In Review: Excalibur (2019-) #19 POISONED BY HER OWN VENOM!

Synopsis: POISONED BY HER OWN VENOM! She didn’t mean anything by it…but what’s a girl without a body supposed to do?

The Story

Picking things up from the last issue. Psylocke has been playing host to the spirit of Betsy Braddock, but when she sensed another presence she let Betsy go. In another Earth somewhere out there Elspeth who is also a Captain Britain has been meditating long and hard and has found Betsy’s spirit. When she and the other Captain Britain’s ask Saturnyne to help them unify Betsy’s spirit with her body. Saturnyne refuses. Luckily Elspeth knows of another way. But it requires that a ritual be performed in Avalan.

In Avalan. Richtor leads the ritual and attempts to unify Betsy’s spirit with a body that King Jamie Braddock has made for her. Things are not working out. This means that Psylocke must go into the otherworld and hunt Betsy’s spirit down and persuade her to return to Avalon with her.

The Artwork

Artist Markus To provides some awesome panels for this issue. We get treated with some brilliant eye candy right from the opening page where we see Elspeth Braddock in meditation. The details of the room that she is surrounded by are awesome. I particularly loved the circle of candles that she was sat in the middle of. I also loved the fact that we saw every version of Captain Britain as Elspeth goes to plead Betsy’s case to Saturnyne. We even see a Captain Britain who is a snake and another one which is a swan. I’d so love to learn what their stories are like.

We also get some brilliant panels of Psylocke as she visits Otherworld in order to track down Betsy. The images of her meditating and conversing with Betsy while she is in the well looked really awesome and when you see those images you can easily see it envisaged in a movie. Hopefully someday Disney will get to Captain Britain and the mythology that surrounds the character.

Overall

POISONED BY HER OWN VENOM! is a very appropriate title for this issue. Especially given that the only person preventing Betsy from using the body that has been created for her is Betsy. As Psylocke points out. It is her own guilt and feelings of failure that are preventing her from returning to the land of the living. She in effect poisoning herself with her own self-doubt. Writer Tini Howard does a fantastic job of nailing this point down. The dialogue she writes that happens between Psylocke and Betsy is so well written you can actually hear the conversation in your head while you are reading. Awesome job.