X-MEN: AGE OF REVELATION INFINITY COMIC #5. By Tim Seeley, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. Part 2 of the Magik story, then. The basic idea here is that thank to the Bloodstones that were conjured by Belasco back in her origin story, when Illyana dies, she gets split into Illyana, whose soul goes to Belasco, and the Darkchild, who for no discernible reason winds up imprisoned by S’ym. So the story seems to be them manipulating S’ym and Belasco into going to war with each other in order that they can be reunited and escape Limbo. Since we know that the Darkchild winds up running Providence, this evidently doesn’t work out as planned. I can’t say I find any of this especially interesting. By its nature, it’s re-treading previous stories – to be fair, that’s partly the point – but they aren’t stories that I have any great desire to revisit in the first place. Belasco and S’ym aren’t very compelling characters and I don’t really see the point of this. I can imagine a world where the 2026 direction includes a bunch of things that were foreshadowed in “Age of Revelation”, which could run to Cyclops reporting back to Magik that she needs to do something about this before she died. But that’s still a Belasco story and I’m not very interested in that either.

AMAZING X-MEN #3. (Annotations here.) This is more like it. Sure, the pacing of Amazing X-Men is weird if you try to see it as a three-issue miniseries, because it isn’t one – it’s issues #2-4 of a storyline that also includes the Overture and Finale one-shots. And sure, all that the characters have really achieved in three issues is to travel to Philadelphia, without any apparent plans for what they’re going to do when they get there. But I don’t really mind any of that, because the relatively sparse main plot is leaving plenty of space for more subtle character work and for hints about the wider story. It’s not so much having Glob Herman turn into a psycho, which is kind of obvious. It’s having Psylocke seem more sympathetic than any of the supposed X-Men, and Schwarzchild coming across as the reasonable one among the future team when we’ve only seen him as a glorified henchman to date. The Beast subplot is working nicely – it seems fairly clear at this point that this is the Krakoan Beast, but it’s being set up in such a way that it’ll feel satisfying when it’s actually revealed – and throwing in the fact that nobody remembers the storyline about Magneto’s supposed degenerative disease is intriguing. Asrar’s art is consistently excellent as well, and playing to the book’s more character-driven strengths. Even though Jed MacKay’s two books are the ones carrying the weight of the plot for “Age of Revelation”, you can make a case too that Amazing X-Men does benefit from the existence of the wider event, since it’s helping to fill out a more-or-less consistent world that this book only has space to touch on.

BINARY #3. (Annotations here.) Jean Grey makes her inevitable return after ten years’ incubation within the Phoenix Force, and Binary heroically sacrifices herself so that Jean can be the sole Phoenix – after winning the townsfolk back on side again. I can see what this book is going for – Carol Danvers as a stand-in Phoenix who doesn’t really have the aptitude to wield it properly but does at least spend ten years holding it in check and protecting her home town in a way that’s both impressive and, by Phoenix standards, slightly underwhelming. And it all looks dramatic and shiny enough. But the end result doesn’t really work. Part of the problem is that it wants Carol Danvers to be an underdog rising to the challenge, which is a story you could have done with her twenty years ago, but feels weird now that her established portrayal is as the Marvel Universe’s most hyper-competent female hero. Once you’ve plugged a character so emphatically into the slot of “you don’t need expensive Wonder Woman, we have Carol Danvers at home”, it’s hard to go back.

There’s more to it, though. The town never feels convincingly like a place – what do these people do, other than go to meetings and get angry? Where do they get food? What do they do to pass the time? Are there children? If they’re dealing with people on the outside, how does that work? Does Revelation have any view at all about Phoenix being a potential problem to him? Madelyne Pryor’s role also requires you to think back to an earlier version of the character; it doesn’t fit within anything that’s been done to steer her in the direction of Limbo in the last few years. And once Jean has returned, nothing changes – she apparently just carries on defending the town. Of course, there’s a fundamental problem with using Phoenix in crossovers, which is that she’s so powerful that she immediately breaks the plot. But the solution to that is to not use Phoenix in crossovers. I certainly don’t want her to show up in Finale as a deus ex machina.

There’s the core of a half-decent story in here, but Carol Danvers was the wrong character to do it with. Maybe it would have worked with Firestar?

LAURA KINNEY: SABRETOOTH #3. (Annotations here.) Well, that didn’t work. And it’s not like Binary, which didn’t work, but you can see what it was going for and how that might have seemed like a worthwhile idea. This book feels fundamentally misconceived from the ground up, and then botches the execution on top of that – it’s weirdly paced, and not especially attractive to look at, with an artist who can’t draw children being asked to draw emotional sequences with a child. Even pinning down the core concept here is difficult. The material about Laura having marrying Sabretooth’s never-before-mentioned son never feeds into anything, but I’ll assume it might be a plot thread that gets picked up by Jody Houser in Generation X-23. At any rate, it certainly isn’t the core idea of this book. So the idea seems to be about Revelation manipulating Laura and her narration rationalising what she’s instructed to do, all while her overriding impulse is to protect her son within those parameters.

To the extent that any actual theme is discernible here, the final scene tries to tell us that Laura was especially vulnerable to manipulation because of her desire to belong. I don’t think I buy that as a reading of Laura’s character in the first place, but that’s beside the point: The whole premise of Revelation is that he can control everyone, so you just can’t do a “Laura was so easy to manipulate” story with that character. I wonder whether this started out as a story that was trying to make some sort of point about how Logan had to be broken to bring him under Revelation’s control, but Laura was so much easier to bring on side – but if so, the story really fails to bring that out. On top of that, we have a trip to Arakko that bears no resemblance to what we saw in the World of Revelation one-shot and simply reverts to the original, one-note version of Arakko, which was never any good. The emotional anchor of the final issue is a young boy whose only personality trait is CHILD. And the “everyone dies” ending might just about work if it was pitched as a cliffhanger into Finale, but when labelled simply as END it feels downright amateur.

God knows what went wrong with this book, because I can’t believe it got commissioned on the basis of a pitch that resembles what made it to the page. But the end result is seriously bad.