claremont to make, as he's been fairly meticulous about showing time passing in his X-Men titles (basically, he goes through a calendar year in terms of seasons over a period of about 3 publication years). I'd guess that the purpose of making Kitty 15 might be to allow the Girls School From Heck storyline that's coming up in a few issues to make a bit more sense, due to the school leaving age in England being 16. She's still far too far ahead of the other students for the premise of the storyline to make sense (especially since the idea of Oxbridge rejecting a genius-level student with unusual education is bunk - I'm aware of several cases of top UK Universities taking students who weren't even teenagers). Whilst I really quite like those issues, the premise doesn't hold water. But if Kitty were 16, it would hold even less, as the best place for her to study if she couldn't get into a University would be a further education college, not a (not as elite as it seems at first glance) public school. Posted by: Stevie G | September 9, 2017 2:40 AM Dang. This is getting convoluted. I could assume Sat-yr^9 manipulated Kitty to make her believe she's 15 instead of 16 and did the same with the school staff so they don't notice it either, all part of a sinister plan that started with the birthday cake... But this is getting out of No-Prize territory and entering epileptic tree level of speculation. I'll just forget about all these contradictions and keep assuming Kitty ages the Marvel time way unless the story needs her to be 15 for a few issues without thinking too hard about it. Posted by: Nate Wolf | September 9, 2017 2:03 PM For extra convolution, where are Kitty's parents? Is there any reason not to think they still believe she's at Xaviers? Posted by: ChrisW | September 9, 2017 8:44 PM Kitty's dad is presumably in witness protection or something after what happened in the Kitty Pryde and Wolverine limited series. Posted by: Michael | September 9, 2017 10:22 PM In fact, both of her parents are said to be in Witness Protection in issue 21. Posted by: Michael | September 10, 2017 10:28 AM Really? I mean, I believe you, but really? They still probably believe Kitty's at Xavier's though, right? [Maybe Betsy or Roma made them forget they had a daughter?] Posted by: ChrisW | September 10, 2017 6:44 PM We see Kitty's mom in issue 78, and she doesn't seem to be in witness protection in that issue or to have seen Kitty's dad in a while but she does know Kitty's in Britain. Posted by: Michael | September 10, 2017 7:53 PM That is probably because it became a forgotten plot point. The Witness Protection is a result of KP&W limited series in 1984, by Excalibur # 78 it is 1994. Ten years is a lot of time. Claremont likely remembered it in his head because he kept track of his own continuity and plans. But since Kitty's parents are seldom mentioned and that plot point is essentially dead, most writers and editors are simply going to forget about it. Claremont's handling of the general "supporting cast" of the x-books is one of his few obvious weaknesses as a writer. He actually has a large number of such supporting or recurring characters (Colonel Rossi, Sharon Friedlander, Tom Corsi, Stevie Hunter, Peter Corbeau to name a few), but they are only sporadically mentioned so when they appear it can be jarring since we're not introduced to them. Very often they would appear in his books and I'd scratch my head since I had no idea who they were despite reading a title for years. Posted by: Chris | September 10, 2017 11:47 PM The issue of Kitty's parents reminded me of a similar situation. Over in The New Mutants, when Dani decided to remain in Asgard rather than return to Earth, were her parents ever told? I don't remember there ever being as much as a throw-away line to that effect. Dani was still a teenager, so you'd think her parents would want to know that their daughter decided to live in another dimension. Claremont was no longer writing the book, and the creative team of that time probably had other things concerning them, but that cross my mind at the time. Posted by: James | September 11, 2017 1:36 PM Dani's relationship with her parents isn't actually that far behind Kitty's, and Kitty is the poster child for what's wrong with 'comic book time.' Kitty's parents being in the Witness Relocation Program is actually a good way to get them away from everything. Literally, they don't know that their daughter has moved to Latveria, then England, then gone off to some boarding school. That works on a story level. What doesn't work is if she's still moving around from being 13, 14, 15, 16 or 17, depending on an individual story's needs. [Just how drunk did Larry Bodine get her? Or Courtney in this issue?] By this point, Claremont had been writing Kitty almost as long as Kitty had officially been alive (13 years or so.) Marvel Time just doesn't work that way. Posted by: ChrisW | September 12, 2017 1:04 AM I was suprised that they let "15" year old Kitty drink champagne. Posted by: Brian | July 20, 2018 2:17 AM Comments are now closed. |
|||||||||
SuperMegaMonkey home | Comics Chronology home |