The X-Men do so love a nice dystopia.  In fact, vast tracts of X-history are built on either the threat of the world becoming one, or a side trip to some alternate world which already is one.  So with Secret Wars being based largely on What If…? stories spinning off from old event stories (at least in the case of those books which are steering clear of the patchwork mechanics of Battleworld itself), it’s perhaps unsurprising that the X-books find themselves largely contributing an array of parallel-world misery.

On paper, Years of Future Past should be one of the most promising.  For one thing, the reference point here is “Days of Future Past”, which is the story that sent the X-Men down this path in the first place.  And for another, it’s by Marguerite Bennett and Mike Norton, which is a pretty strong creative team.

It certainly catches the style of the original “Days of Future Past” stories.  Norton’s art is probably closer to Paul Smith’s than to John Byrne’s, but his linework and his page layouts are certainly in the spirit of the 80s without going too heavy on the retro.  Ruined cities can be a pretty boring backdrop after a while, but good choices of angle, and a focus on the characters, makes it work.  For that matter, Joe Caramagna’s lettering is pleasingly reminiscent of Tom Orzechowski’s, though again without going to the lengths of actual mimickry.

It has ideas too, though how well they land is another matter.  The story sees the X-Men escaping from the camps on the eve of a vote which could apparently lead to the anti-mutant laws being relaxed.  President Kelly decides to fake an attempt on his own life in order to remind the public how terrible mutants are.  Naturally, this is going to go wrong and turn into a potentially real threat to his life.  The X-Men want to stop that happening, and use Kitty Pryde’s daughter Chrissie as the positive face of mutants.  But a couple of the morally flexible ones have other ideas, seeing Chrissie as a potentially photogenic martyr for the mutant cause.

The story really revolves around Chrissie and Cameron, the other second-generation X-Man, and apparently the last mutants to be born before a successful sterilisation campaign.  Chrissie is there to be the symbol of hope and positivity; Cameron, who was raised by the more cynical Wolverine, sees the world as irretrievably screwed.  There are only a handful of mutants left; there is no realistic possibility of them ever returning to a major population; and all they’re really doing is to cause a distraction that stops the world getting back on track for everyone else.

In other words, the series is openly flirting with the idea that all hope in this scenario is in fact delusion.  And it makes a lot of the tension between the basic optimism of the genre and the logical reality of just how bad this place has got.  Perhaps the best example is when a giant Lockheed turns out to be hiding underneath the ruined city.  It’s a lovely intrusion of something fantastic into an otherwise fairly miserable setting.

This is a looser riff on “Days of Futures Past” than it might seem at first glance – what it has in common is the Sentinels, the camps, the threatened assassination of Kelly (but in a different time period), and a New York in ruins.  The central plot here, after all, involves characters worrying about the PR implications of an attempt on President Kelly’s life, and of how Kitty deals with it.  There’s a vote on mutant rights; the first couple of issues have corrupt journalists trying to misrepresent the X-Men.

None of this would work in the original story, because it was a good old fashioned robot apocalypse, in which the robots themselves take over the world.  That’s a classic pulp sci-fi trope, sometimes used just to suggest the dangers of over literal thinking.  (“We only asked the robot to make a cup of tea and now it’s levelled Basingstoke to make way for its own plantation!”)  In DOFP, it has an added dimension, because the problem isn’t so much the Sentinels’ reasoning as the awfulness of the concept that’s at the heart of their programming.  They’re following a terrible idea to its logical conclusion.

In Years, on the other hand, the Sentinels are just big government-owned robots, and actual power still rests with a human President.  There is, it seems, a functioning democracy of some sort here – though since we never actually see any ordinary humans other than Kelly and his immediate staff, it’s all a bit shadowy and off panel.  But when you start tugging at this thread, all sorts of story problems emerge.

For example, why is New York still in a worse state than Mogadishu?  Why is there still “no gasoline and barely any electricity”?  It makes (some) sense for a Sentinel-dominated world to wind up like that, because the Sentinels are monomaniacally obsessed and don’t care about any other metric of human happiness.  But if the humans won outright more than a decade ago, why haven’t they rebuilt by now, at least to the point of switching the lights back on?  Does a story about manipulative TV journalists really belong in a world like this?  How are people even watching?  Ultimately, the plot seems at odds with the “Days of Futures Past” aesthetic that the series is trying so hard to emulate.

Like most “Warzones” titles, Years steers clear of the complications of Battleworld and sticks to the confines of its own domain.  In many tie-ins, the upshot has been a story that really wants to be set in a completely free-standing alternate reality, but with a search-and-replace done on the script to swap in references to Barons and Doom.  Years is largely like that too, the odd exception being a prominent role for religion.  Part of the story involves Nightcrawler as a priest, running a church which (on Battleworld) apparently benefits from the laws of medieval sanctuary.  Of course, this being Battleworld, God has been swapped out and replaced with Doom.

I can’t quite decide what this is going for, and whether it works.  On one level, it reads like a plot point that’s been through the search and replace, even though swapping in Doom obviously changes Nightcrawler’s religion dramatically. But by the same token, the story surely isn’t suggesting that the Sentinels were respecters of churches pre-Battleworld.  Their concern here is that this God is likely to show up in person if he’s been disrespected.  So this doesn’t work unless you see it as a specific feature of Battleworld.  For that matter, Kelly has commissioned a whole line of extra-awesome Doom Sentinels.  Are those specific to Battleworld too, or are we meant to take it that Kelly was already in the habit of designing Christ-themed Sentinels?

This could be a clumsy attempt to work Doom into the story, or it might be a subtle attempt to use him to undercut the religions of both sides – implying a Sentinel design that would have been horrendously offensive, and essentially saying that Kurt might as well be praying to Dr Doom for all the good it seems to have done him.  I’m inclining to the latter, but to be honest, that’s as much a case of giving the creators the benefit of the doubt as anything else.

There’s something to this book; it certainly has more going on than appears on the surface.  But a lot of those ideas seem to be at odds with the elements faithfully replicated from DOFP, and with the book’s (well-executed) nostalgia role.  It’s pulling in too many directions at once, and never quite manages to come together as a particularly satisfying whole.