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.

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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.

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X-MEN: AGE OF REVELATION INFINITY COMIC #4. By Tim Seeley, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. Oh boy. So this one went down well. It’s the first part of a Magik storyline filling her “Age of Revelation” back story. We already established, back in Age of Revelation #0, that Magik had died on the raid that freed Fabian Cortez from SHIELD custody, and that she returned as the Darkchild to rule Providence. Most of this issue consists of the raid itself, which is a bit underwhelming – she gets carried away, kills Maria Hill, and then gets gunned down by Nick Fury. It’s not especially creative. Anyway, the big idea is that the Bloodstones that Belasco conjured from Magik’s soul during her childhood mean that her soul passes to his control on death, with him apparently restored as the ruler of Limbo. That seems like something we might be wanting to address in the present day. The issue then cuts to a rather confusing segment of Darkchild (apparently separate from Magik) as S’ym’s slave, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. I guess it’s a jump forward in time? I think?

It’s not an especially good issue, but many of the complaints seem to be reading in things that aren’t there, or seizing on subtext that’s been part of Magik’s back story for forty years. But you can give Illyana a depressing ending in an alternate future timeline – in the long run it becomes something that she’s motivated to avoid when Cyclops reports back on it. Mind you, if you’re going to give female characters sexualised costumes, you can’t really complain when people read the humiliation sequence with S’ym and take you at face value. But this is more heavy-handed than anything else, certainly in a context where we already know that the story is going to end with Darkchild reclaiming Limbo. Having said that, I’m not really very interested in reading a repeat of Magik’s back story where the Darkchild persona comes out on top, which seems to be where we’re going here. That just feels repetitive, and doesn’t really fit with what’s been done with Darkchild in Magik lately.

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X-MEN: AGE OF REVELATION INFINITY COMIC #3. By Tim Seeley, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. Oh, it’s a three-parter. I figured we’d be spending longer with early-AoR Revelation. Instead, this issue switches to Revelation as its narrator. Tim Seeley does have an interesting angle on how Revelation feels about Cable: he doesn’t really know the guy, precisely because he died before the New Mutants met Cable, and maybe Cable is the hardening mentor that he missed out on. But the plot boils down to Revelation summarily defeating the villain, and then getting rid of Cable too. This might be heading towards Cable being the source of the techno-organics we’ve seen sporadically in “Age of Revelation”, and perhaps it does make sense in the wider scheme of things that Revelation just swans into the story and ends it… but it reads a little oddly.

UNBREAKABLE X-MEN #2. (Annotations here.) I’m not sure this story has very much to do with “Age of Revelation” at all, but the flipside is that it has quite a lot to do with Uncanny X-Men, by picking up the Dark Artery/Shuvahrak storyline in the near future. Shuvahrak is a weird character, with Gail Simone’s stories seeming to be intentionally vague about how she became transformed and how she came to turn against mutants in general. But it kind of works; the story wants her to be a sort of looming, ungraspable presence who’s been changed from a conventional character into a kind of Cthulhuesque monster of unavenged sins, and spelling her out too directly would point away from that. The downside is to leave the stakes a little bit obscure, but I think it’s a more interesting story for leaning into the mood. CF Villa’s art really sells Shuvahrak’s demonic angle too, even while it gives us the clearest view of her that we’ve had to date. The rest of the issue mostly consists of gathering the Outliers for a last stand, with a few more hints of things to come – though the clash with the way Deathdream was written in Amazing X-Men is really, really hard to interpret as anything other than an error. I’m still not sure what Spider-Girl is doing in this book – maybe she’s showing up in Uncanny soon, maybe it’s just a vague gesture at the wider Marvel Universe for the sake of the event.

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