Obsessively putting our comics in chronological order since 1985.
| 1990-11-01 00:07:20 |
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Excalibur: Weird War III
Issue(s): Excalibur: Weird War III
Cover Date: Dec 90
Title: "Weird War III"
Credits:
Michael Higgins - Writer
Tom Morgan & Justin Thyme - Penciler
Josef Rubinstein & Tom Morgan - Inker
Kelly Corvese - Assistant Editor
Terry Kavanagh - Editor
Review/plot:
When you're buying a graphic novel that costs $9.95 in 1990 dollars and one of the creators is "Justin Thyme", you have a right to feel ripped off. This would be Marvel Graphic Novel #66 if they were still being numbered. It is not one of the Special Editions that was promised in Excalibur #22 (one of those would later become True Friends, released in 1999). It is yet another alternate reality story for Excalibur. The writing is done by Michael Higgins, who has already brought us a couple of not very well received (by me, at least) fill-ins in the regular series.
For this story, Excalibur finds themselves merged with their Nazi counterparts from Excalibur #10.
And, i mean, that's it. They run around for a while and see how bad the Nazi world is, and then go home.
You never know with these things if the alternate reality versions of characters that we know are meant to be saying something about the real characters. For example, what do we think about the fact that Iceman has agreed to perform a lobotomy on Polaris?
Or that Professor X is performing horrible experiments on all of his X-Men in the search for an ultimate mutant...
...and is torturing Jean Grey for rejecting his advances on her?
I don't think it means anything, really. It's true that Professor X has been shown to be Machiavellian in the past, and he has an evil side. But putting him in a world where he's planning on usurping Hitler, his former mentor?
There was a time when alternate realities were interesting, but this time it's just a way to fill 60 pages with "look how horrible things are!".
Quality Rating: D
Historical Significance Rating: 1
Chronological Placement Considerations: Kitty Pryde is with Excalibur, placing this after Excalibur #34. And since Kitty still thinks the X-Men are dead, this should probably go before Uncanny X-Men #272 (although she may just have not seen a news report yet).
References:
- We saw the Nazi Excalibur before, in Excalibur #10.
- Kitty Pryde is still under the impression that the X-Men are dead, per Uncanny X-Men #227.
Crossover: N/A
Continuity Insert? N
My Reprint: N/A
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Comments
So Justin Thyme, in this instance, is Chris Wozniak. Josef Rubinstein did a good job with his pencils.
Fnord, your point is well taken - why put out a substandard GN? This could have just been a fill-in for the regular series, and maybe #27 should have been expanded to be this GN, instead.
Claremont, Windsor-Smith and Sienkenwicz would have been much more bang for the buck.
Did Nazi-Xavier neuter Cyclops? Or is that just some really bad thinking on the part of the artist to go "well, we can't actually draw genitalia, but I don't want to be bothered to put a tech gizmo or some shadows in the way to obscure Scott's nudity...so we'll just draw nothing at all there, and assume that all of the readers think naked men look like a Ken doll"?
Marvel sure loved to crank out the subpar Excalibur around this time, didn't they?
How did I keep chugging along with all of this crap. Especially for $10?
Are Scott and Jean naked? I'm not sure what's going on there. Just bad art and colors here...
Style-wise, this seems like a weird attempt to emulate Neal Adams' Continuity Comics. Not a good idea to begin with, and really poorly executed as well.
I similarly dislike the use to "alternate universes" for cheap pathos. All of the emotional manipulation, none of the risk.
I recently suffered through this GN, and plan on never reading it again. It’s so bad that I could never give it away, (at least to anyone who I liked) and the karma that might come back to hit me were I to sell it to someone is not worth the few dollars that I could get. Luckily, I bought it for under its cover price. I feel very sorry for those who were forced to pay the asking price in 1990.
Excalibur comics from the period featured a likeable cast of characters and were generally full of good art and entertaining writing. This GN has none of that.
Also of note is that this GN packs an ending that can only be accounted for by the writer having run out of paper.
This issue has to take place before Uncanny X-Men 272, since Kitty still thinks the X-Men are dead, and it becomes public in that issue that they're alive.
As per Michael above, it needs to go before UXM #272 unless Kitty hasn't been watching the news during the Genoshan incident.
Also it's close enough to the Cross-Time Caper for them to briefly wonder if they came home to the wrong world and are only just noticing it (but they have Kitty so it must be after Excalibur #34).
For those reasons in my own personal order I put it immediately after Excalibur #34 and before the start of X-Tinction Agenda.
Probably best not to ask questions about how "Herr Doktor MacTaggert" (should be Frau Doktor given she's a previously married woman) being controlled by her 616 version's mind ties into the Shadow King / Muir Island story. Is she still under the Shadow King's control but is helping them for some reason? Is she temporarily free but just too lazy to drop in a "by the way you guys, come save Muir Island"?
I've moved this back before Uncanny X-Men #272. Thanks guys.
