I've got a small bin of Age of Apocalypse figures, waiting for a callback.

I'm not very far ahead plotwise right now, but the current "homemade posts" storyline with Kurt, Satana, and the X-Force Nightcrawler was pretty obviously building up to a trip back to the Age of Apocalypse, right? Or, should I say "over to" instead of "back to," because I think in current continuity the AoA is its own world, rather than just being a blip in the timeline that gets reset. Somehow, it even got a lower number! The AoA is Earth-295, while of course traditional Marvel continuity is 616. 

But, here's a little story problem I've been trying to sort out: the comics with the Age of Apocalypse started in X-Men #40, published November 1994 and a cover date of January 1995. We're going to go with 1995 because it's a better number to work with and the bulk of the storyline would then have taken place in an altered version of that same year. Legion had travelled back in time, about 20 years, and accidentally kills his father, Charles Xavier, creating a paradox that changes history. Apocalypse had watched that fight, and decided mutants were ready to take over the world: Magneto didn't have Xavier's temperment to keep trying to prove mutantkind's goodness to humanity, and may have been a bit more isolationist than Charles, creating the opening for Apocalypse to conquer North America. (If I recall correctly, Apocalypse also inadvertently pre-empted most of the "Marvels" that way: the Fantastic Four never went up on that rocket, Namor probably died a bum, Captain America was probably still in an iceberg, etc.) 

All well and good. Except! Marvel is on a sliding timeline. The events that caused the AoA--and thus, the AoA itself--weren't thirty years ago; they were maybe five years ago, seven tops! This does weird things to the Charles/Erik dynamic, since Erik was still tied to WWII, unless Charles was somewhat older when Legion kills him, around 2000? My assumption is the timeline would proceed pretty much as before up until Xavier's death, then things would go completely off the rails when Apocalypse and his forces chew up most of Europe and take over North America, which I'm guessing would be around 2015: the sliding timeline is about ten years, and that would've had to happen before Fantastic Four #1 to keep those events off the board. 

Of course, I don't know if my numbers are even close; and it's kind of like the Empire in Star Wars: the general vibe was that it had been around for a long, long time; but in-story it really only lasted around 30 years? Less? Luke and Leia are born at the end of Episode 3 as the Emperor takes power; they probably weren't in their thirties in Return of the Jedi. (Mark Hamill was maybe 31-32 during filming, Carrie Fisher maybe 27.) The opening of the Age of Apocalypse made it seem like it had been going on for decades; but maybe things just got worse faster than I would've guessed. (I used to have this thing, called "optimism," and...) A lot of this figuring was because I wrote an offhand comment with Satana trying to explain Krakoa-era mutant rebirths as respawns, like in video games; and I wasn't sure the AoA would have ever had any! Not that the X-Men would've had a lot of time to play any: Fighting fascism is a full-time job! But, maybe they did before; and I guess the AoA would have cell phones now, if there were any towers left standing or anything. Your service plan under Apocalypse probably didn't have a lot of minutes... 

Then, the other day there was an announcement, about Jeph Loeb and the "X-Men of Apocalypse," which was teased as if the Age of Apocalypse was still Apocalypsing, even though it was allegedly destroyed or sealed off (or both) in X-Termination #2 in 2013. And it had been seen again anyway, in Doom-approved fashion, in Secret Wars...I know for a fact I've read both of those, but the details are vague as hell for me? I think that tease was different than the story coming up in the Ms. Marvel X-event Giant-Size Age of Apocalypse, but maybe that's just the kickoff. I had personally been working up to the "reveal" that the AoA/Earth-295 was still ticking along, although maybe having been rebooted or remodeled more than once. And I had a deeply stupid reveal to go on top of that!

Ah, time makes fools of us all: back in 2013, I wondered why AoA Kurt would even want to return to the 'dismal suckhole' of the Age of Apocalypse: here we've got...relatively fresh air? Peak TV? Food trucks? And today...yeah, getting the hell out of here now seems more than completely reasonable. Well, we'll see if I keep meandering the plot in that direction: I had an AoA Magneto figure from clearance that I hadn't even opened, and was going to pop him out for this; and now I don't know. I might wait a moment anyway, since toy show tomorrow! Wish me luck, and we'll see what turns up.