Apocalypse returns and picks his new Horsemen. Lorna Dane is Pestilence. Gazer is War. Sunfire is Famine. Gambit is Death (and that is so fitting—this character always sucks). They all get their new powers by drinking the blood of Apocalypse; hence, the name of this mini-event (you can find the tie-in issues by hitting the tag below).
Apocalypse’s offer is that now that there are only 198 mutants, the X-Men really should take advantage of his offers to make them rulers of the world, including the depowered ones. Instead of killing all the humans, he decides to kill 90% of all humans—the way 90% of all mutants got power-wiped. The X-Men say, “no,” and fight a lot.
Gambit being bad means he and Rogue aren’t dating any more. They’re officially on a break.
A main problem with the idea here is that humans didn’t wipe out all the mutants. Scarlet Witch, a mutant, did.
Wolverine brings in his New Avengers pals to help with the climactic fight.
After vanquishing Apocalypse, his horsemen are left having been transformed into having non-mutant powers, so there will be fallout there. We see that it will involve Mister Sinister, who appears in the final issue of this arc, which is billed as an epilogue.
And with Gambit gone, Pulse can finally make moves on Rogue but she decides to be single for a while.
The cast is sprawling, with appearances by cast regulars but also folks like Diamond Lil who haven’t been seen in years, so you might find that rewarding from a nerd perspective. There are also back-ups showing how the horsemen got their horsepowers.
I suppose if you like these characters and want to see them drink blood, the back-ups are good enough.
Peter Milligan is without a doubt a great writer, being the creator of X-Statix, rebooting Shade The Changing man for DC, and writing multiple terrific Vertigo titles. Yet his work on X-Men so far has been underwhelming. Add to that the fact that there is probably nothing anyone can do to make me want (yet another) Apocalypse story, and I’m pretty dialed out here. But at least it’s MOSTLY contained in a single series instead of being spread out over multiple titles and taking a half a year to tell.