When I returned to university to finish my Bachelor's degree, I took a class in Postcolonial Literature. We read a book by Sally Morgan called My Place, a rather beautiful piece of autobiography about an aboriginal woman growing up in a less-than-tolerant Australia. I loved the book, aside from one small problem: it was terribly edited. There were spelling mistakes, obviously typos, that, if I was noticing them as I barreled through the book at university reading speed, surely a decent editor should have caught them as well.
Today's comic suffers from this problem. An encyclopedic comic (which I've talked about a bit here) that, in a drier way, gives us the same kind of required background knowledge as the previously discussed historical tales, its authority is undermined by this shoddy editing. The entry on Colossus (written, as are all of the entries, in Apocalypse's voice) notes the similarity of "philopshy" the two share. Stuff like that drives me nuts. I know it's a relatively small complaint, but we use language to communicate ideas, and if we can't even manage to spell our communications properly, what hope do we have of communicating the more complex ideas behind them? The GCD has no listing for a writer of this comic, and there's no credit inside the issue. This is unsurprising. While it's a useful reference piece, it brings very little to the actual story of the AoA. I imagine that most of the information we're given in the comic is also communicated, albeit slightly more subtly, through the action of the series. This comic, I think, is designed for those readers who are unfamiliar with the X-universe but who have become interested in the Age of Apocalypse crossover, readers like myself who left the X-Men behind in the late 80s.
I know I said it yesterday, but we'll actually get to the meat of the crossover tomorrow. It'll be nice to start off with a pretty comic, Generation Next #1, with art by the pre-cartoony Chris Bacchalo. See you then.
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