In acknowledgement of the opening of X-Men: Days of Future Past, my most recent Gimmick or Good contribution at the Comics Should Be Good blog looks at the bookend issues to another X-story about alternative timelines. X-Men Alpha and X-Men Omega were the first and final chapters respectively for the “Age of Apocalypse” event in the mid-1990s. For this storyline, Charles Xavier was dead, Magneto was a hero leading a new batch of X-Men, and the villain Apocalypse ruled the world. It was a very controversial storyline for the time because it rebooted all of the X-books for four months as part of this new timeline.

For a full listing of my Gimmick or Good columns, click here.