The historical parallel for the Age of Apocalypse story is clear: the persecution and mass murder of Jews by the Nazis in the 1930s and '40s. The usual X-Men script is flipped: the humans are the oppressed, the mutants the oppressors. The stories that adhere most closely to the allegory - X-Man #1, for instance - are the most effective to me.
Still, I have great sympathy for the comic book readers of 1995 in how maddening it must have been to sort out what's going on in all of these different narrative threads released essentially simultaneously. Even with the benefit of on-demand web resources and a quarter-century's hindsight, I am thoroughly overwhelmed. I'm guessing you'd have had to hit the comic stores pretty early to get all those #1 issues at once. I remember the mad rush to get the New 52 issues back in Fall 2011 and I at least had the fallback plan of reading the stories online. The world wasn't like that in 1995.
My Recent Reads
The Astonishing X-Men #1
Cover Date: March 1995
Writer: Scott Lobdell
Artist: Joe Madureira
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| via Marvel Database |
Gambit and the X-Ternals #1
March 1995
Fabian Nicieza/Tony Daniel
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| via eBay |
Weapon X #1
March 1995
Larry Hama/Adam Kubert
Factor X #1
March 1995
John Francis Moore/Steve Epting
X-Man #1
March 1995
Jeph Loeb/Steve Skroce
Oh, trust me, there was no problem getting those issues back in the mid-90s. It was the height of the comic market glut, just before the collapse.
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