Unbreakable X-Men #1 annotations
UNBREAKABLE X-MEN #1
“Guarding the Gate”
Writer: Gail Simone
Artist: Lucas Werneck
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: Age of Revelation Gambit, with the tombstones of Rogue and Marcus St Juniors, and… well, that looming face in the background might be Shuvahrak, but the green gloves seem more like Rogue.
This is the “Age of Revelation” title standing in for Uncanny X-Men.
PAGES 1-8. Rogue dies fighting Galactus.
“Seven years from now.” The main time frame for Age of Revelation is ten years into the future, relative to the present day. By this point, the Revelation Territories should be well established. However, this is Louisiana, and it’s not part of Revelation’s territory even in the main time frame.
Haven House. The base of the X-Men team from Uncanny X-Men. Evidently they’re still there years into the future – or at least they return there at some point.
The X-Men. The team at this point consists of Ransom (as team leader), Rogue, Gambit, Temper, Dome, Spider-Girl and Sentinel Boy. Taking them in turn:
Charts – 9 October 2025
Behold domination.
1. Taylor Swift – “The Fate of Ophelia”
2. Taylor Swift – “Opalite”
3. Taylor Swift – “Elizabeth Taylor”
In 2017, Ed Sheeran managed to get sixteen tracks into the top 20 simultaneously, because his fans were hammering the entirety of his album. The chart company responded by introducing the three-song rule, which limits each artist to three tracks (not counting features on other people’s records). Although the rule applies more broadly, its original justification was actually pretty reasonable: there’s a singles chart, and there’s an album chart, and if people are listening to the whole album then that ought to be reflected on the album chart, instead of counting as sixteen singles.
The X-Axis – w/c 6 October 2025
ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #39. By Alex Paknadel, Tim Seeley, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. Well, someone didn’t get the memo about “Age of Revelation”. Astonishing X-Men ploughs gamely on as normal. Then again, it might not have a choice, because this looks a lot like it’s meant to be drawing the book’s storylines to a head – Morph goes on trial after the previous arc, and the X-Cutioner attacks the court with a greatest hits selection of all the weapons he’s used in the series to date. So that sounds a lot like we’re getting to the pay off, and it wouldn’t be the first Infinity Comic they’ve wrapped up recently. Now, there’s an inherent problem in a marginal book like this trying to play the “mutant trial of the century” card – quite aside from the fact that Magneto and Cyclops have both been put on trial before – and it means that my plot problems with the previous arc are rolled forward to this one, since I don’t really buy that the ground rules of the Marvel Universe allow people to waltz in to nuclear facilities and launch missiles just because they happened to have a high security clearance a decade ago. And this book’s take on X-Cutioner has always been a bit one-dimensional as well. So… it clunks a bit, this. But we’ll see if it can pull everything together.
AMAZING X-MEN #1. (Annotations here.) It’s the first full week of “Age of Revelation”, and this is obviously the core series – the whole thing grows entirely out of MacKay’s X-Men. In many ways I’m happy to see that there’s a clear and contained core to the thing, rather than inventing all manner of busywork sidequests to justify all the tie-ins. From all we’ve seen so far, the answer to the question “Which Age of Revelation books do you really have to read to follow the event” is… this one. Just this one. And… great! It can outsource a bit of the world building to the other titles and focus on its own story, which ultimately seems to be an episodic road trip around the AoR, coupled with a mystery about why the future X-Men are clearly lying to Cyclops about at least some of this. And a subsidiary mystery about what’s up with the Beast; I suspect the twist here may be that he is from the past, but not from the same point in the past. I’m not entirely sold on Wolverine being so unstoppable that he can just get out of a black hole, and the art feels a bit muted at times… but then again, the sequence of Revelation reprogramming Wolverine is very nicely done. It’s a solid chapter of a relatively tight core story, anyway.
Laura Kinney, Sabretooth #1 annotations
LAURA KINNEY, SABRETOOTH #1
Writer: Erica Schultz
Artist: Valentina Pinti
Colour artist: Rachelle Rosenberg
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER: Laura as Sabretooth, in an overgrown city from Age of Revelation. Specifically, the sign says it’s Market Street, which is a main road in Philadelphia, Revelation’s capital.
Obviously, this is the Age of Revelation stand-in book for Laura Kinney, Wolverine.
PAGE 1-11. Laura asks Akihiro and Gabby to get her son Alex out of town.
Yes, it’s an 11 page scene.
“This is what mutants wanted all along…” Laura’s introduction to Age of Revelation Philadelphia presents it as a Krakoa-style utopia, which is basically how the Revelation himself portrays it. The ordinary inhabitants of Philadelphia certainly seem pretty relaxed here. It may not be significant, but for an all-mutant population, they skew much more heavily to human-passing than they ever did in Krakoa. Come to think of it, so did the Babels we saw in Binary.
“Before the government tried to destroy Revelation’s compound, they sent in super villains and assassins to stop us…” This comes from X-Men: Age of Revelation #0. Xorn’s narrative in that issue says that “when they gave up on soldiers and resorted instead to assassins, Revelation had any number of mutants to protect him” (and makes a point about the memory of Krakoa being a driving factor). The art shows Psylocke defending Revelation from Bullseye, but evidently Laura had joined him by this point.
Binary #1 annotations
BINARY #1
Writer: Stephanie Phillips
Artist: Giada Beluiso
Colourist: Rachelle Rosenberg
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Annalise Bissa
COVER: Binary, now with added Phoenix emblem.
This is another “Age of Revelation” miniseries, and I’m covering it in this feature because it’s standing in for an ongoing title, Phoenix.
Binary is a former identity of Carol Danvers (Captain Marvel), which she used as a member of the Starjammers after gaining cosmic powers. The reference is supposed to be to binary stars (hence the two stars on her normal costume motif, but that’s replaced here by the Phoenix emblem). As Binary, she was part of the extended X-Men supporting cast. Obviously Carol has had plenty of solo books under the titles Ms Marvel and Captain Marvel, but this is the first book to appear under the name Binary.
PAGES 1-4. Hank and co try to kill Binary, and fail.
This is a flash forward to “five days from now”, and we’ll see in a bit what Hank is up to – suffice to say that his insinuations that Binary has done something to deserve assassination are misdirection.
Amazing X-Men #1 annotations
AMAZING X-MEN vol 3 #1
“Flight”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Artist: Mahmud Asrar
Colourist: Matthew Wilson
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: The core cast, with Cyclops supporting Schwarzchild.
This is the third series to be called Amazing X-Men. The first was the miniseries which stood in for X-Men during the original “Age of Apocalypse” event back in 1995. The second was an ongoing series which ran for 19 issues in 2013-2015 – it’s the one that opens with Nightcrawler returning from the dead.
This one is the stand-in for X-Men during “Age of Revelation”. To all intents and purposes, last week’s one-shot X-Men: Age of Revelation Overture was the real first issue of this series, and this story picks up the plot in progress: Cyclops and Beast have been transported into the bodies of their future selves in ten years’ time, with Revelation ruling a “mutant land” which is spreading across America. They promptly got attacked by Wolverine, with only Cyclops, Beast, Animalia (Jen Starkey), Glob Herman and Schwarzchild escaping. That’s where this issue picks up.
Daredevil Villains #61: Willow
DAREDEVIL #193 (April 1983)
“Bitsy’s Revenge”
Writer: Larry Hama
Artist: Klaus Janson
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Editor: Denny O’Neil
Frank Miller’s run ended with issue #191, and by most standards he left the book in a much healthier state than he’d found it. Sales had turned around, it was back on a monthly schedule, and it was a book everyone was talking about. But all of that rested heavily on Miller himself, and left Marvel with the question: what now?
Klaus Janson stuck around for a few more issues on art. That gave the book some degree of visual continuity during this transition, although to be honest, less than you might expect. His layouts are more traditional and his issues feel a little more restrained, though there are still visual flourishes to be found. But it’s still Klaus Janson, and there’s still some consistency.
Who would even want to put themselves forward as the next regular writer of Daredevil, though? As it turns out, the answer seems to have been “nobody”. After two issues by fill-in writers, editor Denny O’Neill wound up writing the book himself – in his own words, “mostly because there didn’t seem to be (m)any other viable candidates for it”. But we’ll get to that next time.
Charts – 3 October 2025
Olivia Dean finally gets her week at number one.
1. Olivia Dean – “Man I Need”
9. Olivia Dean – “So Easy (To Fall In Love)”
This has had a long wait for “Golden” to run out of steam – it entered at number 8 in August, and then spent the next five weeks waiting at number 2 while its figures kept growing. After marginally missing out last week, it wins handily this week, with a margin of over 15%. The release of her second album “The Art of Loving” obviously helps – it enters the album chart at number 1. Its predecessor reached number 4 in 2023 but didn’t stick around for a second week. Then again, its total sales are a fraction of “Art of Loving”‘s first week numbers, so I expect this one to show more staying power.
The X-Axis – w/c 29 September 2025
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #38. By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ Diaz & Clayton Cowles. This will be a short week – in scheduling terms, it’s set aside as the launch week of “Age of Revelation”, with just the one lynchpin book. Aside from that, we’ve got the final issue of Deadpool / Wolverine and we’ve got this. It’s a sort of epilogue to the Morph arc, but I can’t say it leaves me much the wiser about the point of it all was. Of course, every arc in this book ends with the X-Cutioner or Cassandra Nova turning out to be pulling the strings, and that comes with the territory. Here it’s Cassandra Nova, but whatever they were trying to do with Morph seems if anything to be less interesting if it’s just Cassandra calling the shots. And why is Cassandra Nova trying to start a nuclear war anyway? What does that have to do with 3K’s agenda? It seems to be trying to set up Banshee as the opposition to Cassandra’s siren song, but in a way that doesn’t have much of anything to do with X-Men, and isn’t desperately interesting on its own terms either. The art is lovely – Audino really does do a great shapeshifter – and comes very close to carrying it, but the direction of this book is losing me.
X-MEN: AGE OF REVELATION OVERTURE #1. (Annotations here.) So I liked this. It’s a little weird to be having a second lead-in book when we already had Age of Revelation #0 a few months ago, but on the whole I think the story benefits from having shifted a lot of the outright infodumping into that book. It sets up the basic plot of Cyclops and Beast arriving in the future and being told that they’re going to kill Revelation, it sets up some mystery about what Bei has discovered, and it sketches out the basic of this future in a way that suggests MacKay has a clear idea of how it all works. Ryan Stegman gets the right balance between post-apocalyptic and quasi-utopian, depending on how you’re seeing the world, and I quite like the subtlety of setting up that something’s not right here by throwing in an outright contradiction to the previous issue and not flagging it up. Some commenters here seemed inclined to take that as a continuity error, but I’ve read enough Jed MacKay by this point to have confidence that he’s doing it on purpose (and I gather the previews for next week confirm it).
X-Men: Age of Revelation Overture #1 annotations
X-MEN: AGE OF REVELATION OVERTURE #1
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Ryan Stegman
Inker: JP Mayer
Colourist: Edgar Delgado
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: Simply an assortment of characters from the “Age of Revelation” timeline.
This is the opening one-shot for the “Age of Revelation” event. As things stand, I’m only planning to do annotations for the quasi-ongoing titles: Amazing X-Men, Binary, Laura Kinney: Sabretooth, Rogue Storm, Unbreakable X-Men, Last Wolverine and Expatriate X-Men. But we’ll see how things turn out.
PAGES 1-4. Glob Herman kills Topaz.
“X Years Later.” The X-books started using this formula during the Krakoan era, but it’s explicit later in the issue that in this case, “X” is 10.
“The Revelation Territories.” The general set-up of this world was previously established in July’s X-Men: Age of Revelation #0, though the essentials are all repeated anyway in the course of this issue. That issue consists of an account of the history of the timeline written by the future Xorn for the benefit of the present-day Cyclops, who the (future) X-Men are planning to bring to their timeline in the style of Days of Futures Past. In very brief outline, X:AoR #0 tells us that Revelation seized control of the X-Men after joining the team; that he used power-boosting mutants like Fabian Cortez to increase his powers so that he could control the environment as well as just forcing people to obey his instructions; that a mystery “X-Virus” was unleashed in Philadelphia, which killed most humans and turned the rest into mutants, and which was blamed on 3K; that the virus terraformed the environment to become hostile to humans; that Revelation has tried to make this world into a quasi-Krakoa; and that Revelation rules as a dictator.
