Marvel’s Most Overrated Story is Still Getting Praise (But Really Doesn’t Deserve It)
Marvel has created some amazing stories over the years, comics that have redefined what superheroes can be. Marvel changed superheroes forever in the Silver Age. Before Silver Age Marvel, superheroes were so unrelatable that they needed teen sidekicks, but Marvel gave their heroes foibles that made it easier for fans of all ages to empathize with. Marvel created the shared universe, and played a huge role in the maturation of the comic industry in the early ’80s, with books like Claremont’s Uncanny X-Men and Miller’s Daredevil presaging the revolutionary year of 1986. However, over the years, many of the best Marvel stories have gotten a little overrated, their effect on the publisher and comics a bit overblown. Overrated doesn’t mean bad; it just means that these comics have gotten glazed far beyond what they should.
One of the most overrated Marvel stories of all time is also one of the most beloved comics of the ’90s — The Age of Apocalypse. There are many out there who believe that The Age of Apocalypse is among the best X-Men stories of the ’90s, but this isn’t the case. That’s not to say that The Age of Apocalypse is bad; there are some amazing chapters to the AoA. However, if you look objectively at the various miniseries that make up the story, you’ll find that most of them aren’t actually great.
The Age of Apocalypse Is the Definition of Uneven
So, I’m going to start out by saying that there are some unequivocally great parts of The Age of Apocalypse. Generation Next, from one of the X-Men’s best writers Scott Lobdell and artist Chris Bachalo, is an amazing story that sends the teen X-Men into the Seattle Core and you will cry by the end. Larry Hama and Adam Kubert’s Weapon X is outstanding, giving readers exactly the kind of perfect Wolverine that they were getting monthly from the team. Astonishing X–Men, by Lobdell and Joe Madureira, is, well, astonishing, making fans love the AoA versions of Sabretooth and Blink and making Holocaust the best villain in The Age of Apocalypse. X-Men: Alpha and X-Men: Omega are near perfect bookends. That’s 14 parts of a story that spans 42 chapters. I think a lot of people only remember those chapters, because they’re the ones that everyone thinks about. Honestly, the rest of the story runs from good — Amazing X-Men, by Fabian Nicieza and Andy Kubert — to mediocre at best — X-Calibre by Warren Ellis and Ken Lashley. Generation Next is a true masterpiece, sure, but so much of the rest of The Age of Apocalypse is just ’90 edginess personified and has a lot of the same problems that many fans used to complain about in ’90s X-Men books.
I think a big reason that so many people look back to kindly on The Age of Apocalypse is simply nostalgia. A lot of us were teenagers when the book first came out, and were in our first few years of comic fandom. I can attest to The Age of Apocalypse being mindblowing back then, but as I’ve gotten older, it just doesn’t stand up as well as it used to for me. I don’t think any of the series are legitimately terrible — I may have called X-Calibre mediocre, but mediocre is different than bad — and there are definitely some cool scenes throughout the story. However, go back and read something like X-Man. The art, by Steve Skroce, is fantastic, but the scripts by Jeph Loeb are just standard dark X-Men stories. I like dark X-Men stories as much as the next fan who started reading in the ’90s, but once you get away from the bookends and the three actually phenomenal AoA books — Generation Next, Weapon X, and Astonishing X-Men — you’re basically just getting standard ’90s comics. There’s some amazing art, and some great worldbuilding, but there’s nothing that you can’t get out of the better issues of What If…. Now, I would go so far as to say that The Age of Apocalypse is one of the best Marvel multiverse stories, but it’s not like there are that many amazing Marvel multiverse stories to begin with. Rose-colored glasses tint everything, and The Age of Apocalypse is a perfect example of that.
The Age of Apocalypse Is Basically the Comfort Story of a Generation
The Age of Apocalypse took a huge chance and there was insane hype behind the story thirty years ago. I was there for the whole thing and it was wild. “Legion Quest” ended with a wave of crystal that swept across every X-book of 1994, and then shattered. We had no idea what was going to come next, and what we got was something we had never imagined before. I still remember marveling at those first issues of The Age of Apocalypse and re-reading them religiously, bringing them to school with me every day. It was exciting, and the heights of the story — the end of Generation Next #4 (if you don’t know, I’m not going to tell you, it needs to be experienced), Logan popping the claws from his stump in Weapon X #4, and the battles between Holocaust and Sabretooth in Astonishing #2 and Holocaust and Blink in Astonishing #4 — are dizzying. However, that’s not the entire story.
Let’s be real for a second — it would be impossible for a every part of a 42-part story from multiple creators to be great across the board, and the fact that they got some of it so right is a big deal. However, it’s not perfect, and it never was. It’s a cool alternate universe X-Men story, but all of these people glazing it like it’s the greatest thing ever need to re-read the entire thing again.
What do you think about The Age of Apocalypse? Sound off in the comments below.
