The villain origins retrospective is now on hold as a regular thing.
In fact I originally planned to stop with Killer Croc and there were no Marvel villains scheduled for the 80s.
Let alone X-Men villains, since they’re one of the few corners of the Marvel Universe I don’t know much about.
But while I fully admit I’m a bit out of my depth here, stick around for the ending because the real world story behind the creation of this villain is INSANE.
X-Factor #5 (1986)
by Bob Layton & Jackson Guice
cover by Ron Frenz
In fact, the main story has basically nothing to do with what I want to talk about.
It does, however, feature a scene that incapsulates why the entire premise of the original X-Factor never made sense to me.
In case you don’t know, X-Factor is about the original X-Men posing as mutant hunters in order to save mutants.
Let me repeat that.
They publicly hunt mutants in order to save them.
Sounds legit.
I wasn’t reading any X-Men title at the time, and I discovered their gimmick when X-Factor had a crossover with Spider-Man. It sounded dumb back then and it sounds simply horrible now.
Even J. Jonah Jameson called them out on that!!!
This is why other heroes don’t like you, X-Men. It’s not because you’re mutants, but because you’re by far your own worst enemies.
Back to the story: the theory for how X-Factor supposedly “““works””” is that while they make the general public hate every single mutant on the planet, they manage to save a couple.
The story is about X-Factor tracking down a mutant named Mike who has the power to increase the abilities of other mutants, but they lose him to the villainous team called “The Alliance Of Evil”.
The story ends with The Alliance Of Evil taking Mike to their boss, who plans to continue experimenting on him and threatening to murder his ex-wife.
And THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is the first appearance of Apocalypse.
The backstory behind the very existence of that last panel is the hilarious part, but before I tackle it let’s have a look at Apocalypse’s REAL first story.
X-Factor #6 (1986)
by Louise Simonson & Jackson Guice
cover by Ron Frenz
Bob Layton left the book with issue 5, replaced by Louise Simonson; her highly influential run will last all the way up to issue 64. In addition to being a successful writer and editor in her own right, she’s also the wife of Walt Simonson.
Mike uses his ability to increase mutant powers to mess with The Alliance Of Evil, but as Frenzy puts it… her power is being super-strong, it’s not like making her stronger is much of a threat.
Apocalypse will have none of that.
Frenzy is pretty strong, so Apocalypse being able to casually knock her out even when she’s powered-up is a quick way to establish his position.
Apocalypse’s vaguely-defined power and his age are quickly established. Also I remind you that, since he can control his own molecules, Apocalypse CHOOSES to have those goofy lips.
Apocalypse will become an insanely convoluted character, but the basic concept is enough to ensure he’ll stick around. When you have a character whose deal includes “make other characters fight each other regardless of making sense”, they’re WAY too useful to include random fights to be left alone. (see: the Grandmaster)
It’s hard to think of Apocalypse as the worst villain of this series, however, considering Cyclops.
Who was married to Jean Grey’s clone while the real Jean was dead… so as soon as she was resurrected, Cyclops left his wife AND HIS SON to return to his old flame, WITHOUT telling Jean that he’s married with kids.
In the eyes of many, MANY readers (including myself), Cyclops never really recovered from this.
He’s a cool character, sure, but he’ll always be the guy who left his wife and newborn son.
Our hero, ladies and gentlemen!
Beast is the first one to fight Apocalypse, who uses his shapeshifting powers WAY more than he typically will.
When the fight reaches Mike, his ex-wife ends up being killed by the various out-of-control mutant powers that he’s boosting.
GREAT JOB, X-FACTOR.
Cyclops said it best a couple of pages earlier.
And so Apocalypse just leaves, having achieved… something, I guess.
Historical significance: 4/10
Apocalypse himself is obviously a HUGE deal… but honestly you can easily skip these very early appearances and still follow everything.
Silver Age-ness: 0/10
Not really.
Does it stand the test of time? N/A
I skipped WAY too much to give it a proper score. Despite my distaste for the original premise and for Cyclops, the Louise Simonson run is pretty solid throughout and definitely a recommended read… if you can stomach a near-lethal dose of angst, but that’s the X-Men for you.
How close is this to the modern character? 4/10
The look is ALMOST there, although his weird lips aren’t in the typical shape and he’s noticeably less muscular than his future look.
Obviously going through his entire publication history would take way too long… I think one of his major problems is that he’s been WAY overexposed.
Adding his increasingly more convoluted history and his ever-expanding set of powers… seriously, he can do basically everything at this point… make it extremely difficult for me to care about him.
In my opinion he should be used as the X-Men’s equivalent to Galactus: use him sparingly, and when he shows up it up should be A BIG DEAL that gets everyone’s attention.
But when Apocalypse is freaking EVERYWHERE and behind EVERYONE’s backstory, it seriously diminishes the intimidation factor.
And now for the REAL reason why I wanted to talk about those issues.
As mentioned X-Factor #5 is the last Bob Layton issue, and he wanted to use a particular villain to be the one behind The Alliance Of Evil.
But when Louise Simonson learned she would take over, she decided she wanted to introduce a new character… so Jackson Guice re-drew the last page of X-Factor to change the shadow figure to the silhouette of Apocalypse.
So who WAS originally conceived as the nemesis of X-Factor? In case you don’t know the answer, there is ABSOLUTELY NO WAY you could guess it. But let’s try anyway!
I will give you one clue: it’s not an X-Men villain.
So you might be thinking… considering Apocalypse’s involvement with genetics, perhaps the High Evolutionary? He has an armor so he might KIND of pass for Apocalypse in the shadows?
Or you might be thinking of the connection with Ancient Egypt and guess Kang The Conqueror.
No no, you’re WAY off. I told you it’s impossible to guess.
Because the main villain of X-Factor was originally going to be…
…drum roll please…
THE OWL.
And yes. This has been officially confirmed.
Yep. Apocalypse was created as a last minute replacement for the Owl.
Instead of the all-powerful Ancient Egyptian super-mutant with Celestial technology and goofy lips, we could’ve ended up with… the mob boss with goofy hair who can kind of fly.
Just imagine what could’ve been!!!
Owl-pocalypse Now!
That close-up of Jean lifting weights is the WORST depiction of Jean Grey I’ve ever seen. LOOK at that CHIN!
– oh, yeah, this series ruined Scott Summers for me forever.
At first based on your text I initially thought it was the high evolutionary. But then I remembered I’d heard about the owl years ago. Ridiculous idea, but who knows what they were thinking or what they were mandated to do. Either way apocalypse was much better.
As for cyclops, I still love the character and the way I read it back then was that he wanted to go check on Jean and then come back to Maddie, but Maddie stated if you leave don’t come back so it just had those I’m abandoning new vibes even though he did try to get back. But honestly I just blame the writers, it was such a piss poor way to put Scott and Jean back together it had all the vibes of a terrible soap opera but instead of making him a hero by making Maddie perhaps crazy or villainous that had anything negative happening to her basically be Scott’s fault and really went out of its way to make Maddie the victim. So I can’t blame anyone who looks at Scott poorly as a result, just bad bad character development. But that is par for the course for Cyclops for really anything media related except for X-Men 97 these days.
Cyclops was right.