I may be a little distracted.  I think I'm still reeling from last night's Eurovision Song Contest.  For years the Eurovision Song Contest has been unwatchably terrible, which is precisely its appeal.  It's a mixture of bad costumes, awful songwriting, and records that would never, ever receive airtime otherwise.  No self-respecting artist (in the west, at least) goes within a mile of it.  It's fabulously terrible. 

But the last few years have seen a sudden upsurge in legitimately entertaining, or just plain ludicrous, entries nestling among the acres of awfulness.  Just look at this year's winner - "Hard Rock Hallelujah" by Lordi, a sort of Finnish cross between Kiss and Spinal Tap.  Rock zombies from the frozen north!  How can you not love them?  An honourable mention is also due to Lithuania, who had the sheer unbridled nerve to enter this.  (They came fifth, and I've heard people singing it all day, so perhaps they had a point.)

Anyway.  Apocalypse.

X-Men #186 completes "The Blood of Apocalypse", a five-part storyline which effectively completes Peter Milligan's run on the book, although there's an epilogue still to come.  It's far and away the most normal thing he's written for the X-Men, featuring the return of an A-list villain in Apocalypse, and the sort of plot twists that feel like they've come straight out the 1990s.

Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that, since Milligan still finds an outlet for his sense of humour in writing Apocalypse. The big lug is a maniac with a superficially rational worldview, and that's precisely the sort of character that Milligan can have fun with.  Apocalypse's basic plan - wipe out 90% of the human race to symbolically level the playing field for mutants - is absurd, yet somehow you can see why he thinks it's a good idea.  And with Apocalypse carrying the weight of Milligan's oddities, the X-Men can get on with some good old fashioned superheroing.

In many respects it's been an enjoyable storyline, but there's something about the final act which slightly misfires.  The issue ends with an obvious set-up for a sequel.  This is odd, since Milligan is leaving the book, so he obviously won't be writing it, and it's become rather uncommon for writers to go to the trouble of setting up future storylines before their departure.  On top of that, a glaring subplot about Apocalypse's feelings of weakness is quietly dropped, and the final chapter really boils down to "everyone attacks Apocalypse at once so he loses" - not the most inventive way of finishing the book.  It's also not very well blocked out, with Ozymandias and Gazer suddenly turning up in scenes halfway through, even though they're meant to be somewhere else.

All of this makes me wonder if there's been some last-minute rewriting to accommodate future plans.  I'm rather ambivalent about that thought.  Frankly, the X-books have been horrifically lacking in forward planning for years now.  On the other hand, it's equally possible that we're about to go off in the other direction and start meddling excessively.

Still, for all its problems, I enjoyed this arc.  We have so many writers trying to put their own twist on the format these days that we don't really see enough of the basic format itself - a bunch of guys in costumes punching other guys in the face.  It's good to get back to basics from time to time, and Milligan kept his quirks sufficiently in check to achieve that here.

Rating: B

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