shaxper
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Post by shaxper on Jul 19, 2022 15:27:07 GMT -5
I've been meaning to read the original Excalibur for nearly two decades now and finally had the time and inclination to get started on it last week. I'm not sure where I got the impression that this was generally considered to be an excellent title but, in hindsight, it doesn't seem like one that ever gets discussed here.
I wrapped up reading the Claremont run (I believe #28 was his final issue), and it was...okay. Decent characterizations, fun shenanigans, utterly nonsensical plotting rife with lazy conveniences and unsatisfying payoffs. Nothing memorable. Should I keep reading, or is this as good as it's going to get? I figure the run must have had some kind of charm if it made it to 125 issues before being cancelled, but with a to-read stack as large as mine, I'm not a fan of wasting my time with something that isn't going to pay off.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Jul 19, 2022 15:43:08 GMT -5
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
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Post by Ish Kabbible on Jul 19, 2022 15:45:57 GMT -5
The little I've read did not give me reason enough to continue. Reading X-Men was more than enough Claremont writing for me to handle
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Post by chaykinstevens on Jul 19, 2022 16:06:32 GMT -5
Claremont didn't write #28, but returned for #32-34. He said he left Excalibur because it wasn't fun anymore and he had no synergy with any post-Alan Davis artist. I liked most of #42-67, mainly written and pencilled by Alan Davis, apart from a few duff fill-ins written by Scott Lobdell.
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on Jul 19, 2022 16:11:06 GMT -5
I had a couple friends -- both big X-Men fans, by the way -- who really loved Excalibur. I think I only ever bought a couple of the early issues, based on my friends' recommendations, but it never did much for me. I got rid of them a long, long time ago. Edit: My Excalibur comics, I mean, not my friends.
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Post by badwolf on Jul 19, 2022 16:22:55 GMT -5
I loved Excalibur back when it was published but haven't read it since. It's probably still a fun book. I would avoid anything not written by Claremont and/or Davis, though.
I guess it doesn't get talked about because it's a lighter book and the stories aren't really "crucial" (for better or worse) to the Marvel universe at large.
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Crimebuster
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Post by Crimebuster on Jul 19, 2022 16:53:39 GMT -5
Did nothing for me at all at the time, and I never saw any reason to go back and try it again. For me personally, it was kind of set up for failure though. Like most people this side of the pond I hadn't read the UK stuff with Meggan and Captain Britain so I had little interest in either, and found Meggan to be mostly annoying. I never liked Rachel Summers in X-Men. The draw for me was that I liked Nightcrawler and Kitty Pryde, so I followed them to this book where they were mostly wasted in the service of boring comics.
The whole thing felt like a cash grab where Marvel wanted as many X-books as they could get, so they spread everything way too thin in the process, both the characters and the creators. Moving Nightcrawler and Kitty Pryde to Excalibur not only meant that they were in a less interesting book, it also made X-Men significantly worse at the same time. I'm not sure you could find anyone who thinks replacing those characters with Dazzler and Longshot was a good idea for the main X-Men title.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Jul 19, 2022 17:21:48 GMT -5
I had a couple friends -- both big X-Men fans, by the way -- who really loved Excalibur. I think I only ever bought a couple of the early issues, based on my friends' recommendations, but it never did much for me. I got rid of them a long, long time ago. Edit: My Excalibur comics, I mean, not my friends. Confession is good for the soul.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 19, 2022 17:42:25 GMT -5
It lasted 125 issues or so because it was being released at a time where anything X outsold most comics on the strength of the brand not the quality of the comic, so much of the run is at best run of the mill assembly line comics put out to meet deadlines and have product on the shelf (but of course that also describes much of Marvel's entire output during the time period of Excalibur's shelf life so it's not unique to the book). As such, it was also a series plagued by fill ins through much of its run. The early Claremont stuff has its fans, but also its detractors. The Cross Time Caper storyline dragged on way too long. The stuff Davis wrote and drew was probably among the better stuff done in the series lifespan. The Warren Ellis stuff was interesting, but he was often paired with slow artists requiring lots of fill-ins. Young Ken Lashley was an interesting artist, but never met a deadline he couldn't blow (he got better with this later in his career even as his style evolved to be more interesting as a mature artist than he was as a young artist). As such, especially since Ellis tends to tailor scripts to the artists he worked with and there were a lot of last minute replacements due to missed deadlines in his run, so it felt very uneven and never really got into a flow, so the execution of the interesting ideas often fell flat. I don't think I ever checked out anything after Ellis left, so I can't comment on that.
-M
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Post by commond on Jul 19, 2022 17:49:35 GMT -5
spoon has been writing about Excalibur in the What classic comics have you read lately? thread. As others have mentioned, the second Davis run is worth reading as he wraps up a lot of the loose plot threads that Claremont left behind. After Davis leaves, the title is brought under the X-Books umbrella with group editor Bob Harras overseeing the title. I haven't read any of those issues, but my understanding is that it becomes more of an X-title. Warren Ellis had a notable run from #83-103, but I've heard the art on that run is a nightmare with 12 artists working on the 21 issues Ellis penned.
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Post by codystarbuck on Jul 19, 2022 20:52:05 GMT -5
Loved Helen Mirren in it!
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shaxper
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Post by shaxper on Jul 19, 2022 21:41:46 GMT -5
It lasted 125 issues or so because it was being released at a time where anything X outsold most comics on the strength of the brand not the quality of the comic, so much of the run is at best run of the mill assembly line comics put out to meet deadlines and have product on the shelf Could be, but as one of the impressionable little idiots fueling that particular money machine at the time, I can safely say that Excalibur and Alpha Flight were those two ancillary titles that my friends and I all understood were closely related to the X-Titles but weren't actually X-titles themselves. Not only was it "Excalibur" instead of "X-Calibur", but they were in a whole different country and never partiipated in any crossovers. Their adventures were never referenced in the pages of any x-titles, so we knew it was safe to skip. It was also a premium edition book that cost more than the regular titles, so that really squelched any natural curiosity we may have had towards the book. With X-Men Classic on the stands at the same time, I could easily get my Nightcrawler and Kitty Pryde fix there, with stories that actually counted towards X-continuity. I suspect there was some tension there between Claremont and either Kavanaugh or DeFalco, as "The Cross Time Caper" felt like an editorially mandated "event" rigth from the getgo that never really matched what was happening within. They were never crossing time (just dimensions), they'd already been dealing with other-dimensional versions of themselves for several issues prior to the supposed "Part One", there is no over-arching storyline during the "Cross Time Caper" (and certainly no clear caper), and the first part was labelled as "Part One of Nine," after which any sort of numbering vanished and the thing ended up going longer than nine issues, including a fill-in story that had no idea where it fit into Excalibur continuity. I actually think these were the most fun stories of the early run and wouldn't have minded if dimension-hopping ended up being the focus for the remainder of the series.
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Post by commond on Jul 19, 2022 23:48:11 GMT -5
Excalibur appealed to me as a kid. I think it was a combination of Davis’ art, the nice paper, and the jokey covers. The trouble is that I could ever afford it. Even in the secondhand bookstores, you could get two regular comics for the price of an Excalibur comic. I remember that I had a copy of issue 4 with the janitor on the cover that I read until the cover was starting to wear. It took years for me to read the other part of that story, but I imagined the outcome over and over again. When are finally read the entire series, I thought it was solid, especially if you read the UK Captain Britain stuff as well. It’s not groundbreaking, but it’s one of the better titles of the DeFalco era, and the second Davis run is one of the better X books of the 90s.
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Post by berkley on Jul 19, 2022 23:57:03 GMT -5
It came along well after I had stopped following Marvel so I missed it at the time and have only heard about it vaguely since then. But anyway, I just looked it up, and I like the idea of the English setting and Captain Britain being the lead character - but then they seem to undermine all that by bringing in American X-Men characters. Also, I've never really liked Alan Davis's style that much, though I don't dislike it so much that it would keep me away from a comic if there were enough other elements that attracted me. So on the whole, I would say this isn't something I'm likely to read.
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Post by spoon on Jul 20, 2022 2:09:44 GMT -5
spoon has been writing about Excalibur in the What classic comics have you read lately? thread. As others have mentioned, the second Davis run is worth reading as he wraps up a lot of the loose plot threads that Claremont left behind. After Davis leaves, the title is brought under the X-Books umbrella with group editor Bob Harras overseeing the title. I haven't read any of those issues, but my understanding is that it becomes more of an X-title. Warren Ellis had a notable run from #83-103, but I've heard the art on that run is a nightmare with 12 artists working on the 21 issues Ellis penned. Indeed, I have. Here are links to my posts, which cover my reading of #1-58, plus some specials, the Marvel Comics Presents serial, & an X-Babies story from an X-Men Annual that sets up one of the specials: classiccomics.org/post/459657classiccomics.org/post/460582classiccomics.org/post/464647classiccomics.org/post/465435classiccomics.org/post/467723classiccomics.org/post/471058classiccomics.org/post/471996This 2022 binge was my first time reading most of these issues. I didn't purchase Excalibur issues new off the rack until later. Part of that was probably because my interest in the X-books sprung from Uncanny, and those other titles didn't really reference events in Excalibur. Part was probably my upbringing create wariness about a hero draped in the Union Jack. I liked a good deal of this. Some of it is weighed down by Claremontisms, and the guest artists don't reach Davis's level (I particularly dislike Wozniak's art). But it feels like a legit part of the classic x-canon (albeit a quirky cousin). As noted upthread, Claremont actually writes one arc after #28 (a few guest-written issues fill the gap), but his last arc goes out like a lamb. It just fills the task of reuniting Kitty with the team, but there are nice Steve Lightle covers. I think the return of Alan Davis as penciler (but then also as writer) is worth checking out. I've read the first two-thirds of it, reprinted as two Visionaries TPBs. I'm thinking of picking up the later issues as floppies, as there isn't a TPB yet. I believe there are some fill-ins issues among that last third, but also in the middle third. I think the material in the first Davis Visionaries TPB (#42-50) is stronger than whats collected in the second one.
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