{"id":4226,"date":"2018-07-31T22:53:42","date_gmt":"2018-07-31T21:53:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4226"},"modified":"2018-07-31T22:53:42","modified_gmt":"2018-07-31T21:53:42","slug":"exiles-1-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4226","title":{"rendered":"Exiles #1-5"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s been a few years since the last run of\u00a0Exiles<\/em>, a book which is essentially\u00a0What If…?<\/em>‘s parade of alternate Marvel Universes crossed with\u00a0Quantum Leap<\/em>‘s uncontrolled dimension-hopping. \u00a0Time for another go around, this time with Saladin Ahmed and Javier Rodr\u00edguez.<\/p>\n

And… does Exiles<\/em> actually count as an X-book? \u00a0The original\u00a0Exiles<\/em> series was clearly an X-book, populated mostly by variants of X-Men characters. \u00a0Here, we’ve got Blink, a version of Wolverine, and that’s pretty much your lot, X-wise. \u00a0There’s still a prominent X in the logo, but I’m minded to treat this as a spin-off that’s gone its own way, like\u00a0Deadpool<\/em>. \u00a0(We miss you, Deadpool. \u00a0Send money.) \u00a0But hey, we’re here now.<\/p>\n

Traditionally these multiverse stories tend to open with the Watcher on the moon, but he was killed off a few years back. \u00a0So now we get the Unseen, the cosmic doomed Nick Fury who’s chained to the spot on the moon. \u00a0In a sense, I suppose it makes more sense for Nick Fury to try to intervene to stop cosmic bad stuff, compared to the Watchers who were meant to be culturally dispassionate. \u00a0But very few writers have gone near the Unseen since Fury was banished to the moon back in\u00a0Original Sin<\/em>, which maybe tells you something.<\/p>\n

Admittedly, you wouldn’t expect the Unseen to show up as often as the Watcher did. \u00a0The Watcher was forever being wheeled out simply to serve as a shorthand for “what you are reading is important, honest”. \u00a0The Unseen doesn’t have that status and doesn’t leave his spot on the moon. \u00a0So you can’t use him in that way. \u00a0But nobody seems to have found him especially inspiring for any other purpose either. \u00a0Frankly, he’s one of those rare bad ideas where I can’t even get a handle on what was meant to be interesting about it. \u00a0At best, he feels like an unduly elaborate back door in case the replacement movie-style Nick Fury didn’t take.<\/p>\n

So when your story starts off with the Unseen… my heart sinks a little.<\/p>\n

But anyway. \u00a0The Tallus, the dimension-jumping macguffin from\u00a0Exiles<\/em> of yore, is dumped at Unseen’s feet by a time-jumping Nick Fury, who promptly dies. \u00a0The Tallus then summons Blink to the Moon, and Unseen gives us the exposition dump: something called the Time Eater is destroying the multiverse, and Blink is particularly well suited to sort it all out, because she’s got the experience of jumping through dimensions, but isn’t as excessively cautious as most people in that camp. \u00a0There’s a vague suggestion, I guess, that beneath the surface there’s a hint of the old Nick Fury going for the comparatively reckless solution to the big problem.<\/p>\n

From here, we get a couple of issues of gathering the team. \u00a0Which seems a bit excessive, considering there’s only five of them – there’s something a bit odd about the pacing here, where the book is packed with detail on a panel to panel level, but at the same time there’s a nagging feeling that not a great deal is really happening in the big picture. \u00a0The general idea here is that Blink meets up with her team members and has to flee with them just as the Time-Eater destroys their worlds, but since the Time-Eater is an event more than a character at this stage, this is less dramatic than you might think – we establish pretty early on that it’s potentially going to be possible to bring the worlds back.<\/p>\n

First up is a hard-bitten post-apocalyptic version of Ms Marvel, which, yes, is playing against type with her, but kind of feels like the least interesting way you could do so. \u00a0Then we have a version of Iron Lad, the younger Kang; this one is more promising, since he’s a naive nerd version of the character whose ambitions have yet to get beyond taking revenge on the school bullies. \u00a0He has the armour because he picked it up in a version of the\u00a0Young Avengers <\/em>back story, and he’s bright, but he doesn’t have the familiar ego or sense of direction, and he’s obviously going to need some prompting to rise to the occasion.<\/p>\n

With issue #2 we add a swashbuckling version of MCU Valkyrie, who plays not too far removed from Hercules. \u00a0And then there’s Wolvie, a tiny Wolverine from “Xavier’s Playtime Fun School for Gifted Youngsters”, who is busy recovering pies from Little Magneto. \u00a0The idea, naturally, is that this hopelessly naive pre-school version of Wolverine is baffled and horrified by most of what he sees when he gets out of his own odd little world.<\/p>\n

And… yeah, I don’t really like Wolvie. \u00a0He doesn’t really feel or look to me much like anything from the pre-school genre that’s being referenced; characters this naive are pitched at the level of shows for the very, very young indeed, at the level where they’re barely functioning characters at all. \u00a0The Paw Patrol are significantly more worldly than this (really, they are). \u00a0And then, once you’ve done the gag, what do you do with him? \u00a0You can build to him standing up to the bad guy instead of hiding in a corner, but what then? \u00a0It’s a cute idea but the story doesn’t sell me on its longer term potential at all.<\/p>\n

Team assembled, the Tallus gets broken at the end of issue #2 and we go on a little diversion through killer dinosaurs, an age-of-aquarius Atlantis, a Peggy Carter Captain America, and the Thing as Blackbeard from 60s\u00a0Fantastic Four<\/em> (they help him fight some slavers). \u00a0It’s an energetic bounce through different worlds, and the art adjusts to them very well while keeping a consistent tone, with some dense and creative layouts along the way – but at the same time, it feels a lot like busy work to keep the team occupied for two issues, given that Iron Lad figures out the rudiments of the solution in issue #2. \u00a0It’s showcasing the premise, I guess, but it feels very bitty too.<\/p>\n

All this is leading to the big fight against the Time-Eater, who turns out to be another version of Kang. \u00a0This one has decided that ruling the multiverse isn’t enough, and he wants to personally replace the whole thing so that he can be the multiverse. \u00a0The big idea is that if they defeat Time-Eater then they can hit the cosmic reset button and restore the various worlds from back-up, but they won’t be able to go home because there’ll be a version of themselves already there. \u00a0Hence, Exiles. \u00a0That’s a nice enough twist, especially as it seems this version of the team will be based on Earth and have some stable base between adventures – something that was always a problem with the original format in the book’s early days. \u00a0The art on issue #5 is the high point of this arc, with some genuinely spectacular madness in the cosmic battle. \u00a0Well, except that Khan’s heroic sacrifice almost gets lost in the shuffle. \u00a0(On a first reading, I didn’t even realise until after the fight was over that she was meant to be dead.)<\/p>\n

There’s a lot going on here – it’s packed with content, and it’s often visually inventive – but at the same time, there’s really not that much to the bigger picture. \u00a0And I’d certainly rather have this compared to another generic Marvel title, but it doesn’t connect make me particularly care about what’s going on. \u00a0With some regret,\u00a0I find myself quite admiring Exiles<\/em>\u00a0without actually enjoying it all that much.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s been a few years since the last run of\u00a0Exiles, a book which is essentially\u00a0What If…?‘s parade of alternate Marvel Universes crossed with\u00a0Quantum Leap‘s uncontrolled dimension-hopping. \u00a0Time for another go around, this time with Saladin Ahmed and Javier Rodr\u00edguez. And… does Exiles actually count as an X-book? \u00a0The original\u00a0Exiles series was clearly an X-book, populated […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-x-axis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4226"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4226\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4227,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4226\/revisions\/4227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}