Issue(s): Excalibur #8
Cover Date: May 89
Title: "Excalibur's New York adventure"
Credits:
Chris Claremont - Writer
Ron Lim - Penciler
Josef Rubinstein - Inker
Terry Kavanagh - Editor

Review/plot:
Guests Ron Lim and Josef Rubinstein handle the art for this mostly downtime issue in the wake of Inferno and while Excalibur is still in New York.

The main story has Captain Britain waking up to find that Meggan is not in their hotel room. He spends the issue looking for her while she wanders the streets searching for her own identity but mostly gloming onto the identity of everyone she meets instead.

Until the end when she seemingly regains her self-confidence.

Captain Britain, meanwhile, is having, ah, performance problems.

As for the rest of the team, Nightcrawler has gone to California to pick up the X-Men's "Stratojet" to solve the transportation problems we saw Excalibur have on the way to New York.

Nightcrawler continues to have problems teleporting.

Phoenix, meanwhile, eavesdrops on her alternate universe mom and baby brother, but does not stop in to say hello.

And probably the most significant bit is Kitty Pryde showing up at the X-Mansion to find the New Mutants picking through the ruins. She's pretty jerky.

And then she sees baby Illyana, who tells everyone to stop fighting.

Mirage creepily uses her powers to briefly create replicas of teenaged Illyana and Doug Ramsey, but Kitty takes the lesson and has her send them away. She's then invited to join the New Mutants, who have been invited to join X-Factor, but she declines.

Note also the reference to the mansion's self-repair systems. We'll see that in Damage Control #4.

A good downtime issue that takes the time to do some character development. And it's nice to see Excalibur not entirely isolated from the rest of the X-Universe by having Kitty meet the New Mutants here. And Lim is a nice substitute artist despite me thinking of this series as being an Alan Davis vehicle.

Quality Rating: B

Historical Significance Rating: 1

Chronological Placement Considerations: See the Considerations for New Mutants #74 for the positioning of this issue with New Mutants #74-75. One additional thing to note is that Mirage's pegasus, Brightwind, is seen in this issue but doesn't appear in either New Mutants issue. But the horse could have been summoned and then sent away.

In the scene where Captain Britain is trying to lift the taxi, we see Spider-Man and Doctor Octopus fighting in the background.

The MCP do not count that as an appearance for either character, perhaps with the idea that it's just a gag. But i've decided to include them.

References:

• Magik was reverted to childhood in New Mutants #73.
  
• Doug Ramsey died in New Mutants #60.

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: N/A

I guess Phoenix learns for the first time here that her mother's still alive (or her mother's alternate timeline counterpart, not to be confused with her mother's alternate timeline clone whom Rachel has also met without much fanfare), and it's not a very big deal. I'll put this down to Rachel's mind wipe at Mojo's hands--it's not clear what exactly he erased, but whatever he did maybe makes her less emotional about family than she was in her Uncanny days.

Walter, that's not the only problem. Walter hears Jean talking about how Nate is the son of a clone of hers. So she MUST realize that the woman she encountered was Maddie. Does she wonder if the other X-Men are alive? Did she read Jean's mind and find out they're alive? Is she keeping the truth from the rest of Excalibur?
Kitty knows about the mansion's self-repair systems and isn't worried about them stealing from innocent people?
Meggan seems depressed over what she did as the Goblin Princess. I wonder if this is what Claremont wished he could do with Maddie.

I remember reading this story here in Brazil, many many years ago. I vaguely recall a cameo of Clark Kent and Lois Lane, and if I'm not mistaken, it went something like this (I'm translating from Portuguese like I originally read it)
CLARK: "Isn't New York amazing, Lois? Everywhere you go you find a super-hero!"
LOIS: "Yeah, someday there will be more of these super-folk than us."
It's a 20-year old memory, but it stuck because it was the first proper Marvel story I read. Back then I knew nothing of superhero comics and I just figured that Superman and these X-people were part of the same company.

This was a good issue. The story combined with the art really made Excalibur a much better book than X-Factor or New Mutants at this time, which is why I kept this but had dropped those.

I do wish, though, that they had dropped the "X-Men are dead" bit. At this point, X-Factor has finally met the X-Men again, but they kept the New Mutants and Excalibur out of that loop. And shouldn't someone tell Kurt that Jean is alive? When does he learn that? When does Excalibur finally learn the X-Men are alive? IIRC, none of Excalibur will actually appear again in X-Men until close to #300. That's still a few years away. It's like Claremont wanted to keep this team together and the only way to do it was to keep Kurt and Kitty unaware of the X-Men still being alive.

Erik, Excalibur finally reaches out to make contact with the X-Men in Excalibur 41, although the dialogue makes it clear that the team realized the X-Men were alive when they saw the news reports from the X-Tinction Agenda. Rachel thinks to herself in that issue that she knew for a long time (either since this issue or Days of Future Present) but kept it from the other members of Excalibur.
As for when Kurt learned Jean was alive, that's complicated. He definitely found out at the latest when he reached out to the X-Men in Excalibur 41. However, Moira and Banshee probably knew by the time of the Cyclops serial in Marvel Comics Presents 17-24, since they knew in that arc about Scott's hallucinations after he thought Maddie and the baby were dead. Of course, that just raises further questions. When did they find out Jean was alive? Did they share this information with Kurt? Also, remember Kitty seemed not to know that Baby Nate was kidnapped by the Marauders in Excalibur 6, even though she saw the video of Maddie asking Scott to find the baby in X-Men 227.

Note that Kitty is [arrogantly] asking why the New Mutants couldn't have simply obeyed the headmaster. She hasn't seen him in a long time, doesn't know what he's been up to lately. Whatever you think of Magneto's various changes, it's clear that Kitty has a totally different idea of Magneto than the New Mutants have, especially with "NM" #75 following directly in this timeline.

Rightly or wrongly, Kitty gets to speak her mind on the guy who nearly killed her in order to defy the X-Babies, and her thoughts on Doug Ramsey too, but only gets stopped by Li'l Illyana throwing a fit.

That's continuity, folks. Different characters have different perceptions of the same events, and remember what has happened before.

'The Fall of the Mutants' has very perplexing repercussions. I cannot see why the X-Men couldn't tell their friends the truth about their deaths right away. Fer chrissakes, people were grieving like crazy. Captain Britain thought his sister was dead, he was drinking himself to death, taking it out on Meggan and even neglecting some of his responsibilities. Excalibur was one comic that really touched me with its characters' mourning of the X-Men. When did other X-people find out the truth? And how pissed were they?

If nobody knows anything about the Blackbird, then who decided to obey "the owner" and get it ready for flight? I am assuming that's the reason Nightcrawler can just start it up. And what a daring rogue, he doesn't do a pre-flight walkaround or anything before he pushes a button to fly across the continent.

And where does he land? I doubt he could just land a jet he stole from Lockheed-Martin itself at New York Airport, and even if he lands at the X-Mansion, it's not like he wouldn't have been tracked all the way, and now he's led the government straight to the remains of the X-Mansion.

It is indeed difficult to suspend disbelief when it comes to the idea of a private jet that is somehow used, kept and stored in secret at a distance of about 35 miles from Manhattan in the continental USA.

Those things need a lot of expensive maintenance and infrastructure and must be incredibly easy to trace by the DoD. Maybe it was more believable in 1978 or so. These days, we must assume that the X-Men made the location of their hangar known to the DoD the minute Blackbird took to the air.

Hasn't the X-Men's Blackbird been enhanced with Shi'ar technology? Certainly it'd require super-science to explain this sort of problems away.

"I cannot see why the X-Men couldn't tell their friends the truth about their deaths right away."
IIRC, the whole point of them "pretending" to be dead was to spare their friends and relatives from being in danger. Keeping them in the dark was the only way to do that.

I think the members of Excalibur are fully capable of taking care of themselves (and X-Factor too), so the X-Men trying to "protect" them by faking their deaths doesn't hold any water.

@Bill That logic doesn't hold up when you review that as of the issue that the X-Men faked their deaths, Kitty was recovering from discorporation, Nightcrawler was in a coma and only woke up after the X-Men died, and X-Factor were believed to be bounty hunters selling out their own kind. There are all sorts of meta reasons to not like Storm's Plan Omega, but in terms of story telling from the X-Men's perspective, it did make sense. It's only after Inferno that it seems redundant.

Shi'ar technology completely escaped my mind.

Ok, how does Rachel - who has been obsessed with her father since she reached this period in time - just happily watch her mother - who she's loved her entire life but was outraged to discover is dead at this period in time - and her baby brother - who shouldn't exist as far as she knows?

In "X-Men" #201, she was happy to meet the baby, but that can be attributed to an "AWWW CUTE!" moment. In "X-Men" #206, she freaked out at the very idea of meeting her father, whom she'd met several times before. [That was the same issue Madelyne was shot by the Marauders and rushed to a San Francisco hospital, and the X-Men were in San Francisco at the time. Odd coincidence.] She'd been going steadily downhill since meeting the Beyonder and nearly destroying the universe to stop him. Then there's all the stuff Mojo and Spiral did to her.

And now she's just floating among the clouds, watching everything through a pane of glass. This girl has problems.