While the primary Age of Apocalypse issues were set in the “present day” part of the timeline, they did think to provide us with a prequel to those stories in the X-men Chronicles series. This title replaced X-men Unlimited, which was basically just a series where Marvel was squeezing even more money out of us X-men fans by providing outside-of-the-main-storyline character pieces in double sized issues. In all fairness, a lot of these stories were really high quality in large part due to that longer length.

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Like many of my generation, watching the X-men cartoon that premiered in 1992 led me to picking up the comics and becoming a full fledged, dedicated reader, visiting my local comic book shop every month to get the latest issues. Being judged by my peers as an outsider and a weirdo, the X-men and their “hated because they are different” themes appealed to me in many ways. Having very few friends of my own, I thought of them as my friends; characters I went on adventures with by reading their comics and watching the cartoon.

As such, I’ll never forget the day I walked into my comic shop in early 1995. The store was run by an elderly couple – he was the sports card expert, and she knew the comics. She also knew who of her customers read what, even without them having a pull list. So when I walked in that day to buy my comics, she pulled me over to the counter to show me a press release. She did not look particularly happy about it. I’ve scoured the internet to try to find a copy of that press release, but apparently no one has uploaded it to the internet, so I’ll do my best to paraphrase:

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