X-MEN: OMEGA #1: ...Endings

This is the end

Originally Published June 1995

When we last saw Magneto, he was a captive of Apocalypse (the guy who has a whole Age named after him.) The master of magnetism is unfazed in his defiance: much like the mythical(?) Andrew W.K., he is ready to die for his cause. The X-Men, says he, won't bother saving their decrepit, washed-up old mentor: they have bigger fish to fry, and their plan will succeed as long as they have the shard of um, the um... what's it called... help me out here, somebody...

Right, like I said, the rebellion is doomed, all hail Apocalypse.

At the back door of the citadel, the X-Men arrive, and are surprised to find not much of a fight. Turns out the place has already been turned upside-down, apparently by Cyclops, who has fulfilled his contractually-mandated role in this affair by teaming with whomst else but Jean Grey to betray whoever-it-was he was working for (Sinister? Apocalypse? I don't know, I didn't catch Factor X.) Some stuff happened and now these legendary lovebirds are on the run.

Yeah, but then they'll be in New Jersey

I know what you're thinking -- "But Scotto, isn't it your job to know everything that has happened in every X-Men comic and give us the full story?" No, nope, nah, that was never my goal. This is what comics used to be like: sometimes something happened in some comic you didn't read, and you just kind of go with it.

Elsewhere, Angel -- incensed that the Apocalypse team murdered his colleague Karma and didn't even have the decency to throw a couple of bucks his way for it-- performs a suicide bombing that knocks out Apocalypse's force field generators. It seems like everyone picked this exact moment to get really pissed off at Big Blue!

At that exact same moment, Apocalypse learns that the Human High Council just nuked the midwest, obliterating a huge chunk of Apocalypse's kingdom, mutants and human alike. Boy, this guy is having a day, huh?

Enter the mutant prettyboy known as X-Man, Nate Gray, who has bypassed all security thanks to Warren's sacrifice play, and has a bone to pick with the boss.

The X-Men, with Destiny and Illyana, make it to the special crystal room. The plot: for Irene and Illyana to go into the crystal with Bishop. Why those three? Because they don't have any counterparts in the other reality.

I mean, actually, Bishop does -- it's no less him than Magneto or Sinister or Apocalypse would be, but whatever. No time to unpack any of this.

As Nate and Holocaust duke it out, Magneto talked Illyana into taking one for the team.

Illyana's stipulation: This must be a world where there is no Sugar Man at all. Magneto is like, "Uh, I'll see what I can do."

But yes, Illyana buys into that hopey-changey stuff and agrees to be the fulcrum on which the fabric of reality is restored.

Colossus is big mad about the fact that his sister -- the sister he rescued from a forced labor camp, sacrificing his entire team for this precise purpose -- is being used in this situation, and vows that if any harm should come to the little girl, Colossus and Magneto will be enemies in any reality.

Umm.... sure.

Outside, Jean Grey is alarmed to discover that the Human High Council, in their infinite wisdom, is preparing to strafe the East Coast with another nuclear attack. Only her power can hold back the certain doom.

Inside, the X-Men duke it out with the hordes of Apocalypse, and Colossus, who is clearly having an episode, is determined to die by Illyana's side, no matter what Iceman has to say about it.

Snowcones anyone?

Meanwhile, Sugar Man hops into the crystal, and damnit, that was Illyana's one rule!

Inside, she asks Destiny what they're supposed to do now. Destiny explains that Illyana needs to use her portal-creating powers to create a portal for Bishop to go through. Illyana is like "But I don't have any portal-creating powers," but Irene is, "Ehh, I think you do."

As Apocalypse enacts his retribution on the Human Council, turning his own deadly weapons on them, Magneto gets his second wind, powering up and giving a fiery lecture asking if Apocalypse remembers what happened to the last dictator who preached about creating a master race.

And to be fair, Apocalypse probably doesn't remember -- he was asleep at the time.

But 'Poc didn't become the dictator of half the world because of his charm and good looks -- he has another ace up his sleeve in the form of Magneto's abducted child.

Outside, Alex thinks he is winning when he takes out his hated brother's new GF with his plasma blast, but his elder sibling calmly elucidates why that might not have been the most helpful strategem.

Alex, naturally, is like "Meh" and kills Cyclops too, only for Logan to parachute in and settle his hash, this whole icky family drama coming to a Shakespearean endings.

He said the thing!

We're ten minutes to Doomsday, but Bishop is making good time -- so to speak -- as he has landed in pre-Apocalypse Israel. He's prepared to stop Legion from killing his own father, but younger Bishop -- an experienced time-traveler himself -- wants to know just who is this mystery man who looks like a grizzled, older version of himself with the exact same facial tattoo. Who indeed??!?!

This man is a cop but he sure as shit ain't no detective

In the chaos, Beast tries to make a getaway but Quicksilver is like "Uh, I think this is a bad guy so I should mess up his stuff" and may or may not teleport him directly into the heart of the M'kraan Crystal.

Colossus, continuing his freakout, runs through everybody -- including his own wife. 

When he realizes what he's done, he has a moment of clarity, which gives Gambit an opportunity to put him down for good.

Illyana returns from her trip into the M'kraan Crystal -- boy, that was easy and not really worth murdering your wife over -- in time to hear Colossus' final words.

Rogue drains Guido of his power and sends him flying with a super-duper Falcon punch, thus ensuring baby Charles' safety (until everyone dies from the nukes that are about to fall.) 

Apocalypse slips away, with his shard of the M'kraan in tow, intending, I guess, to go back to where it all started and team up with his younger self to create an Age of Apocalypses, but gets a taste of X-Man's sexy, slender gam.

Back in Israel, in the past, Bishop prevents Legion from killing either Magneto or Charles, using their two powers in tandem to create a feedback loop that causes Legion to suffer an intense bout of End-of-Issue-itis.

Before Legion dies, Bishop lets him know that he was a complete disappointment to his father, a total letdown.

The X-Men -- that is, the X-Men of our reality that were trapped in the past -- are sucked back into the future -- that is, their present -- while young Charles Xavier, who has only ever met one other mutant prior to this week, explains that the timestream is rebuilding itself.

Charles, Erik and Gabrielle are all left scratching their heads. "Hey, does anyone else feel like they just watched they as-yet-unborn son die? No? Just me?"

Yes, it was a successful mission -- Charles never died and, as luck would have it, Apocalypse never awoke early from his slumber, thus ensuring the Age of Apocalypse never happened at all.

Anyway, back in the Age of Apocalypse, which is somehow still happening, Magneto and X-Man are having a showdown with the final bosses. Nate Grey finishes Holocaust once and for all in a way that will definitely allow him to return to the comics to menace heroes in the main timeline in the future by plunging the M'kraan Crystal into his chest.

Marketability is the greatest mutant power of all

And Magneto, literally being throttled to death by Apocalypse's bare hands, musters all his strength and...

Wait, what was stopping him from doing that years ago?

With his greatest enemy dead, Magneto wonders what kind of a world it would have been had they been fighting on the same side. Perhaps they would have been a force to be reckoned with, or perhaps their paths would literally never cross.

Who's to say? Other than Bishop, I mean.

With that, Magneto reunites with his wife and son, shares a few brief thoughts about hope, and watches their imminent nuclear annihilation.

Further Thoughts:

Let's try not to dwell on the fact that even though the "day" was "saved" by Bishop undoing Charles' death, these characters still lived long enough to died horrific deaths en masse, that on some level, much like the Days of Future Past timeline, this world still exists, it all happened to someone in the multiverse.

I kind of skimmed over Magneto's final thoughts, which is not to diminish them -- Mark Waid does his usual good job distilling the essence of a story to a few snappy and noteworthy word balloons. In cases like this, however, those final words are almost for aesthetic purposes only, to emphasize the gravitas of the moment. To leave them out would leave a void, and yet does it really matter what this doomed man from a dying universe has to say about events that never happened? Your mileage may vary.

I tease it, but I greatly admire the efforts being taken to imbue this story with a beating heart and some resonance beyond "just some stuff that happens on a page."

Boy oh boy, you sure got a lot of comic for your $3.95 USD ($8.10 in today's dollars, which... actually does not seem like such a great deal.) These 40-someodd pages breathlessly close off nearly every thread that has been winding its way through the Age of Apocalypse fable, spinning at a breakneck pace from moment to moment and character to character. There are structural issues that you could point out if you had a critical eye (and, shit, I think I do,) but the whole contraption still holds together and functions well.

That's what you want. That's maximum comics. And the Age of Apocalypse is somehow bigger than the sum of its parts: it's feels huge, grandiose, epic, profound, significant. We know that certain characters will turn up in the future: Dark Beast, Holocaust, Nate Grey and Blink chief among them, but for intents and purposes this is the end of the world.

Comics so rarely get the luxury of an ending. Okay, there are a ton of mini-series that tell a self-contained story, but apart from outliers like Watchmen and the Dark Knight Returns (which had sequels in the long run) most comics published by Marvel and DC are designed to keep popular characters afloat until their next adventure. Here the characters face a literal finality and oblivion to go along with their creative one -- they are doomed to die so that their standard versions may live again.

It is true, as Douglas Wolk wrote in All the Marvels, that the story of Age of Apocalypse is Days of Future Past writ large -- What if the X-Men failed? What catastrophic hellhole could they be living in? But the project was unique, to apply the point of change to the characters and comics as we know them, as we experience them in real time, not as a possible future or a distantly-viewed side-story but as the story: It's A Wonderful Life with mutants. Broadly, the 90s are remembered as a time when marketing was more important than creativity in creating comics, and AOA was marketable as hell, but at a time like this the two could go hand in hand comfortably.

The comic brings to mind a meme I often see on social media of Jim Halpert next to his chart paper saying 'everyone worries about time-travelling and changing the past, but nobody thinks they could do something to change the present.' That's worth keeping in mind.