Not a one-shot, but a back-up strip running through the other five titles, “Degeneration” is a curio. \u00a0I’m pretty sure Apocalypse was comprehensively out of circulation the last time we saw him, so you’d have thought the obvious story was “why is he back at all”. \u00a0That’s not what we get here; instead, Apocalypse is just back as if nothing had happened.<\/p>\n
What writers Zac Thompson and Lonnie Nadler opt for instead is a story from Apocalypse’s point of view with no actual heroes in it. \u00a0It’d be stretching a point to say that he’s the hero here, but he’s certainly taking the role of triumphing over adversity. \u00a0And in itself, that’s at least an underplayed angle on the character, who tends to be played as an A-list villain on an operative scale. \u00a0With nobody else around for him to posture to, this one necessarily ends up humanising him to a degree.<\/p>\n
Since we last saw him, Apocalypse has been working on a new plan to build a permanent host body. \u00a0He’s jury rigged some Celestial technology which is meant to “repair genetic decay” so that it “can now replace all cells in a body with perfect counterparts”, whatever that means. \u00a0He plans to use this machine to turn some poor lab rat into a perfect body which he can use as his next host. \u00a0Quite how he expects that to work is a little hand wavy – wouldn’t it just result in a perfectly healthy weakling? \u00a0Oh, and Apocalypse has named his new machine “The Finch”, for… reasons? \u00a0If there’s a reference there, it’s flying over my head.<\/p>\n
Anyway, since the first few attempts didn’t work, Apocalypse decides to try sharing some of his healing powers with Test Subject D, which leads to a big explosion and Apocalypse waking up on an alien world with incredible accelerated evolution. \u00a0Because, Again, Reasons.<\/p>\n
This gets us to the actual point of the story, though. \u00a0Aside from anything else, Apocalypse finds that on this alien world he’s rapidly degenerating back into a regular old human, and indeed beyond. \u00a0Artist Geraldo Borges does a great job with this. \u00a0The alien world itself has the vibe of a 50s sci-fi magazine cover, but there’s something very effective about the way his Apocalypse starts off traditional, then starts to feel like a bloke in a costume struggling to carry his backpack, before becoming an ordinary human with only his unusual mouth design to signal who he was.<\/p>\n
By part three, Apocalypse is a caveman and his florid narration – which seemed decidedly purple and self-important in the first issue – is starting to have trouble with long words. \u00a0The twist here is that the four lab rats who were his prisoners in part one have also been brought to the same place, but they’ve been evolving the other way, and by the time they capture him, he’s unrecognisable to them. \u00a0So you get a chapter of the now-intellectual victims pondering what it is they’ve found, while Apocalypse is a monkey whose first-person “narration” is reduced to repeating the word “survive”.<\/p>\n
It’s a clever idea, but what’s the pay-off? \u00a0Well, the former lab rats, having evolved into Apocalypse’s role, have also taken up his interest in scientific experimentation, and are having a lovely old time bringing the art of vivisection to this island. \u00a0So the irony is that they wind up repeating Apocalypse’s original error and trying a very similar experiment. \u00a0In a roundabout way, Apocalypse winds up getting his new host body after all.<\/p>\n
This is quite clever, at least for those readers who actually bought the whole thing and realise what’s going on; it won’t make much sense at all if you only bought that chapter, since Apocalypse immediately resumes his role as narrator, and he isn’t entirely reliable. \u00a0Apocalypse credits his victory to the lab rats remaining as simple as ever, and claims that “even as an aphasic simian being, I was able to outwit them”. \u00a0This is, shall we say, overstating his contribution. \u00a0He does grab the guy and bring about the error, but the overall impression is of much more of a destined cycle, which Apocalypse wrongly reads as evidence of his own genius.<\/p>\n
This feels like it ought to be the climax, but it actually arrives at the end of part four, which is odd pacing. \u00a0Part five establishes that We Were On Earth All Along, and sees Apocalypse complete the task of smashing up his creations’ makeshift society. \u00a0This comes across as a bit of a coda, and a backdrop to Apocalypse giving us a closing monologue about his self-image. \u00a0The gist seems to be that he sees himself as both a god and a scientist, privately acknowledging that he still doesn’t fully understand the Celestial technology he’s working with, but convinced that through trial and error he will get there. \u00a0I suppose the idea is that he’s meant to read this as a particularly striking example of a trial-and-error learning experience.<\/p>\n
It’s an interesting take on the character, but how far it’s really illustrated by the story that went before may be more debatable. \u00a0The compelling hook on this story is the humanisation and degeneration of Apocalypse, which doesn’t particularly feel like it sets up the moral that Apocalypse draws from it. \u00a0Then again, the more I think about this, the more it starts to feel like a strength. \u00a0For us, Apocalypse has essentially fluked his way back from disaster thanks to ironic parallels more than his own efforts. \u00a0But from Apocalypse’s perspective, he has triumphed nobly over adversity, persevered when all seemed lost, and proved his willingness to put himself on the line for knowledge; he thinks this is a story about his own heroism, and you can at least see where he’s coming from. \u00a0It’s a dubious reading of the story, but it makes sense as Apocalypse’s reading.<\/p>\n
I wasn’t especially taken with this on a first reading, but it does stand up better on a re-read. \u00a0Still no idea why they called it the Finch, though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Not a one-shot, but a back-up strip running through the other five titles, “Degeneration” is a curio. \u00a0I’m pretty sure Apocalypse was comprehensively out of circulation the last time we saw him, so you’d have thought the obvious story was “why is he back at all”. \u00a0That’s not what we get here; instead, Apocalypse is […]<\/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-4381","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\/4381","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=4381"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4383,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4381\/revisions\/4383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}