The X-Axis – w/c 29 September 2025
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #38. By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ Diaz & Clayton Cowles. This will be a short week – in scheduling terms, it’s set aside as the launch week of “Age of Revelation”, with just the one lynchpin book. Aside from that, we’ve got the final issue of Deadpool / Wolverine and we’ve got this. It’s a sort of epilogue to the Morph arc, but I can’t say it leaves me much the wiser about the point of it all was. Of course, every arc in this book ends with the X-Cutioner or Cassandra Nova turning out to be pulling the strings, and that comes with the territory. Here it’s Cassandra Nova, but whatever they were trying to do with Morph seems if anything to be less interesting if it’s just Cassandra calling the shots. And why is Cassandra Nova trying to start a nuclear war anyway? What does that have to do with 3K’s agenda? It seems to be trying to set up Banshee as the opposition to Cassandra’s siren song, but in a way that doesn’t have much of anything to do with X-Men, and isn’t desperately interesting on its own terms either. The art is lovely – Audino really does do a great shapeshifter – and comes very close to carrying it, but the direction of this book is losing me.
X-MEN: AGE OF REVELATION OVERTURE #1. (Annotations here.) So I liked this. It’s a little weird to be having a second lead-in book when we already had Age of Revelation #0 a few months ago, but on the whole I think the story benefits from having shifted a lot of the outright infodumping into that book. It sets up the basic plot of Cyclops and Beast arriving in the future and being told that they’re going to kill Revelation, it sets up some mystery about what Bei has discovered, and it sketches out the basic of this future in a way that suggests MacKay has a clear idea of how it all works. Ryan Stegman gets the right balance between post-apocalyptic and quasi-utopian, depending on how you’re seeing the world, and I quite like the subtlety of setting up that something’s not right here by throwing in an outright contradiction to the previous issue and not flagging it up. Some commenters here seemed inclined to take that as a continuity error, but I’ve read enough Jed MacKay by this point to have confidence that he’s doing it on purpose (and I gather the previews for next week confirm it).
All that being said – this works as the opening chapter for an X-Men arc, and I’m genuinely looking forward to reading that arc. It doesn’t do such a good job of setting up the whole event. On one level that’s for the best; it can be very clunky when these event-opening one-shots dutifully check in on every participating comic to give them their trailer scene, and the story here is surely better for not trying. Yet this whole thing still feels more like a season break detour than an event – I’m not entirely sure why any other books are even taking part, beyond the obvious point that it might bring in some cash, and I don’t honestly want it to be the entire line for three months. Certainly not with the sheer number of books they’re throwing at it, which feels almost guaranteed to either blur the vision or beat the thing into the ground. But we’ll see. At least I’m sold on reading MacKay’s story.
DEADPOOL / WOLVERINE #10. By Benjamin Percy, Joshua Cassara, Guru-eFX & Joe Sabino. Cancelled, and given that it took ten issues to do not very much at all, I can’t say I’ll miss it. If you were really into Percy and Cassara’s X-Force and haven’t read this then I guess you might want to take a look on Unlimited when it shows up there, but there was nothing in this to merit a ten issue arc. If you want a decompressed action book in 2025 then I guess it’s offering that, I suppose. But it really is slight.
Wild guess: the future Scott and Hank weren’t overwritten, they were sent back to their younger bodies to kill Doug and/or release the X-Virus themselves
Regarding the Infinity Comic, I think we’re supposed to assume that what she’s doing here has nothing to do with her scheme in X-Men and she’s just doing it to amuse herself. Which is just bizarre. Why use a villain who’s being used in another title if their scheme has nothing to do with their appearance in the other title? Why not use another villain? Selene, for example?
Regarding Deadpool/ Wolverine, it’s worth looking at the sales figures for August. The lowest ranked ongoing titles were Exceptional X-Men 12 at 94, Deadpool/ Wolverine 8 at 133 and Phoenix 14 at 144. (As a side note, that makes you wonder what they’re going to do with Exceptional X-Men. Cancel it? Relaunch a new school book and keep Eve Ewing far away from it?)
To put this in perspective, even the Deadpools & Wolverines limited series outsold it. It’s rare that a limited series featuring the same characters as an ongoing outsells the ongoing. It really is amazing that a title featuring DEADPOOL and WOLVERINE sold so low. It gives you an idea of how horrible the writing was.
Whether Age of Revelation as a whole ends up good, bad, or otherwise, this event has really hit the ground asleep on the couch.
Brevoort said he wanted to keep publishing Exceptional X-Men. I expect Marvel is going to relaunch it from #1 and hope it will last beyond ten issues, but volumn 2 will probably end up cancelled at issue ten.
I’m hardly convinced we needed a DEADPOOL / WOLVERINE series, but especially not one from Percy. The version of Deadpool Percy wrote during Krakoa was a completely useless idiot who only existed to suffer. It was not a take I found especially compelling.
Bleeding Cool’s Weekly Bestseller List is out. X-Men Age of Revelation Overture came in 7th.
The sales figures for September 2025 are out. X-Men of Apocalypse Alpha came in 13th, Uncanny X-Mnn 20 came in 18th, X-Men Age of Revelation Overture came in 31st, X-Men 22 came in 33rd, Uncanny X-Men 21 came in 36th, Wolverine 13 came in 38th, Magik 9 came in 44th, Magik 10 came in 53rd, Imperial War Exiles came in 58th, Laura Kinney: Wolverine came in 69th, Exceptional X-Men 13 came in 76th, Spider-Man & Wolverine 5 came in 81st, Deadpool/ Wolverine 9 came in 105th, Storm 12 came in 118th, Phoenix 15 came in 127th, Deadpool/ Wolverine 10 came in 142nd and Hellverine 10 came in 159th.
X-Men of Apocalypse did good.
I know it only had a few days but Age of Revelation Overture coming in 31st doesn’t make it seem like people are excited for Age of Revelation. It only did about as well as a normal X-Men or Uncanny issue.
Magik seems to be losing steam but it still beat all the other solo X-titles except Wolverine.
Imperial War Exiles premiering at 58th doesn’t sound like a promising start for the new series.
The Wolverine titles are definitely suffering from overexposure. It’s hard to believe a Spider-Man & Wolverine title coming in at 81st. Then again, considering how bad it is…
Deadpool/ Wolverine did incredible badly. Issue 10 only had a few days but issue 9 didn’t even make the top 100. Again, it’s not a surpiise considering how bad this series is.
People are finally getting tired of Storm’s solo series. Which is no surprise. considering what a mess it is.
Overall, none of Breevort’s attempts to create solo series for the X-Men worked out, with the exception of Magik. So of course, it’s her series that’s taken off the board for the duration of Age of Revelation.
Breevort’s tenure as X-Editor is looking like a failure.
Brevoort’s biggest success: Jeph Loeb.
Dark days for the X-Men.
@MasterMahan
Guess who’s writing the new Wade Wilson: Deadpool ongoing?