Way back when I reviewed Volume 1 and 2 of these Warren Ellis collections of eXcalibur, I remarked that I found them to be better but duller than the straight Americanism's of the mainline X-Men.
High vs Low Culture is not a debate I care to wade into too much, especially insofar as comics are concerned. The culture is already niche enough that a schism between those who think 'Maus' is an incredible work of visionary genius, a heartfelt and nuanced portrayal of the Nazi regime, and those who prefer a vision of 1930s Germany that features 100% more American super-soldiers straight up punching Hitler on the front cover. There are a lot of great 'high' comics, where mainstream or indy, and a lot of terrible 'high' comics, and that's also true of 'low' comics.
And just like with films, some of the worst comics are also the most entertaining. Go read comicsalliance deconstructing Batman: Odyssey ( http://comicsalliance.com/batman-odyssey-review-commentary-part-4-neal-adams/) or anything by Chris Sims on Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose, and you'll find awful comics that are still entertaining. Likewise, some of the best films and comics are ... well, they're pretty boring.
Warren Ellis is fantastic. Warren Ellis can do little wrong in my book. Warren Ellis is an excellent writer, and these are, aesthetically, intellectually, classically, great comics. There is nothing functionally wrong with them. They just don't do it for me.
I read them and they leave me empty, I feel ... nothing. I leafed through 'Red Rover Charlie' in a comic store today, and that almost made me cry then and there. It features art from someone described by the staff at Nostalgia and Comics as "an artist who can only draw animals. Well, dogs. Well, three specific dogs" and yet it has had more emotional impact from a 3 minute glance, and 12 pages of story than this whole volume featuring a half dozen characters I have invested far too much time in.
It is a well made comic. But it isn't a great one.
Its roughly the same situation I talked about in dissecting the previous two volumes, but in doing so I kind of left them to one side. They disappointed me, so I didn't analyse them in depth. They were a slog, and writing about something that's that much effort to read is a chore, so I didn't. But now I'm going to try and analyse exactly why these comics do not work.
The key thing that needs to be understood is that eXcalibur is "the English X-Men". Based out of Muir Island, featuring a cast of established X-Men (Nightcrawler, Colossus, Kitty Pryde) and their Marvel UK compatriots (Captain Britain, Meggan, Wolfsbane and Pete Wisdom), they protect Britain from threats both mutant and magical.
The conveniently tight focus on the New York scene that allowed for easy cameo appearances, cross-overs and world building between titles within Marvel as a whole leaves a lot of room for heroes operating outside of that - there's a whole lot more of the planet than the areas of New York, or, at a stretch San Francisco the X-Men usually operate in.
So a British team has been, off-and-on, a near constant for years, and the influx of young British creators into the American comics scene meant there were plenty of people willing to tell stories set in London, rather than Manhattan.
But the problem with any spin-off is that you are assuming that there's enough there to sustain the interest when divorced from the original source material, in this case; the X-Men.
Excalibur, at least under Ellis, are not. But it isn't like there's much chance of it carving out its own identity, when three of the main cast are core X-Men team members. Colossus and Nightcrawler appeared in the Second Genesis relaunch, and Kitty was the first new member introduced, in Uncanny X-Men #129, 35 issues later. So these guys have been here since, nearly, the very beginning, and they naturally overshadow even established characters like Moira, Brian and Meggan.
Considering that the cast is rounded out by 'a guy who will grow up to be Ahab' and Douglock, you can see why they were bound to be the most focussed upon.
Making ex-X-Men the most popular and visible characters in a book that's meant to be demonstrating its independence from the X-Men is a bit of a bum start then. It's resolutely not written as an X-Men book. It's 'darker and grittier' in the sense that the phrase 'darker and grittier' was originally intended for. People smoke, die, kill, sleep together, swear and act like humans. They usually do this without needing to remind the reader how dark and gritty this all is. They're mature, without being childishly so. It's not Torchwood. And it's not the X-Men, or at least not the X-Men in the way that someone picking up an issue which prominently displays three X-Men on the cover might expect.
Even ignoring that though, there's the secondary problem that throughout the book the real X-Men keep showing up. It's like they forgot this wasn't their book, so at least once an issue they appear to explain what's happening in New York (it's Onslaught).
A little sidenote; this is, alongside Thunderbolts, the best depiction of the world post-Onslaught. The very first thing that the US Government does, following the deaths of 90% of the worlds non-mutant superheroes, is send agents to warn eXcalibur not to come to the US, or else they'll be killed. At this point you would think that the authorities would be desperate to get some heroes on-board who can actually fend off the next Kree-Skrull war, or stop a giant planet eater from consuming Earth. But no, instead we get fantastic racism.
It's deliberately played up as a weirdly 'American' thing; the idea that their hysterical reaction to mutants is cultural, but that undermines the whole point of the X-Men, that they protect a world that hates and fears them. They are a positive and benign creation of an age of fear and unreason. These children of the atom aren't the villainous destroyers, but protectors of a society that rejects them. Their sacrifice for people who will never, can never, accept, appreciate and understand them resonated in a society, culture and time where racism, sexism, homophobia were real, and bigotry and fear were (and are) accepted.
Rejecting that in British society, selling it as an American disease, undermines the whole concept of who mutants are and why they need protectors and champions. It creates a cultural void that invalidates the basic need for eXcalibur. And they're left dangling without the core delineation between the roles of mutants and other heroes.
And this really is why I think Ellis' eXcalibur doesn't work and why, for instance, Paul Cornell's Captain Britain does; there isn't enough faith in who these characters are as heroes. There's a point where Brian muses on the fact that compared to how people felt about Captain America, the emotional, patriotic response wasn't the same for him. Contrast that with Cornell's pages of Britain's reaction to Brian sacrificing himself:
"when Captain America died, Americans heard it in an American way:
through the media.
When Captain Britain died, the British felt it in their chests."
(I really wish I could get that page up, because I can't tell you how much I love it. For me, it's the ultimate expression of Britishness; we're a nation learning how to deal with what we've lost. Between that, the Black Knight and Faiza holding the bridge alone, and Captain Britain's return, Cornell's series is stunningly worth reading).
British heroes don't have to just be spies, and magic. They can be bombastic and still be British. They don't have to have the in your face jingosim of the Ultimates, but can still represent Britain, and what it means to be British. And they can be separate from the X-Men and still be compelling.
What they can't be is a sub par X-Men lite, divorced from the reasons behind the X-Men and plonked in a new setting. Or rather they can be that, but it doesn't work, and it just makes me want to go read about how the heroes saved New York by jumping into Onslaught, and were themselves saved by a small child's imagination.
Also Try:
Paul Cornell, Captain Britain and MI13
Chris Claremont, Uncanny X-Men
Warren Ellis, eXcalibur Visionaries Vol. 1 and 2
Warren Ellis, Planetary
