We're four weeks in to Age of Apocalypse month, so what better time to produce an issue of The Official Handbook about the timeline?  Well, "week one" springs to mind as a logical possibility, but there you go.

If you're wondering how they can possibly extract an entire volume out of the Age of Apocalypse story... well, so are they.  The answer is to give about a third of the book over to Exiles, and profile all of those characters instead.  Which is at least of some use to somebody.

Whereas most of the previous issues have been written by fans, this one is credited to Mike Raicht, who used to be the X-books' assistant editor.  Not surprisingly, a lot of it reads like solicitation copy.  ("Twenty years in the past, Charles Xavier was murdered... and everything changed.")  I suppose it's a matter of taste whether you prefer these profiles written in that style or in the mock-scholarly tone of most of these issues - which, admittedly, can sometimes go over the top.

Practically speaking, other than a particularly devoted Exiles fan who can't remember the plot of his favourite series, it's hard to see why you'd really want this book.  Unfortunately, as a reference source, it's not very well done.  It's riddled with errors.  "Erik Lehnsherr" is still listed as Magneto's real name, despite being discredited years ago - and it's misspelt, every single time it comes up.  By all means list it as an alias that he uses, but it's not his real name.

Mr Sinister apparently has a PhD in genetics, which is damned impressive for somebody whose university education took place in the nineteenth century, before the science was invented.

Beak is not from Maryland; he's a non-native English speaker, hence the awkward speech patterns.  Specifically, he's meant to be Dutch, but I'm not sure that was ever positively established anywhere.  He also seems to have sprouted a couple of parents who've never been mentioned anywhere before.

Nightcrawler and Abyss are wrongly listed as sharing a common mother, when it ought to be a common father.  That error gets repeated in both their profiles.  I mean, how much effort does it take to double-check that?  It was only established about a year or so back!

Oh, and stylistically, I don't like the use of "rumoured" to describe known facts.  The Handbook isn't an in-story set of profiles based on incomplete information, it's meant to be written from a reader's perspective.

A bit of a pointless exercise on any view, but poorly done even by that standard.  Certainly far and away the sloppiest research we've seen in any of these books.

Rating: C-

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