X-MEN: BOOK OF REVELATION #1
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Netho Diaz
Inker: Sean Parsons
Colourist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort

COVER: Revelation stands before a crowd of supporters. Most of them are generics, but one has Akihiro-style claws (though we’ve seen him as a dissident in Laura Kinney, Sabretooth) and the one on the right is obviously Sunspot.

As a rule, I’m only doing full posts for the “Age of Revelation” books that map on to ongoing titles. This one doesn’t, but it’s written by Jed MacKay and it’s clearly much more central to the plot than any of the other books.

PAGE 1. Elbecca Voss in her bedroom.

This is effectively a flash forward which takes place between pages 7-8. As we’ll see later, Elbecca is the newest recruit to Revelation’s Choristers, the power-boosting mutants who enhance his powers to godlike levels. Since she’s too young to remember anything before Age of Revelation, she can’t be much more than ten years old and if she even exists in the present day, she’ll be an infant. I’m fairly sure this is her first appearance, and her unusual name doesn’t obviously map on to any established character.

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THE LAST WOLVERINE #1
Writer: Saladin Ahmed
Artist: Edgar Salazar
Colour artist: Carlos Lopez
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso

COVER: Leonard as Wolverine, with the original (in his Revelation-era costume) looming in the background.

This is the “Age of Revelation” stand-in title for Wolverine, obviously.

PAGES 1-4. Wolverine rescues kids from a burning building.

We’re in Vancouver, which is comfortably outside Revelation’s reach and seems to be carrying on pretty much as normal for now. The new Wolverine is Leonard, the kid who debuted in issue #2 of the current Wolverine series. He’ll recap his back story for us in the next scene, so we’ll come back to it. At this point, Leonard is wearing a Wolverine costume and seems to be very well established as the local superhero of Vancouver. He’s remarkably cheerful, in a Silver Age Superman kind of way, and it seems from dialogue later in the issue that he keeps this up whenever he’s in public, so it’s not just for the kids’ benefit. He’s just really keen to be a good old traditional superhero. (Given that he’s a Wendigo, it’s possible that making a conscious effort to keep up the persona also helps him stay in control.)

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ROGUE STORM #1
“Deicide”
Writer: Murewa Ayodele
Artist: Roland Boschi
Colour artist: Neeraj Menon
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Tom Brevoort

COVER: A split image of Storm and Rogue, with Storm in what I’m guessing is a savannah, and Rogue in what looks like the Arctic but… well, we’ll come to that. Rogue is wearing the knuckledusters that Storm gives her in flashback during the story.

This is the stand-in book for Storm during “Age of Revelation”.

PAGE 1. Montage: “Five years into the Age of Revelation.”

The main time frame for “Age of Revelation” is ten years, so this is effectively a flashback.

The first panel shows a shattered Mjolnir in orbit, presumably to do with the fate of Thor in this timeline. We don’t know yet what might have happened to him.

The second panel is captioned as the Sahara Desert, but the art shows a snowy wasteland. We’re told later in the issue that Storm has frozen the desert.

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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:

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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STORM vol 5 #12
“Thunder War Ends”
Writer: Murewa Ayodele
Artist: Mario Santoro
Colour artist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Tom Brevoort

COVER. Storm confronts Hadad, who is perches on a dead Galactus.

This is the final issue of the current run of Storm, but the book continues into “Age of Revelation” as Rogue Storm and seems to be getting a fresh issue #1 in January for its next season.

PAGES 1-2. Doctor Voodoo and…

Actually, hold on. The cosmic plotlines in this series are so incredibly convoluted that we’re best off just trying to draw them all together. So, rather than attempting to annotate this conventionally, I’m just going to attempt to draw together all the threads from the cosmic plotline in this series and see if we can make it make sense.

Spoilers: it does more or less hold together if you read it all in one sitting and put it in order, even though the plot hinges on a murderous rivalry between Eternity and Oblivion that seems out of character for both of them.

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X-MEN vol 7 #22
“Dawning of an Age”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Artist: C F Villa
Colour artist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: Clayton Cowles 
Editor: Tom Brevoort

COVER. A split image of Cypher and Cyclops, with their symbolic predecessors Apocalypse and Professor X in the background.

This is the final issue of X-Men before it goes on hiatus for “Age of Revelation”; the story continues into the stand-in mini Amazing X-Men.

PAGES 1-2. Magik collects Cyclops from the Merle town jail.

Chief Robbins arrested both Cyclops and Agent Lundqvist in issue #20 when they got into a fight in a diner. She tells us here that she was putting on a show to demonstrate that the authorities will treat mutants (and Lundqvist) just like anyone else. She’s well aware that Cyclops could have left at any time, and once Lundqvist is out of the way, she’s willing to say so openly.

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