X-MEN: AGE OF REVELATION FINALE #1
Writer: Jed MacKay
Pencillers: Ryan Stegman with Netho Diaz
Inker: JP Mayer
Colourist: Marcio Menyz
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort

COVER: Revelation stands over Wolverine, Cyclops, Kid Omega and Psylocke as the last survivor.

This one-shot ends the Age of Revelation event, and since it’s the only X-book out this week (aside from the Infinity Comic), we’ll talk about how it went in this week’s X-Axis post. First, though…

PAGE 1. Professor X and Apocalypse lead the Arakko army through the portal.

This is the same scene that we saw at the end of Amazing X-Men #3 and X-Men: Book of Revelation #3, although the dialogue is new. Professor X tells us that he’s been in “exile” from Earth for years, though we never did get an explanation of what he was doing on Arakko in the first place. The obvious reading would be that he’s been in space since “X-Manhunt” – he’s meant to be appearing in an Exiles book in 2026, after all – but why he returns to Arakko rather than Earth is unclear. Perhaps he was always trying to raise forces to help deal with Revelation.

PAGE 2. Revelation reflects on his plan.

This picks up on a scene in Book of Revelation #3, which also indicated that Revelation had lost his mind somewhere. The suggestion in that issue seemed to be that he had been driven made by attempting to reconcile his actual values with the “strongest survive” mission imposed on him by Apocalypse, which had led to him trying to remake the whole world in order to erase the contradiction. He also claimed in that scene that millions had died because of his “mistake”; this issue confirms that he was referring to the death toll from the X-Virus, which was apparently intended simply to transform all humans into mutants, not to kill them.

Revelation implies here that another cause of his insanity is the fact that everyone around him is virtually compelled to agree with him – even when he isn’t actively using his power to compel obedience, he’s superhumanly persuasive by instinct alone. This means that he experiences himself as the only character with agency in a world of NPCs. Something similar was done back in the Krakoan era with Empath in Hellions. 

Revelation suggests that the death of his wife Bei in the Overture one-shot removed his last link with sanity, presumably because she was effectively immune to his power. However, his schemes seem to have been in effect since way before that point, so it’s not obvious in plot terms what difference Bei’s death actually made.

At any rate, Revelation is doubling down on his plan on the grounds that seeing it through to a conclusion is the only way to justify the damage that it’s already caused.

PAGE 3. Cyclops, Psylocke and Glob Herman arrive on the scene.

The Arakko forces are fighting some of Revelation’s Seraphim.

I don’t think Cyclops actually did say that they’d need an army to get close to Revelation, as Glob Herman claims. In Amazing X-Men #3, Cyclops just said that “We’re wildly outnumbered so we have to do this quietly.”

PAGES 4-5. The X-Men are reunited with Wolverine.

As the footnote indicates, Logan was freed from Revelation’s control in Last Wolverine #3, apparently as the side effect of the trauma from losing his left arm. Nightcrawler, Leonard (the AoR Wolverine) and Heather Hudson do indeed all die in that issue.

Most of the Seraphim that he’s killed are generics, but the masked women at the top left of page 4 panel 4 seems to be Dragoness.

PAGES 6-7. Kid Omega attacks Professor X.

As openly acknowledged later in the issue, this psychic battle, including the art style, is a callback to their psychic battle in X-Men #13. Although Quentin appears as an adult, he’s wearing his black and red Omega Gang sweater from his earliest appearances in New X-Men.

PAGE 8. The rest of the X-Men shelter in Wiz-Kid’s bunker.

Schwarzchild’s black hole power enables the mind swap between time periods.

Animalia refers to the AoR Beast as “my Beast”. It’s been strongly hinted throughout the event that the time-travelling Beast from the past is not in fact the Beast she knew, and we’ll come back to that; Beast’s reaction here is probably more to do with a fear that he might have been found out.

PAGE 9. Kid Omega defeats Professor X.

As Kid Omega points out, he did win in X-Men #13, more by boobytrapping his own mind than by directly prevailing in combat. But it wasn’t meant to be a sporting contest, and Quentin did set the traps himself, so he’s perfectly entitled to claim it as a victory.

Quentin calls up some of the Omega Kids to help him, the point being that he’s learned from Professor X the value of getting children to do your dirty work for you. This is a bit of a problem, because the Omega Kids don’t all appear to be psychics, and the ones appearing in the Omega Kids miniseries were either killed or mindwiped at the end because they’d run out of control. The blank figures seen here are presumably the next in line for psychic training, but there’s a real disconnect between this scene and Quentin’s own mini – which might explain why they’re drawn so anonymously.

PAGES 10-12. The X-Men, Apocalypse and Revelation confront one another.

Revelation is accompanied by Kid Omega and his two remaining Choristers, Chance and Khera.

Revelation still considers himself morally superior to both Apocalypse and Wolverine, dismissing them as killers. More precisely, his objection to them isn’t so much that they’ve killed large numbers of people as that this is their standard solution to a problem.

PAGE 13. Revelation justifies his actions.

He essentially repeats the point that he has to see his plan through in order to make the deaths worthwhile, but also explains that the idea was to turn everyone into a mutant and thus avoid the need for war. It’s not obvious that Apocalypse would have accepted this interpretation of “survival of the fittest”, since some mutants would still be fitter than others (whatever that means), but Revelation seems able to accept it.

Revelation claims that he “engineered the X-virus by speaking to it, telling it what I wanted it to be.” This basically accords with X-Men: Age of Revelation #0, where Xorn tells us that “With Cortez magnifying his power, Revelation could not only speak to conscious minds, but to the very components of living things, coaxing and cajoling them to change according to his design.” Issue #0 makes sure not to mention this until after the X-Virus part of the narrative, but Cortez was available to Revelation before the X-Virus happened.

This is the first suggestion we’ve had that Revelation’s attempts to control biology in this way are unreliable, presumably because they’re working at the edge of his powers. Described as it is in this issue, Revelation has essentially been trying to achieve genetic engineering by way of vibe coding (which matches his computing background), with predictably disastrous results once it goes into production.

PAGES 14-19. Everyone fights.

Self-explanatory. Revelation is (physically) defeated, and Kid Omega dies.

PAGE 20. Revelation explains why he wanted an invasion.

Revelation already told us in Book of Revelation #3 that he wanted Arakko to invade in order to “kick-start the biological similarity”. He explains here that this simply meant achieving a large enough mutant population in the Revelation Territories to bring about a tipping point in the Territories, which in turn would serve as a tipping point for the world. Therefore, he already won before the issue had started, simply by getting the Arakko army to show up..

PAGES 21-23. The X-Virus starts to consume everything, and Scott and Hank return to their home time.

Scott wants to keep fighting, despite having no plan whatsoever for how to deal with this situation. He simply asserts that they must be able to save the world because that’s the genre convention. Hank (who at this point is pretty obviously the Krakoan version of Hank) simply rejects that sort of heroic thinking and regards the whole storyline as simply a warning that they can learn from.

Before departing, Hank tells the future Jen that she’s “shown my something about myself, or a version of myself”, which he won’t forget. This is obviously something to do with him learning about the clone Beast’s relationship with her and being humanised by it to some degree, but no doubt we’ll get to it in future issues of X-Men.

PAGE 24. The AoR Beast returns and tries to send a message to the past.

As we see at the end of the issue, the AoR Beast swapped places with the Chairman of 3K, the very strong implication being that this is the Krakoan Beast. AoR Beast seems to have no knowledge of where he was in the past; he only seems sure of what’s happened when Jen confirms that the person who replaced him was definitely Hank McCoy. The final page explains that the Chairman’s body is “synthetic” and has counter-measures to shut it down in the event of possession, so presumably Hank has spent the last week sitting immobile in a chair in 3K’s headquarters.

PAGES 25-28. Earth becomes Revelation, the Living Planet.

The X-Men (including Apocalypse) go down fighting in a display of openly futile defiance. Cutaways show the deaths of Phoenix (still in Berverly, from Binary), Rogue and Gambit (from Unbreakable X-Men) and Spider-Man (from Radioactive Spider-Man).

PAGE 29. Cyclops wakes up back in the Factory in the present day.

The future Cyclops was subdued and imprisoned, and failed in his attempt to kill Revelation. In the previous scene, future Cyclops only gets time to explain that he failed, and says that Hank didn’t appear along with him, implying that this might somehow be significant. Solicitations indicate that we’ll get more on what happened with the future Cyclops in the next issue of X-Men. It’s possible that Cyclops did in fact succeed in altering history in some other respect – or that Hank swapping with the Chairman of 3K had consequences of its own – and that this explains why Magneto’s degenerative disorder appeared to have been wiped from history in Amazing X-Men #3.

PAGE 30. The Chairman wakes up.

The Chairman expects the other 3K members to “have been up to all sorts in my absence”, which might fit with Cassandra Nova’s rogue schemes over in Astonishing X-Men Infinity Comic.

The clear implication of this scene is that the Chairman is the Krakoan Beast, having decanted his mind into a “synthetic body”, which is why he no longer has the same physique. He specifically refers to remaking the future “in our own image, as I tried to do before Krakoa fell”, and uses Hank’s catchphrase “Oh my stars and garters”. Basically, the Chairman has been given the idea to do the X-Virus properly.