Charts – 12 December 2025
Well, it’s the second week of December, what did you expect?
1. Wham! – “Last Christmas”
“Last Christmas” returns to number 1 for its eleventh week in total. It reached number 2 on release at Christmas 1984 (because that was the year of Band Aid), but it’s reached number 1in 2020, 2022, 2023 and 2024. As a back catalogue Christmas single, it’s on permanent downweighting – Christmas records are expressly excluded from the normal rules that allow old records to come off downweighting if they have a surge of interest – but it really makes no difference. If “Last Christmas” wasn’t being downweighted, it would have beaten the number 2 single (Raye’s “Where is my Husband”) by more than two to one.
The X-Axis – w/c 8 December 2025
X-MEN: AGE OF REVELATION INFINITY COMIC #6. By Tim Seeley, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. The final part of the Magik story. The basic idea here seems clear enough: because Belasco conjured those Bloodstones from her years ago, when Magik dies her soul gets split in two, and the Illyana part winds up with Belasco while the Darkchild somehow ends up with S’ym. I don’t really get why the Darkchild ends up with S’ym – did he find her wandering Limbo or something – but she does? So Illyana and Darkchild engineer a war between Belasco and S’ym in order to bring themselves together again. They promptly kill Belasco, but then Darkchild seizes control once and for all. It all feels a bit rushed, and honestly it probably needed to be either told at greater length or left to implication.
A bigger problem is that Tim Seeley seems to want this story to be about Illyana learning that Darkchild reflected a dark side that was present in her all along. That’s not quite on the same page with the recent Magik series, but it’s not a million miles away either – that book also wants Darkchild to be a side of Illyana that she’s wrongly interpreted all these years as an infection when it was actually a defence mechanism. But it creates a problem both in having Illyana learn a slightly different version of a lesson that she only just learned in her own book, and in the fact that the actual plot – Darkchild usurps Illyana and replaces her once and for all – doesn’t really dovetail with the message.
Unbreakable X-Men #3 annotations
UNBREAKABLE X-MEN #3
“Like Drowning in the Dark”
Writer: Gail Simone
Artists: Mario Santoro with Luciano Vecchio, Tiago Palma, Davide Tinto & RB Silva
Colour artist: Espen Grundetjern
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: With Haven House burning in the background, Gambit squares off against Namor the Sub-Mariner – not something that literally happens in the story, but broadly a combination of two plot points, so fair enough.
This is the final issue of Unbreakable X-Men, with Uncanny X-Men resuming next month.
PAGES 1-4. Flashback: The Outliers vow to stop Shuvahrak.
We were told last issue that the Outliers had made a vow to stop Shuvahrak if she ever escaped. This flashback shows them making that vow, and is captioned as “present day” – presumably meaning between Uncanny X-Men #21-22, or at least shortly after the “Dark Artery” arc ended in Uncanny #16.
Charts – 5 December 2025
Alright, it’s December, bring on the flood.
1. Taylor Swift – “The Fate of Ophelia”
Seven weeks total, which means it overtakes “Anti-Hero” as her longest-running UK number one. Although “Anti-Hero” did it in six consecutive weeks, while “Fate of Ophelia” had a two week interruption by Olivia Dean. One odd thing about Taylor Swift is that despite her juggernaut status, she’s only actually had five number 1s, and none of the others stayed there for very long: “Look What You Made Me Do” had two weeks in 2017, “Is It Over Now (Taylor’s Version)” had a single week in 2023, and “Fortnight” had a single week last year.
“Fate of Ophelia” peaked a while back, and goes onto ACR downweighting next week, so barring a miracle, this will be its final week at number one. Raye’s “Where is my Husband” is number 2, so the question is whether it can sneak a week at number 1 before getting Whammed. My money’s on “no”.
18. Laufey – “Winter Wonderland”
This was a Spotify exclusive two years ago, and since it’s still less than three years old, it isn’t on permanent downweighting. In other words, it’s not competing on a level playing field with the other Christmas records, but next year it will be.
The X-Axis – w/c 1 December 2025
X-MEN: AGE OF REVELATION INFINITY COMIC #5. By Tim Seeley, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. Part 2 of the Magik story, then. The basic idea here is that thank to the Bloodstones that were conjured by Belasco back in her origin story, when Illyana dies, she gets split into Illyana, whose soul goes to Belasco, and the Darkchild, who for no discernible reason winds up imprisoned by S’ym. So the story seems to be them manipulating S’ym and Belasco into going to war with each other in order that they can be reunited and escape Limbo. Since we know that the Darkchild winds up running Providence, this evidently doesn’t work out as planned. I can’t say I find any of this especially interesting. By its nature, it’s re-treading previous stories – to be fair, that’s partly the point – but they aren’t stories that I have any great desire to revisit in the first place. Belasco and S’ym aren’t very compelling characters and I don’t really see the point of this. I can imagine a world where the 2026 direction includes a bunch of things that were foreshadowed in “Age of Revelation”, which could run to Cyclops reporting back to Magik that she needs to do something about this before she died. But that’s still a Belasco story and I’m not very interested in that either.
AMAZING X-MEN #3. (Annotations here.) This is more like it. Sure, the pacing of Amazing X-Men is weird if you try to see it as a three-issue miniseries, because it isn’t one – it’s issues #2-4 of a storyline that also includes the Overture and Finale one-shots. And sure, all that the characters have really achieved in three issues is to travel to Philadelphia, without any apparent plans for what they’re going to do when they get there. But I don’t really mind any of that, because the relatively sparse main plot is leaving plenty of space for more subtle character work and for hints about the wider story. It’s not so much having Glob Herman turn into a psycho, which is kind of obvious. It’s having Psylocke seem more sympathetic than any of the supposed X-Men, and Schwarzchild coming across as the reasonable one among the future team when we’ve only seen him as a glorified henchman to date. The Beast subplot is working nicely – it seems fairly clear at this point that this is the Krakoan Beast, but it’s being set up in such a way that it’ll feel satisfying when it’s actually revealed – and throwing in the fact that nobody remembers the storyline about Magneto’s supposed degenerative disease is intriguing. Asrar’s art is consistently excellent as well, and playing to the book’s more character-driven strengths. Even though Jed MacKay’s two books are the ones carrying the weight of the plot for “Age of Revelation”, you can make a case too that Amazing X-Men does benefit from the existence of the wider event, since it’s helping to fill out a more-or-less consistent world that this book only has space to touch on.
Laura Kinney: Sabretooth #3 annotations
LAURA KINNEY: SABRETOOTH #3
Writer: Erica Schultz
Artist: Valentina Pinti
Colour artist: Rachelle Rosenberg
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER: Laura fights Apocalypse.
This is the final issue of Laura Kinney: Sabretooth, which was the stand-in book for Laura Kinney: Wolverine. That book isn’t returning in 2026, though Laura is moving over to a new title called Generation X-23.
PAGES 1-3. Revelation sends Laura to Arakko.
Last issue, Laura failed to stop dissident mutants from escaping through their gate to Arakko, a group that included Gabby, Akihiro, Laura’s son Alex, and Shark Girl. Laura sustains a head injury in that story, which she rather oddly ascribes here to “Sage’s force field”. Sage did have a sort of energy bubble thing in the previous issue, but it injured Laura’s arm, not her head.
At any rate, the basic idea seems to be that when her healing factor repairs damage that affects her mind, it also shakes off some of Revelation’s control over her. That would be consistent with Revelation’s need to reprogramme Wolverine in Amazing X-Men #1.
Binary #3 annotations
BINARY #3
Writer: Stephanie Phillips
Artist: Giada Belviso
Colourist: Rachelle Rosenberg
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Annalise Bissa
COVER: Um… well… it’s a woman running away from Phoenix. I assume she’s meant to be Carol Danvers, but she looks absolutely nothing like Carol Danvers beyond the fact that she’s white and blonde (as far as you can tell given that she’s coloured entirely in grey-blue, which means there’s a murky shape as the centre of focus). Her expression doesn’t seem scared, but more like she’s leading the Phoenix after her. I have no idea what it has to do with the story.
This is the final issue of Binary, which in turn was a continuation of Phoenix. That book isn’t returning in January, so the series truly does end here.
PAGES 1-7. Binary realises that she’s dealing with Madelyne Pryor, and Jean Grey manifests.
The basic plot so far is that Carol Danvers inherited the Phoenix Force after Jean Grey apparently burned herself out while containing the X-virus on Earth; that Carol has been using the Phoenix Force to protect her home town of Beverly, Massachusetts by shielding it from the X-virus in a psychic dome; that she started seeing Jean again last issue, since Jean and the Phoenix are one and the same as per Rise of the Powers of X; and that Madelyne Pryor has been scheming against Carol in an attempt to get the Phoenix powers for herself. (more…)
Amazing X-Men #3 annotations
AMAZING X-MEN vol 3 #3
“Philadelphia”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Artist: Mahmud Asrar
Colourist: Matthew Wilson
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER. The X-Men in the ruins of Philadelphia (rather worse than it actually looks in the stories), with a mural of Revelation.
Notionally this is the final issue of the miniseries, but in practice the story continues into X-Men: Age of Revelation – Finale. Counting the Overture issue as well, this is really more issue #4 of 5 than issue #3 of 3.
PAGES 1-4. Psylocke tells the X-Men what she learned from Bei.
Last issue, Cyclops won a duel against the Darkchild, who agreed to transport them from her territory in Providence to Revelation’s capital city of Philadelphia. Presumably that happened between issues and she’s dropped them off on the outskirts. Glob Herman seems genuinely surprised that they escaped Darkchild, which is clearly not a common experience – certainly the Age of Revelation X-Men seemed terrified of the place when they arrived there in issue #1.
All the material about Glob killing Topaz, and Psylocke being sent to kill Bei, comes from Overture. Psylocke’s account of what happened is correct as far as it goes. Interestingly, she comes across as much more sympathetic than the future X-Men – certainly than Glob Herman, who actively laughs about it, but all of the X-Men seem to have much more of a “this is war” attitude than Psylocke. Compared to the others, Schwarzchild seems the most reasonable, since at least he makes a fair point about Psylocke’s selectivity rather than just brushing Topaz’s death off.
House to Astonish Presents: The Lightning Round Episode 28
Paul and I hit a major milestone this episode, as we reach the end of the first run of the original Thunderbolts team, and cover issues 72-75. There’s fighting, arguments, and weird things exploding, and that’s just the behind the scenes escapades of Bill Jemas. Will all the TBolts survive? Will they all get off Counter-Earth? Will they all make it to the next volume of the book? Find out the answers to two of these questions right here, true believer!
Next up, it’s the Homies, so look out for a post on that in the next few days. And then… sigh… it’s Fightbolts.
The podcast is here, or available via the embedded player below. Let us know what you think in the comments, via email, or on Bluesky!
Daredevil Villains #64: Lord Dark Wind
DAREDEVIL #196-199 (July to October 1983)
“Enemies” / “Journey” / “Touch of a Stranger” / “Daughter of a Dark Wind”
Writer: Denny O’Neil
Pencillers: Klaus Janson (#196-197), Larry Hama (breakdowns on #196 and “art assist” on #197) & William Johnson (#197-199)
Inkers: Klaus Janson (#196-197), Mike Mignola (#197) & Danny Bulanadi (#198-199)
Colourists: Christie Scheele (#196-197), Glynis Wein (#198) & Bob Sharen (#199)
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Editor: Linda Grant
We’ve been through a string of fill-ins, but with issue #200 around the corner, it’s time for an actual storyline, and for Denny O’Neil’s run to get into full swing.
The change of creative team is completed here, with Klaus Janson leaving the book after the opening scene of issue #196. His replacement is William Johnson, who’ll be with us for less than a year. Compared to the artists who came before and after him, Johnson isn’t particularly well known. His only previous work for Marvel had been the final four issues of Master of Kung Fu, and he moved over to Daredevil when that book was cancelled.
His opening splash page in issue #197 is frankly not great, but once he settles in, his art is perfectly good – if rather conservative compared to what’s come before. Reportedly, he was taken off the book because he couldn’t handle a monthly schedule. This seems highly plausible, since he drew only eight out of eleven issues during his run, and as far as I can tell, he never worked as a regular penciller on an ongoing title again. He did some scattered fill-in work on Marvel’s licensed books over the next few years before apparently dropping out of the industry.
