Dark Ages #1 Review

Writer: Tom Taylor / Artist: Iban Coello / Marvel Comics I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – Tom Taylor is the master of twisting familiar stories into the best Elseworld tales known to man. The fact that Marvel hasn’t put him in charge of spearheading on ongoing What If…? revival is a missed opportunity if I’ve ever seen one. Now, he’s back at it again. After a long, long wait, Dark Ages is here, and as with many of Taylor’s alternate universe stories, its simple premise is a lot more complex than it seems. If you’ve seen any of the previews or promotional images for Dark Ages, you know what it’s all about. For the uninitiated, it’s basically what if the Marvel Universe lost all electricity forever. What if every electronic device, pacemaker, and just about anything else mechanical that runs on electricity could never be turned on again? A pretty grim premise considering how much modern society relies on such things. An even worse dilemma for the heroes that rely heavily on technology.

Dark Ages #1 plays out more like a prelude than a first chapter, which is a good thing. We’ve known what the book was going to be about for a while now, what we needed to know is how we got here. This first issue sets the scene pretty well. In fact, it feels like a completely different adventure altogether that eventually leads to what we were promised with Dark Ages. Taylor makes the scale of the threat as grand as possible. It’s apocalypse-level stuff and you know shit …