Age of Apocalypse
The Age of Apocalypse was a comic book storyline. It was a major event in the Marvel Universe, mostly affecting mutant titles like the X-Men. It garnered much critical acclaim for Marvel Comics.Warning: Plot details follow.
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2 Comics 3 Characters and affiliations 4 External links |
Legion (David Haller), an extremely powerful psionic mutant and the son of Professor Charles Xavier and Israeli diplomat Gabrielle Haller, traveled back in time with the intention of killing Magneto, who was once Xavier's best friend but had become the greatest nemesis of the X-Men. However, when Legion was on the point of killing Magneto, Xavier interspaced himself between the two of them, and Legion killed Xavier instead. Consequently, Legion ceased to exist, since his father, Xavier, died before Legion was fathered. Because of Xavier's sacrifice, Magneto came to believe in his dead friend's dream of peaceful co-existence between humans and mutants. However, Apocalypse, a mutant alive for centuries who believed in "survival of the fittest," monitored the fight between Legion, Magneto, and Xavier and began his genetic war ten years before he did so in the real timeline. Thus, by the time that Magneto founded the X-Men in this timeline, Apocalypse had already established himself as a major power. Apocalypse would come to rule all of North America; New York City was renamed Apocalypse Island and the Statue of Liberty was replaced by a statue of Apocalypse. He also initiated a worldwide genocidal campaign of "cullings" in which millions of humans died; the surviving humans lived on in the parts of Europe and Africa which weren't devastated by nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, the disturbance of the timeline has led to a crystallization wave of the M'Kraan Crystal that is heading toward Earth...
Characters traveled backwards through time to prevent the Age of Apocalypse from ever occuring. This occured simultaneously with a nuclear exchange between the Human High Council and Apocalypse. Most characters were killed by the nukes, but the fate of the remaining survivors is unclear: presumably, they were erased from existance. However, some characters escaped the Age of Apocalypse into the Earth 616 continuity. Nate Gray (an alternate version of Cable), Holocaust (son of Apocalypse), Dark Beast, Sugar Man, and Blink surivived. Nate Gray joined the X-men for several years but later "died" by disseminating into every life on the planet, and Holocaust remains at large. Dark Beast and Sugar Man, however, were sent 20 years into Earth 616's past. This allowed for major retconning that explained that Dark Beast had a hand in the creation of the Morlocks and why Mr. Sinister initiated the Mutant Massacre. Sugar Man gave genetic technology secrets to the Genegineer of Genosha, allowing this small nation to become as powerful as Singapore or Hong Kong by enslaving mutants under an apartheid-like regime.
Blink escaped into the multiverse itself: she joined and leads the reality-hopping team of heros known as the Exiles, and although once thought dead, is again revealed to be alive. Her counterpart on Earth 616 has been dead since the Phalanx Covenant story arc.Storyline
Characters and affiliations
The only major mutant character missing in the Age of Apocalypse is Psylocke. She was likely either killed in one of Apocalypse's cullings or one of the members of the Brain Trust keeping control over the pens