Issue(s): Excalibur #86
Cover Date: Feb 95
Title: "Back to life"
Credits:
Warren Ellis - Writer
Ken Lashley - Penciler
Tom Wegrzyn - Inker
Suzanne Gaffney - Editor

Review/plot:
Excalibur is not participating in Legion Quest, but the book is going to be part of Age of Apocalypse. This issue sets up the story that Excalibur intended to get to if it weren't interrupted by AoA. So we have an issue full of expository set-up for a story that readers in realtime wouldn't see the continuation of for five months. It might have made more sense to do a fill-in of some kind, but Excalibur had been in water-treading mode since Alan Davis left and i can see wanting to try to make some forward progress. This issue does have a significant development: the introduction of Pete Wisdom.

We start with a prologue, seeing Pete ("Peter", actually) having just wiped out a gang of drug runners in Ronsaphan, Thailand, and, in the aftermath, resolving to quit the British Intelligence.

We then switch to Captain Britain (or "Britanic" at the moment) having an out-of-time vision of Pete Wisdom in Genosha while he's working on upgrading Moira MacTaggert's humble hovercraft into a new ship that looks a lot like an X-Men Blackbird. He redubs it the Midnight Runner.

Excalibur are then visited by a British agency called Black Air that has replaced the WHO (Weird Happening Organization) from earlier Excalibur issues. The contingent includes Wisdom along with a woman named Michele Scicluna and her associate known as Threadgold.

Britanic recognizes Wisdom from his vision.

Excalibur is told that Genosha's economy has recently collapsed, and tension between humans and mutates has escalated again and turned into fighting. Black Air more-or-less orders Excalibur to go there to deal with it and also to accept Wisdom as an embed non-combatant (he's said to be an expert in Genoshan matters). There's a suspicion that "ammunition" being used in Genosha was supplied by someone in Britain, and Black Air wants that investigated. After Scicluna and Threadgold leave, we see Scicluna say that she chose not to tell Excalibur about the "Braddock connection" to events in Genosha.

Before the team leaves for Genosha, there's an interesting little exchange between Douglock and Dr. Rory Cambell.

We also see some internal dialogue from Wisdom suggesting that a Genoshan mutate is really no different than a standard mutant. And we also learn that Wisdom has a goal of stopping the creation of Ahab.

A bigger development is a revelation that Moira has the Legacy Virus.

On their way to Genosha in the Midnight Runner, the plane is shot by a rocket. But everyone freezes into crystal - the results of events in Legion Quest - before things go further.

The ending actually kind of has a "tie-in to the original Secret Wars" vibe.

Quality Rating: C+

Historical Significance Rating: 5 - first Pete Wisdom (and Michele Scicluna & Threadgold)

Chronological Placement Considerations: Moira says that Professor X is in Israel dealing with the "Legion trouble", placing this concurrent with Legion Quest (as the ending also confirms). Technically next issue should continue directly after this, with all of Age of Apocalypse not really "occurring", but i will cover AoA before coming back here.

References: N/A

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: N/A