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.

(more…)

Okay then…

X-MEN: AGE OF REVELATION INFINITY COMIC #2. By Tim Seeley, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. Despite the title, the Age of Revelation Infinity Comic is actually covering events shortly after the X-Virus outbreak, not that far into the future. That means it gets to be the one book where we have Revelation as the leader of the X-Men, still recognisable as Doug Ramsey. That’s probably the most interesting thing about this arc, but this chapter (quite understandably) is mostly devoted to setting up Anton Kruch as a major threat for a Cable story, so that Revelation can show up at the end to kick things up a gear. Kruch is a weird choice of villain at first glance – his only previous appearance was in a single Cable & Deadpool arc 20 years ago. But he has the advantage of being a pre-existing character with his own plan to transform the human race with a virus, which works as an opponent for a pseudo-heroic Revelation pretending to have a team-up with Cable, so I can see why we’re using him. Still, this chapter is mainly setting up Kruch so that we can get to the good stuff next time.

ROGUE STORM #2. By Murewa Ayodele, Roland Boschi, Neeraj Menon & Travis Lanham. If I’d had time to do annotations this week, then this is the only book that would have qualified anyway. Some “Age of Revelation” books seem to be having more trouble with pacing a three-issue story than others. For Murewa Ayodele, it seems to suit him quite well – this feels a lot more focussed than the regular Storm story, and the jumping through time frames works nicely in terms of filling in the back story. After giving the first issue to Rogue, this one is from Storm’s perspective, and it basically turns out that her odd behaviour was due to possession from a demon we’ve seen in the regular series. There’s a bit with Doctor Voodoo that presumably plays into the regular series at least obliquely, as well. But mostly, it turns out to be a fairly straightforward story which leans less than usual on overpowering Ororo. Boschi’s art is really good – the demon design, with the grinning mask-like face, suits him perfectly, but he’s also adding a bit of humanity to the cast. I wish somebody would talk Ayodele out of his gimmick of sticking sound effects on literally everything – I’ll just about tolerate “LISTENING” (which isn’t easy to show), or “SLICE!” (since you’d kind of expect a sound effect in that panel of some sort), but when you get to “POUR”, “TOSS” and “CATCH”, that’s just getting in the way of the artist doing his job. On the whole, though, this is clicking better than the regular Storm title, and I think the discipline of three issues is helping there.

(more…)