X-MEN: AGE OF REVELATION INFINITY COMIC #9. By Alex Paknadel, Edoardo Audino, KJ Díaz & Clayton Cowles. We wrap up the “Age of Revelation” back stories with Glob Herman. In fact, this story doesn’t take us up to the point where he becomes the gun-toting killer from the main books; he simply gets taken in by the X-Men after the Punisher dies heroically to save him from Kid Omega. But maybe that’s better, since it avoids being overly trite and still gestures in the direction of Glob trying to emulate a mentor. Anyway…

X-MEN: AGE OF REVELATION FINALE #1. (Annotations here.) This is the only actual X-book this week – the final week of the year often being set aside for such things – and it’s the end of the three-month “Age of Revelation” event. It seems like a good moment to take stock.

Some criticisms of the post-Krakoa X-books seem to have unrealistic expectations. The decision to move away from Krakoa wasn’t taken by the current editorial office, and besides, even Krakoa’s creator Jonathan Hickman always intended it to end earlier than it did. Taking over the X-books after Krakoa was always going to be a poisoned chalice, since it was never going to be able to compete with Hickman in terms of a big attention-grabbing idea – all the more so if the aim was to steer the books back in a more congenial direction for cross-media synergy. And the back end of the Krakoan era didn’t help, with six months of unrelating fascist misery that left the books with no real alternative but to tack in favour of normalcy, at precisely the time when that wasn’t the story to be telling.

In that context, the basic idea of going for a wide range of different X-books and seeing what worked was sound. One problem with Krakoa was that it did tend to make the whole line very similar. The post-Krakoa books could react against that by showing a mutant diaspora blending back into the normal world in a variety of ways, and in practice books like Uncanny X-Men, Exceptional X-Men and NYX made a more sustained attempt to position mutants within the real world than we’d seen in many years, probably since District X. It’s unfortunate that NYX only lasted ten issues, since it should have been well placed to explore that theme.

The survival rate of the post-Krakoan ongoing titles hasn’t been particularly good, but it’s worth giving that some context. Here’s how the 2024 X-launches fared. X-Men, Uncanny X-Men and Wolverine are still going. Storm also returns next year, but the solicitations for February and March list it as a five-issue miniseries (despite writer Murewa Ayodele saying that he’s been assured it’s an ongoing). Exceptional X-Men lasted 16 issues if you count its AoR mini, and Laura Kinney: Wolverine lasted 13 on the same basis; neither is returning in 2026, but both have recognisable successor titles in X-Men United and Generation X-23. Phoenix lasted 18 issues (if you count Binary), and NYX, X-Force, X-Factor, Psylocke and Hellverine all got cancelled with issue #10. Magik didn’t launch until 2025, and it’s been cancelled too, though it’s getting a miniseries in 2026.

So this doesn’t look great, but it’s not like the rest of the Marvel Universe was doing any better around this time. In fact, unless you count existing titles that got a fresh #1 for a new story arc without even changing writer, the rest of the MU struggled even to match Phoenix. A revival of Deadpool that year only lasted 15 issues. Iron Man lasted ten. Spider-Gwen: The Ghost-Spider is still going, following another relaunch. New Champions and Spirits of Vengeance didn’t even make it to issue #10.

Now, Marvel were having hits during this time – they were just in the Ultimate imprint. But it’s fair to say that the X-books haven’t done that badly compared to the Marvel Universe as a whole. Or, if you prefer, that the whole MU is struggling right now.

Creatively, I don’t think the X-books have had such a bad year. X-Men and Uncanny have been generally strong aside from the crossovers. Exceptional made a bit of a mess of its last arc but its low key character work was great. Psylocke and Magik were good books. Wolverine is patchy but has its moments. Phoenix and Laura Kinney weren’t good, and Storm is just plain bizarre – even if I don’t like the book, I have to admire its dogged perversity. In terms of overall quality, we’ve had far worse periods than this.

Where does “Age of Revelation” fit into this? From the limited sales data that’s still in the public domain, it doesn’t appear to have done very well. Frankly, that doesn’t surprise me. The promotional stunt here was to repeat the “Age of Apocalypse” routine from the 90s, putting all the regular books on hiatus and replacing them with stand-in miniseries. But the X-books were much hotter in the 90s than they were in 2025, and even then, the number of actual books in the line remained constant. “Age of Revelation”, published in an era when the line seems able to support something like six ongoing titles, featured sixteen minis. The idea that the market would support that many titles always struck me as, to put it politely, wildly ambitious.

On top of that, only X-Men itself actually built up to the event in any meaningful way. Every other title essentially treated it as a season break. Uncanny X-Men and Storm produced tie-in issues which pretty much ignored the premise of “Age of Revelation” and used other aspects of the near-future setting. The books themselves were arguably better for that, but this was a sixteen-book crossover in which only three titles actually mattered: Jed Mackay’s Amazing X-Men and Book of Revelation, plus Last Wolverine. Expatriate X-Men ends with what seems like a tacked-on finish in which everyone heads for Philadelphia, but then they don’t appear in the Finale issue at all. The ending of Laura Kinney: Sabretooth might just about have made sense if it was a cliffhanger into Finale, but it isn’t. Omega Kids ends by killing off the Omega Kids, but a different bunch show up anyway in Finale.

“Age of Revelation” works on the level for which it was originally conceived: a story arc in MacKay’s X-Men. Viewed from that perspective, it’s pretty successful. The present-day X-Men stories set up a Cypher who’s trying in good faith to think of a way of squaring Apocalypse’s mission with his own wishes, and then we get an inverted “Days of Futures Past” set-up to show how it’s all gone terribly wrong in the future. Cyclops gets to look impressive when his back is against the wall; the hints that the Beast isn’t quite right are nicely built; and the down ending of the X-Men simply failing to stop Revelation’s plan, leading to the end of the world, is perfectly fine as the end of an act in MacKay’s storylines, with Scott and Hank (and possibly some others) knowing how things turned out in this world and trying to make it turn out better in future. What Doug and Illyana do with the information Scott has picked up from this period is a genuinely interesting story, and we’ve got some groundwork laid for future development of other characters too.

The only real problem with MacKay’s issues is that the storyline is perhaps too straightforward. Scott simply leads the X-Men to Philadelphia and encounters some people along the way, without ever having any plan for what he’s going to do when he gets there, beyond hope. That works in the context of MacKay’s wider story, though, which is that Scott is just being kept busy and his invocation of stock heroic tropes is completely futile. The only thing he can actually do about any of this is try to avert it when he gets home. As an arc in X-Men, perhaps coupled with a Book of Revelation miniseries, this would have worked very well.

But this is not a story which lends itself to becoming an event. That approach does give other books an opportunity to round out other aspects of the world, which Scott doesn’t get a chance to visit; but it creates a problem in terms of making any of those other books satisfying. There’s nothing they can actually contribute to the finale, and the stories that they do tell are given an arbitrary coda of “and then the world ended”. You can’t just read them while ignoring that ending, because it’s part of the event. And the apocalypse is hardly a welcome addition to Unbreakable‘s three issues of Rogue and Gambit, reunited at last. Or Cloak or Dagger‘s family set-up.

Does it work for any of the books? Maybe Undeadpool, which ends with Deadpool securing his own demise and his release from undeath; at least he got to go on his own terms. And Last Wolverine at least builds to Logan being freed from Revelation’s control. Omega Kids, which is mostly a character study of Quentin Quire, also gets away with it, because Quentin’s misguided conviction is the point; knowing that it all collapses in early course is not a problem for that story. For the most part, though, the ending of Finale leaves us thinking: well, what was the point of all those other books? The futility of it all serves the story being told in X-Men, but it’s not a good framing device for a sixteen-book event where most of those books are trying to do free-standing stories.

Yes, I know, “Age of Apocalypse” ended with the world ending. But the books in that crossover fed in to that ending and, besides, the original concept of AoA was that it was the real world transformed; it had to be erased in order for the normal world to return. That’s not what we’re doing here, and it doesn’t work in the same way.

Which is a shame, because this would all have made a good X-Men arc. And in fact, because the other titles contribute so little to it, you can choose to take it as simply an X-Men arc. That’s the best way to read it, and on that level it is a success. But devoting three months of the line to it was a misfire. There’s still plenty of promise in the 2026 line-up, but I don’t think this event has been at all effective in building up those new launches.