We still have one more Secret Wars X-books to go – House of M – but Age of Apocalypse completes our tour of the X-books’ outright dystopias.  As with most of the throwback minis, this isn’t actually the original Age of Apocalypse world, but a new one of the same general ilk.  And it pretty much pays lip service to the Battleworld gimmick (in fact, both the prologue and the ending don’t really work in Battleworld terms).  What we have here, then, is a nineties nostalgia mini.

This one commits rather more fully to the nostalgia angle, bringing back Fabian Nicieza, one of the writers of the original crossover.  Nicieza hasn’t done any work for Marvel in a while, but is obviously well placed to echo the tone of his own original story.

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Some questions can only really be answered with another question.  Take, for example, the X-books’ contribution to a load of What If? one-shots based on 2013’s Infinity crossover.

The book asks the question: “What if the X-Men were the sole survivors of Infinity?”  To which the obvious response is, “Why would anyone want to know that?”

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It is the nature of big crossovers – even of the type Marvel do nowadays – that sometimes a tie-in book pops up, whose remit is to move a character from A to B.  This isn’t always a bad thing; often, a remit like that is so minimal that it makes it perfectly possible to wrap a decent story around it.  A plot point for the big story can double as a macguffin for the small one.

Old Man Logan is a series that exists to get a character from A to B.  But when you get down to it, that’s pretty much the sum total of what happens in the book.

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While much of Secret Wars may be taken up with callbacks to the great crossovers of yesterday, but E is for Extinction turns its attention to Grant Morrison’s New X-Men run from 2001-2004.  (Strictly speaking, “E is for Extinction” was just the first arc of his run, but you can’t really call a book Grant Morrison’s X-Men when Grant Morrison isn’t doing it.)

In its way, of course, Morrison’s run was far more significant to the X-Men than any “event” book.  For the first time since the 1975 relaunch, it broke with the idea that the X-Men was a single, ever-growing saga.  Not everything in the preceding decade had been a straight emulation of Chris Claremont – the Seagle/Bachalo run was in that period, for example – but it was all positioned as a continuation.  Morrison’s run, both at beginning and end, is a break point.

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Back in the day, What If…? used to do nothing but imagine what might have happened if a high-profile story had turned out differently.  The answers tended to be pretty similar: something terrible would have happened – otherwise, what would it say about the stakes in the original story?  Bad things would ensue, alternate versions of major characters would probably die, and some sort of bittersweet redemptive ending would follow.  It’s where the premise tends to lead you.

So with the Secret Wars X-books playing such a straight bat in terms of revisiting old stories, maybe it was inevitable that we would end up with a dystopia glut.  It’s more surprising to see two separate books both built around the set-up of the X-Men quarantining an island.

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