AGE OF APOCALYPSE #1

Review by: akamuu

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381
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Avg Rating: 3.4
 
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Story by Dave Lapham
Art by Roberto de la Torre
Cover by Humberto Ramos & Bryan Hitch

Size: 0 pages
Price: 2.99

Part of reintroducing myself to comics involved reading the full run of Age Of Apocalypse. I’d read portions of it over the years, but it came out when I was young enough to be annoyed that it was interrupting the flow of the X titles that I’d just invested myself in following. And in the years since, I always liked the idea of sitting down to read it all more than the act of actually sitting down and making my way through it.

While I wouldn’t say I enjoyed the experience (It’s a lot of reading for a story when you know there will be nearly no ramifications when the series is over {aside from Nate Grey, Dark Beast, and some Exiles continuity}), I’m glad I did it.

I had reservations about this book because Remender’s Uncanny X-Force keeps surprising me with how much I’m enjoying it, and because Lapham for me invokes extreme reactions. I thought Young Liars was fantastic, but his run on Crossed killed the series for me.

I thought this book was a complete mess. I think a lot of why I don’t like the art is Loughridge’s colors, as the black and white Wolvapocalypse panel, and the nearly monochrome panel before the big reveal look great. But the combination of the lines faces and the nearly muted colors just put me off. Though, I will say that the panels where FIend interacts with Jean Grey, they look nearly identical. Only their uniforms and hair colors distinguish them.

The story just never engaged me. Lapham is one of the many writers who I think comes up with really intriguing concepts but whose dialog reads like someone who’s watched a lot of movies and just scribbled down lines he thought were badass, and wished he’d written himself. It’s not terrible, it’s just neither realistic to me, nor uniquely unrealistic.

I’m hoping this won’t cross back into Uncanny X-Force, so that I won’t have any desire to pick up future issues.

Story: 2 - Average
Art: 2 - Average

Comments

  1. The penultimate line in the third paragraph should read “In the panels where Fiend interacts with Jean Grey, they look nearly identical. Only their uniforms and hair colors distinguish them.”

    I’m writing these at work where the Windows 98 interaction with Mozilla Firefox makes it difficult for me to edit as I go. Soon, we’re rumored to be getting a computer from this millennium.

  2. It is good to have you back as a reviewer; Even if I don’t always dig on your reviews, they have been missed.

    Thanks for the Avengers Academy review as well.

    • Thanks. It’s fun getting back into the reviewing. The whole sleeping on Tuesday nights is vastly overrated.

      I’m going to try and review as many #1s, and beginnings of storyarcs as I can.

      Hope all is well with you.

      –Adam

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