329 – Scheming and Argument

The intended addition of Karma possibly connects to something I found interesting about these issues: Ellis does not seem to have a very stable conception of the book that he wants to write. (I rather suspect that may have something to do with it being a book that he didn’t particularly want to write at all.)

Back pre-AoA, he had made a move to redefine Excalibur as the “European X-team.” That struck me as interesting, and in tune with where a certain strain of British liberal opinion was in the ‘90s — we were about three years from Will Hutton’s famous “Goodbye, xenophobia” headline in the Observer after the 1997 general election. I.e. Ellis took, Excalibur, defined strongly as the British (=comic, twee, a bit crap but charming) X-book from an American perspective when Claremont created it, and repurposed it as an assertion that a team whose members were disproportionately British could damn well *also* be European. Fair enough — as I commented before, ‘90s British liberal optimism on that point has proven, well, optimistic — but I personally sympathize with it all the same. At any rate, it works.

But now, Ellis wants Excalibur to be“the international X-group.” And that really doesn’t work at“international X-group.” Excalibur is not remotely credible as the “international” anything. This becomes obvious when Ellis does his roll-call, and registers nationalities for some of the people on the top half of the page, and leaves them out for the people on the bottom half — and even then it’s painful how much it sticks out that this group contains three people from Scotland alone and the closest thing that it contains to someone not from Europe or America is a Russian from Siberia.

So I can see that looking around for an unused character like Karma who was from *somewhere* else might have seemed like a good idea. And that Ellis didn’t stick with the plan — well, he didn’t stick with the whole “European” thing, either.

Similarly, I don’t get the sense that Ellis has much interest in any of these characters. (with the possible exception of this book’s Ellis self-insert character, Wisdom — but even there it’s not the kind of interest that he was to bring to his later self-insert characters). This seemed most clear to me in that panel where Nate reads everyone’s minds to find out why they are in Excalibur, and most of their motives boil down to personalized glosses on “it’s the right thing,” and even the ones that aren’t that are superficial at best. (Also, Ellis commits the crime against language of writing that Colossus “has come full-circle to the veracity of the vision.”)

Essentially, what I think we have here is an inventive writer with a gift for dark humor using those qualities to skate past the fact that he does not have a compelling answer to the question “What is this book about?” I can absolutely see why at the time it might have seemed like the best X-book. But for me personally, in this era that’s not a high bar.

Also, worth noting that Ellis can’t bring himself to portray Black Air as Nazis without first falling over himself to admire how “efficient” and sensible (=British) they are compared to their counterparts in every other country in the world. Ellis is conflicted enough about this to counter this by making them really horrible — it’s interesting how this story prefigures his use of gold from Holocaust victims as the twist to his “If Britain had a space programme, we would be *so much* better at it than the stupid Americans” narrative in Ministry of Space — but it’s still that recognizable same Ellis soft-British-nationalist theme.