X-MEN: AGE OF REVELATION INFINITY COMIC #7. By Alex Paknadel, Adoardo Audino, KJ Díaz & Clayton Cowles. One last back story arc for the Age of Revelation, then. This one is about how Glob Herman wound up becoming a violent radical. He starts off the way we normally see him in Alaska, just a bit disappointed about the how same-y Revelation’s paradise is. He winds up being accused of counter-revolutionary thought on the basis of a single conversation with an old school friend (and yes, Radian really is a very minor New X-Men character). And he gets rescued by a mutated version of the Punisher. So apparently we’re getting “Punisher mentors Glob Herman” for the next two issues. And that sounds like it could be quite fun, since it’s such a ridiculous clash of characters. The Punisher doesn’t belong in this storyline at all, in a good way. This is apparently Alex Paknadel’s last contribution to the Infinity comics – if they’re even continuing after Age of Revelation, given how many other ones have been wrapped up lately – but it seems like a pretty solid entry.

X-MEN: BOOK OF REVELATION #3. (Annotations here.) For such a sprawling event, Age of Revelation has only two books you really need to read, and they’re the Jed MacKay ones. Amazing X-Men and Book of Revelation are both behaving like an actual crossover, converging for the finale issue. Last Wolverine might possibly be feeding into the finale, but pretty much everything else feels peripheral – or at most as if they’re setting up future plot points for the 2026 titles. But these two books are at least bringing us to some sense of events coming to a head, with the X-Men showing up in Philadelphia just as Arakko invades.

That said, this issue consists mostly of Revelation’s showdown with Elbecca, and an explanation of what he’s really up to. One issue with MacKay’s minis is that the plots may be too minimalist, but they do generally work a character pieces. Here, we get the echoes of Doug’s original personality as he keeps up his computer hobby, and a self-justifying speech about what he’s really trying to achieve. As I read it, the idea seems to be that he’s been driven mad by a compulsion to achieve Apocalypse’s goal that he can only reconcile with his other beliefs by doing something completely deranged – and obviously the direction for the present-day Doug will be to avert this timeline. Netho Diaz’s art has him swinging wildly from relative calm to hysterical emoting, and I can’t honestly figure out whether this is intentional or just massive overacting. It doesn’t quite land for me, anyway, and I’m not sure the conspicuous grid layouts are adding much either. But the subtler moments work.

ROGUE STORM #3. (Annotations here.) This is one of the books that’s much more interested in doing its own near-future storyline than in having anything to do with the wider Age of Revelation – it has some crossover with Unbreakable X-Men, but that book is pretty much detached too. As with Storm, this has a rather convoluted timeline which probably does more to obscure the plot than to help it, but the story itself is clear enough in the end, and Boschi really does deliver some lovely bold artwork here, with an engagingly creepy Eēgūn shifting appearance in an otherwise stable world. I notice the excessive use of sound effects has stopped entirely, and since that happens in mid-arc, I can only assume that someone had a word. Having two versions of Rogue in AoR seems a very odd choice, but at its core it allows for a fairly simple story: Storm is the only X-Man who accepts the copy as a real person, Rogue tries to save Storm and winds up getting herself killed, Storm brings Rogue back to life while sacrificing herself to contain Eēgūn. The trouble is that the “bringing Rogue back” bit feels entirely arbitrary and tacked on, and it’s never really clear what the other choice was, and thus what Storm sacrificed to do it. But there’s something in there. Now, whether we really needed a story where Storm is better at magic than Dr Voodoo… I know we’ve had some material in the present-day book about her undeveloped magical potential, but really, she doesn’t have to be the best at everything. It clearly has an appeal to Storm’s fans, but she really could do with some redeeming flaws these days.

LAST WOLVERINE #3. (Annotations here.) In theory I see where this is going. Heather sets out to “free” Wolverine by using the Muramasa Blade to kill him, but ironically winds up freeing him anyway by using it for a bit of light amputation instead. Leonard’s effort to serve as a stand-in heroic Wolverine ultimately pays dividends, but he has to sacrifice his own humanity to do it – yet since he’s giving in to his berserker rage, it doesn’t even feel like a sacrifice to him. In fact, perhaps his extremely sunny and naive disposition throughout this series is as much as anything a side effect of him working so hard to suppress anything remotely approaching his dark side. And we get Leonard saving Logan in an inverted version of the way Logan drove him away from the Revelation Territories back in the flashback in issue #1. On the other hand, Kurt seems tacked on, and the art is missing something.

Partly it’s the lack of flow in the action sequences. Look at 11 in the digital edition (or page 12 if you’re going by Kindle’s numbers, because they still haven’t fixed that bug). Panel 1: Leonard runs straight at Logan and levels him. Panel 2: Logan is clambering on Leonard’s back. Panel 3: somehow, Leonard is now suddenly behind Logan and grabbing him. Panel 4: Logan swipes at Leonard with the same arm that Leonard was grabbing in the previous panel – not the free arm, which would actually have made sense. Panel 5: close up of Leonard. Panel 6: Leonard is running towards an off-panel Logan (when did the distance between them appear?). It’s choppy, and doesn’t exactly reward attention. But the other issue is one of scale and drama; it’s an issue that mostly consists of people punching one another on the roof of an office building, and it pretty much looks like that. It’s all a bit muted, I think, and doesn’t really pull off what the story was going for.

OMEGA KIDS #3. By Tony Fleecs, Andrés Genlot, Fer Sifuentes-Sujo & Travis Lanham. Well, as you’d probably expect, Quentin gets control of his prodigies again. That’s not particularly surprising (unless they were going to have Quentin’s defeat playing into Revelation’s vulnerability), and I’m a little underwhelmed by the lack of individuality shown by the Omega Kids themselves in this issue. Bailey seemed to be set up as the psycho and Nell as the relatively nice one, but nothing really comes of that. Where the issue does score is in Quentin’s reaction to figuring out what’s going on. Since he still considers himself one of the good guys, he’s honestly horrified by the kids’ disregard for what he regards as innocent civilians. But he’s also desperately proud of what a good job he must have done as teacher to make these maniacs so dangerous. Ultimately all the kids succeed in doing is in prompting him to raise his game, at which point he’s way out of their league – and Genlot does get across the idea that Quentin is as dangerous as they are, even as he firmly considers himself to be the reasonable one. I don’t think it quite sticks the landing, because of the kids themselves becoming interchangeable, but Quentin’s arc works for me.

RADIOACTIVE SPIDER-MAN #3. By Joe Kelly, Kev Walker, Cam Smith, Wade von Grawbadger, Elisabetta D’Amico, Chris Sotomayor & Joe Caramagno. Ten years into the Age of Revelation, Spider-Man finally has to accept that now that Aunt May has turned into a dangerous monster, it’s perhaps time to let her die. This is getting into parodic territory, with Spider-Man attempting to fulfil his usual function of protecting Aunt May beyond all possible reason, despite being warned how irrational this is. But I don’t think it’s intended to be read that way, since much of this issue is devoted to flashbacks of May telling Peter to accept her mortality. It gets away with it largely on the strength of Walker’s art, which gives everything and everyone a suitably run-down look while still feeling dynamic and bold; I really wish someone would give him a higher profile assignment at Marvel, because his art is always a pleasure.