The X-Axis – w/c 29 December 2025
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.
Omega Kids was a very pleasant suprise. Cloak/Dagger would have worked better as a What If, where it wasn’t tied in to the crossover, but this was the opportuniry available and I am glad it wasn’t missed.
The one way that I view the crossover as a success is that when faced with cancelling the enrire line, the three months worked in giving three months to plan a reboot.
@Paul – Thank you. Not just for hosting this group, and not just for the podcast, but also for your posts. This one especially was emotionally validating as I agreed with every well balanced assesment you made. It is a delight to read. Thank you.
I’ve been browsing some of Paul’s older reviews, and I came across this odd specimen:
https://www.housetoastonish.com/?p=8284
It sounded oddly fascinating so I try to look it up on Marvel Unlimited. I regret to inform everyone that Wolverine: Journey of Time has been scrubbed from MU. Black Panther: Soul of a Machine — referenced in the review — has likewise been scrubbed but I had already read that one a while back.
So it seems clear that there’s been a deliberate decision to clear MU of these types of issues.
One the one hand, this doesn’t matter: I don’t think many people will miss these corporate branded comic-length adverts. But on the other hand, these do have some decent creators putting forward some… interesting?… work.
Plus I object to them removing comics from MU as a general principle. It offends the archivist in me. At this point, Paul’s review is virtually the only online evidence that this issue ever existed!
Dear Paul,
Happy New Year! Appreciate you starting 2026 with a State of X post. Providing information about other Marvel titles was helpful context. I certainly agree the X-line is a poisoned chalice at this point. Even though readers have been dealing with rough transitional periods following “big runs” since Morrison, I believe that other factors are making this instance more difficult.
1. X-Men comics are competing against the property in other media formats. There are more people who are versed in X-Men cartoon/movie/video game lore than comic readers.
2. As the readership continues to age, we become more jaded but at the same time our expectations remain high. Plus, increased price points have us rethinking where to place our disposable income especially when there are other priorities.
3. Thanks to creators having an online presence, readers have some insight into how the titles are produced. Since Brevoort took over the line, there has been internet scuttlebutt about creators turning down offers. Plus Marvel’s notoriously cheap page rates.
I do not blame the creative teams, they are taking their marching orders from editorial. Hopefully Brevoort and the higher ups have/will discover in 2026 that less expansive crossovers with a slew of titles may be a better approach.
As I’ve said in the main issue discussion, the downer ending here feels extra pointless because this reality isn’t undone at the end of the story. AoA ‘never happened’ and Days Of Future Past seemed at the time to have been averted/prevented. And DoFP did it in only 2 issues! Having THIRTEEN 3 issue minis that were extraneous was an insane decision. That’s more issues than the total of the AoA minis, and they were mostly relevant.
Yes, but just wait until Marvel touts the success of this event, surpassing the financial sales on AOA, when X-Men comics were “supposedly so much more popular than today”. Of course, there were many more AoR comics and they cost $4-$5 an issue, but Marvel won’t let the facts stand in the way of claiming this a victory, no matter how badly the books actually sold.
Mo Walker-The problem is that Marvel seem to repeat the same stories over and over again. It could be argued this isn’t exactly new. The problem is that it was fine when the majority of the readership were children, especially with a turnover to the younger demographic every so many years. Someone starts reading comics at the age of ten, drops comics by the age of sixteen, a new crop of ten year olds take their place, and it’s all new to them. Today, the average comic book readership is between 35-50 years old. As the demographic ages, Marvel is going to continue to lose readers as they repeat the same formulas. A person in their 40s seeing the same story or gimmick they remember seeing twenty years ago is more likely to say, “That’s enough.”
With comics priced at $5 an issue, they are well outside the ability for children to purchase.
I appreciate your level headed assessment of the From the Ashes era. Personally, I think that if it didn’t have so many titles while there are extraneous books cluttering the line (including actual Age of Apocalypse follow-ups), the unique swings would stand out more. But, much like Age of Revelation, there’s just been too many X titles which drag down the whole thing.
As a story setup and followed through by Mackay, I think Age of Revelation was successful. Amazing works as an arc of the main adjectiveless book and Book of Revelation was a surprisingly good companion. The two set-up and finale one-shots work on those terms.
But as a sprawling line, this was a disappointment. Aside from Last Wolverine (which was fun and followed Ahmed’s ongoing story), everything else I checked out was a dud. As intriguing as some of the creative teams and premises seemed.
Going forward, I’m still going to follow adjectiveless as my main X Book (although I anticipate it will be missing something without Stegman or Diaz). But I can’t really argue with the overall frustration of the X-Line. Plenty of fun and originality to be had, but there’s just too much of it.
Remember, Marvel Comics is and was always a business , publishing AND licensing , and so they need to publish a certain amount of books every week/month in order to keep the legal rights for the being the sole private owner of their decades-old intellectual properties , otherwise , by the USA’s own laws , the IP becomes universal public domain . The BottomLine is ultimately what always matters most to Corporations , thats Capitalism 101.
And for what its worth , we now have arguably 2 brand-new Marvel supervillains, both potentially multiversal (especially ripe for joining Marvel Rivals) , Revelation The Living Planet i.e. Dominion-by-another-name Douglas Ramsey, and 3K’s Chairman i.e. OG 616-Beast/Henry “Hack” McCoy , who is the aggregate cumulative end-result of 62 years of 616 continuity KEK
“A person in their 40s seeing the same story or gimmick they remember seeing twenty years ago is more likely to say, “That’s enough.”
More likely? I would say less likely, actually.
I mean, look at this place. This is an older crowd. We have people here routinely burning Brevoort in effigy while they continue to slavishly buy and read the books regularly– apparently relying on the conviction and willpower of *other* readers to drop the books in the hopes of spurring an editorial change because they quite obviously can’t do it themselves.
I haven’t bought/read a new comic in more than two decades, but I was still in my thirties when I quit. Had I not done that and continued reading to this day, I can’t imagine what would make me quit now. What would be the tipping point now? Comics have been doing the same old/same old for decades.
You either quit when you’re young (young-ish) or you read until you die.
Jdsm24> Remember, Marvel Comics… need to publish a certain amount of books every week/month in order to keep the legal rights for the being the sole private owner of their decades-old intellectual properties , otherwise , by the USA’s own laws , the IP becomes universal public domain
…literally none of that is true. Disney could shut down every last vestige of Marvel tomorrow, even the movies, and it would make no difference whatsoever to the copyright expiry.
Even the trademarks would take years to expire, and that wouldn’t let you use the Marvel characters, it would be like Mar-Vell vs. Billy Batson for the Captain Marvel name.
I think by the time you’re in your forties like most of us you realize that these characters sort of …. grow in circles. That’s just the nature of aging franchises.
You either accept that these books are made for younger people, become more casual about continuity, accept updates that maybe were not done with you in mind…
or you turn your once fun hobby into a miserable life long waste of time.
Yeah, copyright last a long time. For work for hire it depends on creation (120 years) and publication (95 years). E.g. Captain America as a character will become public domain in 2060, while the first story in 2035. That is if they don’t change the laws again.
If Marvel didn’t published a comic titled Captain America for a few years someone else could do it (featuring an different character with the same name). Exact time seems to be 3 to 5 years depending on stuff…
Excellent review, Paul. Thanks for all your work here – I don’t know how you keep up with it, but I’m very happy that you do!
Bengt> Yeah, copyright last a long time. For work for hire it depends on creation (120 years) and publication (95 years). E.g. Captain America as a character will become public domain in 2060, while the first story in 2035. That is if they don’t change the laws again.
No, as it stands, Captain America as a character, as depicted in Captain America Comics #1, will become PD in the USA (other countries may vary) on 1st January 2035. Other elements will follow in subsequent years, some much later – the round shield didn’t debut until #2 in 1941, for instance; and while Bucky will become PD with Cap, the Winter Soldier version of him won’t become public domain this century (as things stand).
If the 120 years thing worked like you say, there wouldn’t have been a rash of Steamboat Willie-styled Mickey Mouse stuff over the past couple of years by everyone except Disney.
IANAL – copyright is 50 years from the death of the creator, if the creation was work for higher than it is created by a corporation and it is 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever is earlier. Titles cannot be copyrighted, that is exclusively trademark laws in the US. Which leads to Captain Marvel, characters copyrighted with the same name but different likenesses and separate copyrights. When DC stopped publishing the title Captain Marvel, Marvel could and did as DC lost the trademark. Both retain copyright and continue to use their Captain Marvel characters.
“When DC stopped publishing the title Captain Marvel, Marvel could and did as DC lost the trademark.”
DC never published a comic titled “Captain Marvel.” By the time DC got hold of the character in 1972, Marvel was already publishing their own Captain Marvel series.
SanityOrMadness: Steamboat Willie was copyrighted to Disney the person and went by the author rules. Marvel claims* all their characters are from work for hire, so would go by the 95/120 rules.
* Has any lawsuit about this gone through a trial to set some precedence or have they just been settled?
I am too lazy to fully answer this but to get you started. Marvel bought Malibu outright, and the Malibu published materials are now legally considered Marvel publications. Sony bought some assets from the Marvel bankrupcy and has movie rights to Spider-man, but the Spider man comics are not owned by Sony.
Was DC’s purchase of Fawcette closer to Marvel’s buying Malibu or Sony’s buying assets? Someone else here can probably answer this on the top of their head.
If you are adventuresome, start with Marvel Characters inc. versus Kirby. Don’t be too distracted by the Miracleman lawsuits, they are interesting but not on topic.
@Bengt:
Two things:
1) It’s 95 *or* 120. Not 95 *and* 120.
2) There is no such thing as a character under copyright law. Only works – which, in this context, means “stories”. If you write a story of a character, legally that is just a derivative work of a previous story or stories. So if a story is public domain, you can use anything introduced in* that story (including characters) as public domain.
(*I specify “introduced” because there are some later PD stories of characters like Superman – the Fleisher cartoons, for example – owing to non-renewal under an old system. You can’t use anything from those which is itself derivative of a still-copyrighted work as PD)
The Captain Marvel situation is a long and complicated one. The short answer is that from 1971-1991 DC licensed the Captain Marvel/Shazam! IP from Fawcett, so it was a bit more of a Sony/Spider-Man situation. Then, in 1991, they bought the IP outright, so it became more similar to Marvel/Malibu.
The longer story of course starts with an entirely different copyright case, a lawsuit from DC claiming that Captain Marvel infringed on Superman. It was in litigation for most of the 1940s and appealed several times. My understanding of the final decision was that it was found that Captain Marvel DID infringe on Superman, but that the Superman strip that it infringed on was not properly copyrighted at the time. In any case, rather than continue to further litigation, Fawcett agreed to stop publishing comic books in 1951, but did not relinquish their copyright – so yes, this clearly demonstrates that copyright is not dependent on continued publication.
So when DC published Captain Marvel comics under the Shazam! banner starting in 1971, this was actually through a licesing agreement with Fawcett. DC paid Fawcett a fee everytime the characters appeared, whether in the Shazam! comic or in cross-overs with DC characters. They even got C.C. Beck and other Golden Age Fawcett artists to draw Shazam! title. I presume the ’74 Shazam! TV series was also produced under a similar licensing agreement.
Since DC bought the property outright in 1991, the copyright to most classic Fawcett comics now belongs to DC/Warner Bros Discovery. However, today there are some individual Golden Age Captain Marvel comic books that are still in the public domain, and some where the actual copyright is very murky.
The other twist, which most of us know, is that in the late ’60s Marvel realized that the trademark to publish a comic CALLED Captain Marvel was available, and started publishing a comic book their own unrelated character – which goes to Bengt’s point about a comic’s trademark needing to be maintained. However, that’s a separate issue from copyright.
@Everyone else who commented/replied
I concede I stand corrected but the fact that theres already this much energetic discussion online (such as in this webite) over this is proof of how messy Intellectual Property law can get , especially in regards to publishing USAmerican corporate comics (remember other infamous examples such as Marvel Comics vs Defiant / Jim Shooter* , Marvel Comics vs Alan Moore , DC Comics vs Alan Moore , Todd McFarlane vs Neil Gaiman) that I believe that Marvel’s corporate management (with the advice and at the urging of their legal counsel) would just rather err on the side of caution by playing safe in maintaining the status quo of continuing to publish their marquee mainstays for as long as possible in order to annul/avoid any possible problems arising from rival fan-made versions of their canon continuity (examples: Ninento vs Pokemon Uraninum , Kodansha vs Attack on Titan : Requiem, https://foleyhoag.com/news-and-insights/blogs/making-your-mark-blog/2016/october/10-copyright-cases-every-fan-fiction-writer-should-know-about/) LOL
* I recommend to everyone Defiant’s main series Warriors of Plasm , it’s my favorite work of Jim Shooter and Dave Lapham and its worldbuilding lore of Plasm could be argued as a possible influence:inspiration for the XBooks’ own Krakoa Era
Just to add a little anecdote to the discussion, some time ago Tom Brevoort wrote in his newsletter that he had commissioned a variant cover for Iron Man (if I’m not mistaken) featuring War Machine so that he could include the logo on the cover, as requested by the legal department for trademark reasons, if I remember correctly.
“There is no such thing as a character under copyright law.”
This isn’t correct – there’s case law in (at the least) the USA, the UK and Germany holding that copyright can subsist in characters as works in their own right, in addition to the copyright in the stories in which they appear. What that actually adds in practice, beyond potential for confusion, may be debatable.
@Aro – Not 1971. 1972. The licensing deal between DC and Fawcett was made in June of 1972. DC’s first issue of Shazam! was published in December of 1972 (bearing a cover date of February 1973).
Bleeding Cool’s Bestseller List is out. X-Men Age of Revelation Finale came in 5th, which is good, because this is the first time an Age of Revelation book has returned to the charts in weeks. But it’s less impressive than it sounds, since there were no DC books this week and Punisher beat it. Not good for the grand finale of a crossover that featured the big reveal of the Chairman’s identity.
“so they need to publish a certain amount of books every week/month in order to keep the legal rights for the being the sole private owner of their decades-old intellectual properties”
Technically not accurate, but legal’s approach to this is fairly close. There is an expression that the IP isn’t real until after it has been successfully defended in court. What Marvel’s legal department requires internally, is not limited to the text of copyright legislation. They want to bury any lawsuits with overwhelming evidence.
Apparently Fawcett didn’t uphold the Captain Marvel trademark, and it wasn’t part of the license for DC to lose by not publishing.
I learned something new. Thank you Moo and Ayo.
*Aro
Sorry for the typos
@Micheal – Marvel could have juiced the Age of Revelation Finale sales by doing a red band version or blind bag variant.
It’s worth pointing out that part of what made this Age of Apocalypse ripoff event even more uninspired is that Marvel goes to this well every five years or less. We had Ages (plural) of Apocalypse, the 10th anniversary AoA series, the “ongoing” AoA series, crossovers with AoA in Exiles and Uncanny X-Force, Age of X-Man, and Sins of Sinister was basically another AoA redux.
The sales figures for December are out. AmazIng X-Men 3 came in 41st, Spider-Man & Wolverine 8 came in 49th, Unbreakable X-Men 3 came in 51st, Laura Kinney: Sabretooth came in 67th, Age of Revelation Finale came in 70th, Book of Revelation 3 came in 72nd, Radioactive Spider-Man came in 76th, Rogue Storm 3 came in 81st, The Last Wolverine 3 came in 87th, Sinister’s Six 3 came in 91st, Iron & Frost 3 came in 93rd, Binary 3 came in 97th, Undeadpool 3 came in 110th, Longshots 3 came in 114th, Expatriate X-Men 3 came in 116th, Cloak or Dagger 3 came in 127th, X-Vengers 3 came in 133rd and Omega Kids 3 came in 140th.
This is bad. A major X-crossover where none of the titles made in the top 40 is horrible. Finale has the excuse that it came out last week but so did Sorcerer Supreme and that came in 38th.
The real question is how will sales be this week- will sales return to normal now that Age of Revelation is over? Of particular interest is Wolverine. The Last Wolverine came in 87th. Was this because readers didn’t realize that Logan would be appearing and not just Leonard? Or has Ahmed’s writing damaged Wolverine’s sales?
AoA itself was basically inspired by Days of Future Past. A dark alternate timeline brought on by an assassination.
As someone who didn’t overly care for Age of Apocalypse at the time, that we keep going back to that well every few years is something I find utterly uninteresting and avoid reading. It’s just so tired and uninspired and inevitably a waste of time at this point.
Another nail in AoR’s coffin was that it happened at pretty much exactly the same time as a long form “Doom takes over the entire world” storyline (So one’s weekly “global despot” story requirement was already satisfied) and, more bafflingly, was released in the middle of Marvel’s other AoA anniversary events just led to confusion on confusion.