Exiles Volume 6: Fantastic Voyage
Writer: Judd Winick
Artist: Jim Calafiore
Issues: Exiles #31-37
How to express my love for Exiles? Is it the dimension hopping? Is it the wide array of alternate universes? Is it the surprisingly well developed characters? It’s all of it.
I have long felt that the best way to get to know a fictional universe is to see it through a skewed mirror. I got into Marvel right about the time the House of M trades came out. Seeing the world dominated by mutants and humanity as a minority was a great way for me to start my plung into the deep, dark hole of comics. The characters are not in their native environment, and they seem to shine all the greater with a new set of rules.
Exiles sends its team of six displaced heroes from a variety of different versions of Marvel into other different versions of Marvel. They are in a particular alternate universe for 2 to 4 issues and then move on. This allows these worlds to come into better focus than the What If? storylines, but prevents them from becoming too large, as some argue the case for House of M to be. These different worlds have varied from a world where the Phalanx Covenant merged with the Legacy Virus to wipe out the majority of the world’s population, to a world where Tony Stark has taken over the world and has his sights set on the rest of the galaxy. Some of the universes can be a bit boring, something like Xavier is a villain and Magneto is mutant-kind’s savior, but on the whole, it’s great to see a variety of worlds where anything can happen. Magneto can destroy the world, because it isn’t Earth 616 and there isn’t continuity to worry about. It’s just fun, over the top action and characters out of their element.
Posted under review
This post was written by frisbie on January 11, 2008
