The Accolade of Betsy Braddock

“The Accolade of Betsy Braddock” / “A Tower of Flowers” / “Three Covenants” / “Fall Back and Think of England!” / “Panic on the Streets of London” / “Watch the Throne” 
Excalibur #1-6
Written by Tini Howard
Art by Marcus To
Color art by Erick Arciniega

Serial stories don’t always click right away, but you can usually tell when an ongoing story has the potential to grow into something better as it goes along. Tini Howard’s Excalibur series seems like one of those to me. Howard is relatively new to writing for comics, and while she hardly comes off as green, it’s clear enough that she’s still in the process of learning on the job and finding her voice. In working on this series she’s essentially being mentored by Jonathan Hickman, and as she is now she reminds me a lot of Hickman when he himself was being mentored by Brian Michael Bendis in the early days of his career at Marvel. You can sense intelligence, passion, and ambition in the writing, but it’s muffled somewhat. Howard is good with dialogue and clever with her concepts, but there’s something missing or buried in the mix at the moment. My theory is that in playing “by the book” in pacing her plot in these issues, she’s denying a more peculiar personal narrative rhythm that would be more enticing. But you need to master the rules to break them well, so maybe that’s just what this arc is for her. 

Excalibur is the series in the new X-Men line that is exploring the concept of “mutant magic,” and is expanding on ideas set in motion by Jonathan Hickman that reimagine Apocalypse as a mutant mystic with ancient scores to settle. These elements of the plot are very interesting and entertaining, and I particularly enjoy the way Howard portrays Apocalypse as a man with an elaborate agenda that involves constantly manipulating the Excalibur crew to his own advantage, but also as a figure who is generally benevolent to the other leads despite having been their archenemy up until recently. 

The series is also about Betsy Braddock taking on her twin brother Brian’s role as Captain Britain in the wake of her ceding her identity as Psylocke to her former host body Kwannon following them splitting off into two separate people. Betsy has been one of my favorite X-Men characters for a long time, but I’m pretty cold on this version of the character – largely because I’ve never found the Captain Britain mythos at all interesting, but also because a lot of the body horror and complex identity issues that went along with the baggage of her living in another woman’s body was very intriguing to me. The version of Betsy in this story feels like someone different from the character I had some investment in. She’s more of an ordinary superhero now.

But as much as I’m personally bored by the Captain Britain-ness of it all, Howard hits those marks with full commitment. I appreciate how fully she’s leaping into the fantasy elements of this series, but feel that her efforts are undermined by Marcus To’s art. To is a strong draftsman who is particularly good at drawing body language and facial expressions, but his work lacks style and flair. His pages are highly functional but sort of drab and ordinary, and do a poor job of conveying the exotic beauty of Krakoa or the more spectacular fairytale imagery he’s called upon to illustrate when the story goes full-on fantasy. There’s no poetry in his linework. He’d probably do well with a more traditional comic series that focused more on comedy or soap opera, but he’s all wrong for a book like this which needs you to buy into high drama and wild imagery. 

This problem reminds me of the early phase of Chris Claremont’s work on the original New Mutants series, where he was paired with industry legend Sal Buscema for about a year before Bill Sienkiewicz took over and radically redefined the style and tone of the book. Buscema, like To, was an incredibly talented draftsman with a clean and old-fashioned style. But his dependable style was at odds with the aims of the series – it was stodgy instead of youthful. Sienkiewicz’s offbeat and highly distinctive style brought out the tensions in the series, and opened Claremont up to exploring elements of horror and abstraction that added a new dimension to a comic about mutant teenagers. Howard’s Excalibur needs this sort of aesthetic shift. The mysticism needs to be emphasized with atmosphere and style. It should feel more surreal, more fantastic. To is far from a bad artist, but he’s not serving the material well and gets in the way of the reader fully believing in Howard’s magic.