Twenty years of Exiles – the first few stories
Last year, I did a series of posts looking at Joe Casey’s 2001-2003 run on Uncanny X-Men (it can be found here for anyone interested). I’ve decided to try and replicate that with Exiles, which was twenty years old (incredibly) on 6th June this year. God I feel old.
2001 was a time of huge creative turnover and energy in the Marvel Offices, as the “Nu-Marvel” era of Jemas and Quesada was riding high and launching a writer-driven era of comics. The X-Books were undergoing a renaissance, with Morrison’s New X-Men topping the sales charts regularly and providing the focus of the line, as Casey and Chris Claremont wrote Uncanny and X-Treme (shudder) while Peter Milligan, Frank Tieri, Gail Simone and others were involved in producing books, to varying degrees of success.
Into that mix would come Judd Winick. Winick had found quasi-fame as a reality TV star on MTVs The Real World: San Francisco in 1994, where he came across as a reasonable (if slightly dull) member of the cast for a season, notably forming a friendship with fellow cast-member and AIDS educator, Pedro Zamora. Winick had expressed his desire to work in comics during the show, and would eventually break through with The Adventures of Barry Ween: Boy Genius which this author can heartily recommend. He was nominated for an Eisner Award for his September 2000 graphic novel Pedro and Me based on his friendship with Zamora, who had sadly passed away in November 1994.
SHH: Can you recall back to how that came about? Was it a series you pitched for or did they bring it to you?
Winick: No, they brought it to me with the very thread bare idea that Blink was the most popular new character to come out of “Age of Apocalypse,” so they wanted the idea that Blink should have her own team.
(Winick answering a question on how Exiles came about, courtesy of www.superherohype.com )
Winick was correct in that Blink - the main character of the series - had been an immensely popular character from Age of Apocalypse, possibly the most successful comics mega-event from the 1990s. The character had actually debuted in The Phalanx Covenant a year or so earlier. Blink spent most of that story ineffectually crying in the corner before sacrificing herself to beat a villain, and was inexplicably mourned by readers consistently in the letters pages of Uncanny and Generation X. The Blink in AoA bore little resemblance to the original character, and was a vast improvement.
Winick pitched a series that was “like if What If met Quantum Leap met Sliders”. I have to confess to having never seen an episode of either TV show, but hopefully we can muddle through.
If anyone reading this is thinking to themselves “hang on a minute – doesn’t a dimension-hopping X-book written by a writer known for his strengths with humorous dialogue sound a bit off for the grimdark nitty-gritty of Morrison-era X-books?” then they’d be 100% correct. You really have to squint at the book to consider it an X-Book, but this was in the golden time where the X-Men franchise was unquestionably Marvel’s hottest property and saying it was an X-book meant more sales and more cash (quite why they didn’t want to put it in the same line that was producing the snappily-titled Citizen V and the V-Battalion I will never understand).
With Winick’s pitch approved, he needed an artist, and he got one of the best. Mike McKone was chosen to pencil the book, and all the pieces were falling into place. McKone has bounced around both DC and Marvel doing the odd issue of JLA and The Punisher Warzone, but it would be with Exiles that he would make a lasting impression on a lot of comic fans. A fine comedy artist, with a good handling of expression, body language and able to frame action scenes that flowed effortlessly, McKone was an ideal fit for the book.
The original volume of Exiles ran for 100 issues, which is (to my recollection) the highest consecutive numbering for any X-book launched this century (Peter David’s X-Factor run went longer but was renumbered). It’s quite an accomplishment for what was certainly a C-level title at best.
When I did the Joe Casey Uncanny X-Men series I did it on an issue-by-issue basis, but that’s frankly far too much effort for a series that ran for 100 issues. I’ve initially just set myself the target of doing each storyline of the Winick run (which in itself is confusing for reasons of exclusive contracts and - in the spirit of Grant Morrison - accumulated script backlog).
Before starting on the Exiles series, it’s worth noting that Exiles was preceded by a Blink mini-series, written by Scott Lobdell and Judd Winick which is utterly, utterly skippable, failing in any and every way possible to set up any kind of interest in the Exiles series which would launch two months after the mini wrapped up. It’s also irrelevant to Exiles as Blink wanders around the negative zone for a bit and then returns to AoA before disappearing in the last panel.
I’m not sure how much interest there will be in this, but if anyone reading this did read Exiles at the time (or has explored it since) – what were your memories of the title? Did you have a favourite character or line-up? A favourite story? Was there a character or setting you’d like to see revisited? And is Sliders any good?