Day Eighty-Two: It's Your Age, It's My Rage
We've got just one week left until the final issue of Marvel's 2007 event, Civil War, wraps up. Now, once the final issue is out, I may or may not sit down with the whole thing and all the various tie-in issues of other books, special one-shots etc which have come out in the meantime, and do a proper write-up on it to demonstrate in a rational and scientific way why it's one of the worst stories Marvel have ever published, a list which features such gems as racist issues of NFL Superpro and a Bob Budiansky Transformers story called The Car Wash of Doom. I may not, of course - I could quite easily just get caught up in writing about how much I love Krypto the Super-Dog or something. It's a possibility, is what I'm saying. Just go with it, okay? Man, so demanding.
Now, I realise that this is going to paint me as a rabid 1990s Marvel fanboy, and I'm content with that, to be honest, but I have to say that if Marvel are going to do a line-wide crossover, then they could do far worse than emulate the strategy behind their 1995 X-Books event, the Age of Apocalypse.
Okay, I hear you. You're saying that Age of Apocalypse was brought to us by legendary comics greats such as Bob Harras, Terry Kavanagh, Howard Mackie, Ian Churchill and Jeph Loeb. That's true enough. It was also brought to us by actually talented people such as Salvador Larocca, Brian K Vaughan, Tim Sale, Chris Bachalo, Warren Ellis, John Francis Moore, Mark Buckingham, Fabian Nicieza, Terry Dodson, Steve Skroce and Steve Epting. It was the last truly great Marvel event, and I'm going to tell you why.
The plot is really simple: Charles Xavier aka Professor X had a son, David Haller. David was a lunatic and he was also a powerful mutant, going by the name of Legion. Legion decided that the reason why his father's dream of human-mutant peace had never come about was because Xavier had been perpetually distracted by his nemesis Magneto. Summoning newly-gestating powers, Legion went back in time, followed by a team of X-Men, to kill Magneto while both he and Xavier were still young. Unfortunately, Legion killed the wrong man, and Xavier died that day. Time twisted and unravelled and re-knit itself, coming to rest with a new reality in which Magneto led the X-Men and eugenicist villain Apocalypse had conquered America, resulting in a dystopian new world. Only the time-lost X-Man Bishop, who was one of the team who had followed Legion back with the aim of stopping his crazy plan, remembered the "real" universe, and having convinced Magneto that the world as he knew it was wrong, the X-Men set out to defeat Apocalypse and set the timeline straight.
The world of the Age of Apocalypse was a very different place to the mainstream Marvel Universe. Characters were evil whom we knew as good, characters were good whom we knew as evil. Alliances were made and broken, innocents were lost, the entire planet was a moment away from doomsday. In order to show just how screwed up the whole thing was, Marvel suspended publication for four months of all of the X-Men books and replaced them with their parallel equivalents. Thus the X-Factor title, which at the time featured Alex Summers as the leader of the team and Lorna Dane as his girlfriend and team-mate, was replaced with Factor X, which followed the story of Apocalypse's lieutenants and the inside of his wicked organisation. In this title, Alex was the manipulative, bitter, nasty head of Apocalypse's security forces, and Lorna was a prisoner in Apocalypse's genetic testing camps, completely out of her tree. Cable's book was replaced with X-Man, in which Cable himself was reworked as Nate Grey, a young and impulsive warrior who, it transpired, had been created by one of Apocalypse's most trusted servants as a weapon to use in a forthcoming coup, gifted with unbearable power levels, destined to burn out and die before he reached 20 years old. Generation X, previously an group of sheltered X-kids, were now footsoldiers at the beck and call of Colossus, who had become a driven and unhinged warrior in Magneto's cause. Nobody was guaranteed to make it through to the end, and indeed most of them didn't.
The reason for the Age of Apocalypse's greatness isn't the fact that it was all a bit dark and gritty, though. It was the convincing coherence of the world which had been created. You could follow a character through the whole story - Wolverine aka Weapon X turned up in X-Men Alpha, then moved through his own title and back into X-Men Omega, while his lover Jean Grey left the Weapon X series to join the Factor X book halfway through the event. Contradictions were miniscule, if that. The writing cohered into a manageable whole, and it's a testament to the editorial hand which Bob Harras had over the whole thing that the story can be collected (as it has now been) in a chronological order in trade paperback without the reader being yanked out of the flow by a contradictory account of a plot point or a nonsensical explanation of circumstances. Now that's something that can't be said about Civil War.
The biggest selling point, though, isn't even the story coherence. It's the moments. Get an X-fan in the pub yapping about the Age of Apocalypse and you won't be able to shut them up. The Age of Apocalypse is the story of the Juggernaut as a pacifist monk, who wasn't able to renounce his commitment to himself and to the path he'd chosen. He knew that beneath his calm shell there was a brutal force waiting to break free and destroy, so when push came to shove his mental strain caused him to suffer an aneurysm and fall down dead, incapacitated by his fear of the man we sadly knew he was capable of being. It's the story of Gambit, who sees Rogue, the woman he loves - the only woman he loves, in fact - having found her own soul mate in Magneto, and knowing that he has to lead his team on a suicide mission on her behalf, even though she'll never love him. It's the story of Shadowcat, killed by the trust and love she had for Colossus, as so many of the Generation X children were. It's the story of Alex and Scott Summers, on the night when the Human High Council dropped the nuclear bomb, fighting to stalemate over the body of Jean Grey, and Scott saying to Alex the one line which has cut more to the heart of their relationship than any other has in the characters' forty-year existence.
In the Age of Apocalypse, each book had a full story to tell, with the entire thing cohering into a glorious whole. For the tenth anniversary of the story in 2005, Marvel collected the whole saga. The first volume is largely skippable, mainly being prequel material which was published after the fact, and avoid the insipid 2005 sequel miniseries entirely,but volumes 2-4 of the original event are indespensible for anyone who's a fan of the X-Men, who's a fan of well-told stories on a truly epic scale, or who's simply a fan of Marvel Comics. In another ten years, X-fans will still remember the Age of Apocalypse as the high point of the X-Men books in the 1990s. I bet you a pound they won't look at Civil War the same way.
