A Summer Of What-If?

So now we have seen the first bookend of the Age Of X. This is a world without the X-Men? But I see most of the X-Men still sat all together anyway. Maybe it was a world without Xavier. No wait, that was the Age Of Apocalypse. Could mutant history have taken a better turn? Doesn’t look like it, and wasn’t that the House Of M? So mutantkind is being hunted. Just like the Days Of Futures Past?

I can’t shake the feeling that I have seen all this before, and thus I find it difficult to get very enthusiastic about this latest X-Event. I wonder what ‘lasting consequences’ there will be from this particular reality shift. You know, lasting consequences like the Sugarman, Holocaust or the X-Man.

Oh wait, when did we last see them?

So I turn to the Distinguished Competition, and I discover this summer’s big event is the Flashpoint. Professor Zoom seems to be making alterations in the past that result in questions like “What if the spaceship never crashed?’

Still, it looks promising, DC have never done a great alternate reality story. Unless of course you add Trinity into the mix. Or the recent Booster Gold series. Or the Elseworlds. Or Tangent.

Plus fifteen accompanying mini-series? Fifteen? Seven or eight I could stomach, but this many? No wonder DC are making their price promise, they intend to strip our wallets with quantity instead.

Now I love my alternate reality stories. However, they must surely have their place, which is not spread over the entire universe. Been there, done that, countless times.

Give me zombie robots any day. Transformers Infestation #1 comes out today, and that has to be my advance recommendation for today.