Marvel Just Raised a Huge Question About the X-Men Timeline and We Don’t Know What’s Real

The X-Men are one of the most complicated franchises in comics. There are multiple reasons for that. The X-Men were massively popular in the 1980s, and this led to Marvel using mutants to create a mini-universe in the greater Marvel Universe. There are a lot of X-Men characters, and there are a lot of story lines that deal with these characters. Even the least well-known X-Men character has at least one weird story under their belt that messes things up for another character. Another big problem with the X-Men comics is the many, many alternate universes and alternate universe shenanigans we’ve gotten over the years. The last six years has revolved around these types of plots, and they’ve just got even more complicated with X-Men of Apocalypse Alpha #1.

X-Men of Apocalypse Alpha #1 is a good comic that takes fans back to the Age of Apocalypse universe. However, this universe is quite different from the one that we knew, and the book itself raises a pretty big question — is it the actual timeline? This is actually a very interesting question; you can say that the 616 universe we’re in right now is the real one, but even that is up for debate, especially looking at the history of characters like Moira MacTaggert or what was established as the future of the Age of Apocalypse in stories like Age of Apocalypse (2005) #1-6, “The Dark Angel Saga”, and Age of Apocalypse (Vols. 1 and 2). Are we currently in the “correct” X-Men universe of has Marvel made their own universe an alternate one?

What Is the Real X-Men Timeline?

Okay, so let’s start back in 1994 with “Legion Quest”. This story saw Legion go back in time to Israel to kill Magneto after he met Xavier, so the two of them would never have their falling out and Xavier wouldn’t have to recruit a bunch of teen soldiers to fight Magneto. Legion accidentally killed Xavier, and the 616 universe became the titular Age of Apocalypse. The X-Men of that universe were able to undo Legion’s actions, and things went back to normal. The Age of Apocalypse universe then became an alternate Earth, with Jean Grey becoming Phoenix after her death and stopping the nuclear attack that ended the original story. X-Men of Apocalypse opens up in a world where the X-Men somehow survived the nuclear attack — we don’t know how yet, and it’s not the same world as the alternate universe Earth established in the later series set there. So, there’s actually a very real chance that this is what happened when the original 616 Age of Apocalypse actually survived somehow. We don’t really have a lot of information on what happened back then, but it would make for a pretty big twist in the series.

However, we’re not done with multiversal shenanigans and the X-Men because now we have to talk about the Krakoa Era. So, that story revealed that Moira MacTaggert was a mutant, and each time she died, time rebooted to the moment of her birth. This was a huge revelation, and it begged the question of whether the X-Men timeline we were following, as well as the one we’re in now, is the correct one. Moira MacTaggert’s powers meant that everything after her birth has changed multiple times thanks to her actions. Which one of those universes is the correct one and did the changes she did to the timeline change the entire multiverse? Are each of her lives their own universe, with the first one being the main one? This is the problem the X-Men books have right now. We don’t know what universe we’re really in and we don’t know whether Moira’s existence deformed the entirety of the multiverse. Sinister puts it best in X-Men of Apocalypse Alpha #1 — time does not loop. Sinister knows they should all be dead, but they aren’t. Their world didn’t end, and it didn’t take the road taken by the Age of Apocalypse universe later. There has to be a reason for that beyond what we see, which is something that the book itself is probably going to answer. The X-Men timeline is extremely wonky right now, and it’s only going to get even more wonky.

Which Timeline Will Triumph?

Let’s be real for a second — Marvel is never going to reveal that the Age of Apocalypse universe is the correct Marvel Universe. In fact, there’s very little reason to believe that Marvel is going to dig too deep into the idea; they aren’t DC. If this was a DC comic, there’d be a huge chance that this idea would get explored deeply, and we’d find out something surprising. However, the idea that we’re in the wrong timeline has more credence than ever before.

The X-Men books have dropped readers into multiple alternate universes, and has used the idea of alternate universes in mainline stories multiple times. The entire Krakoa Era kind of revolved around it. It’s an interesting question to explore and, hopefully, we’ll get some answers eventually.

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