X-MEN: ALPHA #1: Beginnings...

This is the dawning of the Age of Apocalypse!

Originally Published February 1995

We begin in rainy Seattle. Grunge is dead, but Frasier is still going strong and Starbucks is poised to take over America. At least, that's what 1995 was like in our world, but here in the Marvel Universe, things look a little different as a mysterious stranger surveys a scene of carnage and destruction left behind by a violent genetic culling.

Decidedly worse than tossed salad and scrambled eggs

He encounters a small girl being hunted by the Infinites: robotic(?) enforcers of mutant supremacy, led by Lord Unus. Unus attempts to kill the interloper with his forcefield powers, but the stranger shows a resistance to the effect. He, himself, is a mutant. Well that's all well and good for the Infinites: they don't mind killing "race-traitor" mutants who resist them, either.

Not so fast indeed because who should appear but...

Wait, what? Who? The X-Men are looking a little different these days. There's a few familiar faces in here but... since when was Magneto...? I'm confused! And scared! And a little sleepy, but that may be due to dietary deficiencies.

Well, no time for that. Sabretooth siccs his mini-me, Wild Child, on the Infinites and the party is on. These X-Men hit hard and play for keeps.

The battle is won, but Magneto laments that the war may never end, as Apocalypse, lord of all of North America and perhaps soon the world, is jackbooting it from sea to shining sea. He reflects that once upon a time, in his callous youth, he himself believed in mutant rule, until the day his friend Charles Xavier -- a true pacifist except whenever he was in a barfight -- was killed.

Meanwhile, efforts to interrogate the stranger go poorly as he remains stoic and silent, but when Magneto comes face to face there's something of a familiarity between the two...

That's right, it's our favourite time-displaced future cop Bishop, who seems to have been wandering the Earth lo these past twenty years. Magneto puts him to sleep by "restricting the flow of iron to his brain," as magnets are known to do. They'll continue this discussion at a later time.

Elsewhere, mad scientist mutant Henry "Beast" McCoy performs his ungodly experiments on a captive Fred "Blob" Dukes.

Blob breaks free and assaults his tormentor, as well as Prelate Alex Summers, only to be put down by the arrival of Prelate Scott Summers, rocking an impressive Kristen Stewart side-part. The two brother bicker about the chain-o-command.

They are interrupted by their master and surrogate father figure, a version of Sinister who rocks a goatee to let everyone know that he is the evil alternate universe counterpart of Sinister (as opposed to the evil regular version.)

Sinny takes Scott for a walk and lets him know the world is ending. Scott is taken aback: really, this paradise? But as always, Sinister speaks in vagaries about things that only he knows, or that writers haven't fully figured out. He has some kind of plan to ensure that the world lives on for him to continue using it as his genetic playground.

Our tour of this misbegotten world continues as we visit Heaven, a nightclub owned by Warren Worthington III, a wheeler-dealer who takes a meeting with Gambit so the latter can find Magneto.

It is also through Angel's perspective that we first see this universe's version of Sentinels, the all-purpose contingency plan of the Human High Council (more on them later.)

Next, to Westchester where we meet perhaps the most surprising character addition yet... young Charles Lehnsherr, son of Magneto and Rogue.

Rogue laments that, of course, she sadly cannot make skin-to-skin contact with her own son. Magneto, however, has a proposed usage for Rogue's abilities: a little forced interrogation of their visitor.

It's not like being genetically related to someone makes you immune to their powers or something

At his home base, Apocalypse appears before his Horsemen: Sinister, Holocaust and Abyss (the fourth, Mikhail Rasputin, is otherwise engaged and possibly treacherous??).

He boasts about tricking the human council into signing a phony-baloney peace accord called the Kelly Pact, which he will double cross soon after. Sinister wonders aloud if, um, maybe Apocalypse is going to make a world that none of the mutants will want to live in. Apocalypse shrugs: they can s*ck it.

Honestly not that unlike certain modern politicians

While Holocaust sucks up to the boss (his dad), Sinister reflects on his own secret agenda, which is being carried out by two double-agents -- you might know them as Logan and Jean Grey, but in this universe they are... Logan and Jean Grey.

I guess mostly everyone has the same name. That's handy.

They hand over some of Apocalypse's data rods (like USB sticks, but in 90s rave form) to the human high council: Moira and Bolivar Trask, Brian Braddock, and a lobotomized Emma Frost. 

Back at the X-Mansion, Rogue uses her powers to reach into Bishop's mind. Magneto, through magnetic wackiness, is also privy. And what they find is... concerning.

That's right, they download from Bishop the entire history of the mainline Marvel universe's X-Men, even stuff he wasn't there for. Even stuff nobody was there for. We're talking Alpha: The Ultimate Mutant, baby!

Hey, is this issue named after him?

when it becomes clear that this is all too much (seriously, nobody should be ingesting the entire history of the X-Men in mere minutes... or even over the course of several years!) the contact is broken off by Gambit, who has been lurking in the shadows. He has some bad blood with the X-Men, but Magneto specifically sent for him because he has a job for the t'ief to do. Magneto also sends Nightcrawler off to find his mother.

I don't think he means Margali Szardos

At Apocalypse's base, the big man learns of Sinister's betrayal and puts a death bounty on his head, and at the X-Home, Magneto and Rogue have a tender moment contemplating what comes next: whether the X-Men can count on Magneto after Bishop's insinuations that it's his fault the world went sideways, and whether their love can survive.

But even if they can survive the conflict with Apocalypse... can they survive what's really coming?

That's right, it's the return of M'kraan space jam baby!!!

Further Thoughts:

As the first glimpse of the "Age of Apocalypse," X-Men: Alpha has a very particular mandate: set the table in this sprawling alternative universe, pointing out all the players and their roles, including the different versions of characters we know. Magneto leads the X-Men, some of whom are previously-obscure characters or villains to us, and is romantically entangled with Rogue. Cyclops, Havok and Beast are all bad guys under Sinister, while Logan and Jean are ambiguous agents. Apocalypse rules, the X-Men resist and the Human Council, based in Big Ben because why not, plans to destroy them all with Sentinels. Bishop, being the exception to the temporal wave that has seized the world, is our POV character. We see a ton of side-quests and intrigues being set up, and of course, the continuous looming threat from the cosmos.

The whole thing reads like the early chapters of Game of Thrones, the novel by Chris Claremont's old buddy George R.R. Martin, which had not even been published yet.

In his invaluable work All the Marvels, Douglas Wolk is somewhat dismissive of the Age of Apocalypse as merely Days of Future Past writ large. Creatively, this is not wrong: One X-Man has to put right what went wrong and quell the conflict between human and mutant before it reaches the point of no return. But as a project, AOA is unique. It's the culmination of the recently-developed approach to big X-Over events like the Phalanx Covenant where different titles engaged in distinct branches of action. Here, each title will have its own more-or-less enclosed story that feeds into and builds upon, but isn't dependent upon, the rest of the story. You can read as much or as little of it as you like: in a way, it's the classic Marvel Universe in microcosm. 

Then there's the commitment to the "for want of a nail" premise, which owes as much to the classic "What If...?" series as to DOFP. With no Xavier, the Summerses -- and Dr. McCoy -- came under the thrall of Sinister, thus altering the original X-Men's trajectory. Moira is linked up with Bolivar Trask. Characters who barely made an impact on the original X-Men saga are given room, like Morph/Changeling and my dear departed Blink. Sure, I do normally cry foul when the X-Men delve too deep into their past for material, most of the time, but given that is the entire conceit here, I have to let them cook and acknowledge they've created a feast.

And what a fun coincidence that because of the setting, the characters are all now tough badass versions of themselves. Age of Apocalypse is, in its way, the apex of 90's Marvel, where all the wild creative ideas also fold neatly into something that is insanely marketable and commercial. How often does that happen? This is a blockbuster. This is an event.