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Someone Please Report Jubilee to Krakoan CPS – Excalibur #11 [XH]

Published Mon, 24 Aug 2020 14:30:08 -0500

by Jude Terror

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Welcome to X-ual Healing, North Korea's favorite weekly X-Men recap column. There are four X-Men comics that came out last week: Empyre: X-Men #4, Excalibur #11, Cable #3, and Wolverine #4. I'm gonna recap 'em. It's what I do.

But first, anyone pay attention to DC Fandome this weekend? No, me neither. It's kinda hard to fanboy out over a comic book company that just laid off a crapload of people last week. Well, hard for me. Most comic book fanboys… well, they've put up with way worse from publishers. Anyway, there's a Snyder Cut trailer, so at least The Snyderbronies got their due. There was a lot of cool wrestling too. Did you know I recap all the wrestling each week? Find my AEW Dynamite, NXT Takeover XXX, and WWE SummerSlam reports here. And I even got an EX-X-XCLUSIVE interview with Roman Reigns' old teeth (he got new veneers)! The wrestling stuff is starting to gain traction here, which is good. It means I won't be forced to go back to writing more about comics, which I have no desire to do. And that means that you, yes, you, dear readers of X-ual Healing, are the only ones that get to experience my comics-related wisdom! Aren't you lucky?

Alright, enough plugs. Let's get on with the recaps.

Sworn to sell comics for Marvel executives who feared and hated the fact that Fox owned their movie rights, The Uncanny X-Men suffered great indignities. Still, thanks to a corporate merger, a line-wide relaunch, and Jonathan Hickman's giant ego, the X-Men can finally get back to doing what they do best: being objectively the best franchise in all of comics.

EXCALIBUR #11
MAR200915
(W) Tini Howard (A) Marcus To (CA) Mahmud Asrar
BLOOD OF THE CHANGELING!
The Citadel has committed an act of war and Excalibur must respond. While they lick their wounds deep in Otherworld, Apocalypse takes steps toward his ultimate goal.
Rated T+
In Shops: Aug 19, 2020
SRP: $3.99

Excalibur #11 Recap

In Otherworld, some priestesses of Saturnyne are holding Jubilee prisoner. Jubilee is really pissed off because her baby, Shogo, who is also a dragon, was shot down. Shogo is still alive but hurt. And Jubilee should really be pissed at herself more than anyone, for, you know, bringing a baby into combat situations. Excalibur arrives to fight the priestesses and free Jubilee.

A prose page explains the differences between Priestesses of the White and Priestesses of the Green. Both follow Saturnyne, but the White ones are direct subordinates of Saturnyne who live in her castle and do her bidding, whereas the Green ones follow the intent of her teaching but don't take direct orders and live outside the castle on their own. The White Priestesses are the ones who shot down Shogo. The Green Priestesses are the ones holding Jubilee and Shogo and fighting Excalibur. Got it? Good.

Captain Britain telepathically contacts Jubilee in the tree cave she's being held in and tells her to be calm. Excalibur has made friends with the Green Priestesses, who are taking care of Shogo. Jubilee can come out, but she has not to attack the Priestesses. She agrees and gets to see Shogo, who is sleeping and apparently will be okay. Apparently, they can't bring Shogo back to Krakoa for healing because reverting to human baby form might be bad while he's injured. Excalibur tries to figure out what to do. In particular, Captain Britain doesn't understand why Saturnyne has a problem with her and Excalibur. They spend the night at the Priestess's village.

In the middle of the night, Rictor goes for a walk and meets with some priestesses in the wood. They let him touch their crystal. That's not a euphemism. The crystal allows him to communicate with Apocalypse. He updates Apocalypse on the situation, and Apocalypse decides to let Rictor in on some information he's been keeping from Excalibur.

Apocalypse tells Rictor that he started the Externals as a coven back in the day. Back in the twelfth century, he helped Candra store her power inside a gem. Rictor isn't sure what the point of this story is (and neither am I). Apocalypse says that power over the Earth is power overall. Alright then

The next morning, Excalibur leaves Jubilee with the Priestesses to take care of Shogo and heads off to continue to Saturnyne's Citadel. The mission is to plant a Krakoan gate outside of it. Rictor brings Excalibur to the gates of the Citadel by tunneling through the ground. They plant the gate, and after some discussion, Rictor agrees to be the one to test it out and report back to Apocalypse. He remembers after he's gone in that Otherworld gates require special crystals to function. But Apocalypse contacts him telepathically and tells him the crystal was inside him all along or something.

Meanwhile, back at the Citadel, Saturnyne confronts Captain Britain. She says she prefers Brian over Betsy as Captain Britain, but Betsy says she's the only Captain Britain Saturnyne has. The issue ends there.

No, it doesn't. After the coming soon pages, we get another scene. Rogue and Gambit are dismissed while Captain Britain and Saturnyne catch up. They decide to raid a closet, and Gambit steals a pack of playing cards, and a gem that is presumably related to the Gem Candra stored her powers in (that specific one was destroyed in the 90s I think, though of course, you can never count out a retcon).

Good issue. I love Excalibur, especially the fact that it doesn't dumb anything down. It pushes ahead with its story, leaving the reader to just deal with all the information that's revealed (and not spoonfed to us, Wikipedia style Hickmanesque prose pages aside). It's still weird that everyone is just going along with the plans of Apocalypse, who has always been and no doubt still is an evil guy, but I'm sure that will all come to a head soon enough. Also, the art in this book is amongst the best in all the X-books — just beautiful to look at.