What If? X-Men Age of Apocalypse #1

Writer: Rick Remender
Artist: Dave Wilkins
Colorist: Anthony Washington
Letterer: Nate Piekos

Marvel’s current series of What If? specials address alternate outcomes of some of their most recent storylines. This particular issue asks “What if Legion had killed Xavier and Magneto?” In the original Age of Apocalypse storyline Charles Xavier’s son, Legion, traveled into the past to kill Magneto but wound up accidentally killing Xavier himself and creating a terrible alternate world in which humans were on the verge of extinction and the evil mutant Apocalypse ruled the world. In this alternate reality there were no
X-Men, not even Magneto’s X-Men, to oppose Apocalypse and the world was in even worse shape than in the original story.

The utter pointlessness of Marvel’s continuing series of What If? specials is highlighted in this particular issue, one of the worst I have read to date. An alternate vision of a story that was already an alternate vision of regular Marvel continuity just makes me think that they might be running out of “what if…?” questions to ask. The fact that the end result is almost exactly the same leads me to wonder who posed this particular “what if…” scenario in the first place. Especially when a far more effective question might have been “What if Legion had killed Magneto like he meant to?” Not to mention that the original Age of Apocalypse storyline was far too huge to be rewritten effectively into a single 22-page comic.

Rather than definitively answering the question it poses, this issue is full of questions to which the answers are never satisfactorily given. The only reason certain things happen within the story are to manufacture a world that is actually different from the original and not because they actually make sense or help tell the story effectively. Why didn’t Apocalypse not go after Cyclops and Jean Grey until their son Nate was exactly the same age as he was in the original story. Why the hell was Brother Voodoo the new Dr. Strange? Why the hell didn’t Captain America, in the face of human extinction and worldwide destruction, approve of killing the enemy? And what the hell was up with Wolverine’s hair.

Even the ending doesn’t make any sense and hinges directly upon a previously established plot point that would have been moot had it not been introduced at all. The whole thing was nonsensical and so amazingly pointless that I can’t imagine why someone would have approved it in the first place. Couple the disastrous story with the sub-par artwork (which started off pretty nice but quickly spiraled into mediocrity) and I once again realize why I usually ignore these What If? specials at all cost.
 

Special thanks go out to Jeremy Shorr, owner of Titan Comics for allowing us to use his advance preview books for review purposes.

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