{"id":3499,"date":"2016-08-03T21:32:17","date_gmt":"2016-08-03T20:32:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3499"},"modified":"2016-08-03T21:33:57","modified_gmt":"2016-08-03T20:33:57","slug":"extraordinary-x-men-8-12-apocalypse-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3499","title":{"rendered":"Extraordinary X-Men #8-12 – “Apocalypse Wars”"},"content":{"rendered":"

If the three “Apocalypse Wars” storylines are supposed to share any broader theme, over and above just having\u00a0something to do with Apocalypse, then it’s far from clear what that might be. \u00a0All-New X-Men<\/em>\u00a0had Apocalypse in the past, and could at least play off having Evan in the cast. \u00a0Uncanny<\/em> did the present (even though Apocalypse wasn’t actually there), and it had Angel to work with. \u00a0Extraordinary<\/em> gets the future,\u00a0but it doesn’t have any characters with any particularly close link to Apocalypse. \u00a0I suppose one of them gets one here.<\/p>\n

Jeff Lemire and Humberto Ramos’s story\u00a0has\u00a0fairly clear goals in mind, at least when it comes to changing the status quo of various characters. \u00a0Quite why it wants to do\u00a0those things is\u00a0less clear.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0plot goes like this. \u00a0Out of nowhere, the X-Men detect a whole load of new mutant embryos. \u00a0These turn out to have been genetically engineered by the Sugar Man, in his established role of the\u00a0disposable mad scientist, and he’s trying to create new mutants in isolation from the Terrigen Mists. \u00a0They’re all in a little sphere called the Ark which is your macguffin for this storyline. \u00a0The routine fight ends with Colossus and four of the trainees – Anole, Glob, Ernst and Martha – being sent a thousand years into the future along with the Ark. \u00a0The rest of the X-Men go after them, but botch the time travel and show up a year late.<\/p>\n

During that year, the four trainees have been wandering around a future world which now consists of a handful of linked spheres where the survivors of Apocalypse’s great war\u00a0now live, an arrangement which is being kept going by Apocalypse himself. \u00a0The mutants didn’t make it and nobody is especially pleased to see any show up now, if only because they think\u00a0Apocalypse won’t be thrilled. \u00a0Colossus, meanwhile, winds up as\u00a0a Horseman of Apocalypse. \u00a0So the trainees Grow As People and become full-fledged X-Men and so forth. The whole thing ends with the trainees being reunited with the X-Men to fight the Horsemen, Apocalypse casually destroying the Ark, Nightcrawler killing (or at least mortally wounding) Apocalypse, and everyone being brought back to the present, including Apocalypse, who promptly vanishes.<\/p>\n

So there are some lasting effects here. \u00a0There’s an\u00a0Apocalypse in\u00a0the Marvel Universe again, though it’s one brought back from\u00a0an alternate future. \u00a0Four of the kid have been seemingly permanently aged, with Anole losing that lopsided look he’s had for years, and Martha having a more impressive armoured\u00a0body. \u00a0And Colossus is a baddie once more. \u00a0You can’t say stuff doesn’t happen here.<\/p>\n

It’s just that, aside from Colossus becoming\u00a0a Horseman (which is fairly generic stuff), none of it has very much to do with Apocalypse. \u00a0Even the Ark seems to be mostly a macguffin.\u00a0\u00a0It’s quite strange. \u00a0In fact, the best bit of these issues is actually a\u00a0subplot setting up a future storyline with Illyana and Sapna, though that may be simply because\u00a0it’s easy to remain optimistic about stories that haven’t\u00a0happened yet. \u00a0Visually,\u00a0Humberto Ramos gets to have some fun re-designing other characters for the future Horsemen.<\/p>\n

But the more interesting ideas in this storyline – and there are a couple – are\u00a0at the very least underplayed, and more likely just plain underdeveloped. \u00a0We’re told that Omega World is a patchwork of bubbles, each\u00a0occupied by one of the groups which survived the “Great Trials”. \u00a0Apocalypse is\u00a0using his personal power to keep this whole arrangement going, which is why he’s vulnerable to Nightcrawler at the end of the story. The\u00a0surviving groups, curiously, are identified as the Atlanteans, the Inhumans, the Stark-Self (a\u00a0collective artificial intelligence created by Tony Stark), the Wakandans, the “mystics” and, of all people, the Moloids.<\/p>\n

And for all that the Horsemen bluster about survival of the fittest,\u00a0these individual worlds don’t seem to be in any particular state of turmoil, nor do they seem to be fighting among themselves. \u00a0This, apparently, is Apocalypse\u00a0at a stage where he’s deemed the battle for survival of\u00a0the fittest to be\u00a0over,\u00a0and is\u00a0content to keep the winners around. \u00a0Precisely why he’s come to this view is never really\u00a0explored – perhaps he just got to the point where the “survival” bit took precedence over the “of the fittest”, perhaps he simply regards this as the end of the road\u00a0– but he explicitly tells us that there are millions\u00a0of people living in Omega World. \u00a0At any rate, this seems to be more of\u00a0a\u00a0post-<\/em>Apocalyptic world, despite who’s in charge. \u00a0Since this Apocalypse does make it back to the present day at the end, it’s always possible we’ll find out more in due course.<\/p>\n

More strangely yet,\u00a0Nightcrawler\u00a0attempts to kill Apocalypse (and the X-Men then bring him back to their time) despite being repeatedly told that he’s the only thing keeping Omega World alive. \u00a0Apocalypse outright tells them that this is going to kill millions and nobody seems especially bothered. \u00a0Granted, for most of the X-Men there’s the excuse that Nightcrawler has already struck the killing blow, so maybe they’re just trying to save what they can from the situation. \u00a0But it’s a downright weird way to end a story. \u00a0These X-Men seem almost disturbingly preoccupied with a bunch of\u00a0unborn mutants\u00a0to the exclusion of all else. \u00a0If we’re to take\u00a0this at face value\u00a0then this timeline ends with the X-Men killing everyone left on Earth. \u00a0That’s not a win.<\/p>\n

Is this badly misfiring writing, or is\u00a0Jeff Lemire doing this on purpose? \u00a0It’s certainly a bleak future for the X-Men, in that it shows that the mutants didn’t survive, and a big theme of this series so far (Storm keeps harping on it) is whether there’s any point at all to anything they’re doing. \u00a0A very charitable reading\u00a0of the intent might go something like this:\u00a0the X-Men are sticking to a conventional\u00a0superhero ethical line where you never give up and you keep\u00a0trying\u00a0bring about a better world in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds. \u00a0Even when there\u00a0seems to be no rational way to succeed, you plough on regardless. \u00a0This story hammers them over the head with the\u00a0fact that they’re doomed to fail, and that\u00a0mutants were indeed just a short term blip that never ultimately mattered. \u00a0The Ark seems to be explicitly there as a symbol of false hope. \u00a0But the X-Men can’t accept any of that because it’s contrary to their basic premise,\u00a0and so they see\u00a0Omega World as something to avert rather than to save.\u00a0\u00a0So we’re in the territory where heroic persistence blurs into something else.<\/p>\n

That’s\u00a0a potentially interesting idea, but getting there from what’s on the page\u00a0takes some big leaps of interpretation. \u00a0Still,\u00a0Lemire does seem interested in the idea of\u00a0the X-Men’s mission as futile, and\u00a0whether there really does come a point at which you’ve crossed the line from heroism to\u00a0delusion. \u00a0It’s possible that the agenda here really is to subvert the “never give in” schtick of superhero ethics. \u00a0Whether you can actually get a workable superhero comic\u00a0out of contemplating the nature of futility is perhaps\u00a0another\u00a0matter, and I’m not convinced thus far.<\/p>\n

Or maybe I’m just being very charitable in trying to make sense of a very strange\u00a0and\u00a0rather depressing story. \u00a0Superficially a relatively\u00a0normal time travel story, on closer inspection this\u00a0is really quite weird. \u00a0But quite what it’s going for is\u00a0at best hard to decipher – which tends to suggest that whatever it was trying to do, it didn’t\u00a0really work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If the three “Apocalypse Wars” storylines are supposed to share any broader theme, over and above just having\u00a0something to do with Apocalypse, then it’s far from clear what that might be. \u00a0All-New X-Men\u00a0had Apocalypse in the past, and could at least play off having Evan in the cast. \u00a0Uncanny did the present (even though Apocalypse […]<\/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-3499","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\/3499","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=3499"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3499\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3501,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3499\/revisions\/3501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}