Listen to the episode here.
Art by David Wynne. Prints and cards available at the shop, or contact David to purchase the original.
It’s the front-cover equivalent of the slow-motion hero walk. (Excalibur #1)
Hi, Widget! (Excalibur #1)
Kitty is ridiculous and also awesome. (Excalibur #1)
Nigel “The Worst” Frobisher. (Excalibur #1)
Aw, man. (Excalibur #1)
Welcome to the perfectly ordinary lighthouse full of perfectly ordinary rooms! Hope you survive the… (Excalibur #1)
“No one can move in Rachel’s costume except Rachel” is going to become a running joke over the course of the series. (Excalibur #1)
Somewhere there’s a universe where Meggan grew up watching Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23, in which this scene went very differently. (Excalibur #1)
Vixen, never change. (Excalibur #2)
The Warwolves are awful, but also fairly delightful. (Excalibur #2)
Oh, dear me. (Excalibur #2)
HIJINKS! (Excalibur #2)
Well, that happened. (Excalibur #2)
This cannot POSSIBLY end well. (Excalibur #2)
Alan Davis covers are the best covers. (Excalibur #3)
SOMEHOW TEAM VIXEN’S OUTFITS GOT EVEN BETTER. (Excalibur #3)
And so it goes. (Excalibur #3)
Well done, Kitty. (Excalibur #3)
Well done, Kurt. (Excalibur #3)
FRIENDSHIP! (Excalibur #3)
Including this panel purely for Kurt’s dashing outfit. (Excalibur #3)
PERFECTLY NORMAL LIGHTHOUSE. NOTHING TO SEE HERE. (Excalibur #3)
LINKS & FURTHER LISTENING:
- Come see us in Seattle next weekend!
- We previously discussed Captain Britain in Episodes 97 and 98…
- …and Excalibur in Episode 89.
Dear Jay,
Re: Brooklyn 99
I’m convinced The Vulture would arrive to try to pressure Captain Holt into a favor for the top brass, totally inappropriate at a toddler party. Everyone would be convinced that he is Magneto from First Class because he is wearing a leather jacket and black turtleneck. The Vulture would remember Magneto as the guy who had sex with Jennifer Lawrence.
I forgot to add that some of the squad would be convinced that The Vulture had a valid point, doing this favor would be good for the precinct.
The arrows pointing up on Vixen and her guys’s costumes are the Broad Arrow- which is the pattern used for UK prison clothes- equivalent to prisoner stripes in USA.
Ah man, the childhood memories are all flooding back so hard now! Excalibur was THE definitive X-book of my youth, every single one of these panels and plot points and jokes are ones I used to have memorized by heart.
Look at that art, Alan Davis was probably the very first mainstream comic book artist I ever worshipped, spent a long time studying every minute detail of his faces, hair, poses, the way he drew clothes and textures, the works, he’s a real master of his craft. And gosh, the lettering and sound effects and little random noises are also so very perfectly on point.
And a big ol’ shoutout to Sexy Nightcrawler, jeeze. Between his tub scene here and the later many, many scenes of him half or entirely naked and various romantic escapades, it’s clear that Claremont and Davis knew EXACTLY what fans wanted with Kurt, haha.
Yes sexy Nightcrawler is so perfect. There are a couple of scenes (I can’t recall if they were drawn by Davis or not) where his costume (that big red V thing) is borderline pornographic. Which is to say I love every minute of it.
Davis really is phenomenal in this book. I was so sad to see him (and Claremont) leave. It was a huge disappointment.
Excalibur is something I never read aggressively (pretty much only when it related to the main “X” story). I’ve gotta say I might go back and reconsider. I really like this take on Kitty and Nightcrawler. The tone is so fitting for them somehow. I love the visual support with this one. The art is amazing. Also the panel with the Warwovles in the zoo is somehow akin to the feel of a closure of an episode of The Twilight Zone. Nice. 🙂
“We don’t do accents beside our own…”
…and Rogue and Gambit’s.
Well, y’know – those aren’t accents so much as holistic dialect experiences. You must live the faux-Southern gravelly drawl. You must be the pseudo-Cajun sleaze.
What is the sound of one hand stealing the powers and psyche of whomever it touches? If a kinetically charged playing card blows up a tree in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
Tweedledope and the Red Queen come from a British comics tradition of comedy grotesques that dominated children’s comics in my youth. I don’t think the US has anything comparable. Interested parties could search for Ken Reid’s ‘Jonah’ or ‘Faceache’ and Leo Baxendale’s ‘Bash Street Kids’. The anarchy bubbling below the ordered surface is a constant of our comedy and one of the things ‘Excalibur’ gets right.
Yeah, I’ve never heard ‘coo’ said in real life, only in comics. It denotes the speaker is working class. It doesn’t bother me as it works in the somewhat arch atmosphere of this comment. Recently a comic lost me on the first issue as the lead character was running a business on the ‘sidewalk’ in London, so it’s not like I’m that tolerant…
Megan grew up in a caravan, of course there’s room for everyone in the Lighthouse. Brian grew up in stately Braddock Manor, hmm.
I agree that Alan Davis drawing Excalibur is a demonstration that we all live in one of best realities in the Omniverse. However, if we develop time travel, is anyone else up for putting Colleen Coover in the mavhine and sending her back to draw a fill in issue? If you somehow keep the site up in perpetuity maybe future generations will read these words and take care of it for us.