"X-Men: Age of Apocalypse One Shot" was a one shot comic released by Marvel Comics in May of 2005. It consisted of four separate stories, by creators including Scott Lobdell, Alvin Lee, Tony Bedard, Larry Hama and "Akira Yoshida" (the very-Japanese pseudonym for the very not-Japanese C.B. Cebulski, which would cause some problems later when he became editor-in-chief of Marvel). This comic was released as part of an event where Marvel commemorated the original "Age of Apocalypse" story, released ten years before. While I am pretty aware of my Marvel history, I admit that the entire X-Men time travel/alternate future/etc story lines have, even when I have tried to follow them, been pretty opaque to me.
We have four stories here: in the first, Colossus just stops fighting in the middle of a battle, but then Magneto offers him a promotion to run a school. In the second, Sabretooth is sentenced by someone named "Lord Holocaust" to a prison cell with C-List villain "Wild Child". In the third, Wolverine rescues his sometimes-girlfriend Mariko from execution from the yakuza because she is using a scrambler to ruin Pachinko machines. In the fourth, Magneto stops nuclear bombs from destroying New York, and then a Wolverine who looks nothing like the Wolverine we just saw delivers the body of Jean Grey to him, and because this is an X-Men comic, I don't really know which of the 15 dead Jean Greys it might be.
I said that the entire X-Men time travel stories were pretty opaque to me. Reading this didn't make that less true. I am not even sure whether these four stories are even in the same continuity, or whether they are just four unrelated stories. The art is also, while detailed and dramatic, confusing and overwrought.
So here is the real problem here: style versus substance is always a great debate, and while it seems to be that parts of this book is perhaps intentionally making a homage to the styles of a decade previously, the problem is that as long as we are just going along for the stylistic ride, why make it so confusing? I think that when Larry Hama writes dialog like this:
"It is my duty to protect my little half-sister. This gaijin dog stains my honor with his unwanted interference."
I assume he must have a little bit of
tongue in cheek (and unlike "Akira Yoshida", Larry Hama is actually Japanese). And that story is my favorite here: but as long as we are living the
noir dream of a tough-talking Wolverine getting in bar brawls, why do we have to insert the story into a narrative where the world is destroyed
yet again.
The Sabretooth story has an even worse example. Marvel had abandoned the Comics Code almost five years earlier, and it shows in this one, where a prison guard tells Sabretooth:
"Yeah, you better pray your new roomie thinks your butt looks better than it tastes"
Because we need to have the idea of
cannibalism versus
rape inserted into our super-hero stories. Maybe this works in some way as we see Sabretooth gain some sense of morality in the story, but it seems past unneccesary to insert that into what is a science-fiction comic book story.
My overall judgment after reading this is: since X-Men stories often turn into stylized nonsense that doesn't make much sense, why not just admit that and make them fun? Why burden them with an attempt at substance that just adds grotesqueness to silliness? Especially in 2005, when "grim and gritty" had come and gone, why was Marvel putting out this mixture of confusing and ridiculous?