Excellence #8 Review

Writer: Brandon Thomas / Artist: Khary Randolph / Image There’s nothing quite so relatable in the current context of reality that vaguely remembering the events of the last issue of Excellence and then opening up the first page to see the text “Two Weeks Later.” Excellence has always loved to play with its temporal setting. Spencer’s arc is told in punctuated bursts. We get the highlights of the most important set of events happening in the moment, and it slowly gets re-contextualized over and over and over again. And whether explicitly intentional or incidentally relevant, Spencer’s lack of a good night’s sleep, him writing of letters to a friend he is isolated from, and his urge to overthrow the system is just such a mood that I find myself resonating with very strongly this July.

Excellence #8 continues to excel in its continued worldbuilding. The sheer sense of scale that Thomas has conjured and elaborated continues to be steadily impressive. As more and more of the convoluted machinations get revealed, we get to see Spencer just chuck wrenches into the machine to try and rid the world of what he views as a corrupt organization. And Thomas has deftly penned some truly outstanding monologues and dialogues that get to the crux of what it means to challenge the preexisting system to try and create a new one. We are shown a spectrum: the many faceted faces of the groups that oppose Spencer’s revolution, his growing number of allies in different positions of power, all joinin…