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popculturebuffet · 4 years

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Analysis of X: Excalibur: The Sword is Drawn

In honor of britan’s premire superhero team returning today, we take a look back at the original team. Kitty Pryde and Nightcrawler must team up with a drunkard magical british superman and his chipper shapeshifting sorta girlfriend to save their old teammate from an alternate dystopian future with the power of a god from both a squad of skin stealing wolves sicced on her by a sinsiter reality show producer from another dimension and a group of intergalactic weirdo bounty hunters after her due to an entirely separate omniversal dictator who wants to bang british superman. Somehow, Grant Morrison didn’t write this. I would like to, if I may, take you on a strange journey after the cut.

Excalibur has always been the odd mutant out of the X-Men franchise.And that’s in part because the bulk of it’s mythos and characters come not from the deep wells of the X-Men comics of the time, but from another character Chris Claremont had a huge hand in: Captain Britain

Created shortly after Claremont got his start on the All-New All-Diffrent X-Men, redefining the X-Men forever and making them into the sales juggernaut they were for the 80′s and early to mid-90′s and are again today at long last, Captain Britan was Brian Braddock, a scientist who, while escaping a hired goon who torched his workplace, crashed his motorbike. He was saved by, of all things, Merlin... yes exactly the one your thinking of.... and his daughter and omniveral guardian Roma. They choose Brian to be their champion choosing either the staff of right or the sword of might and, not really being a fighter, Brian chose the staff and a hero was born.

Cap was created for the UK Divison of Marvel and while Claremont did a sizeable amount of work on the character, including introducing Brian’s sister and future X-Man and as of this week Captain Britan herself Betsy Braddock, it was two other men who made most of his mythos and the stuff that would end up being the backbone of Excalibur: Alan Davis, an absolutely monsterous talent of an artist and all around nice guy and... your going to want to sit down if you don’t know this I sure as hell was surprised, Alan Fucking Moore... and if that’s not his actual middle name it should be. Yes he of long beards, genere definting runs and yelling at the young people to get off his lawn and DC to stop hurting his baby Watchmen, THAT Alan Moore worked for marvel breifly. This was his only work with them shockingly. Not so shockingly he and Davis redefined the character, created most of the concepts that would be carried over to Excalibur, and gave the character a spiffy new costume seen above, one so good it’s stuck even into the modern era. Moore, and some other artists in addition to Davis, crafted a long epic about Cap going up against Mad Jim Jaspers, a reality warping mutant who was as insane as his name suggested and introduced many things that would become the backbone of the character, as well as establishing Moore’s habit of taking a less than sucessful B-List hero and utterly turning him on his head. Their also the ones who dubbed Marvel’s main universe 616, a fun fact I honestly had forgotten. But of course after Moore left Cap fell by the wayside, making a cameo or too in other marvel books in the US while Betsy made her way to the X-Men just when they needed new blood most. More on that in a bit. But he wouldn’t stay on the sidelines for long. See Chris Claremont has a habit of taking characters he created and using them later if they’d been forgotten somehow or put off to the wayside. Mystique, one of the x-men’s most iconic enemies... was a Ms.Marvel (The carol danvers one before she got the rank up), enemy. Sabertooth? An old iron fist villian he’d created and taken a shine to. Arcade was inveted for a team up of Spider-Man and Captain Britan before primarily becoming an X-Men villian for most of his life. And of course Betsy was a a supporting character who became one of the x-men’s most iconic members through a weird mind swap with a japanese woman before recently getting her old body back. Claremont dosen’t like leaving his charcters to twist in the wind and thus brought most of them into the x-men mythos. Even Spider-Woman, depowered at the time, ended up as a major Wolverine supporting character. One of Claremont’s strengths as a writer to me is that he never truly forgot anything he created or worked on, and the X-Men benefited greatly from it. So while it probably surprised american readers who only thought of Captain Britain as a c-list hero who teamed up with Spider-Man and Captain America, it’s no surprise in hindsight that for his second X-Men ongoing, having also made a TON of mini series, he choose to bring Brian to the big time. While I can’t find much background on Excalibur, I conjecture that Chris wanted to go a bit lighter.

The X-Men were in a DARK place at the time. I mean the X-Men were never all sunshine and roses but most of the humor of the book and lighter moments were gone at the time thanks to the Mutant Massacre, an event where the Morlocks, a group of disfigured homeless mutants who felt at odds with society and thus lived in the tunnels under New York, were slaughtered by professional hitsquad the Mauraders who killed all but a handful of them and during the fight with the X-men took 3 of them out of commission: Nightcrawler had fallen into a coma after overtaking his already crippled teleportation powers defeating one of the mauraders, Kitty Pryde slowly started to disappear, unable to phase back to solid after taking an electric spear for Rouge, and Colossus was heavily wounded in ways I forgot and since he rejoined the X-Men, aren’t really relevant here anyway. The X-Men were up against the wall against a barrage of ruthless opponents, working with longtime foe magneto since Xavier got trapped in space, as you do, and were not in a really happy place. So it feels like, even if the angst was still present because Claremont would go into withdrawl if there wasn’t some form of angst to work off, Excalibur was created as a way for him to do something different in the X-Mold and lighter so he could go as dark as he needed to. So by injuring Kitty and Kurt, he took them off the board and had a starting point for the team, and by adding Captain Britan and his girlfriend Meggan, a shapeshifting empath brought back one of his own creations and brought him into the american side of Marvel, and gave him an almost complete team. It also had the bonus of likely enticing Alan Davis, who in one of the few background things I could find about this book, didn’t really want to work on an established title like X-Men where there were expectations how it was supposed to look etc. But they were still about one member short of a team... but thankfully chris claremont had squared away a spare x-man for just such an occasion.

Enter. Phoenix, aka Rachel Summers. The daughter of Jean Grey and Scott Summers from the Days of Future Past timeline, Rachel ended up in our timeline, bonded to the Phoenix Force like her mom, and struggling with the power, eventually running away after attempting to kill Selene, an evil sorceress who hunted her in an attempt to drain her power. She fled, not sure wether she should rejoin her team or not, and was instead lured into joining Mojo on the promise of a new start. Mojo.. is this guy.

Strap yourselves in for this one: Mojo is the dictator of another dimension that runs off TV, essentially crafting shows for the media hungry populous and kidnapping the X-Men every so often to show up on his programs, to the point he once swapped Psylocke’s natural eyes out with robot camera eyes that looked like the normal eyes so he could record the X-Men’s adventures as it happened, which itself isn’t a bad concept. He didn’t show up to Rachel in person of course, partly because he’s too lazy and partly because he looks like what happens when lightning strikes a pile of twinkies and exposed wiring and somehow brings them to life. She was sent here for the same reason as Kurt and Kitty: to keep her off the board and set up her return here. It’s one of Claremont’s strengths to me: While he ocasionally forgets a subplot or dosen’t realize how wonky one is, more often than not he knows where the story is going and has a plan for it, and thus set up Excalibur a year in advance in the pages of Mutant Massacre.

Speaking of setup there’s one final thing to cover before we begin, the second X-Men crossover event and the one that directly leads into this: Fall of The Mutants, aka one of the worst days in the life of one Kitty Pryde. First her best friend and human google translate Doug Ramsey died while on a misson with the new mutants, sacrificing himself to save the life of his girlfriend Wolfsbane.

As if someone was challenging god to make her days worth, at the same time as this tragedy the X-Men, at the time made up of Storm, Wolverine, Psylocke, Rouge, Havok, Dazzler, Longshot and with tag along Madeline Piror whose story is too much to get into here, were locked in a battle with force of chaos and actual demon Nemisis, a being summoned by their sorta ally Forge by accident. Forge can also build any device he pleases but since every fifth x-men character has magic ruin their life, someone had to take the bullet caked with demon blood. At any rate the only way to stop him.. 9 souls were part of the ritual that brought Nemisis in, 9 souls were needed for the ritual to seal him up. And the X-Men, being true heroes determined to do whatever it took, gladly offered up their lives to defeat the demon and save the world. As the world looked on, the X-Men died, for once not feared and hated, but honored and mourned as heroes. Of course this being a comic book Forge’s method of saving the world was turning the X-Men into pure soul energy and throwing them at the demon but that somehow makes it more epic. And of course, it’s no suprise one of their dearest friends was watching from Muir Island, which was serving as a recovery ward for the surviviors of the massacre and was run by longtime X-Men Ally and lynchpin of Hickman’s run Moira Mactaggert

Thankfully, Kitty got one tiny sliver of sunshine on the worst day of her life: Kurt woke up from his coma... just in time to tell him the only family he’d ever known is dead. And that’s where we pick up, with our two heroes trying to figure out what to do now they’ve lost everything. But before we FINALLY get started, this bit was way longer than I meant it to be, your probably curious how long the X-Men stayed dead as well.. this is comics and they were the hottest team int he world. This wasn’t going to stick even if Claremont was serious about ending the series. And the answer, and i’m not making this up I counted, is two pages. Yup, TWO PAGES. Not kidding. Ironically enough Roma, the omniversal goddess daughter of merlin I mentioned, got wrapped up in all this and, moved by the X-Men’s bravery, gave them the chance to come back and start over however they like, and the X-Men choose to be unable to be picked up on tape and let the world think they were dead so they could strike back at their mounting enemies. Granted I feel that while the “play dead and take out our worse foes while we have the advantage” is a good part of it, not telling the new mutants or kitty and kurt is not only cruel, but just paints a target on a bunch of teenagers backs. Sure teenagers who’ve faced worse but still. But I digress, that’s a rant for when I cover Fall of the Mutants at some point and this exposition has taken far longer than I wanted it to. And so here we are at the one shot that would forge a team and finally, we can get into it: The cover, way up there is decent. It shows a nice right melee between Excalibur, the Warwolves and the Technet, though it makes it look like Gatecrasher is part of the team when she is in fact one of the issue’s main antagonist and is overall a bit weirdly composed. It doesn't help the proper Excalibur #1 has one of the best x-team covers of all time.

As you can see the comparison dosen’t help the far messier above cover. It’s just average in comparison to the creative and funny covers Davis would provide throughout both runs and the majestic one above. WE open on Kitty Pryde, understandably, having a nightmare, being dragged by a crew of makeup people just off screen and smack into

Oh good marvel’s already working on the new X-Men movie. Thank god I thought they really WERE going to take 5 years to do it. Naturally she is curious why their in hollywood but dosen’t suspect fowl play because well... to put it in a personal persepctive if I saw my grandpa I lost a few years ago or my dog I lost in high school that was the same age as me, alive healthy and back, i’d be confused as hell but mostly? I’d just be relived and hope beyond hope it was real, as poor Kitty is diong. Unfortunatley the illusion something isn’t up lasts all about a panel before this happens.

First of all: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!. Second. as AHHHHHH! as it is.. it could’ve been worse.

It soon becomes clear something is up as Kitty wails around confused, wondering why Rouge’s powers don’t work and why the X-Men are acting as if nothing is real before action is called and they run off.. it’s then Kitty finally encounters a freindly face.

It's now from context clear just what the fuck is going on: this isn't JUST a dream: Rachel has somehow dragged Kitty into Mojoworld through her dreams, warning her, as seen above that with the X-Men gone, their image can be twisted and exploited by those wanting to use it for their own image. This warning is cut short when Fake Xavier starts shouting and soon we get this lovely image.

As we can see Rachel deeply regrets running but Mojo won't let her go.. fortunatley Kitty phases the chains and lets Rachel go, with Rachel promising to see kitty again soon as she flees.. unfortunatley Kitty's pissed off Mojo's actors...

Again, it could’ve been worse.

Kitty wakes up and naturally angsts a bit over that fucked up dream she had and then sees a phoenix in the sky, wondering what could it mean and what could the dream mean.

A lot to unpack here. First off... Perverso...

Second, my heart breaks at that last line.. and it’s true. Kitty likely feels, like a lot of people going through grief, that maybe they could’ve done something. Maybe if she was there she could’ve stopped their deaths and saved the day or failing that, she could’ve gone with them. So she wouldn’t have to feel awful about being here while they aren’t, so she wouldn’t feel the unbearable weight of being one of the last X-Men. But the sad truth is, she wouldn’t of made any diffrence. None of them would’ve taken the last slot and would’ve given it instead to their tagalong Madeline Prior so she could see her family again. They died selfilesly, and nothing she could’ve done would’ve stopped them.

As seen above Kitty tries to take solace in petting her dragon Lockheed. Yes Kitty has a dragon for those who didn’t know about him or were only familiar with her from the cartoons.. though why X-Men Evolution never thought to introduce Lockheed is beyond me. He’s a space dragon that stowed away when the X-Men returned from well.. space, and saved Kitty’s life, taking up residence as her pet. He was later revealed to be far more sapient than he seems, but still hangs around Kitty because it’s an effed up world, but it’s a two player game. But as demonstrated Kitty’s powers have inverted. While she has gotten better, as I talked about in my Mauraders #1 review she was fading from existance shortly after the massacre, her intangiable state is now her natural one. She has to concenrate to turn solid. So in addition to having lost just about everything, her powers are broken too. Kitty then sees a picture of her shortly after she joined the X-Men before having a good cry about how most of the people in the picture are dead and professor xavier got shot up into space. Thankfully he dosen’t have to watch cheesy movies.. unless it’s Cho’d turn to pick the movie. For some reason it’s ALWAYS Cool as Ice. no one knows why.

Meanwhile, in the seas of mood whiplash, we meet Meggan. Meggan, like most of the cast, is a mutant, something I was unaware of until now even though the I just thought she was some sort of magical creature, but no, she’s a mutant and the naration outright calls her one. I’m just stupid or thought they just classifed her wrong I guess. Unlike most mutants, who manifest powers at puberty, she manifested hers at birth. Megan is an empathic shapeshifter, basically meaning that she shifts based on those around her’s perception of her. And sadly her upbringing was not a happy one as, since she was born with fur, her parents saw her as a monster and left her in a caravan alone, with the rest of her romani community making up rumors about her.. and due to being unable to control her powers shape shifted into the monster they thought she was. She was raised on televisoin and thus has a rather naive sense of the outside world, and later bonded with brian after he took her in, her home having been destroyed due to lots of stuff I don’t have time to go into, and she later took up her current default form after realizing she was a shapeshifter in the first place. But yes our bubbly shapeshifter is swimming with the dolphins and due to her emphatic ablites, she can commuincate with them learns how to swim like them and, thanks to her ablities, has shifted to do so the best. She’s lost track of time though and heads home to the lighthouse she and Brian live in. She returns home to find the place ransacked, and since she didn’t feed her mogwii after midnight.. this time, she searches for the cause.. and the cause turns out to be similar to the reason Kitty is crying her eyes out miles away in scotland.

When Kitty and Kurt lost their surrogate family, Brian lost his too. As stated far above Betsy was his sister, and they were very close from the looks of it, and the loss of her naturally shattered the man. Meggan tries to comfort him but.. it goes about as well as you’d expect, especially since Brian has been heavily drinking on top of his grief.

This scene.. is really damn sad but really well written. Brian, as I joked in the teaser, has the powers of superman basically minus the add ons like heat vision and frost breath.. yet he couldn't save Betsy. But as Meggan accuratley puts things, he couldn’t of known she was in danger and she was a grown woman. As I said, she choose to sacrifice herself, and as I didn’t fill in, the spell only works with WILLING participants. All that would’ve changed had he gone is Madelyne Prior would be alive and not him. And it’s things like this that also made me take such umbrage with the X-Men faking their deaths: their causing, real genuine greif to people... while I joked mildly about the telpathy thing, i’m not sure betsy’s range, I AM sure that being a telepath one of the simpliest trick is masking your presence. It’d take a lot of effort and be mildly invasive, but keeping yourself hidden to tell your brother goodbye is hardly more morally grey than faking your death and leaving him in a drunken stupor. This is especailly bad once they get a teleporter shortly into their australian stay, as Gateway could SEND HER to him, with no risk of detection, and have her explain it in person with storm in tow. Instead they hurt their friends and loved ones for a plan that ultimatley didn’t quite pan out.

Meggan herself mopes for a second, understandable as Betsy was her friend too and she's hurt she's gone and blames herself.. before snapping out of it, realizing that Brian is just lashing out and needs help, but unable to face him like he is, she leaves him a pictoral note, since she's functionally illiterate, and goes to get advice from Kitty and Kurt, wanting to help him open up the way he helped her do the same. Meanwhile...

Jesus christ this comic loves abrupt tonal shifts.. but yeah Kurt is excercising, but then reflexively teleports after he takes a hit. As I mentioned earlier Kurt’s teleporting is strained, having gotten injured in a battle with Nimrod, who really hickman you couldn’t of come up with either a better name or a reason he’s called that when you brought him back in House and Powers?, and as a result comaed himself defeating one of the mauraders. And while the coma thing cleared up nicely his powers are still a fraction of what they once were and one teleport while injured no less leaves him too shaky to continue and reaching for the saftey panel. Thankfully Kitty phases through it while checking up on him, having been told through the island’s backup alarms that he was doing this borderline suicidal shenanigan. Kitty naturally lays into him over it.

Kitty's rage is entirely warranted: She just lost her surrogate family and her best friend. Things with her parents are strained. She dosen't want to loose the only family she really has left because he feels the same things she feels and is nearly killing himself to try and deal with it. Kurt apologizes, admitting the painful part of it: that he was HAPPY when he woke up from his coma, overjoyed to finally be alive again, to live again.. only to find out his family is dead from one of his closest friends. And with this i'm reminded of Steven Universe.. just go with me. There Pearl mourned for a good decade about loosing Rose because well.. she was everything she had. She , literally and metaphorically, freed her, she was her world.. and Rose moved on to someone else romantically and then decided to up and leave the mortal coil. Her entire world left her and she had no idea to cope or as she put it in song, "Who am I now in this world without her?" That's what our heroes are dealing with: for Kitty and Kurt the X-Men were their world.. not in such a co-dependent way as rose but for Kurt, it was his family: through them he went from a monster in the world's eyes, hiding from it and tired of having to do so, to a bold hero who refused to hide who he was anymore and who had family and a purpose. For young Kitty, she found parental figures in a time when her actual parents, particularly her dad, were going through a messy divorce, found strength she never knew to the point she EARNED her right to stay on the X-Men after Xavier started a junior class and wanted her to go there, and really came of age. The X-Men made them who they are today and without them.. just who are they? But before they can dive into that themselves our heroes find out something disturbing: they had the same exact dream about rachel, complete with helping her escape. Maybe they really did or maybe it was just a warning, the conculsion our heroes reach, and while Kitty does resolve to do something about it, determining that just because their injured dosen’t mean they’ve stopped being X-Men, but before they can deal with this they get a guest.

No but she’s just as weird and abrubt:

This is Gatecrasher, leader of the The Technet, a group of interdimensional mercenaries and bounty hunters. She wants to speak with the lady of the house but that’s not really and option as she’s kinda on a schedule. You know people to grab, drinks to be drunks, sapient racoons to bone.. that sorta thing.. and the last one isn’t something I pulled out of nowhere the recent Rocket Racoon solo not only brought in the technet but had her fancy the guy. Guess it’s the fuzzy, as Kurt himself will tell you chicks dig the fuzzy. It’s why he’s Krakoa’s orgy meister. Before Kitty and Kurt can find out who Gatecrasher is and why she’s here, Meggan soars in.. and hisses at Gatecrasher. See The good captain and the Technet have a history: they’ve been both enemies and reluctant allies, so naturally Meggan is worried their here for Brian. But this time they have no buisness with the good Captain... and when asked by kitty why she’s here Gatecrasher uses a telecom crystal, some sort of magic hologram recording, to explain herself:

Saturnyne is , as she says an omniversal majestrix. This basically means she runs the day to day operations of the Captain Britan Corps, basically the Captain Britians for every reality, helps give underdeveloped words nudges toward advancment and general multiversal maintince stuff. Sorta like a combination of Omnitraxus and Hekapoo from star vs the forces of evil but without being a racist asshole. I mean she’s still an asshole, just not a racist one. She and Brian have a romantic history. As you can also see each of the team is having a different reaction to her: Kurt is popping a boner just off screen, maybe he can invite her to Krakoa orgy night hmm?, Meggan is pissed because she and Brian were a thing once, and Kitty just found out she likes ladies AND she likes guy. What i’m saying is it dosen’t take an intellectual to get that she’s bisexual. And yes I know she turned down Karma off screen later on but that was A) the result of another writer changing things after the previous writer on both character, Chris Claremont himself, apparently had sizeable ship tease for them. and B) if her ex boyfriend iceman can be retconned to have been a heavily closeted until very recently gay man this whole time, Kitty can also have been sticking to the closet or just simply have not explored that side if we want. Anyways it turns out there here for rachel at Saturnyne’s orders, because she’s apparently a theat to the multiverse.. not too much of a stretch when in one reality her mom going dark phoenix destroyed damn near everything and even here the phoenix force has snuffed out entire galaxies. She’s apparently on her way back to earth, and it’s the Technet’s job to catch her. As for the specifics.. Gatecrasher has no idea. And frankly when an omniversal goddess asks you go fetch someone for what I assume is a yak that has a comparentment in it’s back with millions of dollars stashed inside, you don’t really care. Kitty being Kitty, refuses to help her find their friend and until she knows more, she’s willing to fight her on it. Unfortunatley, as you can probably tell, Gatecrasher wasn’t dumb enough to go after a being that can eat an entire solar system alone.

It's here we meet the Technet proper and a fight between two former teammates, a shapeshifter they only just now met and who only Kurt recognized, and a team of weird as shit but highly trained bounty hunters goes about as well as the classic matchup of Wolverine vs "Anyone trying to get between him and his beer stash". Kitty is quickly taken out by the yellow girl with green hair, scatterbrain, whose power is.. just that: anyone she touches has their brain go all spacey and weird and kitty knocks herself out falling over when Scatter shuts her thinky parts off. And as for Meggan..

This is Bodybag. And his power is exactly what it looks like: he gulps people up and then keeps them in his sack on the back. It’s weird but i’ts my kind of creative weird and it makes sense for a team of bounty hunters to have a member to store their quarrry. Kurt wisely BAMF’s the fuck out of there, but Gatecrasher decides not to persue him: He’s not their target, and if he wants his friends he’ll have to come back for them anyway, so it’s not like chasing him all over is really worth the effort. She does have Bodybag snag kitty though, and plans to use her and Meggan as bargaining chips.

Meanwhile Rachel finally returns to the story, as seen above a bit discombobulated given you know, she just crossed dimensions or whatever hapepned. She then ends up at a charity masqurade party , just poofying out of nowhere and when she tries to you know, leave...

I just... what the fuck kind of charity event IS this? The chains she brought with her but “no one leaves without permisson. “ I just... THIS IS A CHARITY BALL NOT VIETNAM. And who, besides racist assholes, thinks holdiing someone down with chains is a good idea. Just WHAT IS THIS SCENE. Thankfully we get some other party crashers.

These are Warwolves, a new, as far as I can tell, creation and basically Mojo’s literal hunting dogs. Rachel tries fighting them off but naturally, their Psi-Proof so just blasting them with telekenisis won’t work and uses the objects around her, including her own chains to duck them. But she mutters what’s the point it’s just another sound stage.. except as I said, it isn’t. She’s in foggy london town.

Rachel continues her run through the urban jungle eventually ending up in a subway. No not the restraunt, she’s not that unlucky. Duckign onto a train one of the warwolves globs on.

To be fair most hollywood contracts are basically slavery, but Rachel as a point.. she was basically tricked into singing it, again not exactly uncommon, and refuses to take this bullshit.

This bit is awesome, and doubly so as I left out a bit of Rachel's backstory on purpose earlier: she was a hound. Basically it meant she was enslaved and conditioned to hunt down other mutants, only escaping shortly before days of future past happened and then escsaping into the present. So naturally the thought of being enslaved and forced to do some asshole's bidding again, to loose her free will? She'll die before that happens and slaughters the warwolf to prove it.. though also scares her fellow passangers in the process. While Rachel tries to explain thing the warwolves greeve.. and Teleporter, Gatecrasher's lizard thing, has located Rachel. Meanwhile Madison is grappling with the fact that not every issue can be settled by comittee... Meanwhile Kurt arrives at the Lighthouse to find Brian stinking of booze and asleep, so he decides to do the only logical thing he can think of.

I fucking love you Kurt. So since Godzilla is too busy at his tax audit to save him from the depths of the ocean Brian wakes up himself pissed and assuming someone tried to kill him. Which granted Kurt outright admitted he might drown but given the only two friends he has left in the world and an innocent he just met who fought beside him despite having no reason to besides it being the right thing are in mortal peril, he has no time to play nice. Kurt’s responses to Brian’s outrage are fucking amazing.

Fucking brutal and accurate: Brian’s alcoholism is killing him and is just as borderline suicidal as Kurt’s play session with largely the same intention. Kurt has no time for wallowing in self pity, no time to baby Brian, as much as it might be warranted, through his grief. Kurt Wagner needs a hero, and since the avengers and fantastic four would likely take hours he dosen’t have, Brian is his best bet at saving his friends. He has no time for pity or sadness, he only has time to save what he has left. He explains the situation to Brian as well as how the hell he found him: since he at least knew of Brian, likely due to Betsy as she was staying with the X-Men prior to joining and just before the massacre, he dug up the X-Men’s file on him and spent the rest of his time getting to him. Brian is, unsurprisingly, in no real mood to help and mopes that there’s really no point in it… and that’s when Kurt somehow gets even more pissed off and 20 times as awesome, with a speech worthy of Sir Patrick Stewart himself.

And as I’ve made abundantly clear that’s the point of this story: The X-Men’s temporary death was unfair, left a lot of pain in their wake and left our heroes scrambling to figure out where do they go from here? And it’s here Nightcrawler is the first besides Meggan, whose simple world view means it was a lot easier to process things and took her three panels to get herself in gear to help Brian, to really turn a corner on his grief. He’s sad his friends are dead, he wishes more than anything that he could’ve died a hero like them instead of living with the misery and sorrow of them being gone.. but he’s alive. And he’s going to honor them the best he can by being the kind of man they wanted him to be. And to me this is why Kurt became leader: out of the five he has the most experience, with only Brian rivaling him in that, but also the most drive. He may of lost everything, but by god he’s going to keep moving. Sure his friends died, it’s the risk of the trade.. but they’d want him to live, to take up the sword and keep fighting so that the dream dosen’t fade out. It’s why, as much as I don’t agree with it, they kept hteir resurrection a secret: because the safety of all mutants, of their friends, is more important than one man. And Kurt is going to honor that. But not before giving Brian another verbal bitchslapping.

Of course it’s not easy as Brian DID die to become captain britan.. and the memory haunts him. And he wonders when it’ll come from him.. and he’s afraid of it. But the question is will he let his fear of the reaper swallow him whole or live like Kurt, fighting on anyways. To truly live.

Meanwhile Rachel is the only member of the forming team to not have had a full on mope sesh so she gets on that, but it only lasts for about a panel and like most of the angst in this comic is warranted: Rachel comptemplates if she should go back to the X-Men.. but realizes despite running out on them , their family, and she has no other options. But before she can learn the truth the technet are upon her and bodybag scoops her up. Gatecrasher plans to release Kitty and Meggan and one thing I like that I hadn’t noticed in previous reads is Gatecrasher is a fairly intresting antagonist. She’s not “evil”, she’s just a merc wanting a payday, and in this case was hired by a legitmate if pompus source. While she takes Kitty and Meggan, it’s more out of pragmatisim and as noted she plans to release the two when she could’ve let Bodybag digest them, and when first showing up is perfectly cordial to Kurt and Kitty, and only fights when it’s clear our heroes won’t let her just walk off with their old friend. It makes me glad there’s far more of her and the technet to come as the series goes on and a ton more in Alan Davis run when I get to that. Their intresting characters with unique power sets and inject a sense of fun into what would otherwise be a fairly dreary story. Anyways before she can do that the warwolves strike and are too dumb to know when to quit so a fight breaks out and Gatecrasher beats the piss out of one while Kurt arrives, watching from the shadows. As for why no one’s spotted him... i’ts simple: One of his powers is to blend into shadows. It’s not used often and it’s forgotten quite a bit, but it is one he’s used on ocasion and even IF Claremont just retconned it out, his foes are too busy to notice. Kurt once again shows how awesome he is and tricks one of the wolves into slashing the bags containing his friends open. Gross but oh so triumphant.

Unfortunatley his victory is short lived: Meggan and Kitty are still woozy as, while I didn’t mention this earlier, Bodybags bags contain a paralyzing goop so they still aren’t quite ready to fight and while Rachel is, she can’t psy zap the dog. Luckily for Kurt gatecrasher yanks it away. Unluckily, she prepares to beat him into furry blue chunklets on the ground. Luckily...

Brian has finally gotten his shit together to save the day.. for all of a panel…

While Brian is fighting who or whatever that is Rachel and Kitty try to get into things but are blindsided by ringtoss and joyboy whose powers well...

Yeah while ringtoss, if still weird isn’t TOO out of the ordinary for Marvel, Joyboy seems like he’s some sorta lost Jojo’s bizarre adventure stand. It’s also another reason to love the technet as again, their powers are just so fucking creative and weird. But that’s also what makes them such a threat: Their powers aren’t what most heroes usually deal with, and thus they have the element of surprise, helped by the fact their all from separate dimensions, meaning even in space, where their likely more ready for nonsense, they still have the upper hand by being races most space peeps aren’t ready for. Speaking of not ready,w ehave two last members to cover...

They speak for themselves, and while they do so Brian tries to rescue Meggan but is stopped by scatterbrain. Nightcrawler notices their asses are getting kicked and figures out WHY: The Warwolves and The Technet are teams. They work together regularly. Excalibur at this point is three former teammates in a disorienting situation and two british persons they just met. And if they don’t’ start working together they aren’t going to last. So Nightcrawler decides to fix that by knocking a warwolf into Ringtoss, who then collapses into waxwork whose touch takes out both and leaves Rachel free. Rachel quickly takes out Joyboy and with him out of the way, Kitty and Kurt can focus on Gatecrasher:

And with that Gatecrasher knows when to fold em and teleports the team away to fight another day, while the Warwolves slinked off in the confusion. Both will be back, obviously, but for now our heroes have one, Brian and Meggan make up and make out, and with the chaos settled Kitty, Rachel and Kurt have a tearful reunion.

Our heroes celebrate with a campfire and memories of their fallen comrades, with Rachel admitting she’s not sure what’s real or not after her experiences with Mojo. Brian prepares to leave and take care of the Warwolves himself.. but Rachel objects. The three others don’t have lives to return to, and just because the X-Men are gone dosent’ mean Xaviers dream should die out, likening them to the symbol of King Arthurs sword Excalibur. Kitty and Kurt start to agree, pointing out their dream taught them that if theirs a vacuum left in the X-Men’s legacy, someone will use it for their own ends. Rachel affirms her reasons for staying as a team, saying she’s tired of running: She’s done so all her live and she wants to , for once, stand for something. Meggan, having had similar problems in the past, agrees with her and the rest of the crew quickly come on board and thus we close on this image as a new team, and a new legacy, is forged: Excalibur is born.

Final Thoughts: The Sword is Forged is an utter classic and a great way to start things off. Our heroes are established, Rachel, who I felt was a bit thrown around by the plot during her time on the X-Men, is fleshed out a bit more and given purpose while Brian and Meggan are decently introduced to the audience. My only real complaints is that Davis and Claremont sometimes forget that American audiences won’t know who half these people are and while they introduce the Technet and Saturnyne well enough, they still never backtrack to explain them better later and what history I DID get I had to dig up for myself online. That aside the story, while having a lot of angst, is well done and has a good flow to it and ends on a high note, the characters are likeable enough, the villains are all creative though the Warwolves feel slight next to the Technet and will get fleshed out a bit more in the series proper. And of course I’d be a moron if I didn’t compliment Alan Davis wonderful art, which captures the whimsical tone well, the emotion in certain scenes perfectly and holds up beautifully years later. Overall The Sword is Forged is a great team origin story and if you liked what you saw here I’d recommend checking it out. Next time, hopefully tonight, we finally get to to the new Excalibur as Brian and his sister and thrust into the shit and a new Captain Britain is born. Until then, courage.

#analysis of x #excalibur #captain britan #meggan #nightcrawler #kitty pryde #rachel summers #the technet #gatecrasher #warwolves #mojoworld #x-men #chris claremont #alan davis #dawn of x

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whetstonefires · 6 years

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d gray man liveblog part 4! (part 1)(part 2)(part 3)

No but seriously, Cyril Camelot is the English Foreign Minister and just staged an assassination attempt on himself for an excuse to declare war on the people he just spent a while negotiating an agreement with.

Why? In what way does this benefit the Noahs?

(...why is the name of the country censored, I feel like hoshino-san just didn’t want to try to come up with a plausible European country for England to go to war with in 18-mumblety.)

I mean Bookman says tragedy breeds akuma in his analysis, but they took Japan while it was so emphatically not at war that it had zero foreign relations at all; war is clearly not necessary for the Earl’s bargains to go through apace.

Cyril kind of looks like he just does this shit for fun.

...”the evil man who made the world his enemy” is a fascinating choice of words, Tykki Mik, I really wonder very hard about you.

And you’re right, when he’s not wearing his balloon costume, and talking normally, and buying flowers from little girls, he looks normal! Weird how that works.

Question: is that umbrella he declined so he could walk in the rain Lero? Does Lero have to share the Earl with other umbrellas outside of official monster business, or disguise himself as a normal bumpershoot when out in public? Is that servant another disguised akuma, or a normal person who has no idea?

...it’s probably an akuma.

YAY KRORY WAKE UP!

why so many chain. it’s not like he lost track of who his enemies were in that last fight, even when he was made of blood. rude to chain.

aw he cry. he cry! ;_; he cry for his friends!

this is the kind of sad boy i like. he can be annoying but not in, you know, a murdery way.

holy shit creepy ghost girl?! i...logically must have read this part before but i don’t remember it, damn i was bingeing like a mad thing.

where...where did the poison come from. why is Krory’s arm sticking out like that. what is going on.

Why Are The Order So Bad.

aaaaand cut to the kind of random hijinks that seem intended to lift the mood but tbh they’re kind of too grim in their own right.

lmao alternately this is an excuse to draw kanda and lavi as chibis and Allen with long hair.

If it’s not because of structural damage, why are they moving to a new base? No one’s said anything about the new headquarters being any more secure against frickin’ teleportation. Maybe the Pope just wants the Order distracted with moving chores?

(I like referring to the higher-ups at the Vatican as the Pope; I realize we have no actual evidence the actual Pope even knows any of this is happening, but if hoshino is gonna be having people shout that other people are ‘property of the Pope’ i’m gonna use the word Pope as often as I can get away with because

1) it makes the whole thing more ridiculous b) it emphasizes the European Gothic Via Japan vibe going on here which is at least 20% of the entertainment value and thirdly, ‘Pope’ is fun to say.)

Oh, right, Allen’s ongoing identity crisis! (it only gets worse from here, kid)

The bosses were logically correct to make Cross Marian do his ‘report to Vatican and be responsible’ part before giving him the pay-off of ‘allowed to talk to Allen’ because otherwise he’d just fuck off but damn it’s hard on the kid, being left hanging.

I absolutely do not believe for one second this business with Mana’s past and secret motives was planned before the series started, but that’s honestly for the best; it’s more wrenching when we didn’t have any more reason than Allen to suspect something was off.

...i like when nice clowns adopt people tho... :o(

not telling the brass or their stooge about your creepy extra reflection was a Good Call.

yes link really truly allen is a good kid who is not plotting evil shit. sheesh.

more Potion Accident gags, i’m sorry, i can’t keep up with your taste in mood whiplash and i never liked most slapstick anyway. the bunny ears are. strange.

...never mind who made the ‘talk like a cat’ potion, who packed that box Miranda spilled; that is such an absurd chaotic collection of items organize your shit people. eesh.

Lmao everyone’s #1 creepy ghost theory is, Komui Playing A Dumb Prank.

...okay, Allen’s reaction as the Matron gnaws on his arm, and the fact that everyone’s first assumption is that Allen has annoyed this very sensible woman to the point that she is communicating via teeth, manages to be funny but noooooo, why would you, not Awesome Shoes Lady after she made it through the Level 4 Akuma attack unscathed, come onnnnnn.

okay, uhhh...contagious vampirism zombie thing...lmao everyone gets worried about matron when she bites Miranda, everyone is super embarrassed when Miranda bites Noise, this is just some impressive Not Realizing Shit’s Fucked guys.

okay, zombie horde of various survivors of all the recent massacres.

uh, if this weren’t being dropped at a time of total emotional exhaustion, it would work better. it’s already working better the second time around for the fact that i took a break after the last arc.

considering it comes out monthly and we had a Noah interlude, it probably worked in the original context just fine, but daaaaaamn did this storyline piss me off the first time, all i even remember about it is the rage.

:D Lenalee rescued Tiny Kanda. Who for some reason can interpret her ‘nyah’ sounds.

...how is a stimulant drug contagious via biting.

i remember the first time i read this i naturally assumed the biting disease was derived from Krory. that still would have made more sense.

robot eats notebook, lol...bickering...”my pride won’t allow me to become a zombie” yes allen excellent logic you weirdo.

okay i’m done checking back in when slightly less stupid shit starts happening....

okay never mind the robot’s fireworks blew Allen through a wall, where Krory was suffering in chains, and then the blanket spontaneously combusted, and then there was somebody with an axe...

...and then Allen wakes up and is informed he was knocked out and concludes Krory’s situation was a dream oh come on.

krory is at the door! but being creepy! the robot refuses to open the door out of self-preservation! allen seduces the robot into risking its life!

...

‘this is nostalgic’ with the hero face on i can’t.

okay, so it was Krory, who apparently swallowed the entire bottle of poison, lid included? for some reason?

oh great there’s a parasitic zombie ghost thing riding Reever and sticking its face out his stomach. horror! nope, now played for laughs.

aaaand suddenly veering back into pathos. bonus info about evil human experiments!

...aaaaaand touching bonding moment for the Lees. Aww.

Not only is Komui protective and self-sacrificing, when he isn’t being psychopathic, he has absolved Lenalee of his having sacrificed his entire life to watch over her after she was kidnapped into this.

then a stupid gag! and the ghost does a creepy jealous possession thing! and meanwhile everything is on fire.

et cetera, mood whiplash back and forth at least once every other page...komui starts reciting from memory the names of every single person killed in the Order’s human experiments...

...i don’t think the names are intended as an additional gag, but most of them are fairly odd and many downright improbable, though none truly syllable-mashing outrageous. I’m rather fond of Asia Smet and Oona Boelyn.

a page and a half of heart-rending pathos, and then the robot falls off the ceiling with a huge syringe of ‘vaccine’ it synthesized from Krory’s blood because he was the first infected by the...stimulant...egad, that’s not how any of that works.

and then, and then...anyway then everyone was zombies and the boss from China came in off-panel and fixed everything, as you do.

i truly hate you hoshino katsura, all the more for the fact that i genuinely loved about 15% of that parade of neck-wrenching bullshit.

anyway! that’s all over and done with, we are now on a boat being cute, because allen is using the stolen teleportation Ark that only he can drive to open a door between the old Castle headquarters and this...uh...cave? that they’re moving into.

...oh hey Shadow Of Allen (XIV) is now sporting wings remarkably like the ones Krory had during his drugged vampire zombie freak-out. i bet that means nothing whatsoever.

man whenever Leverrierererererer turns up i hallucinate ominous music. smug assholish ominous music. slimier sounding than the Imperial March, you know?

that’s not just my biases, hoshino-san lights the panels very effectively to create that effect. egad, he’s going to be in command??? is that why the move, because it was easier to undermine komui’s authority if he was removed from his entrenched power base?

...we just covered last chapter that that castle was a leverrier family fortress originally tho. huh.

excessively creepy secret Pope police involved in isolating and depowering Allen.

also lol that is very Japanese-style religious magic going on, that is not what a Catholic ritual binding would look like at all. not that they have as much settled precedent, their demon-fighting standards run much more toward ‘make it go away.’

aw shit komui’s right there and he can’t do shit, best he can get is a promise that ‘if Allen is a good child’ he won’t die.

flashback! aw man allen the first lesson mana ever taught you was to make peace with the dead and let them lie. should’ve listened.

...man allen was a grouchy brat. i wonder what color his hair was, before it went white. haha apparently he acquired his adoptive dad by running away from the circus with him.

pfffffft little allen hated clowns, that achieves the level of actual irony...welp, suicide joke.

aw shit mana was too burned out on grief to cry for his dog but allen could, for the doggie that licked his hand once. imma cry now.

whoa actual conversation with Cross Marian! under the supervision of papal ninjas (known as Crow) within a magic cage of paper. and wow! an actual answer to a question! unprecedented!

...it isn’t labeled which of these kids was Mana and which was (the most recent incarnation of??) the Fourteenth but imma hazard a guess that the one with hair that matches little Allen’s is not Mana.

oh also Adam Puddinghead killed the 14th, i don’t think we officially knew that until now? or maybe it came up when he blew up Edo i don’t recall.

oh my god i was definitely bingeing too hard last time; by the time Cross Marian started referring to the 14th in the second person to Allen my capacity to be astonished or distressed was burned right the fuck out. i was just like ‘yeah yeah figured get on with it.’

it’s actually a pretty dramatic scene, but it’s weird to be getting this shit in straightforward exposition after all this absence of any information at all.

wait “the human implanted with” ... “the host for his revival” ... i can’t tell if Cross Marian is referring to whatever the normal noah transfer process is or some way 14 found of circumventing that.

ohhhhhh man this title page has tiny clown Allen and it is the cutest shit ever.

did i ever tell you guys one time when my mom was two and a half, she had her stage debut as the cutest little pigtailed clown? and she ran onstage toward her daddy just like they’d practiced and the whole audience burst into delighted laughter.

and Tiny!Mom turned to look at them in appalled horror, and u-turned right back around and ran offstage again.

no one had successfully communicated to her she was going to be laughed at by a bunch of strangers. possibly they didn’t expect a toddler to mind.

oh sure Cross Marian, tell the kid the horrifying truth about himself and his dad in the most overdramatic way possible, in front of witnesses, and then when he dissociates in horror just beat the shit out of him until he resets.

the amount of playing abuse for laughs in this series is one of the many emotional strains that led me to drop it the first time.

it’s honestly a contest sometimes who i currently hate most, Marian, you or Labradorito or the Earl. Ech.

‘no idea’ tch. but if you’re saying he implanted his memories into Allen before he died, then...the Earl caught up with the 14th really recently, then?! How long were he and Mana on the run? I totally forgot these details, wow. i suspect some of them will turn out to be false.

...why the fuck are you saying it like this? bastard.

wow CM you almost look spooked by the fact that allen cares more about the possibility that his dad never actually loved him than the prospect of having his mind eaten.

maybe he’d care more about the mind-eating if the 14th was the Earl’s ally instead of planning to use allen as a weapon to kill him? allen is already using himself as a weapon to kill the Earl.

oop, way to get him back on target! “what if i told you you’ll kill the people you care about?”

aaaand cut.

that was like ten chapters’ worth of blather, i need to get more efficient.

#catching up with d. grey man #d gray man #allen walker #d gray man spoilers #oooold ones but hey #abuse of power #idiocy #this writing style is PUNISHMENT #and ceasing to read was SELF-CARE #yet i persist #i am stronger than the me of a decade ago #stg #hoc est meum

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