Well, I finished off Exiles last night. And yeah, that was just a steady slip down in quality up until the terrible ending, pretty much around when they get a base of operations. And you can really tell when Claremont hops on just by reading the dialogue, and... eugh, that's where it gets straight up bad. The final actual arc being that terrible X-men: Die by the Sword thing. I mean, it's near jibberish, even admitting that I wasn't up to date on the Excalibur stuff. Like, how is it that you have a guy with full on reality warping powers, who is literally just turning the heroes into the thing that killed him, and then... he turns out to secretly BE that thing that killed him which fused to him, and then when that switches places with him it's supposed to be a worse threat? Despite it being seemingly just a big thing that hits hard and heals fast? And then they beat it by... having Blink throw all her crystals at it, which explodes it despite that not being her powers at all? And the whole time the strategy by the defenders of the multiverse seems to just be throw a ton of Captain Britains at the guy in a field in front of their headquarters in the hopes they'll punch him into submission. Just awful, weird garbage that somehow lasted five issues despite feeling like nothing at all actually happened.
Oh, and I realize and I can respect Claremont's desire to put in an homage to David Cockrum, but he really didn't do it right. Like, it's a nice thing to do in theory, but instead it was several issues of inserting him awkwardly into an important place in the Exiles backstory that shouldn't have existed and wasn't properly explained or fit whatsoever.
So yeah, anyone looking into the Exiles Ultimate Collections, you can definitely skip the 6th, and honestly probably the 5th as well.
Also, New Exiles is pure crap, right? But the 2009 series that's collected in a single trade is worth looking into?
