Charts – 28 November 2025
Okay, well, at least we’re less than a month out from Christmas. I guess.
1. Taylor Swift – “The Fate of Ophelia”
Six weeks at number 1, and the same deal as last week: it’s past its peak, and it’s only number 1 Olivia Dean’s “Man I Need” has been out long enough to be downweighted under the ACR rule. It’s basically marking time until the Christmas records come along to replace it.
14. Cynthia Erivo & Ariana Grande – “For Good”
17. Cynthia Erivo – “No Good Deed”
29. Cynthia Erivo & Jonathan Bailey – “As Long As You’re Mine”
The X-Axis – 24 November 2025
X-MEN: AGE OF REVELATION INFINITY COMIC #4. By Tim Seeley, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. Oh boy. So this one went down well. It’s the first part of a Magik storyline filling her “Age of Revelation” back story. We already established, back in Age of Revelation #0, that Magik had died on the raid that freed Fabian Cortez from SHIELD custody, and that she returned as the Darkchild to rule Providence. Most of this issue consists of the raid itself, which is a bit underwhelming – she gets carried away, kills Maria Hill, and then gets gunned down by Nick Fury. It’s not especially creative. Anyway, the big idea is that the Bloodstones that Belasco conjured from Magik’s soul during her childhood mean that her soul passes to his control on death, with him apparently restored as the ruler of Limbo. That seems like something we might be wanting to address in the present day. The issue then cuts to a rather confusing segment of Darkchild (apparently separate from Magik) as S’ym’s slave, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. I guess it’s a jump forward in time? I think?
It’s not an especially good issue, but many of the complaints seem to be reading in things that aren’t there, or seizing on subtext that’s been part of Magik’s back story for forty years. But you can give Illyana a depressing ending in an alternate future timeline – in the long run it becomes something that she’s motivated to avoid when Cyclops reports back on it. Mind you, if you’re going to give female characters sexualised costumes, you can’t really complain when people read the humiliation sequence with S’ym and take you at face value. But this is more heavy-handed than anything else, certainly in a context where we already know that the story is going to end with Darkchild reclaiming Limbo. Having said that, I’m not really very interested in reading a repeat of Magik’s back story where the Darkchild persona comes out on top, which seems to be where we’re going here. That just feels repetitive, and doesn’t really fit with what’s been done with Darkchild in Magik lately.
Expatriate X-Men #2 annotations
EXPATRIATE X-MEN #2
Writer: Eve L Ewing
Artist: Francesco Mortarino
Colourist: Raúl Angulo
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: Rift, Melée, Bronze and Ms Marvel in the crosshairs of… something.
PAGES 1-5. Bronze brings Colossus his medication.
Bronze. She hasn’t met Colossus yet in the present day timeline, but in this timeline she calls him “Unc” (and he calls her “Tristachka”). She’s clearly trying to keep up good spirits when talking to Colossus, although talking about the loss of Kitty Pryde (see below) does bring tears to her eyes. She claims that Kitty would want them to “live”.
Colossus. He was on the cover of the previous issue, but didn’t actually appear, so this is the first time we’ve actually seen him in the “Age of Revelation” timeline. He has a cabin on the Dragonfly and doesn’t look to be in great health. His left arm has been replaced with a crude cyborg one, and much fo the left side of his body seems damaged (it’s hard to tell whether it’s meant to represent rust, or acid burns, or what). He seems to get through pills at quite a rate – Bronze gives him four to take in one go, which nearly exhausts the supply. He has regular nightmares about the missing Kitty Pryde.
Housekeeping
Annotations will be up tomorrow.
Charts – 21 November 2025
Oh god, already? Really?
1. Taylor Swift – “The Fate of Ophelia”
Five weeks total. Its streams are down, and it’s not that far ahead of “Golden” at number 2 (about 6%), but the bigger point is that it’s now number 1 with an asterisk – if we didn’t have the downweighting rule, this week’s number one would be “Man I Need” by Olivia Dean, and by a comfortable margin at that.
19. Wham! – “Last Christmas”
What the hell is wrong with you people? This is the chart measuring the period 14-20 November. That’s more than a month before Christmas. And yet even with permanent downweighting against it, “Last Christmas” is already at number 19. God help us.
The X-Axis – w/c 18 November 2025
X-MEN: AGE OF REVELATION INFINITY COMIC #3. By Tim Seeley, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. Oh, it’s a three-parter. I figured we’d be spending longer with early-AoR Revelation. Instead, this issue switches to Revelation as its narrator. Tim Seeley does have an interesting angle on how Revelation feels about Cable: he doesn’t really know the guy, precisely because he died before the New Mutants met Cable, and maybe Cable is the hardening mentor that he missed out on. But the plot boils down to Revelation summarily defeating the villain, and then getting rid of Cable too. This might be heading towards Cable being the source of the techno-organics we’ve seen sporadically in “Age of Revelation”, and perhaps it does make sense in the wider scheme of things that Revelation just swans into the story and ends it… but it reads a little oddly.
UNBREAKABLE X-MEN #2. (Annotations here.) I’m not sure this story has very much to do with “Age of Revelation” at all, but the flipside is that it has quite a lot to do with Uncanny X-Men, by picking up the Dark Artery/Shuvahrak storyline in the near future. Shuvahrak is a weird character, with Gail Simone’s stories seeming to be intentionally vague about how she became transformed and how she came to turn against mutants in general. But it kind of works; the story wants her to be a sort of looming, ungraspable presence who’s been changed from a conventional character into a kind of Cthulhuesque monster of unavenged sins, and spelling her out too directly would point away from that. The downside is to leave the stakes a little bit obscure, but I think it’s a more interesting story for leaning into the mood. CF Villa’s art really sells Shuvahrak’s demonic angle too, even while it gives us the clearest view of her that we’ve had to date. The rest of the issue mostly consists of gathering the Outliers for a last stand, with a few more hints of things to come – though the clash with the way Deathdream was written in Amazing X-Men is really, really hard to interpret as anything other than an error. I’m still not sure what Spider-Girl is doing in this book – maybe she’s showing up in Uncanny soon, maybe it’s just a vague gesture at the wider Marvel Universe for the sake of the event.
Last Wolverine #2 annotations
LAST WOLVERINE #2
Writer: Saladin Ahmed
Artist: Edgar Salazar
Colour artist: Carlos Lopez
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso
PAGES 1-4. Vindicator persuades Leonard to help her free Wolverine.
Vindicator. Heather confirms that she was indeed referring to Logan as her husband in the previous issue. Given that he becomes an agent of Revelation not too far into the “Age of Revelation” timeline, this must be something that happens not too far into the future, and so it’s potentially another piece of foreshadowing for regular stories.
Heather said last issue that she had found a way to “save” Wolverine, and she refers throughout this scene to breaking Revelation’s hold on him. Apparently Leonard never asks her what the plan is, because we’ll find out later that she’s simply planning to kill him. She believes, probably correctly, that being forced into service as a weapon again would be the most horrific thing he can imagine; evidently she believes that she’s freeing him from torment.
Leonard certainly takes Revelation’s claims of good intent at face value, and is willing to countenance the possibility that Logan has been driven to this by the need to defend his fellow mutants from human aggression; he’s very reluctant to believe that Wolverine would ever directly turn against his friends.
X-Men: Book of Revelation #2 annotations
X-MEN: BOOK OF REVELATION #2
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Netho Diaz
Inkers: Sean Parsons with Livesay
Colourist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: Kitty Pryde shields Elbecca from Fabian Cortez.
PAGES 1-3. Kitty saves Elbecca.
This picks up directly from the cliffhanger of the previous issue, which Elbecca helpfully recaps for us.
PAGE 4. Flashback: Revelation turns Kitty into a ghost.
“When the X-Virus kicked off, when [Revelation] organized the relief in Philadelphia…” This is the official version of Revelation’s role in history, as recounted in X-Men: Age of Revelation #0. We’ve been told in other books that Revelation was actually responsible for the X-Virus in the first place, but Kitty may or may not know that.
“One of my generation of mutants…” Even though she was principally an X-Men character and he was in New Mutants, Doug was first introduced as Kitty’s friend and peer.
Unbreakable X-Men #2 annotations
UNBREAKABLE X-MEN #2
“Burial At Sea”
Writer: Gail Simone
Artists: CF Villa with Mario Santoro, Davide Tinto, David Marquez, R.B. Silva, Alessandro Cappuccio & Ramon Rosanas
Colourist: Espen Grundetjern
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: Basically an image of the cast looking dramatic. That looks to be Shuvahrak in the background, though she’s largely obscured by the logo.
PAGES 1-3. Henrietta comforts Remy after he fends off the zombies.
We established last issue that Rogue had turned into a giant statue as a side effect of using her powers to defeat Galactus, and that Remy had lost his eyesight afterwards. This is a continuation of the final scene from the previous issue, where the “Tormented” from the Penumbra attacked Haven House, and Gambit was driving them away from the “Unbreakable” memorial which commemorates Rogue. It reads a little oddly, since the previous scene was paced as if he’d already finished dealing with them, but apparently there are more. As in Rogue Storm #2, Gambit can still aim acceptably by sound alone.
The previous issue didn’t give any particular reason for Gambit losing his sight. He said last issue that it had happened “with time”, but in this scene he says it started when Rogue was transformed. The prevailing theory seems to be that his eyes were damaged in the flash of light in that scene, but Gambit prefers the emotional/symbolic explanation that he had nothing worth looking at without Rogue. Gambit’s narration also plays up his eyes as symbols in themselves, as the one thing that makes him a visible mutant; this has also come up in regular Uncanny X-Men.
Daredevil Villains #63: Tarkington Brown
DAREDEVIL #195 (June 1983)
“Betrayal”
Writer: Denny O’Neil
Artist: Klaus Janson
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Colourist: Glynis Wein
Editor: Linda Grant
Technically, Denny O’Neil’s run as writer began with issue #194, which we covered last time. But that story reads as if it was intended to be a fill-in. This story is really where we begin his run, which will take us through to issue #226 in 1985 – albeit with more than a scattering of fill-ins along the way.
At first, O’Neil sticks with the crime milieu that had become the book’s established format. He’ll start deviating from that fairly quickly, and the villains will get rather more eccentric. But we’ve just had some format-breaking fill-in issues, so it’s probably a good idea to go back to basics.
“Tarkington Brown” is a strange name for a villain. It sounds like a firm of estate agents from Cornwall, or a whimsical otter voiced by Stephen Fry. In fact, Tarkington Brown is the mastermind behind an NYPD vigilante death squad, who hunt down and kill mobsters that escaped conviction. The story opens with Daredevil stopping the death squad from killing Bruno Ponchatrane, who is not just a mobster, but a child murderer to boot. Ponchatrane got off on a technicality, thanks to the efforts of Foggy Nelson. Foggy wasn’t desperately keen on representing him either but couldn’t see a reason to turn down the instructions.
