The X-Axis – 7 January 2026
So there is a new Infinity comic on Marvel Unlimited – the imaginatively named X-Men Infinity Comic – but it seems to take place in some sort of not-quite-616, not-quite-XTAS limbo, which means that it’s out of our remit here. For those interested, it’s by Steve Orlando and Alan Robinson, and it’s pretty much by the numbers. That just leaves us with…
X-MEN #23. (Annotations here.) “Age of Revelation” was always strongest when viewed as an X-Men storyline rather than as an event, and this is where we pick up on what was going on in the present day. Most of it is along the lines that you could have figured out: future Cyclops tries to kill Revelation, but the plan goes awry because his Beast wound up somewhere else. History quite clearly gets altered in some way, since Revelation doesn’t stay with the X-Men, but whether those changes are for the better, or whether Cyclops has just wound up giving him ideas, remains up in the air. It’s a pretty straightforward issue, but there are some subtleties going on with Hank and Doug’s reactions to all this that add to the interest. And I’m interested to see where we’re going with the subplot about Magneto’s status quo not matching the future characters’ memory – it feels like it may be an attempt to back out of the wider idea of resurrection leading to degeneration, but then again I doubt that was ever really the plan, given that we’re 23 issues into the run and Magneto remains the only character affected.
Tony Daniel seems to be joining the rotating art crew with this arc, and his debut issue is perfectly fine. There are a few strong images – I like the shadows with the light crackling around Cyclops’ visor, even if it doesn’t make much sense, and the closing splash page of Revelation and his crew traipsing off again through the snow is quite effective, particularly with Warlock’s hopeful naivety. All told, it’s a solid return to the main plot.
WOLVERINE #14. (Annotations here.) Silver Sable, is it? Sure, why not, I guess. She feels like someone Wolverine would get on with, at least, and it’s not like she’s been doing much else lately. What feels off is to have her single handedly guarding a new Morlock community in a Canadian ghost town – in terms of her usual status quo, this ought to be prohibitively expensive for anyone who isn’t insanely rich. In which case, why are they in a Morlock community? Whether that’s a plot point or simply Saladin Ahmed not quite getting the character remains to be seen, but there are enough indications of more going on with the Morlocks – Sable gets interrupted when she’s about to tell us about them – for me to give it the benefit of the doubt for now. We only get to see two actual Morlocks, with incomplete hints at their powers, but Cóccolo’s art gives them some immediate personality, and I’m not averse to adjusting the aesthetic from the 80s. He does a good Sable, too.
I’m a little more puzzled by the Department H material, with Agent Mehta – who’d been clearly established as the sensible one in the department, and was meant to be trying to keep on good terms with Wolverine – suddenly going all the way to “he’s too far gone, let’s call in Alpha Flight”. This seems absurdly quick in terms of the development of the subplot, even if there’s some truth in the point that he and Sable attack the Department H recon team before they’ve actually done anything wrong (and seem to recognise that they’ve achieved nothing beyond escalation). To be honest, the Mastermind arc didn’t do wonders for my confidence that stories in this book will come together in the end… but we’ll see how it pans out.
In this week’s Nova 3, Mysterium appears and Cammi bites a bar of it. I realize that this is supposed to be an allusion to the historical practice of testing gold by biting it. But that only works because gold is a soft metal. Mysterium is supposed to be a hard metal. If you tried to bite a titanium, you’d break your teeth. And that should have happened to Cammi.
Bleeding Cool’s Weekly Bestseller list is out. X-Men came in 8th. Wolverine didn’t make the list at all.
The good news is that MacKay’s X-Men seems to have recovered from any damage Age of Revelation did to it. It once again surpassed Ultimate X-Men.
The bad news is that Wolverine is doing horribly. We won’t know how bad until we see this month’s figures. The good news is that Ultimate Wolverine came in 6th, so it seems that the problem isn’t that people are getting tired of Wolverine. The problem is that people are getting tired of Ahmed’s writing.
The very next issue after an event selling well seems less “recovering from the damage” and more “not damaged”. I’ve never liked events in comics, but I think people wanted Age Of Doug to be a disaster, while signs point to it being fairly standard for this sort of thing. I know some people actually loved it.
By the way, the X-Men Infinity comic is a damn strange thing. I don’t know who it’s aimed at or what conceivable niche it’s meant to fill.
Si> I’ve never liked events in comics, but I think people wanted Age Of Doug to be a disaster, while signs point to it being fairly standard for this sort of thing. I know some people actually loved it.
We can argue about definitions of “disaster”, but I think what evidence there is in the public domain suggests that the AoR versions of titles sold less than their counterparts, where applicable (i.e., Amazing XM sold less than MacKay’s X-Men). That isn’t “standard” for events, or else they wouldn’t DO events.
Now, perhaps the sheer spamming of titles means the total sales across all X-books were greater, but that’s not a huge triumph – selling 100 copies of 10 books is usually much more profitable than 10 copies of 100 books. (Numbers chosen for simplicity rather than as a direct example)
By the way, the X-Men Infinity comic is a damn strange thing. I don’t know who it’s aimed at or what conceivable niche it’s meant to fill.
Well now I’m kind of curious what was in that Infinity comic )))
@Maxwell’s Hammer- The problem is that it doesn’t seem to quite fit in the continuity of the 1990s comics and it doesn’t quite fit in the continuity of the Animated Series. So who is it directed at? Fans of either the 1990s comics or the Animated Series will be annoyed by the discrepancies.
@ Maxwell’s Hammer: by trying to be brief I probably made it sound more interesting than it is. It’s mostly the cast of the cartoon, in their costumes from the period, but with a couple of other X-Men tacked on for no obvious reason. It has a kind of dumb cartoony plot, but nothing else that suggests it’s set in the cartoon world. It begins in media res, with no hint as to what it’s all about, not even a whiff of mystery. It’s really not very good.
Brevoort did an interview today at AIPT discussing Shadows of Tomorrow:
https://aiptcomics.com/2026/01/12/x-men-monday-brevoort-shadows-tomorrow/#google_vignette
Why does he do these things? It seems like he always manages to anger half the internet.
Anyway…
First. he responded to complaints that most of the series in Age of Revelation had nothing to do with the ending:
TOM: “So going into the Age of Revelation, we sort of very specifically said, for the most part, we want the books to be able to do the business of their individual books. Some were more tethered to where the story was going and the climax, and others were less tethered. That was, almost across the line, an individual choice on the part of the creators who were working toward that. And Jed MacKay, in writing the event’s finale, had to write an ending that served his story. That was more important than making sure absolutely every tie-in book had some follow-up in the finale.”
“That having been said, I can understand readers who feel like they read three issues of X-Vengers, and then there was nothing for them in the Finale issue. But I feel like even going back to the source material of the Age of Apocalypse, as a reader and editor of the day, not all of those projects were super essential to the wrap-up in Age of Apocalypse Omega. The advantage that it had was there were fewer tie-in series, so it was maybe easier to get a greater percentage with some tangible impact than what we ended up doing. ”
Breevort is being disingenuous here. NONE of the Age of Revelation books that weren’t written by MacKay tied into the ending except for the Last Wolverine. Meanwhile, almost ALL of the Age of Apocalypse series played some role in the finale. The only ones which didn’t were X-Men Chronicles, which dealt with the past of the Age of Apocalypse and X-Universe which featured the fates of the non-mutant heroes in the Age of Apocaylpse. Plus, Brevoort argues that the Age of Apocalypse had an advantage because it had fewer series. Whose fault is that?
Meanwhile, DC is getting comic fans incredibly excited for the rollout of its Next Level initiative simply by talking about using lesser used DCU characters and giving creators as much leeway as possible to tell quality stories utilizing those characters. How novel.
Later on, he explains that Percy and White planned to kill off the Evil Beast for good and replace him with the younger clone. But Brevoort felt the Evil Beast had potential and convinced Percy and White to leave open the possibility that Evil Beast survived. That explains a lot about how X-Force 50 ended. The Chairman was always supposed to be Evil Beast, by the way.
Scott and Factory Beast will learn that the Chairman is Evil Beast relatively soon.
Jean will not be a significant part of the books for a little while. But we will see her during the year. The problem is that they had plans and those plans changed and now they have to rework their ideas for Jean. Brevoort says he doesn’t want to depower Jean but he wants her to play a significant role in the books without making it too easy for the X-Men to win and he’s trying to come up with a way to do that.
Brevoort did say that the reason he gave permission for Jean to be used in the X-Men Annual was because he realized that she wound up isolated in space away from the X-characters.
He explained that when a title is cancelled, they don’t immediately shoehorn a major character from that character into another book. So when NYX was cancelled, Kamala wasn’t immediately shoved into another book.
Brevoort said that he prefers five characters to a book and acknowledged that Gail Simone having nine X-Men in Uncanny including the Outliers made it difficult for some characters to get room for characterization. Gee Tom, if one you could do something about that! You’re just the editor, after all.
Brevoort acknowledged difficulty in figuring out what to do with Betsy Braddock. The original plan was Kwannon is in X-Men, Betsy’s in X-Force but then X-Force got cancelled. The other problem is that the fans don’t seem to agree on which version of Betsy they prefer.
Brevoort acknowledged that there have too many events lately and they will be spaced farther apart in the future. So of course, the next event will be teased in the May FCBD issue. 🙂
Within six months, the Graymalkin Prison situation will start exploding.
@Michael and anyone else who cares ig
Brevoort’s AIPT interviews always make me grind my teeth, but this one in particular was vexing. There’s a lot of talk about doing/changing things in reaction to online fan feedback which … seems like a terrible idea to me. I admit to bias against the dude but I feel like he’s a really poor fit for the X-Men in general and especially right now.
Hell, his talk about being reactive in general (like overcorrecting to his bizarre perception of the Krakoan age) feels like his finger is far from the pulse. Fans are idiots as a group, and the most negative are always the loudest. I get the impression that he thinks Krakoa fans are attached to the island idea, and maybe some are, but Krakoa is just a place. I think good storytelling and advancing the X-Men dialogue with bold ideas was what made it so special.
I think Jean being absent is a failure of imagination, and not something you can halfass. That leads to her just standing there and dying in AOR, for example.
The idea of a telepathic school is a good one, at least. This whole Beast thing seems exciting too, and I look forward to more Magneto. Fingers crossed he doesn’t get reverted.
@Rei- The problem iwith Jean right now is that she’s too powerful. Phillips had her go up against Eternity! It’s not easy to imagine an Evil Hank McCoy being a serious threat to an X-Man team she’s a part of.
Oh, that’s simple. Give her the Nega bands. She and the Phoenix switch places when she bangs them (the Phoenix wears them on its legs, like bird tags). Except, oh no, the Phoenix is a literal star now and can only hold it’s energy back for a few seconds, long enough to leave Earth’s atmosphere. So Jean’s not depowered, but when she turns into the Phoenix, she has to leave the planet immediately.
That, or split her into Jean Cosmic Gold and Jean Earth Blue or something…
@Rei: I wouldn’t worry *too* much about anything Brevoort says to outlets like that – by his own admission in that same interview, he never feels especially obligated to follow through on his blatherings anyway.
@Michael: Hell, if you *really* want to split hairs, even X-Universe was relevant because it revealed the identity of the fourth Horseman (Mikhail) and explained why he wasn’t involved in the larger storyline.
@Krzysiek Ceran, I had a similar idea. The Phoenix sends Jean back to Earth with her regular powerset because:
– to save the universe the Phoenix has to use all its power and that would destroy or trap Jean;
– the Phoenix becomes infected or corrupted by an outside entity and has to use all its power and will to avoid another Dark Phoenix incident. It doesn’t want Jean to bear that burden;
– the Phoenix is erased or trapped by another cosmic force, and only has time to teleport Jean to Earth before separating;
– the White Hot Room is going to fall apart unless the Phoenix rep[airs it and merges with it.
None of these are great ideas, but almost any writer should be able to find a way to solve the Phoenix problem. The fans won’t like anything they do anyway, so the “how” doesn’t really matter.
@Michael oh yeah I get that, but Storm is kicking around being super duper powerful too. I guess my point is that especially in comic books there’s a lot of ways to either include her or explain why she isn’t present. She’s got a telepathic bond with Scott yet they don’t talk all that much. It’s not like the Phoenix can’t be in two places at once and Imperial already demonstrated that she clearly doesn’t feel the need to intervene in every little problem.
I’d even be fine with de-Phoenixing her or following up on RoPoX’s ‘Jean and the Phoenix orbit each other and are close/further away depending on circumstances/time.’ We seem to be dealing with time travel stuff ATM which is totally Phoenix territory.
I’m blathering a bit but there’s a lot of space in between killing Jean and her just not showing up.
@Diana haha agreed. It’s not so much worrying as irritation. I feel like he’s telling the truth there – reacting to fan response. It feels… revealing.
@Mike Loughlin agreed! That’s what I’m trying to express. Well said.