The X-Axis – w/c 8 September 2025
ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #36. By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ Díaz & Clayton Cowles. Um… yeah, you’ve kind of lost me here. What does the LMD stuff have to do with Morph and Changeling again? If Changeling was responsible for the break-ins then when the hell did he make it to the town for that to happen? Is the plot really that you can waltz into nuclear facilities just by copying the face of someone who used to work there but retired several years ago? Why have we been spending so little time with Morph/Changeling on panel if that’s the point of the story? I’m just confused. I usually like the Seeley/Audino arcs on this book but… this is a bit of a mess, honestly.
EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #13. (Annotations here.) The wind-down for “Age of Revelation” continues. This book has an obvious temporary successor in Expatriate X-Men, with the same writer and two of the same characters, so I’m assuming that it’s continuing for now. Nonetheless, this issue is an evident attempt to draw a line under one major plotline – Kitty’s ambivalence about having been a teen hero herself – by using a time travel plot to give her a chance to change her history, and then letting her make the choice to affirm her history. It does that adequately on an emotional level, but it’s not the strongest issue of the book. The time travel gimmick is weirdly played, with some bemusing signals about when exactly this is meant to be happening. As a general rule, unless there’s some sort of meta point being made, the first rule of the Marvel Universe is “Don’t draw attention to the sliding timeline” and the second rule is “No really, for christ’s sake, don’t.” And this does, for no reason at all.
But also… if the whole plot hinges on the idea that there’s an opportunity to change the past and alter history, and if you’ve used the butterfly effect as a reason why Kitty can’t meet her past self and why Emma and Bobby can’t go back in time, you really, really, really can’t just leave a bloody great Sentinel outside Kitty’s house and have her discover her powers two months early without some sort of gesture towards how that all gets sorted out. Because the plot mechanics here depend on telling us that this does matter, so you can’t turn around on the final page and decide that it doesn’t.
The art is generally good, even if it also struggles to make sense of the time frame (and there’s a panel where Trista seems to have momentarily lost a foot in length from her legs). I quite like the more organic take on the Wolfpack Sentinels, though it wouldn’t work for every artists. And the scene with Trista and Kitty on the swings, which is the heart of the story, is beautifully drawn. But… it’s not the book at it’s best.
HELLVERINE #10. By Benjamin Percy, Raffaele Ienco, Bryan Valenza & Travis Lanham. So, another cancelled book. This is simply the final issue of the Hell Hulk arc, and doesn’t make any particular effort to resolve the series more generally. Instead, it winds up putting Hellverine back with the Project Hellfire characters from the preceding miniseries… which is where I thought that miniseries had left him anyway. It’s perfectly adequate but really nothing more than that.
Hellverine joins NYX, X-Force, X-Factor, Psylocke, Magik and Deadpool / Wolverine in being cancelled after ten issues. That’s pretty much a 50% failure rate. It’s possible, of course, that some books might get a relaunch coming out of “Age of Revelation” – Magik, which seems to have sold quite respectably, is the most obvious candidate there. Is that bad? Well… the first phase of the Krakoan era had ten ongoing titles, and three of those didn’t make it past ten issues either (Fallen Angels, Cable and X-Factor). And that was in one of the hottest periods in X-books history; nobody is seriously expecting the current office to match that.
It’s not as if this issue is unique to the X-office, either. Iron Man’s last run managed less than a year. The last run of Spider-Woman was ten issues. West Coast Avengers was the same. Spectacular Spider-Men made it to 15. But still, it doesn’t look healthy and I can’t help thinking there would have to be some big announcements coming out of “Age of Revelation” to make a difference.
WOLVERINES AND DEADPOOLS #3. By Cody Ziglar, Rogê Antônio, Guru-eFX & Travis Lanham. Final issue of the miniseries, and it really is just the tail end of Cody Ziglar’s Deadpool run with Logan and Laura as guest stars. But hey, that’s no bad thing. It’s a perfectly good little Deadpool story that ties up some loose ends with Ellie and her mother and puts the toys back in the box as Ziglar leaves. The art has quite a nice Leonard Kirk style quality to it. It doesn’t really need the Wolverines but it uses them well enough. Completely fine on its own terms. Not an X-book, but better for not trying to accommodate the guests too much.
X-MEN OF APOCALYPSE ALPHA #1. By Jeph Loeb, Simone Di Meo and Tyler Smith. Oh dear. Oh dearie me.
Let’s start with the positive. Di Meo’s art is generally pretty striking and not a bad fit if you’re trying to capture the style of Madureira-era X-Men. There’s a tendency to fill the panels with characters to the point where the backgrounds are barely present and the flow of the action gets lost, but it really is quite pretty. And bringing in Comicraft for the lettering is a nice touch.
It’s also a Jeph Loeb comic. And look, there are some good Jeph Loeb comics. But there’s also the Romulus stories in Wolverine, and Ultimatum, and they’re some of the worst things I’ve read in my life. This isn’t as bad as either of those, but it’s getting there. The high concept is to have everyone wondering how the Age of Apocalypse timeline can still exist after the bombs fell at the end of the original storyline. There’s some hazy blather about fixing the timeline though it’s never really clear what needs fixed. The whole thing is a continuity train wreck: it talks about Scott and Alex being former X-Men (they weren’t, in this timeline), Holocaust is still there (he was one of the characters who escaped to the mainstream universe), and so on. Oh, and there have already been tons of stories explaining how the Age of Apocalypse timeline continued after the end of that storyline. We’re apparently meant to just ignore all those.
Now, with some writers, I might give all this the benefit of the doubt and say, ah, these are all hints that things are not as they seem. But frankly, I’ve read enough incoherent drivel from Jeph Loeb over the years that he’s long since forfeited the benefit of the doubt. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong, but I’m not holding my breath.
The description of DiMeo’s art is what I remember of it from their book “We Only Find Them When They’re Dead” with Al Ewing. The book is mostly conversations between two or three characters but the art made it unreadable. A real shame.
Yeah, that ending to Exceptional X-Men sure did seem like the team left Kitty to die at the hands of a time traveling Sentinel.
The whole point of the original AoA was that their world was doomed. They were fighting for a better world they would not live to see.
Jeph Loeb was there in the 90s. He knows he’s writing a story that misses the point of the original. I’m sure the paycheck is nice enough to look the other way.
I enjoy few things more than reading Paul tear apart a Jeph Loeb comic.
Why “celebrate” the 30th anniversary of AoA to begin with? Celebrating the anniversary of the creation of the X-Men I can understand. But we’re celebrating the anniversaries of events now? And this one? Even Fabian Nicieza said it sucked.
It was very popular during 1995, basically the last gasp of the comic market boom before Marvel found itself on the path to bankruptcy. Nostalgia tends to run every twenty to thirty years. Kids who were nine to thirteen years old and losing their mind over discovering AOA will now be be at an age where they should have disposable income that they can spend to try to rediscover something they loved as a child.
A lot of people seem to get excited about this sort of thing. At the comic book store I frequent, Loeb writing AOA was the most excited I’ve seen a lot of comic fans in a while. They seemed to want to read another Jeph Loeb comic and revisit AOA. I don’t understand it, but I was just out of high school at the time of AOA and wondering if I should be embarrassed I was still buying superhero comics.
Addendum: Fans were also excited to buy the new Batman comic on the day it was released. I didn’t hear the type of hype that Loeb writing AOA was getting beforehand, but on that day, people were excited by a Batman #1. I could kind of understand that, as Matt Fraction writing Batman did pique my interest.
Re: Helllverine- can anyone tell me what the point was of Mephisto seemingly having captured Aurora, only for it later to turn out to be one of Mephisto’s tricks? Akihiro arguably didn’t do anything he would have done anyway if he hadn’t been tricked. I have to wonder if Percy expected this book to go longer than 10 issues and had to hastily rewrite that plot when he found out it was cancelled.
Regarding the cancelled titles, you can kind of sort of add Phoenix to the list. It’s not been cancelled but the writer is leaving, although Stephanie Phillips claimed she’s leaving voluntarily.
Re: X-Men of Apocalypse- there were a LOT of continuity errors. Alex claimed Lorna was his fiancé (she wasn’t). Alex claimed Sabretooth killed Lorna (he didn’t), Forge is alive (he was killed by Sinister), etc.
“And bringing in Comicraft for the lettering is a nice touch.”
Thank you Paul. I initially cringed a bit at your defense of Loeb, but I came around as I kept reading. Your words here made my day so much better.
@Ronnie Gardocki — Agreed!
Breevort discussed the Age of Revelation in an interview on AIPT yesterday:
https://aiptcomics.com/2025/09/10/x-men-monday-311-tom-brevoort-revelation/
The crossover will end in December, not February as was erroneously reported.
We won’t be seeing any R-LDS stuff during Age of Revelation but we will be seeing it in early 2026. Breevort claims ” people will start to get a sense of at least a broader idea of what’s actually going on as opposed to what maybe seems like is going on”. It looks like there’s going to be some other explanation for R-LDS. (It reads like they came up with the plots for Rachel and Magneto without knowing how Fall of X would end- Magneto supposedly had R-LDS even though he wasn’t resurrected through the Resurrection Process the last time and Rachel was suffering from side effects of having resurrected herself even though she was resurrected by the Five. And now they’re backtracking with Magneto.)
According to Breevoort, there will be a bunch of new projects in January. February and March and characters who haven’t had the spotlight in a while will be spotlighted. He also said:
“A bunch of titles are coming back just like series came back after the Age of Apocalypse. Other titles are going to come back with a bit of a refresh. Some of them are going to transform and essentially be new titles coming out the other side. ”
Two present-day X-Men will end up in the Age of Revelation and will remember their experiences when they return.
Breevort also had this to say about Doug:
“We landed on the idea that Doug Ramsey would become the chosen person. In part, we liked it because it was unexpected of all the characters in that list of 12. For years, he’s kind of been described as the X-Man with the useless power that can’t do anything. Why is he hanging around with these other cool New Mutants who can do stuff? He can’t fight anybody, so what good is he? I liked the idea just on the face of it — turning that upside down and taking the least dominant mutant character and putting him into a much more active place and role. But at that point, that was that.”
I’m not liking that Breevoort embraced the “Doug is useless” meme, since so many writers have shown that he isn’t useless.
I can’t cope with the “Doug is useless* trope either. House of X made Doug one of the most compelling and (to my mind!) sinister characters amongst all the politicking. This “Revelation” character has naff all to do with Doug or his overarching narrative. It’s just so badly thought out and executed!
Agreed. I always liked Doug Ramsey, but to continue to insist on that interpretation of Doug after Hickman is really pushing plausibility. Although, I guess the writers post-Hickman pulling back on Doug probably bear some blame. I think they chose Doug because it was a leftover idea from the Hickman run. It’s pretty obvious that Doug, in some form (with Warlock, with Krakoa), was meant to be in the place taken by “Enigma”. Without the revelations of Doug’s true motives, his role in Krakoa is left kind of hollow.
The weird thing about the “Doug is useless” line, is the people who care about the character don’t agree, and the people who agree generally don’t care about the character. So who is the target audience?
Doug doesn’t have a useless power. He has a non-combat* power. Cypher’s power would be extremely handy in real life, it’s just not good for pummeling an enemy unconscious. It’s the mismatch that make him interesting, imho.
*except those times he can read body language.
People discounting Doug Ramsey has annoyed me for well over three decades.
I know comics is all about punching people with your heat fists and clawing them and flying and stuff, but it’s the creative use of lesser powers which really makes things interesting. Doug just wasn’t cut out for front-line combat in a mutant paramilitary unit. But in a support/intelligence/diplomatic role? He’d have been priceless. Especially when partnered with his shapeshifting alien robot best pal. One issue is that he was a hacker-type created long before the world became as technologically connected and controlled as it has, and no one appreciated his potential.
The return to AoA is absolute nonsense.
Hellverine, like most of Benjamin Percy’s stuff, was edgy nonsense.
I’m a little afraid of what the line will look like when it returns in a few months.
I can understand the nostalgia for AoA, since that kind of alternate timeline/mulltiverse thing hasn’t been done to death in the mid 90s and some of the new books were clever at the start. Also, nostalgia for the shiny gold cover TPBs.
I miss Sins of Sinster.
“Doug just wasn’t cut out for front-line combat in a mutant paramilitary unit. But in a support/intelligence/diplomatic role? He’d have been priceless.”
Agreed, but don’t be annoyed by fans for hating on him. Be annoyed at Marvel Job Placement Services for giving Doug completely the wrong job. Doug had no business being on a superhero team in the first place. He’s the sort of character you have an agency like the CIA or SHIELD recruit (and then put behind a desk, with a computer in front of him).
See, I think the real problem is that they introduced Doug as a plot device–they needed a translator to talk to Warlock, and so they went bam, here’s this friend of Kitty’s who was hanging around, and he has the convenient power of translation, and oh by the way, under normal circumstances we wouldn’t even have told him he was a mutant until the giant killer robots stepped on him.
That’s right, Xavier knew Doug was a mutant and didn’t have a use for him, so he ignored Doug until the New Mutants dragged him in.
And well, then it was too inconvenient to, I dunno, send him back to Salem High and normal life, so he got folded into the team and that was that. And he barely even makes an appearance for the next few issues…
Poor Doug. He really deserved to be left alone until he aced some unspoken application and got recruited by SHIELD like you said, rather than be turned into a junior superhero.
@The Other Michael – I could be mistaken, but I thought Doug was initially created as a foil for the Kitty/Peter romance that Shooter ordered Claremont to bring to an end. He was made the same age and given similar interests as Kitty specifically so that Peter would become really insecure about his relationship with Kitty before going full Captain Kirk on an alien chick during Secret Wars.
But whatever. Either way, you’re right that Doug was a plot device from the start, and he should have been left alone after that until he landed a gig that he was actually suited to.
Paul, I can’t believe how callously cruel you’re being about X-Men of Apocalypse Alpha.
A brand new pile of stinking Jeph Loeb garbage fresh from the bin, and it doesn’t get its own dedicated annotation to be torn to shreds in? I genuinely might cry.
Zsaji was a phenomenon. All she did was heal men and screw men, then climb into her refrigerator without ever speaking a word of English. Any more reductive and she’d be a magic fleshlight. But I still like her better than the problematic relationship between Kitty and Piotr.
I never really thought about it, but Doug Ramsay was almost certainly Claremont saying “no, THIS is how you break up a relationship using a sympathetic character from another (figurative) world, you hack.”
Doug has been ultra capable since his return in Necrosha, in that story he takes down the rest of the new mutants. People who think he’s still bystander have not paid attention since his first death.
@chris V it would be interesting if the AOA buyers and the Batman Buyers were the same group, after H2SH part 1, I would not be running for new Loeb comic.
@Moo, the Other Michael- I think part of the problem was that the adult characters kept insisting that the New Mutants were a training team, not a strike force like the X-Men or Avengers, until Cable came along. If Doug had stayed alive until X-Force. then he’d probably have been turned into the team’s Oracle at some point. But since the adults kept insisting the New Mutants were not a superhero team, despite all evidence to the contrary, none of them bothered to try to redirect Doug to a position where his talents would be more useful.
I liked Doug on the New Mutants. Like any Claremont character, he went on about his insecurities too much, but he was a great foil to all the weird stuff that happened to the team, keeping one foot in “reality.”
And a way to keep the “I don’t fit in” theme alive when they had all met a couple dozen people more or less exactly like them. He’s almost the reverse of a mutant in that nothing he does with his powers is actually visible, so he ends up looking very human among all the lava and sunspots and psychic arrows, etc.
Doug also gave Warlock something to do besides talk funny. They complemented each other like Dani and Rahne did in the early issues of the series. Doug could always end up punching someone if Warlock acted as his mecha suit.
“Doug has been ultra capable since his return in Necrosha, in that story he takes down the rest of the new mutants. People who think he’s still bystander have not paid attention since his first death.”
Oh, I’ve paid attention, but I’m ignoring all of that garbage because I vastly prefer pre-death Doug to post-resurrection Doug. Ramping up a character’s abilities in an effort to make them more viable is fan-fiction level writing. “Look, he took down his old squad single-handedly! He’s cool now!” Nope. That doesn’t work for me.
A more interesting way to handle a character like Doug, to me, would have been to place him in a completely different context from the start. A mutant character who wasn’t at all suited for superheroing given the passive nature of his ability, but who nonetheless proved to be invaluable to the X-Men in a support capacity. Not a regularly-featured cast member, but a recurring guest star.
But no, apparently everybody needs to wear a damned costume.
I have no problem with Doug becoming a well-meaning pragmatist who does what he thinks is best even if it might not be morally upright. I liked how he operated outside of the system on Krakoa (e.g. modifying Sabretooth’s stay in the pit, staying near the council to see their next moves without joining) while still being an integral part of it. I don’t like the idea that he will rule the world according to something resembling Apocalypse’s principles, however. I think Doug works better as a mover and shaker with his own agenda. I’d rather see him manipulate the Hellfire Club or form a new X-Force than become the next Dr. Doom.
The Doug thing is just…how many years out of date? He was the ‘useless’ one so he got killed. That’s the last time this was a relevant topic.
I just want to make sure I read that right. Did Dave interject just to tell us to shut up about Doug?
For their first training session under Magneto as headmaster, Magneto kept him out of the Danger Room which looks pretty good in hindsight.
Doug could very well have been the Tessa-equivalent for the X-men, but Louise Simonson took over writing the New Mutants, and, well, it wasn’t very good, either for the New Mutants or for Doug.
Given the number of alien species in the Marvel Universe, I think making Doug the First Contact specialist of SHIELD (or whatever organization) would be the best use of his abilities.
To be fair to Louise Simonson, she had apparently got many complaints about Doug. She said that artists told her he was not fun to draw, and that New Mutants got letters asking Marvel to kill Doug. It wasn’t until she decided to have Doug die that she says Marvel started getting letters from fans who said they liked Doug.
At least Doug’s death in Simonson’s run gave us one of the both most unintentionally hilarious and also disturbing comics, where Warlock discovers about death.
I don’t think Doug would have fared well in the 1990s. It might be best that he stayed dead for a while.
Doug would have fit in well in SQUIRREL GIRL. That’s the only place I feel like he fits.
However, I did like that Krakoa was like, “oh, you’re my favorite mutant, everyone else can die, but you’re my emotional support human.”
Er… emotional support MUTANT.
Doug very much had what would be later called the Wesley Crusher about him, so I’m not surprised some fans hated him.
@Mark Coale- Not really. Wesley Crusher was younger than the rest of the cast. Doug was the same age as the rest of the cast. Wesley was often the one who saved the day, got praised by the other characters, etc. If anyone fit that role on New Mutants, it was Dani.
Doug was a different trope. He was the character with the least useful abilities, so the writers felt the need to periodically demonstrate why he was useful.
Bleeding Cool’s Weekly Bestseller list is out. X-Men of Apocalypse came in 3rd. Exceptional X-Men 13 came in 9th.
Simonson killed Doug in the same storyline where she introduced the world to fan favorite Bird-Brain, so she gets no slack from me.
3rd! I wonder how many bought X-Men Age of Apocalypse thinking it was part of X-Men Age of Revelation. I know that I did. Everyone should have first read Michael’s post about how they were unrelated. Although… Michael replied to Paul. So we need to break out a time machine. Paul, in the future if you find a giant sentinal destroyed in your front lawn than take that as a message that Loeb dropped another.
Simonson can do no wrong. Not only did I like all of her New Mutants & Power Pack works, I credit her with improving all of the writers around her. Every public comment reinforces my perception:
Executive – obnoxious dictate / bigotry
Writer – swears
Simonson – demands malicious compliance brainsorm
Writer [not just Claremont] – produces best work ever making enough sales to avoid getting fired by angry executives
I didn’t read Death of Superman, but I imagine she brought the same energy to DC.
It should be remembered that sales figures are for copies of a comic ordered by retailers, not how many customers bought said comic. The Loeb/Lee Hush 2: Shy Shy nonsense was ordered at crazy levels. I’m sure stores ordered Loeb’s AOA nonsense at higher levels based on Loeb’s Batman.
Bleeding Cool’s list is based on actual sales but only from a fairly small sample of stores. The fact that Absolute Batman didn’t even make this week’s top ten makes the whole thing pretty suspect.
@Scott B- Rich updated the article admitting that Absolute Batman’s absence is due to a glitch which happened once before:
“For some reason there is an Absolute Batman glitch again, I will try and get that addressed because I would have expected #12 to top the chart.”
I don’t understand the popularity of Di Meo’s art, particularly the palette choices. From a distance it all looks like blobs of pastels, mostly blues and purples and pinks. It doesn’t help that there’s very little depth, so the crowding of panels with background characters and stuff that Paul mentions makes nothing stand out.
Bleeding Cool’s Weekly Bestseller list has been revised. X-Men of Apocalypse came in 5th. (Still not bad.) Exceptional X-Men didn’t make the list at all.