Scientific Romance

Hey Mom,

Marvel has been touting its new Age of Apocalypse on-going series coming in March. The most recent reincarnation of this classic X-Men story was born from the pages of Uncanny X-Force’s Dark Angel mini-series. This is what we call a “back-door pilot” in the television industry. I can’t say I’m thrilled about any of this. I know that the Age of Apocalypse isn’t Watchmen or some incredible piece of work that could be considered high art, but it was the height of the 1990’s X-Men and did change the landscape of the franchise forever.

I feel that the Age of Apocalypse was the ending of one era and the beginning of another. In the final issues of the books leading into the Age of Apocalypse, we slowly watched the m-kraan crystal creep in on the last page and finally, in the last panel, consume all. The statement was powerful. After the story, we got the Sugar-Man and Dark Beast. The statement was eye rolling. Arguably The Age of Apocalypse led the X-Men into wholesale bullshit territory and into the still persisting and unnecessary layering of complicated continuity upon the corpses of retcons, reboots, and disregard for any groundwork laid within the thirty years previous. However you personally felt the impact of the story, it left its mark for better or for worse.

The story was epic and wholly unique. We got to see radically different personas of our favorite characters fleshed out in interesting ways. Those characters were shaped by different circumstances in their universe and the choices they made following their origins reflected those experiences. Heroes were now villains and villains were now heroes. Characters we hadn’t seen in ages were now regular members of the team. Others were simply gone and never mentioned or possibly were alluded to have already been killed, possibly never even born. The story, whether you loved or hated the idea, was fleshed out well. I felt that the universe The Age of Apocalypse resided in was a living, breathing, and parallel world to the Marvel Universe we all loved.

Alternate universe stories are special because they are strictly finite. This is the fundamental flaw in bringing back the Age of Apocalypse as a recurring series. We love these alternate worlds so much because they are shrouded in mystery and ripe with drama. The mirror universe episodes of Star Trek for example are some of the most haunting because we don’t ever see the entire picture. We are dropped in the middle of a conflict and we have to sort it out for ourselves. We never get all the pieces.

The entire situation is unknown to us; we didn’t grow with these same characters for thirty years, but there was just enough information to flesh out the spaces we had to venture in to. The mystery of what lay beyond though, pulled us in and intrigued us to no end. We salivated to know more, but that air of mystery is what keeps the nostalgia of the story strong in our hearts. Marvel cheapens the impact the original story had on us so many years ago by revisiting the well so many times over the years. If they cop out and just make a series discussing every aspect of the universe it becomes commonplace, stale, and, ultimately, unappealing. The universe looses its allure, and that has a direct impact on the drama that unfolds within the story.

Comic book style retconning removes the emotional meaning in the character’s original sacrifices. The X-Men in the Age of Apocalypse literally sacrificed everything in the end because, back when the original stories ran, the arc had an ending. There was no reason to keep the characters hanging on through a series of convenient plot devices that allowed them to live. A lot of characters that we loved actually died, permanently too! They died with the belief that their actions could return the world to the way it used to be. That small glimmer of hope kept them fighting until annihilation.

Because Marvel relies on these franchises to pay for their existence (which, ironically produces very little “new” content, in turn creating a system that exclusively exists to sustain itself) they can’t kill characters in any permanent way to prevent readers from souring on the book. In comics today those semi-permanent deaths can be turned into marketable and profitable events only a few years later. Rather than simply come up with an original title, rather than take a real risk, Marvel has tapped a beloved story once again to wring the money out of it, unfortunately they’ll also wring the life out of it.