Excalibur [20] : Review and Spoilers

[silvercover]

I think this is the best excalibur issue written so far, only issue is that at this point its feeling less like a team book, rogue also got put in the cover which made it look like she might help a bit and she actually has ways she could through getting some power from betsy and kwannon, on top of her actually having some relatability to this situation when you think about the situation she had been with captain marvel in the past.

[warlockofgreed]

Not really sure why Malice needs to be an angry teenager. No offence but we have a lot of teenage X-Men who are underutilised atm though I guess time will tell if we see anything further for Malice in Excalibur. If it turns out she is an older mutant who is in the body of a teenager, I think that could be more fun to play with.

We got some Jubilee but still does not justify her being in the book. Kwannon has been great. I really enjoyed them burning the clothes because they were not her style and appears to have been cathartic for both Betsy and Kwannon.


I am intrigued with the idea of what suicide means in Krakoa and how that reacts to the resurrections protocol. What if you have a mutant who does want to be resurrected after taking their own life? Can you only be allowed no resurrection if you die a natural death? These are questions which should be addressed in these books but not sure if Excalibur handled/explained this topic well-enough.

Also, the things Xavier was saying about Alice only shows that maybe a country should not have only three rules. Clearly from this issue of Excalibur and the New Mutants run, this is not OK for the children.

[silvercover]

I am intrigued with the idea of what suicide means in Krakoa and how that reacts to the resurrections protocol. What if you have a mutant who does want to be resurrected after taking their own life? Can you only be allowed no resurrection if you die a natural death? These are questions which should be addressed in these books but not sure if Excalibur handled/explained this topic well-enough.

x-factor actually advertised on this, they have a resurrection protocols list in where that's one of the redacted lines. so I think it will be expanded and explained more in that book.

[alexphantom]

I'm sorry, but for me this was awful, had to keep checking the front cover just to make sure it wasn't called ' My Little Pony ' or something ! Think I've finally given up on this book.

[CGAR]

Which is crazy because I think the this issue and last issue are the best of her run.

But overall much to be desired on my end.

[jwatson]

I couldn't find an excalibur thread. But i seriously have to walk back my criticisms of tini excalibur. The early stuff even Apoc being part of the fabric of magic is all in the Mystic Arcana series. If this book was called X:men Mystic Arcana i think it would be like the #1 book of the x-line but the trying to mix it with excalibur directly is where it went wrong. But man, what this book could have been or still may be.

[GeneTitan]

The look on Lorna’s face when she finds out the new girl is “Malice...”
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[Devaishwarya]

I couldn't find an excalibur thread. But i seriously have to walk back my criticisms of tini excalibur. The early stuff even Apoc being part of the fabric of magic is all in the Mystic Arcana series. If this book was called X:men Mystic Arcana i think it would be like the #1 book of the x-line but the trying to mix it with excalibur directly is where it went wrong. But man, what this book could have been or still may be.

I believe in one of her early interviews Tini expressed a keen interest in magic lore and such so...
I'm currently re-reading the recent arc and my one constant criticism remains the same as when I re-read the earlier arcs...she needs a better editor or learn to edit her own work to tighten up her storytelling and plot progression. A lot of the stuff she throws in (dialogue and guest-appearances) are superfluous to the story being told, resulting in a story that seems to be aimlessly going everywhere and nowhere, simultaneously.
In each of the issues 16, 17 and 18...there are are at least two-three pages of 'stuff' that could be (should have been) edited out to make the story flow better.

[Rnap22]

Akabba Coven comes off so silly to me. Maybe it’s the art. They really don’t come off as imposing or dangerous, so when there’s a fight and Excalibur is having a hard time with them, it comes off as laughable. Her ideas are good, but execution is the problem. It’s like she’s trying to handle all these plots and she can’t keep up or she just doesn’t know how to string them along. Throwing Malice into the plot could have worked better. For me, I didn’t need to know Malice’s backstory. It just made her so uninteresting. If she wanted to do a story about depression and suicidal thoughts, she could have just stuck with this turn of Betsy not wanting to come back to her body.

Editing is another problem. We see it in almost every issue where the plot just jumps ahead and you’re left to wonder if you missed a page. Some people don’t mind that as they just make up their own story. I’m not interested in making up a pretend “this happened off panel” scenario. While she’s gotten better, she still has the same faults. Maybe she would do better handling a solo character and not a group.

[Devaishwarya]

Akabba Coven comes off so silly to me. Maybe it’s the art. They really don’t come off as imposing or dangerous, so when there’s a fight and Excalibur is having a hard time with them, it comes off as laughable. Her ideas are good, but execution is the problem. It’s like she’s trying to handle all these plots and she can’t keep up or she just doesn’t know how to string them along. Throwing Malice into the plot could have worked better. For me, I didn’t need to know Malice’s backstory. It just made her so uninteresting. If she wanted to do a story about depression and suicidal thoughts, she could have just stuck with this turn of Betsy not wanting to come back to her body.

Editing is another problem. We see it in almost every issue where the plot just jumps ahead and you’re left to wonder if you missed a page. Some people don’t mind that as they just make up their own story. I’m not interested in making up a pretend “this happened off panel” scenario. While she’s gotten better, she still has the same faults. Maybe she would do better handling a solo character and not a group.

Agreed.
-The Akabba Coven added nothing to the plot (not even a good fight scene).
-The pages of Saturnyne being petulant and stupid were unnecessary and wasteful and added nothing to the plot because the CB Corp returned Betsy's essence to the source who charged them to seek it out in the first place.
-The Malice origin/plot-swerve could have been more effective if it just didn't seem to happen out of no-where.