Product Description: When his people need him the most, he shall return! Lord Apocalypse is here to lead mutantkind into the future of the earth and only the strongest can survive! Plus, just wait until you see his new Horsemen! Even we were surprised! Collects X-Men #182- 187.
Apocalypse I love Apocalypse and this is a great story, especially who he gets to be the horsemen, how he deals with the 198 and what he tries to do show you the real apocalypse.
Great book.
Maybe things are looking up after HoM? I haven't been thrilled with the X-Men for the past few years, but Apocalypse has always been a favorite character of mine. The way they got rid of him in the 90's never appealed to me very much (that whole 12 saga ended up being an anticlimax after years and years of buildup, ya know?), and we all knew he'd be back anyway sooner or later.
Now, I was not crazy about House of M. The stated goal according to Marvel was to make the X-Men and friends a more "realistic" metaphor for the vicissitudes of human prejudice by reducing the mutant population with a big ole deus ex machina. Because, you know, killing off six million mutants in Genosha with wild sentinels under Cassandra Nova's control (six million? There were that many mutants in the world? What the...) wasn't enough of a trimming, I guess. And hey, we all know in the real world, minorities usually only number a few thousand (WHAT THE....)
So, yeah, pretty much typical delusional Marvel editing decisions. I didn't expect the X-Men to recover from that debacle.
But maybe I spoke too soon. Now that mutantkind has been decimated, and Sentinels have been turned into defacto slave overseers for Homo Superior, Apocalypse Returns! And it is a pretty neat idea to make him sort of an anti-Messiah who returns when his "people" most need him to restart the Darwinian struggle for supremacy. I'm sure that's how Apocalpyse thinks of himself--a kind of dark King Arthur, right?
Well, he's got a pretty daring plan this time around. And while some of the visual choices are questionable--Apocalypse is flying around in a big metal sphinx-shaped spaceship, and his new character design makes him look like he grew a beer belly and bolted robot guts to his arms and legs--they don't detract too much from the neat ideas flying around here.
I gotta say, I'm getting kind of tired of the Horseman lineup changing for every different outing. I sort of like the idea that the Four Horsemen would be fixed (and that they would be four nobodies who traded their souls for power and allowed to grow into characters in their own right, like Kieros and Rolfson who were the original War and Famine--remember them?), but for the last ten years they've been like Menudo--new guys every single tour. The Four Horseman this time are all familiar X-Men characters except for War (or did I just not recognize who he is supposed to be?), which gives the whole thing some personal resonance for the other characters--so it's not like that time they make the Hulk into War or anything. And hey, you might even find the lineup a little shocking. You're supposed to.
The real gem of this storyline is the insight into Apocalypse's personality and ideals, though. Not since Stryfe's Strike File have I gotten such a thrill out of peeking into an X-Villain's twisted psyche. The things Poccy says to his 'recruits' when he's trying to get them to choose to be Horsemen--notably the new Famine--it's great stuff.
If I had twelve bucks to burn and decided to buy a "recent" X-Men TPB, this would be my first choice.
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