The first volume of Exiles ended at #100, about five issues after I dropped the book. Marvel, being Marvel, immediately relaunched it as New Exiles, still with Claremont as the writer and a shiny new #1 on the cover.
It ended after 19 issues in early 2009. Undaunted, and having learned nothing, Marvel released Exiles two months later, now with Jeff Parker as writer, and a shiny new #1 on the cover.
It ended after 6 issues in fall of 2009. Same month as Agents of Atlas, actually. Not a good month for books written by Jeff Parker, or my pull list. Parker took the approach of seemingly pulling in an entirely new team of Exiles, and Morph was in the role of Timebroker now, handing out missions and explaining the rules. There was a Blink on the team, but she appeared not to know anything more than the others.
The book only had enough time for two missions. The first was for the Exiles to help Wolverine overthrow Magneto, currently ruling a Genosha that is a haven for mutants, but under repeated attacks from the rest of the world. The second, which started seemingly before the first was complete, was to help a world dominated by machine intelligences. I thought I remembered they needed something from the second mission to complete the first, but reading over my old reviews that was just what I thought was gonna happen. Instead, they completed the first mission by taking advantage of Cyclops being a lousy boyfriend. Which is better, frankly. Anything that shits on Scott Summers is A-OK by me.
Parker clearly had a lot of things he planned to tease out over time. Sadly, he didn't get the chance and had to spend most of the sixth issue trying to explain what was going on. It was an exposition heavy issue and not the most engaging, but I appreciate he didn't want to leave us hanging.
After that, Marvel let the Exiles concept lie until Saladin Ahmed and Javier Rodriguez pulled it back out in 2018. Unless you count all of Jonathan Hickman's multiverse Illuminati crap in his Avengers run. But considering the "geniuses" repeatedly failed to actually save any realities, they were the shittiest group of Exiles ever.
Anyway, the 2018 run lasted 12 issues, which puts Ahmed 4th on the list of most Exiles issues written (behind Bedard, Winick, and Claremont, but ahead of Chuck Austen, Parker, and Calafiore.) I think Marvel may have trained their audience to care too much about "important" comics. A book that mostly dances around the fringes, barely ever interacting with the big guns, would be hard-pressed to get that kind of weight.
Full disclosure, I don't still have any of this series in my collection, and I was gonna just skip it. But I remembered that in Random Back Issues #5 I promised to post that double-page splash when I got to this point. So there you go. You can (as always with the double-page splashes) click on it for a somewhat larger version.
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