Excalibur #68
“Facades”
Writers: Scott Lobdell and Dan Slott
Pencils and colours: Steve Buccellato
Inks: Harry Candelario
Letters: Chris Eliopoulos
Editor: Suzanne Gaffney
Original publication date: August 1993
After a brief sojourn lost in a temporal wave, we’re back and ready to talk you through Excalibur #68, “Facades”—a comic that maybe shoulda stayed lost in a temporal wave. But I’’s not all grim ‘n’ gritty griping and mourning the loss of more than one character we used to love. We also have lots of fun talking 90s tropes and reboots and transmedia transformations with comics & games scholar and all-around Gotham expert Dr. Kalervo Sinervo!
On origins:
“For all its company man propaganda, Les Daniels’ Five Fabulous Decades of Marvel book had a lot to do with getting me interested in studying comics. I learned that comics have creators and a history—that they’re social objects.” -Kalervo
On what-might-have-beens:
“Captain Britain was supposed to star in a new comic alongside other British heroes, part of a planned resurgence of Marvel UK. It didn’t happen, and no one bothered to rewrite Excalibur to account for it. Which shows you how much respect this title was getting at the time.” -Andrew
On tonal inconsistency:
“This feels like a major break from the tone and themes of other Excalibur comics I’d read. A book that used to be all about family has family members missing… A book that was about Britain has dropped their British superhero… A book that was about humor or at least hope is nothing but brooding and grimacing.” -Kalervo
On the Feron of it all:
“If I read a comic and the most sympathetic character is Feron—something has gone horribly wrong.” -Mav
On chararacterization:
“Nightcrawler is this character who has every reason to be mad at the world, but instead he’s like—no, f*ck that, I’m going to swashbuckle. But this guy, in this book, is #NotMyNightcrawler.” -Kalervo
On emotional crises:
“Kurt has clearly been through some big emotional crisis to arrive where he is in this issue, but it’s all off panel. Writers are allowed to change characterization, but if you don’t show how or why the character got there, it’s simply bad writing.” -Anna
On anti-climaxes:
“The overriding thing that frustrates me about this issue is that every character beat or interesting thing that you’d like to see happen—it goes in the opposite direction.” -Anna
On the 90s-ification of Excalibur:
“You talked in the last episode about Davis going out with an ironic salute to the 90s. And now here’s this cover, which is as 90s as it gets. Cleavage up front. Everyone is angry. Kurt has a jacket. The men bulge with muscles while their waists have shrunk.” -Kalervo
Want more Kalervo Sinervo?
You can find him on Twitter (@kalervideo) and at the Technoculture, Art and Games (TAG) Institute at Concordia University!
Plus! Check out the totally rad “acafanzine” on Wizard magazine that Kalervo made along with Anna and Dr. Benjamin Woo – part of a longer ongoing research project on the cultural history of Wizard!
And as usual:
You can find Anna on Twitter (@peppard_anna) and at Sequential Scholars (@seqscholars).
You can find Andrew on Twitter (@ClaremontRun) and at Sequential Scholars.
You can find Mav on Twitter (@chrismaverick) and on his podcast, VoxPopcast (@VoxPopcast).
Enjoy!
-GGW Team