300 – Götterdämmerung

Thinking about Age of Apocalypse, now that I’ve waded through something that I only ever skimmed before: how much is there by X-Men: Omega that wasn’t there already in X-Men: Alpha? I don’t mean finding out who Character A is now that they’re in Universe B — obviously, there’s a lot of that.

But is there anything else? This is an event that from the beginning announces that it’s about big, important themes of genocide and ethnic cleansing that were salient in the mid-90s. It tries to reconfigure the X-metaphor as one about the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. But it seems to stop at just being about that as a sufficient end in itself, and doesn’t seem to have much desire to say much about what it’s about.

I have the sense that there was a big whiteboard which had all the plots for the various miniseries sketched out, and a laundry list of the things that would have to be checked off in X-Men: Omega to resolve them (“You’re the mutant that Forge promised me!”) — but what was needed was another big whiteboard next to it that had written on it in big letters, “But what’s the [expletive deleted] point?”

Perhaps the problem is Apocalypse. I would be really interested to know which came first: the idea of a world without Charles Xavier, or the idea of a world ruled by Apocalypse.

Because I can respect the whole “What does the X-metaphor mean nowadays?” impulse – it’s definitely a question that anyone responsible for an X-book needs to ask. But I think it works best with the first idea – there’s a natural connection between “Take away Xavier” and “Let’s examine what the ideas with which the X-books have historically interwined him.” By the same token, making Magneto the central figure on one side is great stuff, especially because his Claremont origin gives him a direct purchase on the theme of genocide.

But there isn’t much organic connective tissue between “Charles Xavier isn’t there” and “Apocalypse becomes ruler of North America.” You really are reliant on the idea that Apocalypse is the natural figure to symbolize genocide. And I do still think that the story is doing something interesting by making Apocalypse so much like Silver Age Magneto – it works for me when Magneto accuses of him of being no more impressive than Hitler, because in a sense it’s a post-Claremont Magneto talking to the Lee/Kirby Magneto.

But at that point, I have the same slightly squicked-out feeling that I have about modeling Dark Beast so closely on Josef Mengele. Apocalypse and many of the characters that surround him as presented here are simply too cartoonish to bear this kind of symbolic weight. This can be summed up in that this is the story that contains the awfulness of a character called “Holocaust” — and then compounds that with the added awfulness of having him in a story that is referencing the actual Holocaust.

Part of the problem here is that we never have much exploration of Apocalypse’s regime. Bishop says at the end that this universe was claimed by “fear, prejudice, and hatred.” Tell me more? We see mutants as a ruling class, but not that much about how that came about. It is worth remembering that supposedly, this all came into being in the comparatively recent past (about two decades ago?), which is to say that the point of departure is a society that we should find familiar. In that context, how exactly did Apocalypse recruit his mutant army and take over? What did he tell them at the time? Were they being persecuted by humans? Did he tell them, “And our official aesthetics are going to be big on the dark and industrial, but don’t worry, you’ll be encouraged to grow your hair as long as you like?”

There’s a whiff here of the Mirror Universe — the point is to show us our regular characters, but (mostly) Daaark, and not to worry about it beyond that. In that sense, Age of Apocalypse might be the perfect ‘90s X-story, in that it takes for granted that you are reading it because it is an X-comic, and alternate takes on the characters are worth all of these pages as ends in themselves.

Best orphan to adopt:
Warlock!

Then I get one of the best kids ever and he gets a better dad too!
Ya know, not that I’m an awesome parent, but the fact that I don’t want him dead…

For the benefit of anyone who, like me, is reading along with the podcast via Marvel Unlimited. In one of Marvel Unlimited’s well-known triumphs of indexing, it is vital for the next episode to be aware that, as far as MU is concerned, there is X-Men Prime and then there is X-Men: Prime.