229 – Giant-Size Special #7

So, having listened to the podcast;

I think our hosts made a very good case for this miniseries as a better idea than I felt it was when I was reading it. I will be curious to see, going forward, how well later development does in joining up this Cable and this Stryfe with the much older ones that we already know. Stryfe in particular seemed a difficult retcon to make work, but with several decades of character life with which to work, the two Stryfes can probably be reconciled.

Still, there are some problems here. As so often in this era, they feel as much like problems of editing as problems of writing – places where Harras should have sent the script back to Lobdell and pointed out that this or that needs fixing. Some are trivial: “tenants” for “tenets.” But there are some crucial plot points here that needed more thought.

First, everything in this plot turns on the idea that Stryfe is not a substitute for Nathan. So what does it *mean* to say that the clone has the “ability” to host Apocalypse, but not the “capacity”?

Second, Ch’vayre’s motivation is daft. There is literally dialogue to justify his switching sides in which he says that he thought that when Apocalypse talked about survival of the fittest and that the strongest should dominate, what Apocalypse meant was peace, love, and understanding. On the one hand, how could Ch’vayre possibly think that? And on the other, that was not how Ch’vayre was presented in issue 1 – there was absolutely no sign that he was confused about how things were supposed to work.

These are narrow specific points, I realize, but what they have in common is that (a) they’re material to the plot and (b) could be easily fixed by rewriting the dialogue.

More broadly, I hate the Apocalypse retcon, because it’s so insensitive to Louise Simonson’s vision for the character. There is perhaps no X-antagonist for whom the idea that he vampirically moves from host body to host body is so inappropriate. This is true on a narrow continuity level: the whole point of Apocalypse’s powers is that he has absolute control over the molecules of his own body — he’s the Molecule Man, but only for his own molecules —, and therefore doesn’t *have* this sort of physical limitation related to his body.

But there’s a less nitpicky aspect to which Apocalypse’s powers contribute. Simonson’s Apocalypse isn’t about his own survival (in part because, with his powers, he doesn’t have to be – he’s immortal and invulnerable to almost all conceivable threats). He’s a ‘70s Jack Kirby character injected into the X-books, tied to the Celestials. He illuminates how Kirby was exploring similar ideas in some ways in his ‘60s X-Men work and in his ‘70s Eternals work, and by joining them up contributes something that Kirby himself wasn’t suited to do. As a character modelled after ‘70s Kirby characters, Simonson’s Apocalypse isn’t *selfish*. He represents an outlook on life taken to a purer, more “mythic” level than in a “rounded,” “complex” character. Apocalypse genuinely and wholeheartedly believes in his vision, in a way that is not so much idealistic as idealized.

Having him rant at the dead Xavier is definitely a false note for me. For all the ways in which it’s a really bad instance of a misguided move away from Simonson’s characterization, but also because it’s part of that whole “Everything *has* to be about Charles Xavier” thing that makes the X-books seem, at least to me, a little cramped and self-limiting in this era.