{"id":4668,"date":"2019-08-06T21:17:20","date_gmt":"2019-08-06T20:17:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4668"},"modified":"2019-08-06T21:17:20","modified_gmt":"2019-08-06T20:17:20","slug":"age-of-x-man-apocalypse-the-x-tracts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4668","title":{"rendered":"Age of X-Man: Apocalypse & The X-Tracts"},"content":{"rendered":"

Considering that\u00a0Age of X-Man<\/em> seems to have been intended as something of a palate cleanser before Jonathan Hickman’s run, it could hardly be accused of lacking ambition. \u00a0It’s delivered some very unusual X-books indeed, and none stranger than this: a comic in which Apocalypse leads a group of art-school drop outs to campaign for the power of love. \u00a0The titular X-Tracts aren’t the team, by the way – they’re scriptures. \u00a0(The team are called the Light Riders.)<\/p>\n

All this makes a reasonable degree of sense within the context of the\u00a0Age of X-Man<\/em> crossover. \u00a0Nate, for his own reasons, has built a “utopia” based on autonomy, isolation, and the rejection of personal relationships. \u00a0Cast as the villain, Apocalypse rejects all that. \u00a0He’s not calling himself Apocalypse, of course; he’s En Sabah Nur, or “Murshid” (teacher), and he looks more like a cult leader. \u00a0But Nate wants him as an antagonist, presumably because he thinks there needs to be some sort of threat to order – however ineffectual – in order to keep everyone in line. \u00a0And certainly, in the other\u00a0Age of X-Man<\/em> books, the X-Men weirdly overreact to En Sabah Nur, who is doing nothing more than arranging some peace-and-love rallies.<\/p>\n

X-Tracts<\/em> focusses on Nur and his group from the inside, and they’re quite the bunch of eccentrics, hanging around in Greenwich Village, holding meetings in galleries, and setting about the important business of printing more flyers. \u00a0Curiously, considering the ground rules of Nate’s world, they do have a reasonable following (of characters we’ve never seen before) – but then, they’re still firmly the sort of marginalised fringe group that would serve Nate’s function.<\/p>\n

As with so many\u00a0Age of X-Man<\/em> titles, you can debate whether there’s an especially compelling reason for Nate to stick this particular group of characters in this role. \u00a0Apocalypse is given the unlikely team of Kitty Pryde, Colossus (who eventually runs way from the X-Men to be with her), Dazzler and Eye-Boy, plus a new character called Unveil who’s presumably one of Nate’s creations. \u00a0Her literal plot role is to help people bond together, but she’s basically psychedelia, completed with sixties swirly colours. \u00a0Kitty is just kind of lost; Dazzler has found a niche for herself in protest songs; and Eye-Boy has been remade as a gun-toting mod who’s vastly more confident than he ever was in the mainstream Marvel Universe. \u00a0That’s an interesting inversion of the character.<\/p>\n

On top of that, Apocalypse also has Genesis, his real-world clonal son, who he apparently rescued from one of the X-Men’s hatcheries as a child. \u00a0(This doesn’t stack up with the timeline of other characters who claim to remember the real world – they say the X-Men have only been in this world for a few months – but perhaps it’s a memory implant.) \u00a0So this turns out to be quite a significant series in the bigger scheme of things: it’s the first time we’ve seen Apocalypse and Genesis spend any significant amount of time together, and do it in a father-and-son role, both seemingly oblivious of their actual back story. \u00a0This seems to be setting up Apocalypse’s role in the upcoming\u00a0Excalibur<\/em> series. \u00a0So X-Tracts\u00a0<\/i>might wind up being the most significant of all the\u00a0Age of X-Man<\/em> stories – and at the very least, it seems that these minis won’t be entirely ignored.<\/p>\n

The art is a little patchy. \u00a0The character designs are generally rather strong, and I like the way Apocalypse plays as a gentle, measured spiritual leader. \u00a0Some of the psychedelic colouring works rather well. \u00a0But it’s better at comedy than action, and there’s a whole storyline with Omega Red that looks a little bit bland. \u00a0Colossus feels a bit off, too, though that’s as much by comparison with the other\u00a0Age of X-Man<\/em> books as anything else.<\/p>\n

Omega Red, then. \u00a0The main plot here is very simple, probably too simple. \u00a0Apocalypse sends his team to recover Omega Red from a cell. \u00a0Ostensibly, this is because Omega Red represents the extinct governing philosophy of communism, and the X-Men\u00a0really\u00a0<\/em>won’t like that. \u00a0The implication, though, is that Apocalypse is hunting for allies to take on Nate. \u00a0And while Nate was able to find roles for Blob and Apocalypse in his utopia, Omega Red presents him with a real problem. \u00a0So, even though all the other “real” inhabitants of this world seem to be clustered around a single city in America, Omega Red is locked away in a cell. \u00a0In Siberia. \u00a0But… there’s nothing all that interesting about Omega Red when he does get out; he’s mainly there to cause chaos for Genesis and Eye-Boy.<\/p>\n

And there’s some rather heavy handed stuff with a menorah, which is used a little too obviously as a symbol of what the characters have lost through Nate’s reprogramming. \u00a0That doesn’t really work either. \u00a0Still, there’s something about the basic idea of Apocalypse trying to act out the role of father and spiritual leader that carries the book. \u00a0There’s a genuine uncertainty about how far he’s acting and whether the circumstances really have changed him. \u00a0It’s an odd way of changing the character’s direction, but it leaves him in a far more interesting place than before.<\/p>\n

It’s a mixed bag, but it takes an audacious premise and gets away with it. \u00a0Strange but worthwhile.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Considering that\u00a0Age of X-Man seems to have been intended as something of a palate cleanser before Jonathan Hickman’s run, it could hardly be accused of lacking ambition. \u00a0It’s delivered some very unusual X-books indeed, and none stranger than this: a comic in which Apocalypse leads a group of art-school drop outs to campaign for the […]<\/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-4668","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\/4668","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=4668"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4668\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4669,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4668\/revisions\/4669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}