{"id":5509,"date":"2020-08-20T21:25:49","date_gmt":"2020-08-20T20:25:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=5509"},"modified":"2020-08-20T21:25:49","modified_gmt":"2020-08-20T20:25:49","slug":"excalibur-11-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=5509","title":{"rendered":"Excalibur #11 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

EXCALIBUR vol 4 #11<\/strong>
“Verse XI: Blood of the Changeling”<\/strong>
by Tini Howard, Marcus To & Erick Arciniega<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

COVER \/ PAGE 1:<\/strong> An angry Jubilee surrounded by… well, I guess it’s meant to be dragon fire, though if it’s supposed to be forming any particular shape, I’m not seeing it. In a retro touch, we have the story title too… plonked somewhat arbitrarily on the page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGES 2-5.<\/strong> Excalibur show up to rescue Jubilee from the Green Priestesses.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We’re picking up here from issue #9, where Excalibur were in Otherworld in an attempt to create a permanent Krakoan gate. They were attacked by Saturnyne’s Priestesses – who are now clarified in this issue to be the White<\/em> Priestesses – and Shogo was shot down. Issue #10 was a diversion into events in an alternate timeline (which doesn’t directly play into this issue), and so it’s been a long long time since we picked up this plot thread.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

You presumably remember that Shogo is an infant who (for unclear reasons) takes the form of a dragon while in Otherworld. But if not… well, he is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGE 6.<\/strong> Data page on Saturnyne’s priestesses. This clarifies that there are two sects: the White, who follow Saturnyne’s word to the letter, and the Green, who are somewhat more liberal and (by implication) not inclined to follow direct orders from Saturnyne unless they can see a coherent reason to do so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This seems to be alluding to different religious groups who take a more or less literal approach to their favoured texts. The obvious difference is that Saturnyne is literally right there, ready to tell you precisely what she wanted. The Green Priestesses appear to take the view that they follow Saturnyne, but that they base their actions on her “intent” rather than her “direct will” – which seems to amount to saying that they think they know what she intends better than she does, or at the very least that the truth of matters will always be more complex than any order can account for, justifying a very relaxed interpretation of what Saturnyne has to say. Saturnyne, on the other hand, seems to accept them as some sort of check and balance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still unclear in all this is quite how old these sects are, and where they came from – after all, Saturnyne has a back story as a normal human who worked her way up from nothing. Have these groups sprung up around her recently? Or did she inherit them from her predecessors?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGES 7-8.<\/strong> Credits and recap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGES 9-11.<\/strong> Jubilee calms down.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Betsy was complaining in issue #9 that Saturnyne was hiding the Starlight Citadel from her, and that she couldn’t understand why.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGES 12-14.<\/strong> Druid Rictor makes psychic contact with Apocalypse.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The awful bloodshed coming soon is either a building war with Jamie, or X of Swords<\/em>. Or maybe both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGES 15-16.<\/strong> Apocalypse tells us about the High Lords.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The High Lords<\/strong> is a less common term for the Externals<\/strong>, though Rictor helpfully reminds us of their more familiar name. They’re a group of immortal mutants introduced in the early issues of X-Force<\/em>. Previously it seemed to be a description of a particular power set (or linked power set), rather than an organised group as such. Apocalypse describes them as his coven… but then he claims Excalibur are his coven, so it’s not clear that the rest of the Externals would necessarily share his reading of that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The term “High Lords” is not new, and has been around since the early days. In those early stories, the parallels to Highlander<\/em> were rather more glaring, but that’s faded away over the years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The five shown on page 15 are (left to right):<\/p>\n\n\n\n

  • Selene<\/strong>, though she’s unrecognisable in her costume here. Still, there aren’t any other established female Externals other than Candra (who shows up on the next page), so Rictor’s almost certainly right in identifying her. I’m not aware of any previous stories establishing her as a former nun, but her history in this period is a blank anyway.<\/li>
  • The guy with the short white hair is Nicodemus.<\/strong><\/li>
  • The purple guy with the headpiece is Crule<\/strong>. Look, it was the nineties, people had names like Crule.<\/li>
  • Apocalypse<\/strong>, obviously. There’s been some uncertainty over the years about whether he’s actually an External, but he was described as one in Powers of X <\/em>#3.<\/li>
  • The guy with the long hair is Saul<\/strong>.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n

    “When we desire to meet, it takes little more than a thought to bring us together.”<\/strong> This is new, as far as I know. I don’t think Apocalypse is claiming he can literally teleport everyone to him, so much as asserting that he can easily contact and locate them all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    “If one of us dies, the others feel ourselves become stronger, as though one had distributed the contents of them among us.”<\/strong> The Externals’ psychic link was established in early appearances, and the idea that their power can be transferred in this way was used as a plot point in the last Cable<\/em> run (in the rather confused “Newer Mutants” arc from Cable<\/em> #150 onwards).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    “So when one of our number had a plan to extract her own life energy and place it into a stone…”<\/strong> This is the Heart of Candra, and it comes from a relatively obscure Scott Lobdell story in X-Men<\/em> vol 2 #60-61. Apocalypse’s description of the gem is basically faithful to how Candra described it in that story: it’s an external repository for her life energy, designed to stop the other Externals from getting to it. But Candra claimed that she created it in order to protect herself from the other Externals, after refusing to join their group. In Apocalypse’s version, they help to make the thing. It seems as if one of them is lying – either that, or Apocalypse and Candra were in league.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Apocalypse seems to be saying that magical stones are at least symbolically a kind of earth, and thus within the scope of Rictor’s powers (which, in this series, are being treated as earth-control and not merely as vibrational).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    As Rictor points out, Candra is a Gambit villain, and thus suitable for bringing in to this series.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    PAGES 17-18.<\/strong> Excalibur set off on their mission again.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    For some reason Captain Britain has dropped her earlier suggestion of continuing to the Citadel alone. Rictor is obviously helping to steer things in the direction that Apocalypse wants – no doubt in good faith.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    “Avalon’s war with Saturnyne”<\/strong> was going on in the background through the early issues, ending with Excalibur deposing Morgan Le Fey as the acting monarch of Avalon, and Jamie Braddock becoming “King”. But from what we’ve seen of that war, Saturnyne was the attacker. It’s not immediately obvious to me why Captain Britain would think that Saturnyne would have a problem with the relatively-sane Morgan, but not with the completely demented Jamie. In issue #9, Saturnyne said that her goal was to “put a stop to whatever madness threatens the balance of the Omniverse”, apparently referring to Jamie’s efforts to create pocket universes with extra Captain Britains (which we then saw in more detail in issue #10). She doesn’t much care for him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    PAGES 19-22.<\/strong> Excalibur break into the Citadel and set up their gate.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    It’s pretty obvious throughout this scene that most of the team have no very clear idea of what the objective of this mission actually is, beyond “stick a gate here for no particular purpose.” There seems to be no clear plan of what to do once it’s there. You’d think some of them would have asked more questions, but that’s been a recurring issue with Excalibur<\/em>. Rictor, the true believer, tells us that somebody has to use<\/em> the gate – I’m not quite sure why.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    PAGE 23.<\/strong> Rictor goes through the gate.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    “Don’t the Otherworld gates need crystals or something…”<\/strong> Apocalypse needed specially powered crystals in order to make his Otherworld gate work in issue #5. Rictor had to get them for him. I realise this piece of dialogue is there to explain why the gate doesn’t work normally, but surely Excalibur would have remember that at some point on their mission. (Maybe the way around that would have been for Apocalypse to tell them that the crystals were only needed once.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    PAGE 24.<\/strong> Captain Britain confronts Saturnyne.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Straightforward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    PAGES 25-26.<\/strong> Trailers. The Krakoan reads NEXT: EXTERNALS. So maybe we’re not dropping that name just yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    PAGES 27-28.<\/strong> Coda: Rogue and Gambit go thieving.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The jewel<\/strong> that Gambit picks up is the Heart of Candra – that may not be obvious just from its generic appearance, but it’s a faithful rendition of how it appeared in X-Men<\/em> vol 2 #60-61. The Heart was supposedly destroyed at the end of that story, and I’m pretty sure we haven’t seen it since then.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition. EXCALIBUR vol 4 #11“Verse XI: Blood of the Changeling”by Tini Howard, Marcus To & Erick Arciniega COVER \/ PAGE 1: An angry Jubilee surrounded by… well, I guess it’s meant to be dragon fire, though if it’s supposed to be forming […]<\/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":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5509","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=5509"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5509\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5512,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5509\/revisions\/5512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}