And continuing the "Oh god, make it stop" theme, X-Men: Age of Apocalypse.  Fortunately, god is feeling merciful, and this is the final issue.

This, of course, was meant to be out two weeks ago.  To be fair to the creators, it was a six-issue weekly miniseries, five issues shipped on time, and the sixth was only a fortnight late.  Really, as these things go, that's not so bad.  Of course, it's been achieved by hurling multiple inkers at the book.  This issue credits six inkers, and this time it calls them "finishers", which suggests a particularly hasty contribution from Chris Bachalo.  But Bachalo's art on these apparently rushed issues has been some of the best that we've seen from him in years.  Maybe he's been overthinking things.

On the other hand, I can't review this issue without drawing attention to that godawful cover.  A thrilling picture of the left-hand side of Magneto's back in heavy shadow, it is arguably the single least dramatic image to appear on an X-Men cover in many a year. 

Anyhow.  The Age of Apocalypse miniseries has sold rather well.  But a major factor was that Marvel solicited the whole thing in consecutive weeks, effectively requiring retailers to order the book blind.  They bet high.  Anecdotal evidence suggests that the book is now piling up happily on comic store shelves around America, and stubbornly refusing to go anywhere.  Of course, how were the retailers to know it was going to be so awful?

Again, in fairness to the creators, this was a fundamentally bad idea from the start.  The Age of Apocalypse is a classic example of a story which does not call for a sequel.  The whole premise is that it's an alternate timeline in which Apocalypse has dominated the world.  At the end of the original story, Apocalypse is defeated.  Leaving aside the fact that the world was then supposedly destroyed, you've still got an ending which undoes the central premise of the story.  The potential for sequels is limited.

Conceivably, the series might have worked if it had picked up in the immediate aftermath of Apocalypse's defeat, and done a story about the X-Men in a world which is picking up the pieces.  That would at least have still been under the shadow of the original idea and might have rung true as a sequel.  By skipping past all of that to a largely reconstructed universe, however, Yoshida has utterly missed the point of the whole property, and given as a story which serves no real purpose at all.  The world that's been created doesn't even ring true, certainly not a year after the fall of Apocalypse.  In fact, since Europe actually remained free in the original story, at this point what we should have is a ramshackle provisional American government living on handouts from France.  Now that's a story I'd pay good money to see.

Instead, we have a world, or at least an America, that's basically back to normal.  We have Mr Sinister engaging in inscrutable schemes.  We have Jean Grey being credited with keeping the timeline around, which I suppose just about makes sense given the Phoenix connection.  And in this issue, Mr Sinister gets to explain what the point of the whole thing was.

Unfortunately, the point turns out to be complete gibberish.  Sinister rambles on for a page or so about mutant alpha, the first mutant.  For reasons never adequately explained, Sinister is convinced that mutant alpha would have been enormously powerful (why?), and that their powers would have been passed down unaltered to future generations (why?), and since Jean Grey is really powerful, she must be mutant alpha (even though her parents didn't have the same powers, which means that her powers haven't been passed down the line from mutant alpha, so he's wrong).  It's a cretinously stupid plot that depends on an understanding of genetics so sloppy that even a five-year-old could see why it's unworkable - and science that bad isn't viable even in comic books.  Moreover, it utterly fails to work as a thematic pay-off for anything that's happened in the series.  The general impression of is random ideas staggering around pointlessly, and trying to behave as if some sort of climax is occurring.

At the end of the issue, X-23 suddenly decides for no good reason that she wants to have her memory unscrambled (did we even establish before that it was impaired?), and then learns that Wolverine is her father.  We are supposed to be moved.  We aren't.

It's a real shame that Bachalo's best art in years has to be tied to such a truly awful piece of writing as X-Men: Age of Apocalypse.  The very idea of a sequel to the Age of Apocalypse was questionable to start with, but it could still have been done an awful lot better than this mess.

Rating: C

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