X-Men #23 annotations
X-MEN vol 7 #23
“Assassin”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Tony Daniel
Inker: Mark Morales
Colourist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: Cyclops attempts to kill Revelation with the Soulsword, while everyone else looks horrified.
This issue is bannered both as an “Age of Revelation” epilogue and as part of “Shadows of Tomorrow”, the tag line being used for the post-AoR books. The “Shadows of Tomorrow” branding doesn’t appear to require any particular impact from AoR, though – it also appears on this week’s issue of Wolverine, which has nothing to do with AoR at all.
It’s a new year and I think we’ll go back to the character-by-character format for these posts, rather than the page-by-page one – which was often rather confusing with double page spreads, and given Amazon’s persistent misnumbering of the pages in the digital editions.
THE X-MEN:
Cyclops. Aside from the recap at the very start of the issue, he spends the whole story possessed by his future self from the Age of Revelation (of whom more below). This story takes place before X-Men: Age of Revelation – Finale, where present day Cyclops returns to his body and wakes up in his cell.
Daredevil Villains #67: Crossbow
DAREDEVIL #204 (March 1984)
“Vengeance of the Victim!”
Writer: Denny O’Neil
Penciller: Luke McDonnell
Inker: Danny Bulanadi
Colourist: Bob Sharen
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Editor: Bob Budiansky
Denny O’Neil doesn’t like the English, part two.
William Johnson was still notionally the regular artist at this point, but by all accounts he struggled badly with deadlines. Issue #203 was an inventory story. This issue returns to the regular storyline, but with a fill-in artist. Luke McDonnell was the regular artist on Iron Man at this point, but over the course of the 1984 cover dates he somehow found time to pencil not only this issue, but also the back-up strip in issue #202 and the whole of Further Adventures of Indiana Jones #20. He did skip one issue of Iron Man, to be fair, but then again he also drew that year’s annual. He was seriously fast.
Daredevil #204 doesn’t even look like a rush job; the opening splash page on the streets of New York is full of properly designed individual bystanders and journalists. Regular inker Danny Bulanadi must have helped, but it’s still remarkable.
This is the second part of the Micah Synn storyline that began in issue #202. Crossbow is a hitman, who’s been hired by Lord Barrington Synn to kill Micah. Barrington is a stereotypical simpering aristocrat, who wants Micah dead “before anyone learns that he and I are of the same ancestry”. Apparently, Micah is a brutal, savage heathen and “a blot on the Synn honour”. Later on, there will be mention of Matt and Foggy pursuing some sort of claim that Micah might have on the Synn estate, but at this point Barrington seems simply to regard Micah as a family embarrassment. Of course, Micah really is awful, but Barrington doesn’t know about any of that. His objection appears to be simply that the man has gone a bit African.
The X-Axis – w/c 29 December 2025
X-MEN: AGE OF REVELATION INFINITY COMIC #9. By Alex Paknadel, Edoardo Audino, KJ Díaz & Clayton Cowles. We wrap up the “Age of Revelation” back stories with Glob Herman. In fact, this story doesn’t take us up to the point where he becomes the gun-toting killer from the main books; he simply gets taken in by the X-Men after the Punisher dies heroically to save him from Kid Omega. But maybe that’s better, since it avoids being overly trite and still gestures in the direction of Glob trying to emulate a mentor. Anyway…
X-MEN: AGE OF REVELATION FINALE #1. (Annotations here.) This is the only actual X-book this week – the final week of the year often being set aside for such things – and it’s the end of the three-month “Age of Revelation” event. It seems like a good moment to take stock.
Some criticisms of the post-Krakoa X-books seem to have unrealistic expectations. The decision to move away from Krakoa wasn’t taken by the current editorial office, and besides, even Krakoa’s creator Jonathan Hickman always intended it to end earlier than it did. Taking over the X-books after Krakoa was always going to be a poisoned chalice, since it was never going to be able to compete with Hickman in terms of a big attention-grabbing idea – all the more so if the aim was to steer the books back in a more congenial direction for cross-media synergy. And the back end of the Krakoan era didn’t help, with six months of unrelating fascist misery that left the books with no real alternative but to tack in favour of normalcy, at precisely the time when that wasn’t the story to be telling.
X-Men: Age of Revelation Finale #1 annotations
X-MEN: AGE OF REVELATION FINALE #1
Writer: Jed MacKay
Pencillers: Ryan Stegman with Netho Diaz
Inker: JP Mayer
Colourist: Marcio Menyz
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: Revelation stands over Wolverine, Cyclops, Kid Omega and Psylocke as the last survivor.
This one-shot ends the Age of Revelation event, and since it’s the only X-book out this week (aside from the Infinity Comic), we’ll talk about how it went in this week’s X-Axis post. First, though…
PAGE 1. Professor X and Apocalypse lead the Arakko army through the portal.
This is the same scene that we saw at the end of Amazing X-Men #3 and X-Men: Book of Revelation #3, although the dialogue is new. Professor X tells us that he’s been in “exile” from Earth for years, though we never did get an explanation of what he was doing on Arakko in the first place. The obvious reading would be that he’s been in space since “X-Manhunt” – he’s meant to be appearing in an Exiles book in 2026, after all – but why he returns to Arakko rather than Earth is unclear. Perhaps he was always trying to raise forces to help deal with Revelation.
Daredevil Villains #66: The Trump
DAREDEVIL #203 (February 1984)
“Trumps!”
Writer: Steven Grant
Penciler: Geof Isherwood
Inker: Danny Bulanadi
Letterer: Jim Noavk
Colourist: George Roussos
Editor: Dennis O’Neil
Daredevil went into 1984 with regular penciller William Johnson struggling to keep up a monthly schedule. Having started his run on issue #197, he managed to do six consecutive issues. But this is where we hit our first fill-in, evidently commissioned back when Denny O’Neil was still the editor. Johnson only manages two further issues – #205 and #207 – before leaving the book.
Steven Grant had been writing for Marvel on and off since 1979, but hadn’t yet had a regular run on a series, unless you count seven issues of Marvel Team-Up. We’re still a couple of years away from him writing the first Punisher miniseries. Penciller Geof Isherwood was relatively new to Marvel: prior to this, he’d done an anthology story for Bizarre Adventures #33, and a fill-in issue of Power Man & Iron Fist (also written by Grant). In the same month as this, another Grant/Isherwood fill-in story appeared in G.I. Joe. You get the idea.
Expatriate X-Men #3 annotations
EXPATRIATE X-MEN #3
Writer: Eve L Ewing
Artist: Francesco Mortarino
Colourist: Raúl Angulo
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: The Darkchild holds the X-Men in her hand.
This is the final issue of Expatriate X-Men. The parent title Exceptional X-Men isn’t returning in 2026, but X-Men United appears to be its spiritual successor.
PAGES 1-4. The Providence city wall attacks the X-Men.
This picks up directly from the end of issue #2, which ended with Ms Marvel discovering that there was 3K technology underneath the Flotilla – on re-reading, the idea seems to be that it’s on the hull of the boats, and the storytelling problem is that issue #2 jumps from Ms Marvel reaching underwater to retrieve Lyrebird to being underwater with him, with no apparent moment where she actually goes underwater. Anyway, as soon as this secret is exposed, Melée and Rift teleport the ship to the edges of the Limbo Lands, where they immediately come under attack. The opening caption here establishes that the attacker is the city wall itself, which is “semi-sentient”.
The X-Axis – w/c 15 December 2025
X-MEN: AGE OF REVELATION INFINITY COMIC #7. By Alex Paknadel, Adoardo Audino, KJ Díaz & Clayton Cowles. One last back story arc for the Age of Revelation, then. This one is about how Glob Herman wound up becoming a violent radical. He starts off the way we normally see him in Alaska, just a bit disappointed about the how same-y Revelation’s paradise is. He winds up being accused of counter-revolutionary thought on the basis of a single conversation with an old school friend (and yes, Radian really is a very minor New X-Men character). And he gets rescued by a mutated version of the Punisher. So apparently we’re getting “Punisher mentors Glob Herman” for the next two issues. And that sounds like it could be quite fun, since it’s such a ridiculous clash of characters. The Punisher doesn’t belong in this storyline at all, in a good way. This is apparently Alex Paknadel’s last contribution to the Infinity comics – if they’re even continuing after Age of Revelation, given how many other ones have been wrapped up lately – but it seems like a pretty solid entry.
X-MEN: BOOK OF REVELATION #3. (Annotations here.) For such a sprawling event, Age of Revelation has only two books you really need to read, and they’re the Jed MacKay ones. Amazing X-Men and Book of Revelation are both behaving like an actual crossover, converging for the finale issue. Last Wolverine might possibly be feeding into the finale, but pretty much everything else feels peripheral – or at most as if they’re setting up future plot points for the 2026 titles. But these two books are at least bringing us to some sense of events coming to a head, with the X-Men showing up in Philadelphia just as Arakko invades.
Last Wolverine #3 annotations
LAST WOLVERINE #3
Writer: Saladin Ahmed
Artist: Edgar Salazar
Colour artist: Carlos Lopez
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER: Leonard fights the original Wolverine.
This is the final issue of the miniseries, with Wolverine resuming next month.
PAGES 1-3. Nightcrawler rescues Leonard from Wolverine.
The previous issue ended with Leonard waking at night to find that Vindicator’s plan to free Wolverine from mind control was simply to kill him with the Muramasa Blade. Leonard and Kurt’s role was simply to get her close enough.
Incidentally, the recap pages on issues #2-3 of this series give Leonard’s full name as Leonard Two Bears, which I don’t think has ever appeared in the body of a story. (Issue #1’s recap page just calls him “Leonard”.)
For the purposes of this story, we seem to be workings on the original, Wolverine: Origins concept of the Muramasa Blade, where its magical powers can cut through adamantium and leave wounds that won’t heal.
Rogue Storm #3 annotations
ROGUE STORM #3
“The Gallows and the Executioner”
Writer: Murewa Ayodele
Artist: Roland Boschi
Colourists: Neeraj Menon, Fer Sifuentes-Sujo & Rachelle Rosenberg
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: Rogue Red with a bunch of arrows through her at the top, and a defiant-looking Storm on her knees in the bottom half of the page.
This is the final issue of Rogue Storm, with Storm: Earth’s Mightiest Mutant #1 solicited for February. Despite Murewa Ayodele insisting that he’s been told it’s an ongoing, the recent solicitation for issue #2 still has it as a five-issue miniseries.
PAGES 1-3. Storm fights her way through Eēgūn’s soldiers.
While Rogue Storm is much easier to follow than the regular Storm series, it would still probably be useful to stick the plot in chronological order before we go any further. It runs like this:
- Flashback in issue #1: Two years into the Age of Revelation timeline, Storm takes in Rogue Red and gives her vibranium knuckledusters. (The timing is confirmed by Gambit in issue #3.)
- Per dialogue in issue #3, the demon Eēgūn escapes “the imprisonment imposed on him by the universe” (presumably his consumption by Maggott in Storm #6).
- Flashback in issue #3: Eēgūn attacks and destroys the Storm Sanctuary. Storm fights him for ten days straight and imprisons him in her body (presumably using magic). Unable to control him, she secludes herself in the Sahara Desert, guarded by the Storm Engines. She loses control of her powers and involuntarily causes worldwide devastation.
- Flashbacks in issues #1-3: Five years into the Age of Revelation, X-Force (Rogue Red, Warpath, Iceman, Gateway, Fantomex and Akujin) fight their way to Storm, and Rogue uses her powers to absorb Storm’s abilities, thinking that she’s going to stop the devastation. As a result, Eēgūn escapes. Akujin turns on the rest of X-Force and kills most of them; she’s an agent of Eēgūn who enlisted X-Force to help get past the Storm Engines in order to free Eēgūn. Storm and Rogue Red are rescued by Dr Voodoo and the ghost of his twin brother Daniel Drumm. Voodoo is killed while holding Eēgūn at bay. Rogue Red dies from her injuries, and discorporates on death.
- Dialogue in issues #2-3: Over the next five years, Storm searches the world for Eēgūn and practices magic. Daniel’s ghost continues to hang around with Storm in deference to his brother’s final wishes.
- Flashback in issue #3 and main story in issues #1-3: Storm gathers various magical weapons with a view to fighting the demon as “Primal Storm”. Gambit turns up looking for Rogue Red. Eēgūn attacks before the conversation can get anywhere. Storm defeats his henchmen and uses magic to trap herself and Eēgūn, apparently forever, resurrecting Rogue Red as a side effect.
X-Men: Book of Revelation #3 annotations
X-MEN: BOOK OF REVELATION #3
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Netho Diaz
Inkers: Sean Parsons & JP Mayer
Colourist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: Revelation squares off against Elbecca and, oddly, Kitty Pryde, who doesn’t appear in this issue – making this a conflation of scenes from issues #2 and #3. This is the final issue of the series, with the story continuing in the X-Men: Age of Revelation – Finale one-shot.
PAGES 1-2. Flashback: Apocalypse despatches Elbecca to Earth.
We established last issue that Elbecca was not actually a little girl from the Revelation Territories, but an Arakkii spy with a “cover personality” who had been sent to infiltrate the Choristers and weaken Revelation. This flashback shows her being sent on that mission in the first place. Revelation points out later in the issue that this scheme must have been planned long before Arakko received word from Bei of his plans (in X-Men: Age of Revelation – Overture and the World of Revelation one-shot), and thus can’t be a reaction to Bei’s message. This seems likely to be right, and raises the question of why Apocalypse was already scheming to bring Revelation down even before then. Revelation’s explanation of his motives later in the issue probably provides the answer to that.
