Finally, the X-Men: Age of Apocalypse miniseries itself.

A year has passed since the end of the original storyline, and everything's pretty much back on its feet.  Magneto and the X-Men are now working with the government to hunt down the remaining mutant villains.  But basically, the entire planet seems to have gone back to normal in a matter of months.

This puts an awful strain on credibility.  The world is recovering from a global disaster, and yet American life has returned to normal as if it were just a minor blip.  There's some muttering about "how can we trust the mutants", but no more than we're used to.  They've even had time to rebuild the White House, and you'd have thought that kind of thing would be a very low priority.

There's a subplot with a hooded figure with claws, whom we're obviously meant to take as Wolverine, but who turns out to be a girl looking for Wolverine.  Reputedly, this isn't meant to be the AoA version of X-23 (and the number of claws is off).  It's another teen girl version of Wolverine.  I'm not convinced the concept is strong enough to justify having one of them, let alone two.  Incidentally, congratulations to Chris Bachalo for getting a script largely based around concealing her identity, and then sticking her on the front cover with her claws out.  Nice one!

Whatever happened to Chris Bachalo?  He did some fantastic work on books like Shade the Changing Man, but his work has deteriorated further and further over the years into incomprehensible abstract shapes.  To be fair, this is a lot clearer than some of his earlier books - Steampunk was genuinely impenetrable - but it's still very far from ideal.  I remember Steampunk running lots of letters defensively insisting that people who claimed they couldn't understand the comic just weren't trying hard enough.  No, people couldn't follow the comic because it was ludicrously difficult to work out what the art was supposed to show.  I remember that book having panels where I genuinely couldn't decipher whether the art was showing a human being or an object.

This bizarre disregard for clear storytelling - something that we know Bachalo's capable of, given his back catalogue - still mars his work to this day.  Look at that opening page of the figure in the cape, for example.  What the hell is the figure doing in panel 1?  Which bit is the head?  Where are the arms?  It took me five or six readings to work out which way up the figure was supposed to be.  Sure, you can decipher it if you're prepared to put in the effort, but what does the issue gain from being so hard to follow?  If the script just calls for a character to jump down a hillside, and you can't even work that out on a first reading, then the visual storytelling sucks.  Bachalo's storytelling has been dire for years, and I don't understand why editors continue to put up with it.  If you can't even work out what's happening, there's no drama, there's no excitement, there's no entertainment.  There's just a bunch of pseuds congratulating themselves for working out which way was up.

Not all of this issue is so hard to follow - the press conference scene is commendably clear, although Magneto's bizarrely abstract design just looks weird rather than dramatic.  But when characters start moving, it's all too often a mess.

As a story, this isn't horrible, but it's riddled with credibility problems.  The art is an obstacle, and the whole event still strikes me as pointless.

Rating: C+

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