Excalibur 6 - Inferno

The British based team get drawn to New York.

Excalibur #6

Writer: Claremont
Penciler: Davis
Inker: Neary
Colorist: Oliver
Letterer: Orzechowski
Editor: Kavanaugh
Boss: DeFalco

Rachel Summers (Phoenix) has a telepathic vision of her brother being tormented by demons and her mother so speeds off to New York to save him. The other members set off to follow her. At Euston station in London Brigadier Alysande Stuart leads a squad of the Weird Happenings Organisation (Who) including her brother and Who scientific advisor Professor Alistaire Stuart in investigating a mysterious steam train from an alternate timeline where the Nazis rule. Rachel flies into New York and assumes the Goblin Queen is her mother, Jean Grey, but it's Madelyne who rejects her. Rachel crashes down to the ground and into a bridal shop where someone turns her into a mannequin. The other four fly across the Atlantic, stopping off on a ship for a loo break, where Meggan finds herself struggling to control her powers to become what others desire. Arriving in New York her powers respond to the demonic energy and she becomes the "Goblin Princess". Kurt (Nightcrawler) is thrown to the ground whilst Kitty (Shadowcat) and Brian (Captain Britain) get pulled into a cinema and find themselves in an action movie.

This issue is from the early days of Excalibur which was usually the most obscure title in the growing X-Men family of titles. Although sharing a writer with Uncanny X-Men and Wolverine (which had just launched), it had a different editor and for the first few years it managed to steer clear of most crossovers, even having one-shot specials that stood on their own instead of annuals that had to be part of wider crossovers. Things changed a bit from 1993 onwards but before then it avoided just almost every X-Men and wider Marvel crossover going. But this issue and the next one are the exception as it got drawn into Inferno.

It's an awkward point in the series to do so. The team had formed in a special edition one-shot six months before the regular series launched and so this is de facto the seventh issue for the team. The title has been setting itself out as a cross between the Marvel UK Captain Britain stories and members of the X-Men who had been away from the team when it was seemingly killed of, with a strong dose of whimsy in contrast to the ever darker adventures in the other X-Men titles. The tone of the series is not a natural tie with a dark crossover like Inferno whilst this isn't the best way to introduce the series to readers passing through because of the crossover.

And yet it would be difficult to ignore it completely. With so much of Inferno revolving around the travails of the women and son of Scott Summers, could his daughter from an alternate future be ignored? But it would be complicated to work a third team into that part of the crossover and there's also the complication that the X-Men are generally presumed dead (along with Madelyne hence why Rachel automatically assumes the Goblin Queen is Jean) which was the reason Excalibur formed in the first place. And Rachel has not yet met her Jean or dealt with the implications retcon that Jean-Phoenix in this timeline was not the original Jean Grey but the Phoenix force impersonating her. That's an awful lot of baggage to handle in a crossover already working through so many other strands and thus it probably made sense to keep Excalibur out of the core rather than removing their raison d'être so soon or engaging in further complicated meetings that are best handled separately.

So instead we get this issue in which Rachel charges off to New York, gets swatted aside by the Goblin Queen before she can really do anything and then transformed into a mannequin, whilst the others make their way with a comedic stop off and then get into generic encounters with demons. For a book with the Inferno logo directly above the series logo, thus signifying a core part of the crossover (as opposed to the satellite issues with the logo in a triangle in the corner), this feels incredibly inessential and it's clear why it's been left out of most collections of the core of Inferno. (Its presence in the core rather than the crossover trade paperbacks seems to be more down to page lengths as they convert two hardcovers into three softcovers.)

There's one fun little subplot that shows a great adoration for Doctor Who. The Weird Happenings Organisation is clearly based on Unit with Brigadier Alysande Stuart's name clearly evoking Brigadier Alastair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart and in a remarkable piece of prediction her brother Professor Alistaire Stuart looks and is dressed somewhat like David Tennant's Doctor but two decades before he came along.

Other than that side moment this is a really disappointing issue. As the next few years would demonstrate Excalibur did not need to be included in every crossover and this issue seems to know what it can't do and then just stumbles as it tries to unite the series's light-hearted tone with the dark sinister world of Inferno. It isn't a great introduction to the series for visiting readers either. Instead it's just an unnecessary issue.