Aside from reading the "Age of Apocalypse" back in the first year of the project, they've been mostly absent from my writing. I started out liking the team, but they just became too mired down in continuity, and too mired down in their own metaphorical nature. I picked this issue up and was struck by the fact that Marvel basically tries to commit genocide against a group of people every few years with the X-Men. What if we instead tried showing a world that doesn't hate and fear them, but accepts them? Perhaps then life might imitate art for a bit.
Despite that, I loved, and still love, this crossover. I think it was one of Marvel's first bit crossovers, and the GCD lists it as the first X-Men crossover issue. That's a dubious honour, considering some of the crossovers that followed. This one, though, unlike many of those that follow, seems very personal. There's something intimate about the way the Marauders cut a swath through the Morlocks. It's got a claustrophobic setting that bleeds out into everything about the comic. This is my era of X-Men, when I discovered the mutant corner of the Marvel U and found a metaphor blunt enough to speak to my 12-year old brain.
Enjoyable as it is, I will say that Chris Claremont's style in this series has not aged well. Colossus has waaaaay too many internal soliloquies, as do, honestly, all of the other characters in the book. There's so much exposition that, really, doesn't need to be there. Contemporary comics allow that the reader has some experience of the world, and some intelligence, and don't spell everything out for you. I wonder what it would be like to remaster some of these old stories into contemporary aesthetics.
More massacred mutants tomorrow.
"What I wish, comrade Piotr Nikolievitch Rasputin -- what I really want -- is a super hot fudge quad-scoop sundae bananarama split with all the trimmings."
