Excalibur: Cross-Dressing Caper

Excalibur now engages in the Cross-Time Caper, where Claremont and Davies invent Sliders 6 years ahead of schedule. Like that show, it uses its settings principally as sources of comedy, rather than seriously as a tool to examine history; and any drama that arises comes mostly from the characters and their reaction to being stranded. Unlike that show it features a massive BDSM subtext.

I'll skip most of the immensely tedious details of the various alternate timelines (although the gay ogres, the royal marriage of Prince William and Catherine are worth a mention, as is the the world which is a a horrifying preview of what comics will be like in the 1990s. Captain America is a cyborg. Galactus comes in at the end to arresteat everyone for being too silly.)

Instead on Earth-616, Nigel Frobisher continues his long-running plotline. You remember what I wrote about body mod fic in the Lady Mandarin entry. Well, that's not the only fetish stuff that appears in late 1980s X-Men. Nanny would just about slip under the radar if we weren't looking for it (as has pretty much everything involving heroes being tied up), but now we're primed to see what we can find, there's adult baby and ageplay, well before the mass media coverage that that attracted in the early 1990s. The Frobisher plotline has feminization, where Frobisher is briefly transformed - against his will but in line with his innermost desire - to the form of Courtney Ross. It's immediately brushed off as a joke, but those few panels are no more an accidental invocation of this than I am a steeplejack.

Phoenix's costume is kind of a bit, too, and I don't just mean the spikes, when suspended upside down; Kitty is able to wriggle out from her boots (amateur work tying them up). But Ray admits that her boots go up to her neck. This sort of garment exists but is very specialist; typically catsuits are worn with separate boots, even in the fetish community. Even by comic book costuming standards, this is impractical. Catwoman doesn't wear one: the cover of the recent Catwoman #1 shows this quite clearly. And there would have to be a zip or other fastener, something Ray's costume does not appear to have. We know that Ray can shift atoms around to make clothes: is that how the Phoenix costume works? Did she magic it up around herself? She's three openings in her costume away from being Fetishman. Of course, this all ignores the fact that the costume was forced on her, back when she was a hound in the future, which isn't fetishy at all, no. In #16, she dresses up in a different costume entirely, to enter a tournament. This one is a bit more ponygirl.

This stuff, put together, makes the Hellfire Club and Emma Frost look vanilla.

Excalibur #11: At Least We've Still Got The Omniverse

Excalibur is based on the Marvel UK stuff, of which I know little beyond which I have read on Wikipedia. As I understand it, a key element of it, introduced by Alan Moore, is the omniverse and the responsibility of the "Captain Britain Corps", consisting of multiple alternate versions of Captain Britain, for maintaining it. One of my favourite little examples is Captain Airstrip One, who is from a world similar to that of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four ¹. Yes, he might be a participant in one of the most brutal regimes in fiction, but he's still your colleague. So you can see that Excalibur semi-cooperating in a swap of Lightning Force for Moira and Callisto back isn't quite so terrible. Excalibur, bless them, find this appalling, especially when it comes to Evil!Nightcrawler.

Invariant across timelines.

In Britain, of course, the authorities have had a long tradition of dealing with general weird crap, and we have this all be managed by our first predecessor to MI-13: the Weird Happenings Organisation. It's led by Brigadier Alysande Stuart (no relation to the Lethbridge-Stewart appearing in Uncanny #218, I take it), and her brother Alistaire, their scientific advisor. They have a headquarters under the Tower of London, which Doctor Who will borrow back as an idea in 2005's Christmas Invasion (and again in 2012's Power of Three, which featured a Kate Stewart, chief scientific advisor to UNIT.)

Incidentally, I have failed to post about the Nazi train so far. It swapped with a real train in a tunnel under freak circumstances involving Widget, which is why Moira and Callisto are stranded. This Nazi train is from "Reichsrail Englande", which is terrible German (they want Reischsbahn, and that's ignoring the extra 'e' which also makes its unwelcome appearance in "Hauptman Englande"). But that's not even the funny part - the Nazi British Rail has somehow managed to also devise the British Rail double-arrow logo, which was created in our timeline in 1965. And why not. It's a design classic, after all, much better than those Dutch or Polish or Swiss rip-offs, and I'm glad it remains part of our signage even though British Rail is now but a distant memory.² Slightly disappointed they didn't try and swastika-ise it, though.

The swap is made, but Widget freaks out and there is an explosion and all the player characters vanish. Oh noes! I have a feeling we're about to get the prototype for Exiles.

BritWatch

"Thames River". I don't care that it's the editorial voice reflecting U.S. usage. The name of the thing is "River Thames". If you call it "Thames River" you are wrong. Just as wrong as I would be if I started calling those watercourses either side of Manhattan the "River Hudson" or (even better) the "River East".

1. When other kids were reading comics, I was reading George Orwell. And by that I don't just mean Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. Sure, I enjoyed those. In fact, I liked them so much that I decided to read all his other books. The school library had Down and Out in Paris and London, Keep The Aspidistra Flying and The Road To Wigan Pier, which a 12-year-old me somehow managed to get through (when she wasn't reading Peter David's Star Trek novels, or Tolkien's History of Middle-Earth). It's a shame they didn't have Homage to Catalonia, I didn't read that until much later. In 33-year-old me, well, I recognise a certain pattern of intensity in reading projects.

2. Bet you didn't expect to read about the privatisation of British Rail on a blog about the X-Men, did you?

Excalibur #9-#10: Deutsch verwendet mehrere Buchstaben in Earth-597

Excalibur has quickly defined its mission: X-Men in Britain, but funnier and quirkier. Which is why before its first year is out it is also the first X-book to do a "Nazis Win" AU. Nazis Win AUs have a long tradition in comic comics, to the extent that Misfits did one in 2011, in its course of working through comic book tropes in a Thameside council estate setting (the episode that I have named "The One Where Kelly Kicks the Shit Out of Hitler", or series 3 episode 4, if you must insist). It wasn't quite as well-worn in 1989, though - Claremont beat Fatherland by three years. But it came from somewhere and as he often does, he acknowledges his source explicitly in the text, which would be the 1964 film It Happened Here, one of those films I've been meaning to watch for years.

But that isn't what's going on here (or anything like Dick's 1962, The Man in the High Castle). Instead, this more closely resembles another tradition, which includes "Mirror, Mirror" from Star Trek, and the Crime Syndicate of America (both 1960s again). In these, rather than a serious attempt at doing a what-if, you make history a mirror image in order to justify an evil version of the team, which each member having a malicious analogue. In "Mirror, Mirror", there was an Evil Captain Kirk, an Evil Spock, and suchforth. In the Crime Syndicate, a bunch of folks with the same powers and names were all villains instead, and decided to band together. Never mind what a remarkable coincidence it is that the ISS Enterprise happened to be at the Halkan homeworld at the same time as the USS Enterprise - that's completely besides the point, and is a misunderstanding of the genre of story being told here.

In this case we want an Evil version of Excalibur. Excalibur is very much a British team, and Britain's defining national identity myth - in the absence of any independence struggle - is the Second World War. By default the Evil version of any British superhero team will be a Nazi version. And that's what happens here. Hauptman England is fair enough: Captain Britain with a swastika. He's an English aristo, so frankly that's a natural fit (I like how the Internet hasn't quite realised that Hauptman England is very likely just an alt-Braddock). Reichsminister Moira MacTaggert makes sense, too. And Nightcrawler is German already! So he makes an excellent political officer. And who doesn't enjoy an evil Nightcrawler, eh? Evil Meggan is a bit difficult given her background, but the real problem is Kitty. Kitty Pryde is Jewish. Very Jewish. So, Earth-597 has an evil tortured ghost Kitty, bald and with a star of David tattooed on her forehead where the others have swastikas on their costumes. Worst. Idea. Ever.

Curiously, there's no Phoenix. Like the lack of Doctor in Inferno (Doctor Who, known for its genre-hopping, did this the first season it got a stable home base), perhaps this is because Rachel Summers is a time traveller, not bound by the laws of mirror universes. Can you imagine a Days of Future Past future for the Lightning Storm universe? I wouldn't know who to root for: the Sentinels or the Nazis.

Excalibur #8: An Englishman, Two Americans, a German, and a Roma in New York

Excalibur #8 makes it worthwhile having gone to New York. There are several main plot threads. Firstly, Kitty has gone to the mansion to get some stuff. She meets the New Mutants there, before they tangle with Magneto. Words are exchanged, and she appears to have reverted back to that rivalry with the X-Babies that I thought we'd got over 5 years ago. But most of this is the bad news about Doug and Illyana. They invite her back to X-Factor, but she declines.

There are minor continuity wrinkles with this: for example, the Kid!Illyana in this knows English, whereas the Kid!Illyana in New Mutants doesn't. But a more important problem is that Kitty still thinks Colossus is dead, and the New Mutants do not correct her on this. It could hardly be otherwise, of course, but it is a shame that a book whose one consistent moral lesson has been the value of solidarity and teamwork can only exist because of poor communication between friends and colleagues. Still, we're in the phase where this is being addressed, and different X-books are acquiring identities beyond merely "X-Men, but in Australia/San Francisco/New York/London/wherever": Excalibur is already developing its distinctive humour and New Mutants has started its slow mutation into X-Force (well before Cable or Rob Liefeld turns up).

Another strand is the interleaved tale of Cap and Meggan. Meggan has gone missing, as far as Cap's concerned (she's illiterate and so didn't leave a note), and he tries to track her down. But his power is on the fritz, for unclear reasons that might have something to do with his geographic location or his costume. This provides some amusing culture clash, as the denizens of New York are unfazed by Cap's antics. As an adopted Londoner, I might take issue with the details - we're the spiritual home of studious ignorance, and I have disregarded stranger things on the tube than many people have seen in their lives. But it's a gag that wouldn't work with a Londoner-in-London or a New Yorker-in-New York, and New York is the epicentre of superheroes in the 616.

Meanwhile, Meggan is hanging out with randoms at Coney Island¹ and such places, and finding her power has gone wonky as well - she's losing the ability to hold her identity - and worse, isn't even noticing this. She's recovered, eventually, but doesn't realise the fuss that she's caused.

1. In my one trip over the Atlantic, in April 2009, I made sure to visit Coney Island ². We were the only goyim on the dodgems. This has no relevance here, I just wanted to use that phrase.

2. I visited other islands, as well, such as Manhattan, Long and Staten; although all I did on the Isle of Staten was to watch the video extolling the many supposed virtues of that isle at the ferry terminal before then heading back on to the ferry to go back to the Island of Manhattan. I heard there was a larger landmass nearby, too, but I didn't go there. I'm sickeningly metropolitanized, me.

Excalibur #6-#7: Inferno

Excalibur #6-#7 is the crossover with Inferno. Because what this new British team title really at this relatively early stage while it's still establishing its own identity is a trip to New York.

Ray, in what I can tell is going to become a pattern, provides our entry into the story, through her psychic link with baby Nathan. She bolts, and the rest of Excalibur go follow: Cap carrying Nightcrawler and Meggan taking Kitty. One of Claremont's more successful attempts at outright humour follows, as the practicalities of a multi-hour flight over the Atlantic and what this mean for bladders are considered. ("Can't you just phase?", says Cap, to Kitty's disgust.)

When they arrive in New York, stuff is weird, in a way similar to and yet more lighthearted than the Inferno issues of the other X-Books. Ray has been nobbled, and a demonically-influenced Meggan provides our main antagonist. There is some fighting. Cap goes bad too; Kitty has to use the soulsword to free him. Oh. She has the soulsword. That was probably a bad sign, right?

The basic premise of Excalibur: i.e. that Kitty and Kurt think that the X-Men are dead, necessitates that there can't be any crossover with the other titles, so once they're here, all they can have is a different viewpoint of the same apocalypse happening, not meet any of the other teams, and not then contribute towards the overall resolution (because that's already being taken care of in too many titles already). Should have stayed at home, really.

Excalibur #4-#5: Excalibur Meet Arcade

Excalibur #4-#5 features Arcade, and despite not being any different to normal, he's understated in it. This is because he has hired Wimbledon F.C. as minions. I think I've got that right, anyway. Arcade's plan is the usual: capture a loved one (in this case Courtney Ross, as Brian's actual girlfriend, Meggan, is powered), and set traps waiting for the heroes to arrive. In this case he's doing it for revenge rather than cash. And he's doing it as a disused steelworks in Strangeways in northern England.

They go stumbling in and there's a new element in an Arcade story as his minions bodyswap with Excalibur. Ray is taken out of action by possession, lest she break the story. (There's some linkage with Inferno setup there, but it's not clear to me what's going on. Interesting fact: she thinks Baby X is called Nathan. She should know, since she was with the team around the time he was born.) Kitty remains free, and is able to convey to Courtney the information necessary to bodyswap everyone back.

And... in the soap opera bits: Meggan nearly manages to seduce Nightcrawler (I'm going to need to carefully examine their next appearances); Saturnyne swaps places with Courtney; and Brian takes some flowers to !Courtney. Kissing happens. Chart might need updating.

Issue #4 wins my prize for best cover yet:

Alan Davis writes about it here, and spoils the mystery. It was just a cheap gag because the first issue was all setup.

BritWatch

Well. Chris Claremont takes several hundred Brit points by having it be a plot point in #4 that Marks and Spencers refused to take credit card payments (that's why Kitty had to use cash to pay, which was subsequently found to be bogus).

I almost forgive him for having Captain Britain say "strewth". Curiously urbandictionary makes the same mistake, and perhaps for the same reason Claremont did. Yes, it does appear in episode 1 of Monty Python's Flying Circus, said by a man from Guildford. But it is put in the mouth of a man who is called "Bruce Foster" and has, for that one syllable he utters, a bad Australian accent.

It is clarified that the lighthouse is on the western coast of England. This consists of two distinct stretches from the Solway Firth to the River Dee; and then from the the Severn Estuary down to Cornwall. My guess would be that it is on this second, south-western stretch, because that would be more Celtic; but somewhere in Cumbria is always an option. It appears to be not that far from a major town. Kitty calls it the "middle of nowhere", but then she is a Chicago girl who spent much of the last year in suburban New York.

There is a real Strangeways, in Manchester, better known as the location of HMP Manchester, and immortalised in the album by the Smiths. But Manchester has never been known for its steel.

Excalibur #3: Excalibur 1 - 0 Jugger

Excalibur #3 is a single-issue story with Claremont's by now standard formula of a superheroic plot to give us our action, along with about as much emphasis placed on Internal Team Drama. Action plot. Someone breaks info HMP Crossmoor (fictional, by the way), and breaks out the Juggernaut, who had been languishing there since the events of Uncanny #218. There is a brief fight. Excalibur win, because Phoenix.

Excalibur are getting ready to move into the Braddock Lighthouse, which means he and Meggan are having to compact all their stuff. Meggan didn't tell Brian before making the invite, which is a bit difficult on him. The next morning he's forced to deal with a teenage kid hogging the bathroom and the bunch of them moralising about his alcohol consumption (the guy's sister just died, and now her ex-teammates all just moved in with him, give the man a little space already). Ray destroys his whisky collection; which I'm sorry but pretty clearly puts her in Dark Phoenix territory in my book (see footnote in my bio to the side). He storms off and meets up with his ex, Courtney Ross, but gets called away before anything steamy happens. He and Meggan reconcile for now.

This is a fairly bland issue. The action is pro forma, and the character development is mostly just a recapitulation of the existing position of these characters, with added moving-in fun. Needs more artifice.

BritWatch

No major howlers! I would quite like to know where the lighthouse is, though. It says it is on the "west coast of Britain", which as a location is infuriatingly vague, 'cos of the way the country is oriented and the sheer crinkliness of that part of it. It could be anywhere from a few miles from the presumed location of Muir Isle down to to Lizard Point in the southern reaches of Cornwall, which form several different cultural areas (the Highlands of Scotland; the Central Belt; the Borders; Cumbria and northern Lancashire; industrial Lancashire and Merseyside; north Wales; west Wales; south Wales; the West Country; and Cornwall...) And I don't feel like I can connect to it without knowing where it is in a cultural sense, even if I don't know the geographic location. What type of people are its neighbours, is the question?

Excalibur #1-#2: Warwolves

Excalibur had what was basically a Marvel Graphic Novel (complete with more sophisticated colouring) to launch it. I found it kind of dull. For one thing "Some Left Over X-Men, but in Britain" isn't really a premise; not when Uncanny has already demonstrated its ability to shift its setting at a whim (Scotland, New York, San Francisco, Australia, lately.) And the special protectors of the Omniverse (by appointment to Roma) shtick that you can do with the Marvel UK stuff is already being done in Uncanny. What? It's rather haphazard, this integration of Marvel UK with the X-Men...

#1-#2 is much more to my taste, though. Excalibur fight the Warwolves, who never had been properly defeated in that Special Edition. These Warwolves are much better antagonists: they steal skins and can carry on a conversation. They're looking for Rachel still, so Kitty cosplays as her, which leads to all sorts of hilarity. Well, if you think being et by a warwolf and then have it gradually transmogrify into you is hilarious. Which I kinda do.

The Warwolves are rounded up in the end, and are donated to London Zoo. And we also say hello to a significant new character from Marvel UK: Courtney Ross, Brian's ex. I'm surprised how much tie-in there is with the first few issues of New Excalibur there is here (Ross, the warwolves escaping from the zoo): suddenly New Excalibur almost makes sense.

BritWatch

A new regular feature where Abigail notes minor details of Britishness that Excalibur gets wrong and right, to keep that from overpowering the rest of the entry.

A caption has "Fraser's Bank, Thameside", which is much more plausible as a place name than the "Thames-side" it had mutated to by 2005. It still isn't anywhere in particular in reality. Perhaps it's just because "Fraser's Bank, Bankside" would sound stupid, or perhaps it's supposed to be a fictional place.

The backgrounds and locations are fine. The tube station is dead on.

A policeman says "strewth", which appears to be Claremont mixing up his English and Australian slang again. (The policeman could be an Australian immigrant, I suppose. We'll come back to this later for #4.)

The story is partly set at the fictional Hob's End tube station, a reference to the 1967 Quatermass and the Pit film. The plot of that bears a strong resemblance to the 1971 Doctor Who story The Dæmons, also namechecked here with the improbably titled "Loch Daemon".

Meggan suggests watching various television series: Coronation Street, EastEnders, Doctor Who, Star Trek, or Wildways. Ignoring the scheduling issues, if we assume it is set on cover date to the issue (October 1988), then the Who she'll be watching is Remembrance of the Daleks, which is popularly regarded as a good one. It was written by Ben Aaronovitch, who recently wrote the urban fantasy police procedural Rivers of London/Midnight Riot (and its sequels), which you should read. His next Doctor Who was "Battlefield", which is based around Arthurian mythology and inter-dimensional travel, which is a funny coincidence if nothign else. Ben Aaronovitch and Paul Cornell both wrote for the Virgin New Adventures, and Aaronovitch provided Cornell with a nice quote for the front of his London-based police procedural urban fantasy, "London Falling" which you should also read, and is about as different a book as you could get while still having that label. Cornell, of course, will write what is essentially a renamed Excalibur (Captain Britain and MI-13) in 2008. In case you are wondering, yes, there are only actually about 100 people here in the UK. The rest of us are props.

Excalibur Special Edition #1: Welcome to London

And now we come to Exalibur Special Edition #1, also known as "Excalibur: The Sword is Drawn", by Chris Claremont and Alan Davis. Here is what I wrote about New Excalibur in September 2007, when I was first getting into Marvel.

I got hold of the first trade of New Excalibur, but it was hideously non-authentically British. Captions included "Thames-side", and "Dockland, London". Erk. However - Paul Cornell's recent miniseries Wisdom does one of these characters, Pete Wisdom, excellently. He even manages to have Wisdom call Captain Britain "You tosser!", and invents a few new characters for Wisdom's team, including Captain Midlands (hehe) and, rather oddly, a Skrull duplicate of John Lennon. Cornell takes over New Excalibur soon, and I'm looking forward to this.

New Excalibur ended up being called Captain Britain and MI-13, and surfaced in May 2008. That's one hell of a gestation period - I'd first seen him talk about it in May 2007 at a BSFA meeting. He had two major projects on the boil there: the other being the adaptation of his Doctor Who New Adventures novel, "Human Nature", for the screen. Neither of these had been officially announced, which must have been frustrating, especially since everyone in the crowd knew. He was forced to resort to answering hypothetical questions about Human Nature.

Enough of that, anyway. We're obviously going to be talking a lot in the posts about Excalibur about Claremont's relationship with these islands. He was born here. He appears to have a fair amount of affection for it, which is expressed through his writing. He uses British characters lots. But the time that Uncanny X-Men has spent in the UK has been in two particular touristy areas: the Highlands and Islands, and Edinburgh, and our British and Irish characters have a tendency towards owning islands or castles or being aristocracy. What we have here is a mild case of exoticisation, that he thinks he's exempt from having to do research about these islands and can just idealise it, like he has a blind spot or something. This is why I responded so well to Kieron Gillen's "Manchester Gods" arc in Journey Into Mystery, I think. I'm going to try and squeeze that into the remit of the blog later on, I expect.

So, excluding that backup in Classic X-Men, I believe this is our first actual appearance of London in an X-Men comic. What sort of London do we get? Page 27 provides a hint. There's an Odeon Cinema close by Palace of Westminster, showing the Ipcress File (1965), A Clockwork Orange (1971), and advertising the arrival of National Lampoon's Animal House (1978). Not Thatcher's Britain, then. But visually, it's fine: there's a street entrance to an Underground station that could have been drawn from life, and then an almost spot-on drawing of the Victoria line's 1967 stock †, both inside and outside. Sadly both of these things have been let down by miscolouring, but there you go.

Oh, and some plot happened as well. So Rachel Summers came back from MojoWorld and has teamed up with Kitty Pryde and Nightcrawler (who are better now, finally), along with Captain Britain and Meggan and formed a new superhero team now that the X-Men are dead. They have decided to call it Excalibur, which is a pretty neat coincidence because it's a Britishy mythological thing that starts with an X already!

Despite my concerns, it more than justifies the $3.50 cover price with the first double-page spread with Wolverine having his nails done and reading a book on flower arranging, though.

† I went on the last in-service journey of 1967 stock, on June 30th, 2011. It was late.