“Apocalypse Wars” may for once be better described as an “event”, because it isn’t a “crossover” in any real sense.  In fact – and as Marvel made clear from the outset – it harks back to the structure of 1988’s “Fall of the Mutants”, which was simply a banner slapped on three storylines that shook up the status quo but were otherwise unrelated.

“Apocalypse Wars” doesn’t shake up the status quo.  Instead, it consists of the three X-Men titles each doing an unrelated Apocalypse story.  Why Apocalypse?  Because there was a movie out when this whole thing started.

But how do you do three Apocalypse storylines without having any interaction between them?  Simple – time travel!  Through the miracle of this wonderful plot device, plus the fact that Apocalypse is helpfully immortal, we can have All-New X-Men in the past, Uncanny X-Men in the present, and Extraordinary X-Men in the future.

Rather than complicate matters by bringing the whole X-Men team on a trip to the past – especially considering that they’re supposed to be stuck in the present and unable to return home – this is an Evan and Hank three-parter.  Hank is, understandably enough, messing about with homemade time machines in an attempt to find a way home.  Evan, thanks to the convenient magical mask thing that was the macguffin in the previous issue, winds up taking them both back in time to ancient Egypt and the childhood of the original Apocalypse.

In fact, this area of continuity has already been documented, and so what we get is a story written in the margins of the 1996 miniseries Rise of Apocalypse.  So Evan – who by this point is clearly being written as simply a clone of Apocalypse, not a reincarnation – gets to meet the original at roughly the same age.

Needless to say, this is a nature versus nurture story.  After all, that’s pretty much the whole premise of Evan as a character – we know he’s a copy of one of the X-Men’s worst villains but he shows no signs of being anything other than a thoroughly nice boy, partly because of the mock-bucolic upbringing that Fantomex gave him.  The tension comes from the fact that not only do we know that it all went wrong before, but so does he and everyone around him.

Issue #9 has some good ideas on the character, dialling back just a shade on his more naive tendencies.  In Dennis Hopeless’s approach, Evan is indeed a genuinely pleasant, mostly cheerful guy.  But he’s also trying very hard to keep up that persona, partly because he sees it as evidence that he’s on a different course from the original, and partly because he doesn’t feel he can let anyone else see any signs of negative emotions.  Basically, he believes that any sign of negativity, anger or whatever would be taken as a sign of trouble, so he’s working very hard to brush such things aside.

So the big idea of this arc is to confront Evan with the fact that the original Apocalypse, at his age, turns out to have been equally nice and pretty much heroic.  In many ways this is deeply disconcerting for Evan, because it’s renewed evidence that he’s actually on the same path as the original after all.  But it also encourages him to try and intervene to keep the original En Sabah Nur on the right path, which of course Hank can’t allow, and you know where it goes from there.

Mark Bagley’s task isn’t made any easier by the fact that Rise of Apocalypse established all of Nur’s childhood tribe as wearing basically identical hooded costumes.  And atmospherics have never been the focus of his work.  But he’s always a clear storyteller, and he’s very good with character – his strength here lies in making Evan and En Sabah Nur expressive enough to convey their similarity and sell the idea of the original Apocalypse as a thoroughly lovely kid.  (And the “kid” bit is important too – he’s a teenager, not an adult.)  That’s the big idea of this story, and Bagley sells it well.

But it’s a story that’s already covered all the important stuff by the end of part 2.  That’s where Evan gets to grips with what he sees in En Sabah Nur.  It leaves part 3 to be an exercise in plot mechanics, as the Apocalypses first return to rescue Hank, and then Hank stops Evan from trying to alter history.  This stuff feels a bit perfunctory, especially as their return to the present hinges on a magical macguffin.  There’s an undeveloped subplot about a tribal mystic who knows about Apocalypse from the stories told by Pharaoh Rama-Tut, another time traveller (and a major player in Rise of Apocalypse, but off panel throughout here).  The mystic wants knowledge of the future; Hank apparently tells him something but it’s not clear what.

Perhaps we’re coming back to this at some point.  It’s been a long time since I read Rise of Apocalypse – the issues will be boxed upstairs somewhere, but heaven knows where – and it’s not on Marvel Unlimited either.  But as best I recall, it suggested that he was driven part by his tribe’s “survival of the fittest” ethos, and partly by a misjudged attempt by Rama-Tut to nip him in the bud by wiping out that same tribe, which could be taken to imply that he was a self-fulfilling prophecy.  You could, possibly, go back to that later with Evan.

But even if that’s the long term goal, it means that this story hits its best ideas some way before the end, leaving a rather ordinary conclusion and a lack of a decent payoff.  It’s okay, but its stronger concepts never really develop into anything more than a routine story.