X-Men: Book of Revelation #3 annotations
X-MEN: BOOK OF REVELATION #3
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Netho Diaz
Inkers: Sean Parsons & JP Mayer
Colourist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: Revelation squares off against Elbecca and, oddly, Kitty Pryde, who doesn’t appear in this issue – making this a conflation of scenes from issues #2 and #3. This is the final issue of the series, with the story continuing in the X-Men: Age of Revelation – Finale one-shot.
PAGES 1-2. Flashback: Apocalypse despatches Elbecca to Earth.
We established last issue that Elbecca was not actually a little girl from the Revelation Territories, but an Arakkii spy with a “cover personality” who had been sent to infiltrate the Choristers and weaken Revelation. This flashback shows her being sent on that mission in the first place. Revelation points out later in the issue that this scheme must have been planned long before Arakko received word from Bei of his plans (in X-Men: Age of Revelation – Overture and the World of Revelation one-shot), and thus can’t be a reaction to Bei’s message. This seems likely to be right, and raises the question of why Apocalypse was already scheming to bring Revelation down even before then. Revelation’s explanation of his motives later in the issue probably provides the answer to that.
Elbecca’s real name is “Virta the Subtle”, implied to be something of a derogatory term in the rather direct context of Arakko culture. However, Virta generally seems to regard herself as a conventional Arakkii unbothered by the views of others. She certainly appears patriotic.
Apocalypse is flanked by his son Death, who we saw in issue #1, and Professor X, who was shown on Arakko in the World of Revelation one-shot. Professor X seems troubled by all this – it’s unclear whether that’s because he worries about war in general, or about Apocalypse’s motives in particular, or simply because Apocalypse is sending a child on a mission is unclear. It’s practically a stock element in the X-books to criticise Professor X for using child soldiers, but Virta is young even by his standards.
PAGES 3-4. The funeral of Fabian Cortez.
Cortez was killed by Elbecca last issue. Chance’s dialogue indicates that his death has been ascribed to suicide after Revelation removed his ambition as punishment earlier in that issue (which would be plausible enough, give his condition before Elbecca killed him). Interestingly, it’s Khora, the other Arakkii representative, who seems to think there’s a bigger picture here.
Only the other Choristers attend his funeral. This could be because his death is being kept secret, at least until the ranks of the Choristers are replenished. If it was simply that attendance was optional and nobody else cared enough to come, then Khora and Chance probably wouldn’t have shown up either.
Revelation’s eulogy tells us that Cortez “disappointed me, disappointed us all” and “betrayed me, betrayed us all”, coming close to equating himself to the wider community. Even so, Revelation seems to think that Cortez merits a funeral, or at least that the other Choristers need to see him have one. Revelation is clearly troubled by the loss of two power-boosters within a fortnight and has the Seraphim searching for replacements.
“One killed the other. Or had her killed.” Cortez tipped off the X-Men to the whereabouts of Topaz, leading to her being killed by Glob Herman in the Overture one-shot.
PAGES 5-7. Elbecca plants a seed to grow a gateway from Arakko.
“The single loyalist in this next of traitors to Apocalypse’s dream.” Revelation is meant to be the heir to Apocalypse, who apparently views the entire direction of Revelation’s society as contrary to his “survival of the fittest” tenure. After all, it seems to be embracing mutants of all sorts.
“The damned in Providence…” Providence is part of the Darkchild’s territory, and linked to Limbo, as seen over in Amazing X-Men.
“Everyone knows that Arakko is not subtle.” Elbecca believes that she succeeded where everyone else failed because nobody was looking out for an Arakkii spy – and as illustration, points out that Death left a seed for her when he was forced to his knees by Revelation in issue #1. We don’t actually see this happen in issue #1, but there are plenty of panels in that sequence where Death’s would have the opportunity.
However, Revelation claims later that he was indeed anticipating an Arakkii infiltrator, though it seems he hasn’t picked up on it being Elbecca. And indeed Elbecca’s reasoning doesn’t quite make sense: Revelation’s not meant to know that she’s from Arakko, so why would his cultural prejudices against Arakko give her any advantage over the other mutants who tried and failed to stop him?
PAGES 8-10. Elbecca vists Revelation.
“I loved computers when I was your age…” Cypher was originally introduced as Kitty’s hacker friend. Computers are apparently obsolete in the Revelation Territories, with most things being supplied by the land itself.
“You don’t believe?” Revelation spells out directly that his use of religious iconography is purely to manipulate others; he doesn’t actually view himself in that way. He drops his guard here and seems willing to explain it directly to Elbecca, presumably because he hasn’t yet worked out that she’s the long-anticipated Arakkii assassin, and he’s still trying to bring her into his inner circle.
“Didn’t Death say you had abandoned your mission?” In issue #1. Revelation firmly maintains that he simply has a different interpretation of his mission from Apocalypse.
“No matter what it cost me. My best friend. My wife.” His wife Bei was killed in Overture, and Revelation claims later in the issue that he was deliberately setting her up to invite an Arakkii invasion. His “best friend” is Warlock, and Revelation explains that he had to add Warlock’s technarch biomass into the initial X-Virus outbreak in order to make it virulent enough. Revelation seems genuinely upset by this memory and claims, with apparent sincerity, that Warlock genuinely wanted to do this.
He seems legitimately troubled by Elbecca’s point that his powers make everyone agree with him – and in fairness, there has generally been a distinction between Revelation directly compelling people to do as he says, or simply making his case to them. But as the religious iconography exchange has just explained, Revelation’s power also extends to knowing how to be maximally persuasive.
Although it hasn’t been a major feature of the event, references to Technarch biomass in the Territories have also appeared in Undeadpool and X-Vengers.
“Mutant weapon.” This was indeed a common term for mutant powers on Arakko in X-Men Red.
PAGES 11-12. Elbecca tries to kill Revelation.
Although Revelation’s dialogue could be read as meaning that he knew Elbecca was an infiltrator, his reaction to her “mutant weapon” idiom suggests that what he really mans that he was expecting an attack from Arakko at some point. He says later on that he at least had doubts on the point, but might be bluffing.
PAGES 13-16. Revelation explains his plan.
Page 13 is simply a symbolic panel showing Apocalypse and his Horsemen on the left, and Revelation, Bei and Warlock on the right. Page 15 is just an image of Ego, the Living Planet.
Revelation explains that he wanted to square his mission from Apocalypse – to make sure that only the storng survived – with his desire to care for the weak. His solution to this is to erase the distinction between strong and weak by merging everyone into a single entity, inspired by Ego the Living Planet. Clearly, this is not what Apocalypse had in mind.
He characterises this as his solution to “an insane paradox”. Intriguingly, he seems to take it as read that he had no alternative but to pursue Apocalypse’s mission, despite acknowledging that they conflicted with one of his deepest values. Is it possible that Apocalypse’s upgrade left Revelation with a compulsion to pursue his mission, and that his attempts to rationalise it with his own beliefs have driven him mad?
Ego the Living Planet debuted in Thor #132 (1966) and is much as described here. Stories conflict somewhat as to whether Ego is a single scientist who merged with all the biomass on his world (including the rest of his race), or a gestalt of the entire population (which is getting us back into Dominion territory from the Krakoan era). Revelation certainly understands it to be the latter, though if there’s a core personality, then presumably it’s going to be him.
“Millions died because I made a mistake.” This is a curious comment – it’s not obvious what Revelation has in mind here, unless it’s something to do with the death toll from the first, inadequate version of the X-Virus.
PAGES 17-19. Revelation defeats Elbecca.
He does try to simply subdue her, but his power misfires because he addresses her as “Elbecca”, when the current personality regards herself as Virta. That, and the analogies to programming earlier in the issue, suggest we may be heading for a finale where Revelation is tricked into the giving the wrong orders.
According to Revelation, he wants Arakko to invade so that the can “kick-start the biological singularity” – apparently, there is a window of opportunity here where the X-Virus has spread far enough, but the humans and the Darkchild have yet to defeat him. Revelation seems to believe that one or other of them would defeat him in the end. Quite how the Arakko invasion helps the plan isn’t spelt out, but presumably it’s something to do with increasing the number of mutants in the territories.
PAGE 20. Professor X and Apocalypse lead the Arakko army to Earth.
We also saw this in Amazing X-Men #3, though this version shows soldiers following them, which wasn’t visible in the previous issue.
Wow. A lot of this seems to be leftover plot ideas from Hickman’s run being directly plugged into this story with some terms changed so we’re not thrown back during Krakoa. The importance given to Ego reads very strange, trying to find some way to avoid references to Ascension and Dominion.
So, Hickman’s plan for Doug (and the “Trickster Titan”) in place of Enigma seems to have been that Doug, Warlock, and Krakoa planned to infect all the mutants on Krakoa with the TO-virus in order to attempt to overcome the distinction between biological and technological.
Are we done yet? Are we done yet? Are we done yet?
Doug killing his wife and using his best friend to turn the entire world into an Ego-mind made up of himself is just such a horrible betrayal of the character.
Why can’t he just be the nice guy whose power is to be a universal translator, and leave the wacky world domination schemes to Apocalypse and Sinister?
@The Other Michael, Brevoort had to clean up the Heir of Apocalypse mess somehow and apparently Sinister wouldn’t have cut it
Doug seems genuinely unsure whether he used his power on Warlock to compel him to die. I would tend to think he did- I can’t see Warlock agreeing to such a crazy scheme otherwise.
Doug sacrificing Warlock to bring a twisted peace to the world was also done by the Truefriend, another evil future version of Doug.
One thing that’s not clear from Doug’s speech- did he already plan on turning the Earth into Ego when he offered to join Scott’s X-Men?
@MaakuJ- The other candidate for Apocalypse’s heir was Rictor. Arguably Rictor would have been a better choice, since he was already Apocalypse’s disciple on Krakoa.
Michael-
Re: Rictor-Try something new and not use Hickman’s plots that were lying around in Jordan White’s desk? Perish forbid.
Re: Doug’s reading an old issue of Thor and getting the insane idea to copy it-No. I think this is either an alternate future or Doug’s decision came about based on something that happened in the current-day’s future prior to X Years Later. I think that will be the ethical dilemma or the returning X-Men. Future Scott went back in time to kill Doug, but Doug is still innocent. He has no intention of deciding to…turn Earth into Ego (we’re really going with this, eh? sigh OK.).
*ethical dilemma of the returning X-Men *comic.
My reading of Doug’s admission that he does not believe his own tale was that he had realized that Elbecca was working against his plans and wanted to provoke her into action to learn how exactly she would react.
Independently, he also expected to be tested by Apocalypse at some point, because that is what Apocalypse does. Since there was no overt probing in ten years, the unavoidable implication is that Apocalypse would make some sort of covert operation. That could be through Elbecca, and then again Elbecca could be working for someone else instead. He even shows a slight amount of surprise when she hurts him, and expresses the fact as confirmation that she is from Arakko.
Hard to tell what exactly he sees as the “mistake that cost millions of lives”, but one obvious possibility is that he has simply realized that his rule brought disaster and he can only atone by literally undoing the damage – which is, by going back in time and branching out a new timeline. Presumably from a time before Magneto’s disease first manifested. That would also mean that most of “From the Ashes” would thereby become a divergent timeline, rewriting as much of the events since as writers and editors want to.
I find myself wondering if Xavier is not also a sleep agent, in this case working for Doug in Apocalypse’s turf. Do we know of any Arakkii with powers that could rewrite the past? Or maybe Darkchild’s limbo will provide the means for rewriting the past?
We have only guesses on what exactly motivated Warlock to go along with Doug’s plan. There is a chance that he genuinely agreed for reasons of his own, perhaps even something that can help redeem Doug or at least reverse the damage from the X-Virus. For all we know Warlock is dispersed instead of actually dead; he has been in similar situations before, although not anywhere near this much.
I’ll continue to give MacKay some breathing room, as his books have been pretty good. Doug’s plan here is pretty supervillain – if Apocalypse is against you, you know you’re pretty far gone.
It’s interesting seeing Doug admit that he made mistakes here. I wonder if that’s playing for his audience (his powers making him good at communication) or if his doubts are real.
I also wonder whose side Xavier is on. He hasn’t really had any characterization post-Krakoa, so maybe he and Apocalypse really have come to an accord and maybe he’s just trying to get his old student to see reason. This can’t be a bid to get Xavier back on the table in the present, since he’s off in space doing space things, but I’d figured he’d return to set up X-Men movies in 2028 or whenever that happens.
From the hints and conjecture, I think I’d have enjoyed Sins of Cypher far more than both this and the Sinister story we got (nothing against the latter but still). Imagine the jaw drop if this happy kid who sits in a tree, suddenly became a maths god and ate the whole damn nation. We knew he was up to *something*, but that would have been a hell of a swerve.
I like the real Doug showing up in private – tinkering with an old PC, drinking coffee out of a mug, calling the little murderous tyke ‘kiddo’. Obviously it’s been brought up in earlier issues, but it’s still a fun contrast to the whole ‘attend me, minions’ stuff elsewhere.
“Why can’t he just be the nice guy whose power is to be a universal translator, and leave the wacky world domination schemes to Apocalypse and Sinister?”
My heart agrees with you 1000%, Michael.
My head responds, “Because these are action-oriented superhero comics that’ve been running for 60+ years, and eventually you run out of ideas, and they’ve already done ‘Apocalypse tries to take over the world’ like a dozen times.’ And because a book where Doug founds a grassroots mutant rights outreach program with Berto’s financial backing, builds it into a movement, and slowly rises from private citizen to city councilman to congressman to senator to governor to POTUS would be lovely and engaging and would sell about six copies per issue. And would be wholly incompatible with a universe where mutants need to remain feared and hated indefinitely.”
We already saw this version of Doug Ramsey though, in a New Mutants story-arc where in an alternate dystopian future he becomes the “Truefriend”. So, yeah, apparently they have completely run out of ideas at Marvel.
I’m more bothered by the lack of originality shown in having Spider-Man, 10 years in the future, STILL being obsessed with keeping Aunt May alive.
“So, Hickman’s plan for Doug (and the “Trickster Titan”) in place of Enigma seems to have been that Doug, Warlock, and Krakoa planned to infect all the mutants on Krakoa with the TO-virus in order to attempt to overcome the distinction between biological and technological.”
This seems very Hickman. His smart guys are always morally suspect.
“Doug killing his wife and using his best friend to turn the entire world into an Ego-mind made up of himself is just such a horrible betrayal of the character.”
I’ve loved Doug since the ’80s, but it seems like Marvel writers mostly want to assassinate his character (sometimes literally). If I were another one of the New Mutants at this point, I would steer clear of Doug no matter how good our friendship used to be. You never know when he might try to kill/use/transform you.
The Doug/Warlock/technovirus dominion plot would have worked in the Krakoa context as it ties up thematically. Tragic consequence of Doug and Warlock’s friendship, character drives plot. Moira would have been drawn in too.
Age of Revelation has almost nothing to do with Doug’s character and is plot driven. Revelation may as well be anyone, for all it matters.
Bah!
Doug was never going to be the villain of Hickman’s run. That was just an unconfirmed fan theory that’s been blown out of proportion.
Denying that Doug was going to be the villain of Hickman’s run is a fan theory that has also been blown out of proportion. It applies equally. There’s no definitive proof either way, but Hickman using Doug in place of Enigma makes a lot of sense with what made it to the page. The “Trickster Titan” made sense as some type of evolved Warlock, Krakoa, Doug considering that a Warlock translates to “deceiver” which is another word for trickster.
Doug’s comments to the T-O Virus/Phalanx at the end of Giant Size Storm were creepy and seemed to be foreshadowing. “I’ll be seeing you soon.”
The fact that Marvel seem to be using a cribsheet left over from Hickman for Revelation is also telling. It has precedent at Marvel, as Claremont left behind a lot of plot notes when he left X-Men which it’s know that editors used for plots during a period of the 1990s X-Men.
Also, unlike Enigma and unlike how Moira was ruined after Hickman, Doug would have made a more sympathetic antagonist (like Hickman’s Moira) whose ideas fit with the themes of the Krakoa-era, trying to overcome divisions. It would have thematically made sense.
…Hickman’s Moira wasn’t sympathetic. She wasn’t outright psychotic, but she wasn’t sympathetic, either.
You could understand what she had been through and why she would want to make the decisions she made by the end of her time on Krakoa. If people say that Magneto was a sympathetic villain due to his past, even though he’s done some hideously vile actions through the years, I’d say Moira was sympathetic, even though her solution was vile. Of course, Morrison said that Magneto is simply a terrorist making excuses for being a horrible person, so your mileage may vary. The fact that Magneto had often been written as a lunatic between Claremont and Morrison could also play into why Morrison didn’t find Magneto sympathetic.
It’s all speculation, of course, but Doug was acting awfully secretive/creepy during most of Hickman’s run. I would be surprised if he wasn’t being set up as some kind of villain, possibly as the variable that Moira didn’t take into account and that ultimately disrupted her own villainous plans.
I’ve read enough Hickman comics to know that he writes the happily married guy as the hero and the powerful, shadowy council as the villains. Doug’s portrayal in Inferno demonstrated his final thesis on that character.
“Doug was never going to be the villain of Hickman’s run. That was just an unconfirmed fan theory that’s been blown out of proportion.”
Especially on here.
“Child soldiers” is a smear often used against Prof. Xavier, but it isn’t true. The youngest O5 X-man he sent out was Iceman at 16, which is over the legal age for child soldiers. He tried keeping Kitty from going on missions with the X-Men and even tried sending her to the New Mutants. This got him labelled a jerk by her, the picture of which is used against him. Cyclops, Storm, and cable were more likely to use child soldiers.
John Byrne retconned Ego to be a singular entity that evolved from space dust, and that interpretation seems to have continued in things like Maximum Security.
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