“Apocalypse Wars”\u00a0may for once be better described as an “event”, because it isn’t a “crossover” in any real sense. \u00a0In fact – and as Marvel made clear from the outset – it harks back to the structure of 1988’s “Fall of the Mutants”,\u00a0which was simply a banner\u00a0slapped on three\u00a0storylines that shook up the status quo but were otherwise unrelated.<\/p>\n
“Apocalypse Wars” doesn’t shake up the status quo. \u00a0Instead,\u00a0it consists of\u00a0the three X-Men titles each doing an unrelated Apocalypse story. \u00a0Why Apocalypse? \u00a0Because there was a movie out\u00a0when this whole thing started.<\/p>\n
But how do you do three Apocalypse storylines without having\u00a0any interaction between them? \u00a0Simple\u00a0– time travel! \u00a0Through the miracle of this wonderful plot device, plus the fact that Apocalypse is helpfully immortal, we can have All-New X-Men<\/em> in the past,\u00a0Uncanny X-Men<\/em> in the present, and\u00a0Extraordinary X-Men<\/em> in the future.<\/p>\n Rather than\u00a0complicate 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\u00a0and unable to return home – this\u00a0is an Evan and Hank three-parter. \u00a0Hank is, understandably enough,\u00a0messing about with\u00a0homemade time machines in an attempt to find a\u00a0way home. \u00a0Evan, thanks to the convenient magical\u00a0mask 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.<\/p>\n In fact, this area of continuity has already been documented, and so what we get is a story written in the margins of\u00a0the 1996 miniseries\u00a0Rise of Apocalypse<\/em>. \u00a0So Evan\u00a0– 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.<\/p>\n Needless to say, this is a nature versus nurture story. \u00a0After all, that’s pretty much the whole premise of Evan as a character – we know he’s a\u00a0copy 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. \u00a0The 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.<\/p>\n Issue #9 has some\u00a0good ideas on the character,\u00a0dialling back just a shade on his more naive tendencies. \u00a0In Dennis Hopeless’s\u00a0approach, Evan is\u00a0indeed a genuinely\u00a0pleasant, mostly cheerful guy. \u00a0But he’s also\u00a0trying 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. \u00a0Basically, he believes that any sign of negativity, anger or whatever would be taken as a sign\u00a0of trouble, so he’s working very hard to\u00a0brush\u00a0such things aside.<\/p>\n 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. \u00a0In many ways this is deeply disconcerting for Evan, because it’s renewed evidence that he’s\u00a0actually on the same path as the original after all. \u00a0But it also encourages him to try and intervene to\u00a0keep the original En Sabah Nur on the right path, which of course Hank can’t allow, and you know where it goes from there.<\/p>\n Mark Bagley’s task isn’t made any easier by the fact that\u00a0Rise of Apocalypse<\/em> established all of Nur’s childhood tribe as wearing basically identical\u00a0hooded costumes. \u00a0And atmospherics have never been\u00a0the focus of his work. \u00a0But he’s always a clear storyteller, and he’s\u00a0very good with character –\u00a0his strength here lies in making Evan and En Sabah Nur expressive enough to convey their similarity and sell the idea of\u00a0the original Apocalypse as a thoroughly\u00a0lovely kid. \u00a0(And the “kid” bit is important too –\u00a0he’s a teenager, not an adult.) \u00a0That’s the big idea of this story, and Bagley sells it well.<\/p>\n But it’s a story\u00a0that’s already covered all the important stuff by the end of\u00a0part 2. \u00a0That’s\u00a0where Evan\u00a0gets to grips with what he sees\u00a0in En Sabah Nur. \u00a0It leaves part\u00a03 to be\u00a0an exercise in plot mechanics,\u00a0as the\u00a0Apocalypses first return to rescue Hank, and then Hank stops Evan from trying to alter history. \u00a0This stuff feels a bit perfunctory, especially as their return to the present hinges on a magical macguffin. \u00a0There’s an undeveloped subplot\u00a0about a\u00a0tribal mystic who knows about Apocalypse\u00a0from the stories told by Pharaoh Rama-Tut, another time traveller (and\u00a0a major player in\u00a0Rise of Apocalypse<\/em>, but off panel throughout here). \u00a0The mystic wants knowledge of the future; Hank apparently tells him something but it’s not clear what.<\/p>\n Perhaps we’re coming back to this at some point. \u00a0It’s been a long time since I read\u00a0Rise of Apocalypse\u00a0<\/em>– the\u00a0issues will be boxed upstairs somewhere, but heaven knows where – and it’s not on Marvel Unlimited either. \u00a0But\u00a0as best I\u00a0recall,\u00a0it suggested\u00a0that he was driven part by his tribe’s “survival of the fittest” ethos,\u00a0and partly by a misjudged attempt by Rama-Tut to\u00a0nip him in the bud by wiping out\u00a0that same tribe, which could be taken to imply\u00a0that he was\u00a0a self-fulfilling prophecy. \u00a0You could, possibly, go back to that later with Evan.<\/p>\n But\u00a0even if that’s the long term goal, it means that this story hits its best ideas some way before the end,\u00a0leaving\u00a0a\u00a0rather ordinary conclusion and a lack of a decent payoff. \u00a0It’s okay, but its stronger concepts never really\u00a0develop into\u00a0anything more than a routine story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “Apocalypse Wars”\u00a0may for once be better described as an “event”, because it isn’t a “crossover” in any real sense. \u00a0In fact – and as Marvel made clear from the outset – it harks back to the structure of 1988’s “Fall of the Mutants”,\u00a0which was simply a banner\u00a0slapped on three\u00a0storylines that shook up the status quo […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-x-axis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3485"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3485\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3487,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3485\/revisions\/3487"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}