Thursday, April 9, 2020 by Paul in x-axis Posted onby Paul in

Excalibur is a real mixed bag.

It looks great – let’s get that out of the way first. Marcus To is dealing with a large cast, a dense plot, and a wide range of locations, and he’s handling all that very well. He’s very good at establishing a setting, which is important for a book that’s trying to play up the tensions between Krakoa, England and Otherworld. There are clarity issues in this series, but they’re in the exposition, not the visuals.

The magical theme is potentially interesting too. Magic has been a part of the X-books for decades – most obviously, it was a core part of New Mutants thanks to Illyana – but it also exists on the fringes of the X-Men’s world, peripheral to all but a few characters. And characters like Apocalypse, Rogue, Gambit, Psylocke and Jubilee are hardly associated with magic.

But it’s that clash which is supposed to be at the heart of this. Apocalypse’s basic plan is to try and establish a mutant beachhead on Otherworld, for reasons that have been strongly hinted at but (for present purposes) could also just be plain expansionism. The rest of the cast are open to manipulation in that regard precisely because they don’t understand any of the mechanics of this, and so they can’t really follow the plot. That conflict of worlds, with the mutants (particularly Apocalypse) in the ascendant thanks to the wider X-Men direction, makes sense.

Excalibur is also an unusually dense book – there’s a lot going on in most issues, little of it spelled out too directly. A lot of material is being juggled, and there’s clear ambition in the plotting. Up to a point, what’s happening is meant to be a little bit obscure. And some of the character angles play out clearly enough – Apocalypse is manipulating everyone, they’re somewhat aware of it, only Gambit seems to really push back in the way you might expect. Jamie Braddock’s impotent Caligula angle is quite fun too.

And yet there’s a lot about Excalibur that annoys me. Yes, the magical theme and Apocalypse’s manipulations require the plot to be a little hidden – but even allowing for that, things are often not well explained. What was the point of that extra coven in the first issue? Why did they bring a comatose Rogue to the Excalibur lighthouse? (The answer is “because its connection to Otherworld might help wake her up”, but this isn’t clearly explained for some time, and it still doesn’t explain why they’re in a little boat.) Why doesn’t Cullen Bloodstone, a monumentally obscure character, get a proper introduction to explain his gimmick? It’s literally what the data pages are there for.

More fundamentally, though, I’m left unconvinced by the book’s view of magic, or of Britain. I’m not convinced Tini Howard really gets either of them.

Magic is, for the most part, treated as a foreign world or a convenient power source, rather than as anything particularly meaningful or symbolic. We have data pages trying to take things like “As above, so below” literally and concluding that symmetrical symbols have power. But that’s not what “As above, so below” means in this context – it’s meant to be a claim that the same patterns repeat on different scales. This is supposed to be why astrology works – the patterns in the stars will be replicated on the smaller scale of human lives. It doesn’t work, of course, but it’s what the phrase means. And I’m left with the impression that Howard has heard some rudimentary elements associated with magic, but doesn’t actually understand them, even to the superficial degree that I do.

Then there’s Britain. If you’re going to do a story where Betsy becomes Captain Britain, and has the challenge of filling that role despite her competing loyalties to Otherworld and to Krakoa, you really need to have a reasonably coherent view of what Britishness is. Excalibur doesn’t have one. It has no discernible awareness of, or interest in, any of the issues surrounding British national identity in 2020. Instead, it takes place in a world where the Queen apparently does things personally. And the book’s take on Cullen Bloodstone seems like a tenth-generation copy of vague ideas about what the aristocracy are like.

And the druids. Oh god, the druids. Howard seems to think that druids were some sort of culture that have survived in secret to the present day. But modern druidry isn’t secret; and if you’re talking about ancient druids, they weren’t a society, they were a priest class. You could have a surviving hidden Celtic tribe which has druids, but they can’t be the whole tribe on their own.

Which is really my problem with Excalibur. It’s undoubtedly dense and ambitious in its plotting and structure. But when I stop to consider what the story is actually about, I’m driven to conclude that it’s about various things that the writer doesn’t really understand terribly well. I’m impressed by the complex edifice, but I’m not at all convinced by what it contains.