{"id":5292,"date":"2020-06-10T21:26:53","date_gmt":"2020-06-10T20:26:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=5292"},"modified":"2020-06-10T21:26:53","modified_gmt":"2020-06-10T20:26:53","slug":"excalibur-10-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=5292","title":{"rendered":"Excalibur #10 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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COVER \/ PAGE 1.<\/strong> Captain Britain in front of a burning Houses of Parliament, with a Krakoan gate in the foreground. As we’ll see when we get into the story, this isn’t actually our<\/em> Captain Britain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGE 2.<\/strong> The recap page… which, unfortunately, doesn’t actually recap some of the things you need to know for the story to make any sense. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When we left off, Excalibur were in Otherworld, and Captain Britain was trying to track down Opal Luna Saturnyne. One of the reasons for that was to find out the current status of the Captain Britain Corps, which was meant to have been largely wiped out. For reasons not yet revealed, Saturnyne seemed to be blocking Captain Britain from reaching her. After Excalibur fought some of Saturnyne’s followers, the issue ended with Saturnyne concluding that Krakoa and Excalibur were escalating their war with her, and saying that she would “destroy whatever I see fit” in order to “put a stop to whatever madness threatens the balance of the Omniverse.” The art showed her picking up a small bag, and an image of Jubilee, Gambit, Rictor and Rogue as Captain Britains, the significance of which was less than clear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

This story establishes that those four “Captain Britains” are counterparts from a pocket world, and explains how they came about. The “real” Excalibur don’t appear in this issue, but that only becomes apparent about halfway through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGE 3.<\/strong> Credits. This is “Verse X: A Crooked World” by Tini Howard and Marcus To. “Crooked World” was an early-1980s Captain Britain storyline by Alan Moore and Alan Davis, better known as the “Jaspers’ Warp”. It’s the story which introduced the Captain Britain Corps and Saturnyne in the first place, as well as coining the name “Earth-616” for the Marvel Universe (originally intended to convey that it was nothing special, and just one more Earth among hundreds of others).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGE 4.<\/strong> An info page in the form of a public information poster warning Londoners about the threat from mutants. This isn’t remotely like anything that you’d see in terms of government communications today, but it’s intended to evoke 1940s posters of the “Keep calm and carry on” variety.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As we find out later, Jamie Braddock has deliberately set out to make the authorities on this world believe that Krakoa is firing missiles at them, so the fear of a war with Krakoa is seemingly justified. The anti-mutant tone is obviously intended to be excessive even allowing for that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Minister of Information is identified as Reuben Brousseau, who has previously been shown as a major figure in Clan Akkaba, and (at best) a reactionary bigot. The Ministry of Information hasn’t existed since 1946, but it was the name of the department responsible for propaganda during World Wars I and II.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Protect & Survive”<\/strong> was a public information campaign on how to survive nuclear armageddon. It appeared near the start of the Thatcher government, but it had been under preparation during the previous administration. <\/p>\n\n\n\n