X-Men: Age of Revelation Finale #1 annotations
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.
Sigh…
Too many callbacks (or allusions) to Krakoa. I kept hoping for a swerve as to the Chairman’s identity. I’m still holding out hope that this Beast is under the control of Sublime, making it a callback to Grant Morrison instead (which at least was 25 years ago, at least). That future version of Beast was the Beast of the Revelation, after all (Biblically speaking).
Oh no. Once the Ego is created, the Ego will exist outside of time and space, meaning the Ego will always have existed and always exist. How will they ever stop the Trickster Ego now?
Really liked this, and the potential storylines coming out of this. The main AoE books written by Jed were great.
So Doug’s original plan was just to turn all humans into mutants. So I guess the present-day Doug can still be saved. I wonder if Scott is going to kick Doug out of the Factory, though.
I do think it a nice twist to have Scott fail to save the future. We were led to believe that Scott’s future self had declined but present-day Scott couldn’t do anything to save the world either.
Hmm. the Chairman is trapped in a synthetic body. I guess that what will happen is he tries to download his mind into Factory Beast’s body and we get a good Beast with all his memories back.
I like the way MacKay characterizes the Chairman. You can tell he misses being friends with Scott.
So I guess that since the Chairman is Hank, he rescued Cassandra Nova from the past with time travel.
This issue shows the problem with Jean and Phoenix. She’s supposed to be nearly omnipotent but she easily gets absorbed into Doug the Living Planet.
Cassandra Nova is immortal. She can control every atom in her body. The past is no longer the past, it has already happened. That’s the problem with stranding someone immortal in the past, it only works as a banishment if the individual is not immortal. Yes, she had an extremely long wait from her perspective, but from the perspective of a person in the present, the person they stranded in the past will miraculously be in the present again. It begs the question of why Nova wouldn’t have changed anything in all the billions of years she spent living through all of history. That would be a huge risk they were taking leaving Nova at the beginning of all lifeforms.
Maybe Cassandra Nova did tamper with the timeline. We’ll see a picture of Julius Caesar, and it’ll be Cassandra Nova in disguise.
The Decade of Doug is now over. Can’t wait for Doug to die and go back to being used as a bad example for Mutants.
“this explains why Magneto’s degenerative disorder appeared to have been wiped from history in Amazing X-Men #3.”
Does it? Wouldn’t any changes to the timeline that could achieve this have to have happened before ‘now’?
Evil Beast’s body being a fake seems like a cheat. Why didn’t they just show less of him?
This was a frustrating read.
In equal parts predictable and inescrutable. Spotlighting Wolverine is just boring and does not fit the plot. Having Beast apparently be both Chairman and Krakoa Beast is unsatisfying, unexplained IMO and irritatingly still just short unconfirmed by my reading. And there isn’t even a clear reason why Hank’s travel to the future botched.
This reads like the most boring half of what a full story was supposed to be.
@Luis- I think the reason why Hank’s time travel was botched was because there were TWO Hanks in the present day.
This resolution made me kind of angry in a way I can’t quite explain. Maybe it’s because three months of myriad storylines all wrapped up with a variety of endings only for it all to be sucked into REVELATION THE LIVING PLANET, thus negating almost everything. X-Vengers? Gone. Cloak and Dagger and their kid? Gone. Rogue and Gambit? Gone. Spider-Man? Gone. Everything is Doug Now. Three months of spinning the wheels only to give us the sort of doomed shitty future that used to be a 22 page What If.
Does Future Cyclops succeed in changing the past? Nope. Does Present Cyclops save the world in the future? Nope. Does Wolverine breaking free of his brainwashing affect anything? Nope. Did Storm’s series affect anything? Nope. Was Binary’s story at all relevant save to keep Jean out of commission? Nope. Was Jean even useful at the end? Not at all. How about the Expatriate team? Nope.
*Throws up hands* At least in the original Age of Apocalypse, all the various sub-stories felt like they were contributing to something at the end, each one offering a piece of the puzzle. But this could have been a five issue arc in X-Men and it wouldn’t have changed a thing.
Days of Future Past was two issues. This was like, 40+.
Oh, and as for the Chairman being a returned Evil Krakoan Beast (and not an evil Age of Apocalypse Beast)? Dammit. I was hoping we could be done with the character assassination of Hank McCoy once and for all. Honestly, 3k is like playing the Greatest Hits of a third rate cover band of a third rate one-hit wonder band, and them being led by the Worst Hank Ever is the icing on the cake.
Because I KNOW what we get now. Shadows of Tomorrow. The entire line overshadowed by remnants and hints of this storyline, where writers will incorporate stuff introduced here. Laura might meet Zane. Illyana might meet Lyrebird. Rogue might split in twain. We’ll get Scott trying to prevent Doug from going Fully Evil based on his knowledge of the future.
Again, this coulda been five issues in the mainline title. I love Jed MacCay as a writer but his event stories are really not his strong point.
Remember Krakoa?
Remember Grant Morrison?
Remember…Alan Davis on X-Men?
Remember…the horrible ‘90s Alpha Flight that no one read…?
Mix it all together and what do you get? I don’t know. Comics I’d read instead of this…I guess?
@The Other Michael, that’s why I didn’t like From the Ashes to begin with. 3K always felt like knock off ORCHIS. Sarah Gaunt felt like magical Moira. I had more fun with Fall of X and that’s my least favorite part of Krakoa.
@The Other Michael: I had a similar reaction to this issue. All that build-up for… Revelation just wins? If none of the characters confronted Doug, the outcome would have been the same. All they had to do was bring a lot of mutants to Doug. Couldn’t he have said, “teleport a bunch of mutants to me” years ago? Or, “Arakki, all of you step into this portal. If Apocalypse shows up, keep him away from me.” I hate plots in which the protagonists’ actions have little or no effect on the outcome.
To be fair, I didn’t predict Beast would be the Chairman. I don’t like it, but it caught me by surprise.
@Diana, @Michael, @Neutrino, and anyone else that I missed –
The Chairman is exactly as you called it. You were right. I dismissed the posibility that a self-cloning geneticist would choose to not place himself into a cloned body and instead use a ‘synthetic’ body. I still don’t get it, but clearly you did.
The various dropped or rushed through plots since From The Ashes, coupled with recent titles such as Cloak Or Dagger and Undeadpool, not to mention Rogue Rouge, puts a pretty clear picture in my head of a team meeting, with one person at the whiteboard while everyone else shouts whatever hook words come to them in the moment. “Sinatra! – er – er – Chairman!” “Magneto in a Xavier chair!” “Who’s the Endling!”
Then the editor picks the phrases he likes, and hands them out for the writers to do something with. And suddenly it’s less fun, because he then makes them compulsory, just to flex.
On the whole, I rather liked it. I don’t have an issue with the ending. Some of the miniseries were bad, other mediocre, but Jed MacKay’s core was fun. And there were some surprises – I did not expect to enjoy Undeadpool or Omega Kids, for example.
Editorially, it was a mess, with stories overwriting each other (Omega Kids killing Xavier after being switched off in the OK mini – sure, it was a new batch of Omega Kids, that Quentin trained to the level where they could take down Xavier, uh huh), but…
I don’t know, I guess Raid on Graymalkin and X-manhunt lowered my expectations so much that a C+ event with a decent enough core was a nice surprise.
As they say in online social media reels ,
And With That , The 2025 Season Officially Comes To An End LOL
I’m not satisfied with the Doug plot. I guess I’m happy that the event gave the other writers a chance to tell weird future stories that they probably wouldn’t get to do otherwise.
I don’t think any of the future children are going to exist in 616.
[…] 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 […]
So if you took the main plot of AoA as being 2 double issues (Alpha & Omega) plus 4 each of Astonishing and Amazing, it was 12 issues. AoR was 3 double issues (including 0) plus 3 each of Amazing and Book Of, for 12 issues. I suppose you have to include the last issue of Last Wolverine as well, for 13. But somehow AoA had much more plot in its issues, and didn’t have to wait ’til the penultimate issue to reveal what one of the main plot points actually was. It also undid its ‘everyone loses’ ending as it happened, unlike this.
Now thinking about that last-minute main plot – Doug created a collective living planet by talking to an engineered virus. Even for superhero comics that feels pretty flimsy. Whereas the setup without payoff on Krakoa had Doug secretly transmoding the island – the process with an established history of making things part of a collective conscious.
I want to say Warlock and Technarchy should obviously have been a part of this but I’ve already forgotten what was supposed to have happened to Warlock in this.
My main point is that I found this unsatisfying on almost every level.
@Woodswalked: To be fair, I was actually a Beast Skeptic near the end there, just because the Chairman’s body didn’t look anything like Hank’s. But I guess we have an answer as to why that’s the case.
(As for the “how” of it, I assume this was less of an intentional transfer and more of a desperate backup – it may even explain why he wants his clone-self to join 3K)
Dave> So if you took the main plot of AoA as being 2 double issues (Alpha & Omega) plus 4 each of Astonishing and Amazing, it was 12 issues. AoR was 3 double issues (including 0) plus 3 each of Amazing and Book Of, for 12 issues. I suppose you have to include the last issue of Last Wolverine as well, for 13. But somehow AoA had much more plot in its issues, and didn’t have to wait ’til the penultimate issue to reveal what one of the main plot points actually was. It also undid its ‘everyone loses’ ending as it happened, unlike this.
But AoA’s other series largely involved major plot points that fed into Omega. Generation NeXt got Illyana and Gambit & the X-ternals brought a piece of the M’Kraan Crystal to Earth, both of which were the main plot elements required to reset the timeline. Weapon X had the armada full of nukes which set up the ending. Factor X was the bad guy book, moving Cyclops from the loyal soldier in Alpha to the renegade in Omega. All of those were pretty important to the ending. Even X-Man dealt with Sinister, whose vanishment in Factor X was a major part of that plot, and brought Nate Grey into the mix for the finale.
The only real “side books” were X-Calibre (other than starring Nightcrawler, I can’t remember anything about that, although it was set up in Alpha), X-Men Chronicles (flashback/history book) and X-Universe (Whatever happened to some of the non-mutant characters in AoA).
I know. I was trying to be generous to AoR by only comparing the cores of the stories.
It’s a long time since I read AoA, but in that Amazing and Astonishing had 2 different sub-teams of X-Men fighting Holocaust and Abyss, and the Multiple Men. It gave enough characterisation for heroic Sabretooth and Blink and Morph for them to become popular. AoR had Cyclops talking to Darkchild and then talking to other people for an issue, plus the Elbecca plot, and that’s it. I can hardly believe I’ve read more than 10 issues for that amount of plot.
@SanityofMadness,
Actually , X-Calibre was ALSO essential to XMen Omega, because it was about Nightcrawler’s quest to fetch Destiny/Irene Adler (apparently his biological mother in 616, according to Simon Spurrier’s 2024 XMen Blue retcons, IDK if its also true in 295/OG AoA) who was absolutely essential to confirming Lucas Bishop’s claims about the original Marvel timeline pre-Xmen 41 (before Legion went back into the past of the 616 timeline where/when he accidentally killed his own dad , Charles Xavier , thus creating the 295 timeline) as well as convincing Young ‘Yana Rasputin to prematurely awakem her own mutant timespace warping powers so LB could physically go back in time to the point of divergence and save CX from getting killed by Legion, thus restoring 616 (and turning 295 into its own divergent Alternate Universe)
I called the Chairman reveal, but I figured he’d just put himself in an Xavier clone or engineered himself himself a less recognizable build or something. Not that the geneticist would put himself into a synthetic body.
Maybe the idea is that someone else pulled Krakoa Beast’s mind out of his black hole gun and put it into this robot?
@MasterMahan- When the Chairman said that his body was synthetic. I was assuming something along the lines of Adam Warlock or Her, not a robot. But we’ll probably get a more complete explanation as to the Chairman’s body in the next few issues of X-Men.
Well, that was ridiculous and mostly pointless. Sigh, I’ve said this a lot but X-Men has an editorial problem.
Only half in jest here, but I think it’s cowardly to not just add two panels of Doug getting ate by Galactus immediately after ‘ascension.’ That would be funny at least.
Another thought I had about the Beast reveal: It never occurred to the future X-Men that they might get a different Beast, which means either they were very dumb or they never found out in the whole intervening decade that Krakoa Beast was still around.
@Dave- The dialogue makes it clear that 3K went into hiding shortly after Doug released the X-Virus. As for Schwarzschild, he apparently never knew the Chairman’s real identity. If he did notice similarities between the Chairman’s speech patterns and Factory Beast’s speech patterns, he would have dismissed it as coincidence, since Factory Beast and the Chairman have completely different physiques.
rei rei> Only half in jest here, but I think it’s cowardly to not just add two panels of Doug getting ate by Galactus immediately after ‘ascension.’ That would be funny at least.
Didn’t Rogue eat Galactus in this timeline, ’cause Simone thinks she’s Awesome?
“The dialogue makes it clear that 3K went into hiding shortly after Doug released the X-Virus.”
Which means Krakoa Beast sat around and accepted his fate as a constituent part of planet Doug.
AoR seemed like a waste of time, showing us a potential future where everyone dies. It’s What If? With more steps. The only value the story has is its impact on the characters we know, but it has no impact on its own terms. AoA was memorable and meaningful even with the rever a l. This wasnt.
Also, I think its a little unfair to compare it to AoA because it was simply not going to beat that. It’s fairer IMo to compare to the other AoA derivatives, Age of X and Age of X-Man. Even then, its not as good as either.
I’d still put it a bit ahead of Age of Ultron, though.
Better than AoR: AoA, AoX
Worse than AoR: AoU, AoX-Man
Leaving the Age crossovers aside, how would you say it compares to Battle of the Atom, Axis (though I still want to call it Sixis because of that logo), X of Swords, or One World Under Doom?
IMHO, AoR is worse than all of those crossovers (though I forgot to include Sins of Sinister which is basically an AoA derivative in all but name). Most of those stories had their issues, but they changed something and had some momentum. The only comparable stories to AoR would have to feel pointless and without reason. The only one i can think of is From the Ashes’ Hunt for Xavier and likely some of Bendis’ stuff which just petered out by the end and had little effect.