No More Classic Excalibur Trades???

Marvel Senior VP of Sales David Gabriel posted on the MarvelMasterWorks.com forum about what trades will be released in the future by Marvel. Unfortunately, it doesn't look good for Excalibur:

New Mutants and Alpha Flight Classic trades will forge ahead, but Excalibur Classic looks to be on the backburner. "I think we've done all we can for now", says Gabriel.

This means that Alan Davis' amazing run will not be collected in the near future. Alan's solo run on Excalibur has never received the accolades it deserves from Marvel, and this is a future insult.

The last Classic Excalibur trade is Volume 5, covers Excalibur 29-34, including Claremont's final three issue arc, Girls' School From Heck. While Girls' School is fun, as a whole, this is mainly a bunch of poor fill-in issues and a special, Weird War III, so no wonder sales have been low.

The period of Excalibur between when Claremont left and when Davis' run began (Excalibur 35-41) wasn't a great time for Excalibur, with Scott Lobdell cutting his teeth as a writer and a variety of low quality fill-in artists. Although, there are a number of Excalibur Specials that could be included such as X-Men: True Friends, Excalibur Air Apparent, or Excalibur: The Possession, I can understand why those issues would not be collected.

However, there is no reason not to collect Davis' run, which began with Excalibur 42 and concluded with Excalibur 67, and was one of the best periods for Excalibur.


What You Can Do

- Contact Marvel and request that they release Alan Davis' Excalibur run as an Excalibur Trade or perhaps an Alan Davis Visionaries Collection or Alan Davis Excalibur Omnibus.

- Post on the MarvelMasterWorks.com Forum in support of more Excalibur trades, since David Gabriel posts there. There is already a thread discussing this here.

- If you haven't already, buy the existing five volumes of Classic Excalibur. Amazon offers some good discounts. The better sales are, the more likely Marvel is to release more.