There’s a time honoured tradition in the X-books of following up a vaguely regrettable crossover with a rather better single-issue character piece.  Dennis Hopeless and Mark Bagley actually had the best of the “Apocalypse Wars” crossovers, even if that still fell short of completely working, but this issue gives us the traditional change of gear, as the series turns its attention back to Warren and Laura.

So this is a nice, simple, light story on which a bigger point can be hung.

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If the three “Apocalypse Wars” storylines are supposed to share any broader theme, over and above just having something to do with Apocalypse, then it’s far from clear what that might be.  All-New X-Men had Apocalypse in the past, and could at least play off having Evan in the cast.  Uncanny did the present (even though Apocalypse wasn’t actually there), and it had Angel to work with.  Extraordinary gets the future, but it doesn’t have any characters with any particularly close link to Apocalypse.  I suppose one of them gets one here.

Jeff Lemire and Humberto Ramos’s story has fairly clear goals in mind, at least when it comes to changing the status quo of various characters.  Quite why it wants to do those things is less clear.

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For the second part of the “Apocalypse Wars” trilogy, Uncanny X-Men has a problem.  The idea of this event is past, present and future – one story dealing with each.  Uncanny gets the present.  But Apocalypse isn’t around in the present.  That’s kind of the point of Evan, who may or may not be his reincarnation.  So Cullen Bunn and Ken Lashley end up giving us an Apocalypse story without Apocalypse.

What we have instead is… well.  There’s a lot going on in these five issues; there’s a lot of stuff trying to build to some kind of climax; there are changes of status quo for both Warren and Monet; and Fantomex and Mystique are drawn into contact with the rest of the cast.  So it’s certainly trying to pay stuff off.

But.

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“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.

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Following from the “Bordertown” three-parter, Old Man Logan gives us a one-shot story.  And it’s time, yet once more, to contemplate the imminent collapse of society.

Now, these are apocalyptic times indeed.  Pop culture – hell, culture generally – is not exactly going through one of its optimistic phases.  Not that it particularly should be.  And so sure, there ought to be something to work with in the hook of Old Man Logan, the thing that makes him different from the original Wolverine – which is not so much that he’s old, or even specifically that he was tricked into killing his version of the X-Men, but that he’s already lived through the collapse of the society around him.

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