House to Astonish Episode 216
It’s only 348 sleeps ’til Christmas, so we’re taking the opportunity to look back at the best 2025 had to offer, as we run down our pick of our three favourite comics of last year in the 14th annual Homies awards. Will your favourite make the cut? What did your fellow listeners choose? Find out here, true believer! Or in the comments for the Homies post from the start of December, I guess, for that second question at least. Here is definitely more convenient.
The podcast is here, or available via the embedded player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments, via email, or on Bluesky, and here’s hoping you choose to stick around with us for 2026!
Daredevil Villains #68: The Gael
DAREDEVIL #205 (April 1984)
“The Gael”
Writer: Denny O’Neil
Penciller: William Johnson
Inker: Danny Bulanadi
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Colourist: George Roussos
Editor: Bob Budiansky
Gather round, children! An American is going to tell us about the IRA! This always goes well!
Daredevil #205 brings in Matt’s new love interest, Glorianna O’Breen. She’ll stick around as a regular until issue #233. But we first meet her as Debbie Nelson’s photographer niece from Ireland, on the run from “terrible danger” back home. Her father Fergus is a member of the IRA – “the anti-government rebels”, as she describes them – but he’s been falsely accused of betraying the organisation, and so he’s sent her to America to keep her safe from retribution.
Soon afterwards, Daredevil stops two IRA men from trying to bundle Glorianna into a van. But of course, the IRA couldn’t possibly be doing anything bad – it turns out that they’re actually trying to keep her safe from the Gael, an IRA hit man who “went bad”. We’ve already seen the Gael in the opening scene: he’s a man in a trenchcoat who kills one of his informants for the hell of it, has a shamrock motif on his gloves, and leaves a paper shamrock on his victim’s forehead as a calling card. You’d think it would blow away. Maybe he makes them with Post-it notes.
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.
Charts – 9 January 2026
We’re past Christmas, but we only have a couple of new releases for 2026. What can fill the gap? Well, there’s the season finale of Stranger Things.
Welcome to 1980s week.
1. Djo – “End of Beginning”
This isn’t from the soundtrack of Stranger Things, but it is by one of the cast. It kind of counts as back catalogue itself, though, because it was already a hit last year, and got to number 4 then. He hasn’t had any other top 40 hits, so for now he goes onto the list of pure one-hit wonders. “End of Beginning” has a 5% lead over Taylor Swift at number 2, though again there’s an asterisk: if it wasn’t on ACR, Olivia Dean’s “Man I Need” would be number 1 by a comfortable margin.
There are six back catalogue entries this week, thanks to Stranger Things, and they join the Kate Bush and Tiffany tracks from last week. It’s like early December, but with Now That’s What I Call 80s instead of with Christmas songs. One difference is that, because they’re not Christmas songs, these tracks are eligible for an ACR reset – they come off downweighting if they have a big enough week-on-week climb, so they’re on an equal footing with new releases.
Wolverine #14 annotations
WOLVERINE vol 8 #14
“Silver and Snow”
Writer: Saladin Ahmed
Artist: Martín Cóccolo
Colour artist: Jesus Aburtov
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER: Wolverine in a snowbound forest, with an image of Silver Sable in the background.
WOLVERINE:
For some reason he’s only just got around to returning to Canada to mourn the wolf pack from issue #1. He suggests that the need to mourn them only really became clear to him over time, and in particular that it may have been prompted by his reaction to the illusions of his mother in issues #9-11. The whole thing prompts him to reflect that his very need to mourn the animals demonstrates that he was never really like them.
He winds up in a ghost town looking for fuel, and naturally decides to stick around to defend the local mutants from Department H interference – especially once he’s escalated the situation by fighting them off once.
X-Men #23 annotations
X-MEN vol 7 #23
“Assassin”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Tony Daniel
Inker: Mark Morales
Colourist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: Cyclops attempts to kill Revelation with the Soulsword, while everyone else looks horrified.
This issue is bannered both as an “Age of Revelation” epilogue and as part of “Shadows of Tomorrow”, the tag line being used for the post-AoR books. The “Shadows of Tomorrow” branding doesn’t appear to require any particular impact from AoR, though – it also appears on this week’s issue of Wolverine, which has nothing to do with AoR at all.
It’s a new year and I think we’ll go back to the character-by-character format for these posts, rather than the page-by-page one – which was often rather confusing with double page spreads, and given Amazon’s persistent misnumbering of the pages in the digital editions.
THE X-MEN:
Cyclops. Aside from the recap at the very start of the issue, he spends the whole story possessed by his future self from the Age of Revelation (of whom more below). This story takes place before X-Men: Age of Revelation – Finale, where present day Cyclops returns to his body and wakes up in his cell.
Daredevil Villains #67: Crossbow
DAREDEVIL #204 (March 1984)
“Vengeance of the Victim!”
Writer: Denny O’Neil
Penciller: Luke McDonnell
Inker: Danny Bulanadi
Colourist: Bob Sharen
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Editor: Bob Budiansky
Denny O’Neil doesn’t like the English, part two.
William Johnson was still notionally the regular artist at this point, but by all accounts he struggled badly with deadlines. Issue #203 was an inventory story. This issue returns to the regular storyline, but with a fill-in artist. Luke McDonnell was the regular artist on Iron Man at this point, but over the course of the 1984 cover dates he somehow found time to pencil not only this issue, but also the back-up strip in issue #202 and the whole of Further Adventures of Indiana Jones #20. He did skip one issue of Iron Man, to be fair, but then again he also drew that year’s annual. He was seriously fast.
Daredevil #204 doesn’t even look like a rush job; the opening splash page on the streets of New York is full of properly designed individual bystanders and journalists. Regular inker Danny Bulanadi must have helped, but it’s still remarkable.
This is the second part of the Micah Synn storyline that began in issue #202. Crossbow is a hitman, who’s been hired by Lord Barrington Synn to kill Micah. Barrington is a stereotypical simpering aristocrat, who wants Micah dead “before anyone learns that he and I are of the same ancestry”. Apparently, Micah is a brutal, savage heathen and “a blot on the Synn honour”. Later on, there will be mention of Matt and Foggy pursuing some sort of claim that Micah might have on the Synn estate, but at this point Barrington seems simply to regard Micah as a family embarrassment. Of course, Micah really is awful, but Barrington doesn’t know about any of that. His objection appears to be simply that the man has gone a bit African.
Charts – 2 January 2026
Welcome to the post-Christmas chart. Christmas Day fell on a Thursday this year – the end of the chart week – and predictably, the Christmas tracks mostly vanish, leading to a vast number of re-entries filling the void. A mere four manage to cling on – apparently there were still a decent number of Christmas records being played on Boxing Day – and none of them were in the top 10.
1. Raye – “Where is My Husband”
This is Raye’s second number 1, after “Escapism” reached number 1 in January 2023. To be honest, it’s something of a post-Christmas glitch. It wasn’t even in the top 40 last week, and it has the lowest number 1 sales in months. It’s been out for 15 weeks by now and it would have been behind Olivia Dean’s “Man I Need” if it wasn’t for the downweighting rule.
The X-Axis – w/c 29 December 2025
X-MEN: AGE OF REVELATION INFINITY COMIC #9. By Alex Paknadel, Edoardo Audino, KJ Díaz & Clayton Cowles. We wrap up the “Age of Revelation” back stories with Glob Herman. In fact, this story doesn’t take us up to the point where he becomes the gun-toting killer from the main books; he simply gets taken in by the X-Men after the Punisher dies heroically to save him from Kid Omega. But maybe that’s better, since it avoids being overly trite and still gestures in the direction of Glob trying to emulate a mentor. Anyway…
X-MEN: 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 for such things – and it’s the end of the three-month “Age of Revelation” event. It seems like a good moment to take stock.
Some criticisms of the post-Krakoa X-books seem to have unrealistic expectations. The decision to move away from Krakoa wasn’t taken by the current editorial office, and besides, even Krakoa’s creator Jonathan Hickman always intended it to end earlier than it did. Taking over the X-books after Krakoa was always going to be a poisoned chalice, since it was never going to be able to compete with Hickman in terms of a big attention-grabbing idea – all the more so if the aim was to steer the books back in a more congenial direction for cross-media synergy. And the back end of the Krakoan era didn’t help, with six months of unrelating fascist misery that left the books with no real alternative but to tack in favour of normalcy, at precisely the time when that wasn’t the story to be telling.
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.
