Excalibur #26 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
EXCALIBUR vol 4 #26
“The Fantasy is Over”
by Tini Howard, Marcus To & Erick Arciniega
COVER / PAGE 1. Saturnyne, with Betsy as her knight, and her sword in a scrying pool that shows the rest of the cast. Unusually for 2021, we get a very old-school piece of lettering trailing the climax. In three mismatched fonts, none of which fit well with the logo, and all of which feel squeezed into a space in the corner. I’m really not sure what it’s doing there, since the cover as a whole doesn’t evoke anything retro, and it drags down a perfectly nice piece of art.
PAGE 2. Merlyn briefs his troops.
Merlyn captured the Starlight Citadel and renamed it the Lunatic Citadel last issue. Those are his siege engines in the background of the first panel.
Aside from Arthur himself, Merlyn is addressing groups from the various factions allied with him in previous issues: the Sevalith (the vampire guys), the Furies (the robot thing) and the Colony (the bees people). There are some more generic soldiers around as well. Saturnyne’s aide Ryl is still there, standing by Merlyn’s throne and apparently being accepted by him. Presumably she’s loyal to the throne rather than its current occupant.
Merlyn’s speech about the importance of driving all the mutants back through the gate to Earth, because even one would be able to take root and rebuild, is obviously foreshadowing the climax.
PAGES 3-4. Betsy and Saturnyne arrive back at Castle Avalon.
As a child with the mind of an adult, Maggie Braddock is normally a comedy character, but it’s wisely played down in her conversation with Meggan. The colouring seems more subdued as darkness spreads across the land.
The previous issue ended with Betsy and Saturnyne stranded in the Sea of Secrets, and Saturnyne about to explain how she deposed Merlyn to become Majestrix of Otherworld. We’ve skipped over that bit, because Saturnyne’s about to repeat the exact same story to the rest of the cast, though I think it reads a bit oddly to skip the revelation scene that was actually trailed.
Betsy tells us that Saturnyne was able to bring them back using her previously-hidden power to “drop through reality”. The problem is that literally two pages later, Saturnyne tells us – as a plot point – that when she uses this power, “[t]here’s no way of knowing where you’ll land”. So either there’s something more to the explanation, or it’s a plot hole. Perhaps the idea is that she didn’t know how to use the power when she used it last time round, but if so, that’s not very clearly explained.
Merlyn’s conquest of the “diplomatic ring” (the area around the Citadel) was established last issue.
PAGES 5-8. Flashback: Saturnyne’s story.
The Fall of the Captain Britain Corps was previously shown in flashback in New Avengers vol 3 #30, as per the footnote. This was part of Jonathan Hickman’s storyline building to Secret Wars, in which different universes were colliding with one another (“incursions”) until only one was left. In the original flashback – which only lasts a page – Brian explains that the Captain Britain Corps began investigating the incursions. “Eventually we captured a mapmaker as well, but instead of following the harmonics, Saturnyne had us construct a beacon. The Ivory Kings sent everyone. The Starlight Citadel was overrun and the Corps was destroyed in a matter of hours. I should have died there, but after embedding me with the Citadel’s secrets, Saturnyne cast me out, returning to this Earth.”
Saturnyne’s picks up from the end of that. The Mapmakers were part of the incursion plot, and were basically agents of the Beyonders who travelled the multiverse documenting it in advance of the Beyonders’ plan to destroy it. According to Saturnyne, she escaped with the Mapmaker by using her reality-dropping powers to take him to the world that became Blightspoke. At this stage Blightspoke isn’t yet a graveyard of failed realities, though Saturnyne says it was “a terrible, broken place, even then”. Presumably it got worse thanks to the collapse of the Multiverse.
The Mapmaker was largely destroyed in the escape, leaving Saturnyne with access to its power. According to Saturnyne, she used that power to kill Merlyn and Roma, who (as legends) were reborn in the same sort of style seen in books like Thor. She then took the role of Omniversal Majestrix and rebuilt new realms for them, which is where we find them in “X of Swords”. Saturnyne claims that this was a specific deal she made with Roma, who was the previous Majestrix, but apparently believed that she was only nominally in charge while Merlyn was still around. I don’t recall Merlyn being much of a presence in Roma stories over the last, what, thirty years or so? So this doesn’t really work, but maybe Saturnyne is lying about that bit.
Saturnyne seems to imply that she herself is responsible for the particular versions of Merlyn and Roma that returned, by framing the sort of worlds (“provinces”) they would run. This is presumably why Betsy accuses Saturnyne of having doomed them; her new version of Otherworld proves unstable.
It also begs awkward questions about how these worlds actually work and where their populations came from. Did the populations of Roma and Merlyn’s domains exist before Saturnyne created these worlds? Are they even real in any meaningful sense? Do they remember anything else? These questions matter because the story goes on to have Betsy pushing back against the idea that Otherworld is less real than Earth… but everything Saturnyne says in this scene strongly suggests it is less real.
The remains of the Mapmaker remain buried in Blightspoke. For some reason, Betsy says this has contributed to the fall of Otherworld, but I don’t understand how that works at all. Saturnyne points out that the Vescora, who were sent to mine Blightspoke at the end of “X of Swords”, would have found it in the end. She mentions that she had planned to get Excalibur to stop that at some point, all of which sounds a lot like a dropped plot.
PAGE 9. Recap and credits.
PAGES 10-12. Excalibur return to Earth.
The characters waiting by the lighthouse are S.T.R.I.K.E. (Alison Double, Vicki Reppion, Kevin Mulhearn and Tom Lennox), Pete Wisdom, Prestige (with her Warwolf pup Amazing Baby), Professor X and Emma Frost. Ambassador Reuben Brousseau and a bunch of hooded guys from Coven Akkaba are also visible in the background of one panel.
The UK government helicopters circling the lighthouse are apparently worries about incursions from Otherworld, which is fair enough, really. The idea that the UK and Krakoa are on the brink of war comes entirely out of nowhere and again looks alarmingly like a dropped plot, particularly as Pete Wisdom and S.T.R.I.K.E. show up to say “Um, are we going to get to do the thing we’ve been trailing for several issues” and are told “No, you’re not”. It’s all a bit clumsy.
The stuff about Betsy having “abandoned the real world for the fantasy” also feels like a theme that’s suddenly barrelled in from nowhere, and doesn’t really work in the light of the flashback we’ve just had about the nature of Otherworld. At any rate, there’s an angle that aside from Excalibur, nobody really cares about what happens to Otherworld. It’s something of a U-turn from the whole angle of Avalon being mutant territory, and presumably it’s lack of space that prevents Rictor joining in to vigorously side with Betsy. This is everything his beloved Apocalypse worked for collapsing, and the guys in charge don’t care.
The idea that mutants who die in Otherworld can’t be resurrected in the normal way was established in “X of Swords”. Rictor separated Braddock Isle from the mainland UK in issue #21. Prestige’s line about “a hundred people bummed they didn’t get to grab a sword and go in last time” is a reference to the plot of “X of Swords”, where all of the competing champions had their own sword.
Betsy gets a page to tell us that she finally feels in control of her destiny now that her choices are the ones that matter. There’s something to this; certainly, Betsy now has a defined agenda which isn’t just about getting over the trauma of stories published in the late 1980s. And that’s nice.
PAGE 13. Data page. A journal by Sir Lirio Ironsights, one of the soldiers in Merlyn’s army. We saw him last issue – he was the one speaking to Arthur on page 10.
Broadly speaking, Lirio tells us that the Arthur of Otherworld is not the Arthur of any individual world, but rather an amalgam of assorted Arthurs from assorted worlds, all of whom end their story by coming to Otherworld. Thus, his back story literally encompasses all different versions of the Arthurian myth and his relationship with Modred. Lirio suggests that by focussing so much effort on avoiding the versions of the tale where Modred defeats him, Arthur is in fact bringing those versions to the foreground which, in the logic of Otherworld, will actually make them the more canonical versions of the story, and thus the more “real”.
PAGES 14-16. Excalibur join Merlyn’s forces in battle.
Well, Excalibur plus Shatterstar and Bei. Kind of confused about what the point was of bringing them into this arc, to be honest. The whole thing really does read like a change of plans, maybe not as regards the core plot, but certainly as regards second-tier plot threads.
This scene opens by plugging the obvious plot hole: why doesn’t Jamie just rewrite reality to get rid of Merlyn? The basic answer is that reality is now too unstable to risk messing with in that way, which is fair enough.
Rictor and Shatterstar get a scene about wanting to stay and fight together for a cause in Otherworld. Perhaps they’ll show up in the next volume as part of the reinforcements that Betsy asks for.
PAGES 17-20. Excalibur retreat back to Earth, and the gate is destroyed
Basically, Excalibur are driven through the gate, and then Merlyn’s forces use magic to destroy it. The two characters in page 17 panel 4 are Morgan Le Fey and Coven Akkaba co-leader Marianna Stern.
Betsy is obviously planning to stay and make a last stand, but Brian pulls her out of it at the last minute.
PAGE 21. Data page. Reuben Brousseau’s “remarks to Parliament”. This isn’t how Parliament works. Since he isn’t an MP, he wouldn’t address the House of Commons, though he might well give evidence to a select committee. And he is addressing the House of Commons, he isn’t going to say “my lords”. And he can’t be addressing both, because he says he’s informing “the House”.
The idea that Brousseau is talking up outright war with Krakoa in public – and is openly part of a weird magical coven, and still taken seriously in British politics – is real parallel universe stuff and frankly impossible to take seriously.
PAGES 22-24. Betsy uses her sword to return and fight alone.
Having been persuaded by Brian to escape to Earth just a few pages ago, Betsy changes her mind and uses the sword to go back alone, in order to lead the Captain Britain Corps. She does ask for reinforcements, though quite how anyone’s supposed to get them to Otherworld isn’t made clear. The External Gate which previously connected Krakoa to Otherworld presumably ceased to exist after bringing Arakko to Earth in X-Men vol 5 #16. Nonetheless, Gambit’s in the promo art for the next issue, so apparently a way back is found.
The cats have been pets of Rogue and Gambit since Mr & Mrs X.
Rachel says that Betsy “once led the X-Men”. Unless there’s a period I’m forgetting, that’s a reference to a handful of issues in the run-up to the team splitting in Uncanny X-Men vol 1 #250, when most of the big guns had disappeared. But it’s technically true.
PAGE 25. Trailer for the next season, Knights of X. The art is an obvious reference to “Days of Future Past”, showing Captain Britain, Prestige and Gambit in front of a poster of banished teammates, and a Fury coming round the corner. At any rate, I assume that’s Prestige based on the jacket and her prominence elsewhere in the issue; it doesn’t really look much like her, but the all-red colouring doesn’t help there.
The small print reads “Ten Realms, Ten Knights”. So maybe it’s pronounced “Knights of Ten.”
Well…
I’m glad that’s over. Only good thing is Betsy being defined away from her late 80s stories.
I can see why they put the text there on the cover. Saturnyne’s hand draws the eye to the largest bit of otherwise empty space in the picture. I’d guess the cover is a zoomed-in section of the full artwork, which uses the Fibonacci sequence. There’s probably something else curving off of the upper left of what we can see, but since it was zoomed in to focus on the two characters, it just leaves the whole thing looking off-balance.
P.S. it was kind of cute the first time they did it, but “X also means 10” is nowhere near as clever as some people seem to think. What they should do is reveal it’s actually Knights of Buried Pirate Treasure. Wolverine is Weapon Kiss.
Sadly, it’s not over.
Knights of X is the replacement book for Excalibur and I can only assume Howard is returning to mess up that book too.
Oh well. It doesn’t matter to me. I wasn’t reading this (dropped it at X of Swords, with some other titles) and I won’t be reading that. The books are for people who enjoy them.
I would have thought the poor sales would have killed Marvel’s interest in keeping a book like this one and New Mutants alive.
I know that a relaunch will bring in some initial additional readers, but if Howard on Excalibur failed to maintain sales, I doubt Howard writing a book without an established namebrand is going to hold readers.
This is inconsequential, but Gambit hashad the cats since Marjorie Liu’s Astonishing X-Men run.
Also they’re miscoloured here.
Si-I’ve been waiting until the end of Hickman’s run for my big reveal, but I’m going to announce it early:
My name has been Chris 5 all along! Everyone just assumed it was the first initial of my last name. This changes everything!
My name is actually just me saying yes in Spanish.
At least the presumed tone of ‘Some X-Men decide to go play Dungeons and Dragons for realsies’ that the next iteration of the team will have should hopefully move us away from the kind of distasteful portrayals of British society and national identity that Excalibur was using as backdrop.
“…but everything Saturnyne says in this scene strongly suggests it is less real.“
Well, sure but I think we can just kinda roll with it. Franklin, Valeria, and the FF remade the entire multiverse didn’t they, so why not make the same claim about the populations of the “real” world as well? (IIRC there was a plot that flirted with this idea in Bendis’ post-Secret Wars Jessica Jone series; a man had memories of the Ultimate Universe and thought he was going crazy).
As for Betsy and the fantasy world it could have been so FM posted better but there were some instances where they teased the idea. Akaba accused her of gaining the mantle and immediately abandoning Britain, after X of Swords I think.
But anyway yeah, glad it’s over, not particularly looking forward to the relaunch.
I obviously am the first Chris and what remains unrevealed are the 2nd through 4th models of Chris.
And why they were shelved, lost, hidden, kept in reserve respectfully.
I do think it’s funny how “distasteful” readers have found her portrayal of Britain considering the X-books portrayal of literally any non-white nation.
There’s really no need to go out of the way to explain something as a ‘previously hidden power’ when you’re dealing with characters whose powers are never really fully defined. Saturnyne, Apocalypse, Sinister — you’ve got a lot of wriggle room for whatever the plot requires, mostly.
ChrisV> Knights of X is the replacement book for Excalibur and I can only assume Howard is returning to mess up that book too.
Your assumption would be correct – Marvel has announced on Twitter that Tini Howard is the writer and Bob Quinn (who recently did Way of X) is the artist of Knights of X, with Rod Reis doing the covers.
Paul> The small print reads “Ten Realms, Ten Knights”. So maybe it’s pronounced “Knights of Ten.”
Yeah, I read the title as a ‘Knights of the Ten Realms’ sort of thing. Maybe it’s a homage to GRRM’s A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.
Though with the ‘Ten Realms, Ten Knights’ tagline, I wonder if Howard is taking inspiration from Jason Aaron’s League of the Realms (in his Thor books), and the Knights of X will consist of ‘knights’ from each of the ten realms of Otherworld who team up to retake the Lunatic Citadel.
In that case,
Captain Britain – The Diplomatic Zone
Captain Avalon – Avalon
Bei the Blood Moon – Dryador / Amenth
I scrolled through Bob Quinn’s Twitter and saw that he recently designed what looks like a female vampire, so maybe she will represent Sevalith.
Brad: I certainly don’t wish to place undue prominence on the matter or raise it above any other portrayal of a place or national identity, and of course, there is a long history of all manner of portrayals that are less than stellar.
I hesitate over wishing to mention it, but I can’t shake it I guess. I was intrigued by what I thought the story was doing with the subject re: Krakoan vs British considering current and recent related matters in the real world. It feels like there was a theme there that could be / was intended to be developed, but was lost under fantasy trappings and exclusionary approaches that don’t really gel well anymore. We can ask for more than the poor showings of the past I feel, but I don’t wish to offend anyone who disagrees or feels it isn’t important either by itself or in relation to other portrayals.
there is definitely a choice writers need to make with otherworld, if it’s an topsy-turvy alice in wonderland fantasy world of dreams and myth or a populated place with kingdoms, rules, and laws. howard seems to want to have it both ways, and that makes the writing pretty incoherent.
and should say the success rate for otherworld stories in marvel is pretty low.
Betsy did lead X-force for a fair while, and I think she was the de facto leader of the London team in the astonishing run just before Karakoa.
The portrayal of the UK is particularly off model, though i don’t get annoyed as I’m sure half of the British don’t really understand how UK politics work (see Brexit). I don’t think we get it as bad as Russians in X-force and Avengers currently or in the same comics Vampires who really are an unrealistic stereo type. But is just unusual to get it the UK so wrong in a new way, rather then just assume a mix of Harry Potter and Love actually.
It sounds like the good guys won.
Rich Johnston made the point
“Now here’s the thing. British Ambassadors don’t address a collected sitting audience of MPs and Lords. Such addresses are rare and are either a) the sitting monarch for the Queen’s Speech, which is dictated by the government of the day. Or foreign heads of states and dignitaries, invited by The Speaker. The most recent was Barack Obama. Other “recent” examples would be Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, the Dali Lama and Charles de Gaulle – still, this is the Marvel Universe, and this is Coven Akkaba, who knows what strings were pulled?”
https://bleedingcool.com/comics/mutant-brexit-wolverine-love-life-in-krakoa-today/
If Otherworld is a fairy tale realm, Excalibur has violated tropes that get one killed: cheating, oathbreaking, killing your rightful lord…
For all the talk about Krakoa as a new mutant nation, the books are pretty US-centric. By which I mean, it’s the non-America countries that get portrayed shallowly and/or stereotypically, and the non-American mutants only get to discuss Krakoa in the Marvel Voices books.
I don’t think the writers are doing this maliciously. I just think they’re not using Krakoa’s premise as much as they could be. Brazil is anti-mutant now and we don’t get Sunspot’s opinion on this? There aren’t any Terra Verdean mutants? Etc.
I keep wavering in my opinion on this book. It has good ideas that keep scratching on the surface – it’s just so sloppy in execution.
I like the “hero’s journey” Betsy has been on. But her own rationale is so muddled. Literally back and forth through the gate this issue.
The supporting cast is great – but that’s all they are, supporting wallpaper. There’s very little meaningful development for them. Why are Bei or Sunspot there?
The confused jumps in action. Paul’s pointed out many, but another small example in Meggan leaving Maggie behind, both in art and dialogue, only for the next panel to have her holding Maggie in her arms. And that’s not even on the macro story level.
The on the nose dialogue. How often does Saturnyne need to give “we strong women need to stick together” type dialogue in this issue?
I didn’t like the Brexity angle, as it’s too emotive and still a live enough issue to shoehorn into a fun comic book. Just have Britain be rotters! But there was a very valid point about… Who exactly is Betsy as Captain Britain, if she doesn’t ever spend any time there? That was never satisfyingly concluded.
I did like the resolution, or understanding, that arose between Betsy and Kwannon. That was done strong and necessary work from Howard and Wells.
It’s a shame though, as the art in Excalibur is solid, the ideas are fun, and it focus on a corner of Marvel that I love. But it’s just never quite hit that high. I don’t think I’ll pick up Knights of X unless there’s a significant pick up in quality.
I am so tired of comics ending, but not concluding their stories. The biggest offender was Scott Snyder’s Justice League- two set-up miniseries, 38 issues and an Annual or 2, all focused on telling one long story, and it ends on “to be continued in Dark Knights Death Metal”- but Excalibur is a close second. 26 issues, some of which I’ve enjoyed and some of which have left me cold, that lead to “come back in April?” Nope, sorry, not going to happen.
I don’t need every plot-thread to be wrapped up in a bow, but how about writing a conclusion that at least attempts to finish the main plot? Hell, end with an epilogue that sets up Knights of X, I understand the need for a hook to keep reader interest. Nothing in Excalibur 26 was satisfying in and of itself, however, making me resentful of the series as a whole for wasting my time.
On a different note, this issue pushed hard for a Betsy/Rachel pairing. And while I’m all for more established characters coming out on page as queer, it felt weird because Rachel has barely been in this book. A weird role in a dreamworld close to the start of the series, a dance scene in the Hellfire Gala issue (which I had to be reminded of), but now it’s ‘you’re wanted’ this and ‘that’s my Betsy’ that? When they’ve barely interacted in this title?
I think part of what stands out about the hamhandedness of this version of Britain over terrible versions of other countries is that Britain should be one of the easiest countries for American comics to depict.
There is no shortage of British comics writers who write American comics. You’d think there might have been *one* who could have been talked into doing Excalibur, the one reasonably high-profile American superhero comic that is traditionally set in Britain.
The only parallel in US comics is Canada, I think: where you’ve got the combination of a reasonably prominent title associated with the other country and several creators working for the US market who would know what that country is like from personal experience.
So: what if someone took the Tini Howard approach to Alpha Flight? 🙂
The use of Britain in comics used to be a lot worse in the olden days.
Everything looked like it was from a Monty Python skit (but was meant to be taken seriously), all the characters were aristocrats, and everyone “talked wiv a hurrible accent, guv’nor”.
I agree that it would have been easy to get a British writer to write the British book, but there may be reasons why that did not happen.
Spurrier could have done a good job with the book, but he seemed to have a different perspective wanting to work on a Krakoa-title.
I can’t blame him. Mutant rabid nationalists who believe in separatism having an issue with Britain supporting leaving the European Union seems to be contradictory.
There’s probably an interesting story to tell amidst all of that, but “Coven Akkaba being evil racial supremacists compared to the good racial supremacists ruling Krakoa” seems to be a tonedeaf direction.
“obviously am the first Chris and what remains unrevealed are the 2nd through 4th models of Chris.”
Infinite Chrises.
It’s not just the Betsy/Rachel pairing – a lot of Krakoa feels very much in service to fan shipping, rather than organic plot development.
Also I don’t think this warm, sardonic Rachel feels in character necessarily with how we know her in other issues.
Though, I’m sure a Wisdom/Betsy/Rachel triangle could be fun. But the Wisdom thing is equally left field…
I think there’s more mileage to be had in investigating how Angel feels more Betsy isn’t in the body he fell in love with. That would be actual drama.
A run of Alpha Flight where the writer doesn’t seem to know anything about Canada? So, the Mantlo run? The Nicieza issues? The Seagle run? The Lobdell run? Take your pick! The Seagle run in particular sticks out for me as a “so what property was this pitch originally for?” poster child.
As for Excalibur, the Rachel/Betsy scene felt odd to me since they don’t know each other all that well. I think they were only on the same team at the same time once? Gambit and Jubilee know Betsy more than Rachel does, and they were/are series regulars, so it was mostly just to set up Rachel joining the relaunch and potentially setting up a Rachel/Betsy romance. Betsy has so many well-established close friends that wedging in Rachel for the pep talk stuck out. Considering how little Jubilee has done in this series, I had hoped she’d get a moment to shine, but nope, just more fussing over Shogo.
Chris V’s reveal was better than anything post House of X event series. He should have been at the helm of the X-Men franchise rather than Hickman
Ha, ha! Thanks, Nick!
Allan M-I know. Has there ever been anything particularly specific to Canada with Alpha Flight since the original run?
Byrne did, at least, work to try to set up a team which is representative of the different ethnic or local identities across Canada. Byrne is, of course, also Canadian.
Otherwise, their gimmick always seemed to be that they are a superhero team…but they’re located in Canada!
Byrne (and Claremont) tried to the hardest to set up a recognizably Canadian team, albeit rooted in basically every stereotype available. Northstar’s backstory of being part of a real-life terrorist organization remains bonkers, though. Mantlo more or less wrote them as a generic superteam, as did other writers on v1. Lobdell on v3 was doing a sitcom, where the joke is that it’s silly for Canada to have a superhero team, which is honestly fair, just not well executed. Seagle’s run is the truly strange one where he’s doing government conspiracies and Prisoner riffs… except in Canada for some reason. All of them left me feeling like they paid lip service to the idea that they’re set in Canada but none of them get the details right, nor do they have anything much to say about Canada.
So I think your overall assessment is accurate. But I’m Canadian, so the details and lack of an overall perspective likely strikes me more since it’s my home.
I love the original 80s Alpha Flight so much, but some of the stereotypes are downright cringe-y these days. We’ve talked about that on this blog before, so I won’t belabor the point. But a little person called “Puck”? Really?
I think Snowbird would probably have to be seen as worse than Puck…
Shaman is also problematic, but could have been interesting if he was ever fleshed out; although there’s a bit too much of sameness in characterization when compared to Forge.
Puck is fine, if you get rid of the nickname. Otherwise, it’s a stereotypical portrayal of a prairie province “hoser”.
Wasn’t there a plot point in Alpha Flight/X-Men where Loki’s magic “cures” Puck of being short? I think at the time they claimed that being little was either a byproduct of his mutation or he had some kind of curse on him? I’ve never read the original Alpha Flight so I don’t know how accurate that take is, but in hindsight it’s pretty problematic
Yeah Puck is cursed. He’s supposed to be unusually tall, but a demon compressed his body and made him age slowly. This was ridiculous and offensive even in the 80s.
Yes, that was from the Bill Mantlo run.
I believe Byrne wrote Puck saying that he “lived in constant pain and it was a curse”.
Mantlo apparently misunderstood this and took that statement literally and unfortunately wrote a back story involving a demon as to why Puck is little.
Huh, Rich Johnson’s writing is about as in need of an editor as Howard’s….
Anyway, I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned this, but although I’m American I’ve lived in Canada on and off for over a decade, including these last few years. I certainly learned a lot more about Canada after moving here, but I’m consistently shocked at just how little Americans know about, or even think about, Canada. With few exceptions, Canadian media often files off the serial number, so that generic Canadian locations can pass for generic American. Orphan Black was a good example of how this plays out. But the UK is really something else entirely, and there are at least a couple Brits in the x-office slack, so I really can’t fathom how this book has been so consistently embarrassing of its portrayal.
The book was at its best when it was just about Otherworld. Can the market support a monthly book about Captain Britain and Otherworld? I guess not, but probably would have been better if they could actually push said book on the UK market, and for that they’d have needed a writer who better understood the UK.
Still, at least they’ve resolved the Betsy/Kwannon situation in a satisfying way. Ok, we have them both now! They have distinct looks and personalities (Kubert’s versions in the 90s always confused me; besides different shades of purple hair, Revanche always looked identical to Betsy, which kind of defeated the purpose of a body asap story, right?) There’s a lot about Betsy that works in this series. I wish we’d have seen more of Rachel.
@evilgus-
I’m with you. There’s plenty that I enjoy about this book, which is why I’ve kept reading it. I love the art, I like the cast, I do think this book can be really fun on the whole.
But so often, the plot moves in ways that make no sense. Sometimes I find myself questioning why and how something makes any sense, before I just accept that Howard was trying to get from point A to point B, and that’s that.
Also, the data pages in this book are so dense and so dull- I truly dread them.
I think Howard is a product of the current trend you see in writing that focuses on generating moments over plot. See the new Star Trek shows as a prime example. I hate it.
As an American who watches Jeopardy, about once a week I think “god why don’t I know more about Canada?”
Ben, I really think if we studied the history of Canada growing up it would raise too many questions about our founding myths/propaganda. The British debt incurred in the “French-Indian War” (another sad Americanism) and the American anger towards the Quebec Act (Catholics!?), at best, contradicts the supposedly noble revolutionary spirit. Maps also consistently crop out Canada, making it easy not to think about them at all. Honestly when I first moved to Montréal I thought about taking a trip to Halifax or Saint John’s and was literally shocked when I finally looked at a map of the Maritimes and realized there is like a 1000km of coast past Maine… I still haven’t visited anywhere east of Quebec City. The Canadian Rockies are incredible though, so much nicer than the Rockies to the south.
My partner is Canadian, not a comics reader, and has never heard of Alpha Flight. We just went through a primer of AF characters. She agrees there a some questionable stereotypes here but broadly finds them inoffensive. (Canadians have a bit of cultural younger sibling inferiority complex, but perhaps because of that are pretty good at laughing at themselves; cf SCTV, Trailer Park Boys, Letterkenny, etc). She also reports that Puck is “cute,” and is happy to hear that the hockey themed hoser character is a brawler.
Based on these annotations, I think the real problem with “Otherworld is as real as Britain” is that it’s not clear Howard thinks of Britain as being a real place either.
Regarding Alpha Flight, there was also the Greg Pak series, which was more government conspiracies, and the True North one-shot, which I know nothing about except that the writers were actually Canadian.
@Joseph S: I’m reminded of a joke about a woman in Glasgow who sent a telegam (it’s an old joke) to her brother in Vancouver to say her son was arriving in Halifax, and could he meet him at the airport?
She got a reply saying “You go. You’re closer.”
I am, no joke, half-Canadian, and… having been to my father’s homeland…
I can see why my grandparents left
@ Daibhid ha! That’s a good one. And true! I’ve only been to Vancouver once (beautiful), but I crossed over from Seattle. It’s honestly cheaper to fly to London (or Paris or Milan or Casablanca…) from Montréal than it is to Calgary or Vancouver. High speed rail would be nice but with only 35 million people in the whole country those kind of projects just don’t scale.
I have driven across all of Canada once (Victoria to St. John’s) and pretty close another time (Vancouver to Charlottetown). Not a trip for the faint of heart or bladder. I also used to teach Canadian history for a little while so if the King/Byng affair ever comes up in an X-book, we’re covered. Mind you, if that happens, we’re officially in a dystopian timeline and presumably Chris IX will be commenting on the annotations.
Puck is interesting in that he’s a C/D-lister with a truly awful bit of backstory retconned in (the Mantlo origin). But he’d already established himself as probably the most likeable member of the team by then so everyone kinda shrugged it off and moved on, where Pym/Wanda/Donna Troy/etc. were forever chained to one bad story choice.
Chris V: It’s worse than that. Byrne actually intended for Puck’s statement to be taken literally. Mantlo just didn’t understand that dwarfism can often lead to severe joint pain, which would be particularly severe for someone trying to make their living as an acrobatic superhero.
Other Chris: And here I am trying to figure out if I want to move to Saint John.
Krakoa is general is overwhelmingly American. Not just in population-in terms of culture, too. If the Five are resurrecting people equally, then even if all the surviving mutants were American they would quickly become outnumbered. So Krakoa to me comes off as having extreme racial imbalances that nobody is ever going to address. Maybe Beast is suppessing ethnic activist groups?
Really, the only thing that makes the ignorance with Britain notable is that it’s an X-men book focusing on a non-America country. When other countries appear in X-books it’s even worse-at least Tini Howard’s portrayal is merely inaccurate instead of outright racist like some of Duggan’s.
@Taibak Saint John (NB) or St. John’s (NL)? Confusingly two similarly named cities in the Maritimes. (From what I’ve seen St. John’s looks to be the more colorful one.)
As for Krakoa being US-centric, I think this is one of those times we just have to accept that Marvel is a US media company and that realism in occurrence of mutation would derail the marketability of the line. So, suspension of disbelief and all that.
And for what it’s worth, it’s not just the x-office and it’s not just writers. I recall an Avengers story not too long ago that depicted a battle above Vesuvius, probably the most iconic and recognizable volcano in the world, depicted as a stereotypical science fair project, absent anything recognizably locating the setting in the Gulf of Naples. “Foreign” locations are almost universally interchangeable and unrealistic.
It’s kind of a weird turn of events – Wein and Claremont really leaned into the idea that mutants would occur around the world. The Wein/Cockrum X-Men and the New Mutants were 12 characters of whom only three were American, and two of those Native. But other than those two big groups, the idea didn’t stick around much – subsequent new mutants to join for the rest of the 80s were nearly all American (Magma, Psylocke, was Rictor depicted as from Mexico in his early appearances?) Some non-Americans here and there in the 90s, including in Gen X, but especially once the school concept became dominant it’s all been way too American.
I’m imagining a Krakoa where literally every second person is Asian, ruled by the Quiet Council which has one person not of European descent. I’m not sure that’s the social commentary they’re aiming at.
Joseph: New Brunswick. It’s supposed to be an up and coming little city and I kinda fell in love with it a couple summers ago.
@ASV
Louise Simsonson said that Richtor was the son of a German mercenary and a Central American woman IIRC.
I’m reading the old X-Factor comics that have just been put up on Unlimited (at last). Rictor’s parentage isn’t mentioned, but he has that weird dark pink skin colour Marvel used for Native Americans, and he says a couple of times that he’s from Central America. Oh and he can fire a machine gun because they teach all the kids there are taught gun violence apparently.
It’s also heavily implied that Cameron Hodge forced Rictor to cause the real-life 1985 Mexico City earthquake, which had happened not long before he was introduced and had killed thousands of real people. Which is perhaps not the most sensitive story to tell.