X-Men: Book of Revelation #3 annotations
X-MEN: BOOK OF REVELATION #3
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Netho Diaz
Inkers: Sean Parsons & JP Mayer
Colourist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: Revelation squares off against Elbecca and, oddly, Kitty Pryde, who doesn’t appear in this issue – making this a conflation of scenes from issues #2 and #3. This is the final issue of the series, with the story continuing in the X-Men: Age of Revelation – Finale one-shot.
PAGES 1-2. Flashback: Apocalypse despatches Elbecca to Earth.
We established last issue that Elbecca was not actually a little girl from the Revelation Territories, but an Arakkii spy with a “cover personality” who had been sent to infiltrate the Choristers and weaken Revelation. This flashback shows her being sent on that mission in the first place. Revelation points out later in the issue that this scheme must have been planned long before Arakko received word from Bei of his plans (in X-Men: Age of Revelation – Overture and the World of Revelation one-shot), and thus can’t be a reaction to Bei’s message. This seems likely to be right, and raises the question of why Apocalypse was already scheming to bring Revelation down even before then. Revelation’s explanation of his motives later in the issue probably provides the answer to that.
The Homies 2025
Jingle bells, Batman smells… or DOES he? Does he actually smell of GOOD THINGS, in an unexpected twist? How does he smell… compared to other comics? There’s only one way to find out – let’s have an end of year awards season! It’s time for the 2025 Homies!
As always, we want to hear from you about what you dug this year. As with last year, rather than give you a long list of categories, we’re concentrating on the comics we read that really did it for us. We simply want you to tell us:
What was the best comic you read all year, and why?
It could be a new release, it could be a relaunch, it could be another great year for a reliable ongoing. It could be a majestic miniseries or a great graphic novel, an incredible indie or a brilliant Big Two book. We’ll be reading them out on the show, so let us know what you dug and what about it made it so special for you.
Give us your pick, and may 100% of your Christmases be white.
Daredevil Villains #65: Micah Synn
DAREDEVIL #202 (January 1984)
“Savages”
Writer: Denny O’Neil
Penciller: William Johnson
Inker: Danny Bulanadi
Colourist: Glynis Wein
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Editor: Mike Higgins
We’ve skipped issue #200, which is a Bullseye story, and issue #201, where the villains are one-off ordinary criminals. That brings us to issue #202, which was part of Assistant Editors’ Month – a stunt event where the assistant editors were supposedly running Marvel’s line for a month while all the regular editors were away at a convention. In practice this meant a lot of wacky gimmicks. Daredevil‘s contribution was a comedy back-up strip which doesn’t concern us – its only effect on the main story was to make it a few pages shorter.
Even so, Micah Synn is by far the most bizarre concept that we’re encountered since Steve Gerber’s Black Spectre arc back in the 1970s. He’s a major fixture of Denny O’Neil’s run – he appears nine times between issues #202 and #214 (and most of the issues where he doesn’t appear are fill-ins). And after that storyline, he vanishes entirely. He’s never been seen again.
Micah Synn is the chief of the Kinjorge tribe, “from Mount Suruba in eastern Africa”. Ah, eastern Africa. That really narrows it down. In 1775, a party of British explorers went to Africa hoping to start a trading post, but got stranded there and “reverted to savagery”. They’re the King George Tribe, if you hadn’t figured it out. They’ve been living in isolation ever since, apparently hiding from hostile neighbouring tribesmen, until being “discovered by a party of Belgian geologists” six months ago. The Kinjorge are entirely white, so it would appear that the eighteenth century traders had enough numbers (and enough women) to make a viable breeding population. Seems unlikely, but that’s the story.
Charts – 12 December 2025
Well, it’s the second week of December, what did you expect?
1. Wham! – “Last Christmas”
“Last Christmas” returns to number 1 for its eleventh week in total. It reached number 2 on release at Christmas 1984 (because that was the year of Band Aid), but it’s reached number 1in 2020, 2022, 2023 and 2024. As a back catalogue Christmas single, it’s on permanent downweighting – Christmas records are expressly excluded from the normal rules that allow old records to come off downweighting if they have a surge of interest – but it really makes no difference. If “Last Christmas” wasn’t being downweighted, it would have beaten the number 2 single (Raye’s “Where is my Husband”) by more than two to one.
The X-Axis – w/c 8 December 2025
X-MEN: AGE OF REVELATION INFINITY COMIC #6. By Tim Seeley, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. The final part of the Magik story. The basic idea here seems clear enough: because Belasco conjured those Bloodstones from her years ago, when Magik dies her soul gets split in two, and the Illyana part winds up with Belasco while the Darkchild somehow ends up with S’ym. I don’t really get why the Darkchild ends up with S’ym – did he find her wandering Limbo or something – but she does? So Illyana and Darkchild engineer a war between Belasco and S’ym in order to bring themselves together again. They promptly kill Belasco, but then Darkchild seizes control once and for all. It all feels a bit rushed, and honestly it probably needed to be either told at greater length or left to implication.
A bigger problem is that Tim Seeley seems to want this story to be about Illyana learning that Darkchild reflected a dark side that was present in her all along. That’s not quite on the same page with the recent Magik series, but it’s not a million miles away either – that book also wants Darkchild to be a side of Illyana that she’s wrongly interpreted all these years as an infection when it was actually a defence mechanism. But it creates a problem both in having Illyana learn a slightly different version of a lesson that she only just learned in her own book, and in the fact that the actual plot – Darkchild usurps Illyana and replaces her once and for all – doesn’t really dovetail with the message.
Unbreakable X-Men #3 annotations
UNBREAKABLE X-MEN #3
“Like Drowning in the Dark”
Writer: Gail Simone
Artists: Mario Santoro with Luciano Vecchio, Tiago Palma, Davide Tinto & RB Silva
Colour artist: Espen Grundetjern
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: With Haven House burning in the background, Gambit squares off against Namor the Sub-Mariner – not something that literally happens in the story, but broadly a combination of two plot points, so fair enough.
This is the final issue of Unbreakable X-Men, with Uncanny X-Men resuming next month.
PAGES 1-4. Flashback: The Outliers vow to stop Shuvahrak.
We were told last issue that the Outliers had made a vow to stop Shuvahrak if she ever escaped. This flashback shows them making that vow, and is captioned as “present day” – presumably meaning between Uncanny X-Men #21-22, or at least shortly after the “Dark Artery” arc ended in Uncanny #16.
Charts – 5 December 2025
Alright, it’s December, bring on the flood.
1. Taylor Swift – “The Fate of Ophelia”
Seven weeks total, which means it overtakes “Anti-Hero” as her longest-running UK number one. Although “Anti-Hero” did it in six consecutive weeks, while “Fate of Ophelia” had a two week interruption by Olivia Dean. One odd thing about Taylor Swift is that despite her juggernaut status, she’s only actually had five number 1s, and none of the others stayed there for very long: “Look What You Made Me Do” had two weeks in 2017, “Is It Over Now (Taylor’s Version)” had a single week in 2023, and “Fortnight” had a single week last year.
“Fate of Ophelia” peaked a while back, and goes onto ACR downweighting next week, so barring a miracle, this will be its final week at number one. Raye’s “Where is my Husband” is number 2, so the question is whether it can sneak a week at number 1 before getting Whammed. My money’s on “no”.
18. Laufey – “Winter Wonderland”
This was a Spotify exclusive two years ago, and since it’s still less than three years old, it isn’t on permanent downweighting. In other words, it’s not competing on a level playing field with the other Christmas records, but next year it will be.
The X-Axis – w/c 1 December 2025
X-MEN: AGE OF REVELATION INFINITY COMIC #5. By Tim Seeley, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. Part 2 of the Magik story, then. The basic idea here is that thank to the Bloodstones that were conjured by Belasco back in her origin story, when Illyana dies, she gets split into Illyana, whose soul goes to Belasco, and the Darkchild, who for no discernible reason winds up imprisoned by S’ym. So the story seems to be them manipulating S’ym and Belasco into going to war with each other in order that they can be reunited and escape Limbo. Since we know that the Darkchild winds up running Providence, this evidently doesn’t work out as planned. I can’t say I find any of this especially interesting. By its nature, it’s re-treading previous stories – to be fair, that’s partly the point – but they aren’t stories that I have any great desire to revisit in the first place. Belasco and S’ym aren’t very compelling characters and I don’t really see the point of this. I can imagine a world where the 2026 direction includes a bunch of things that were foreshadowed in “Age of Revelation”, which could run to Cyclops reporting back to Magik that she needs to do something about this before she died. But that’s still a Belasco story and I’m not very interested in that either.
AMAZING X-MEN #3. (Annotations here.) This is more like it. Sure, the pacing of Amazing X-Men is weird if you try to see it as a three-issue miniseries, because it isn’t one – it’s issues #2-4 of a storyline that also includes the Overture and Finale one-shots. And sure, all that the characters have really achieved in three issues is to travel to Philadelphia, without any apparent plans for what they’re going to do when they get there. But I don’t really mind any of that, because the relatively sparse main plot is leaving plenty of space for more subtle character work and for hints about the wider story. It’s not so much having Glob Herman turn into a psycho, which is kind of obvious. It’s having Psylocke seem more sympathetic than any of the supposed X-Men, and Schwarzchild coming across as the reasonable one among the future team when we’ve only seen him as a glorified henchman to date. The Beast subplot is working nicely – it seems fairly clear at this point that this is the Krakoan Beast, but it’s being set up in such a way that it’ll feel satisfying when it’s actually revealed – and throwing in the fact that nobody remembers the storyline about Magneto’s supposed degenerative disease is intriguing. Asrar’s art is consistently excellent as well, and playing to the book’s more character-driven strengths. Even though Jed MacKay’s two books are the ones carrying the weight of the plot for “Age of Revelation”, you can make a case too that Amazing X-Men does benefit from the existence of the wider event, since it’s helping to fill out a more-or-less consistent world that this book only has space to touch on.
Laura Kinney: Sabretooth #3 annotations
LAURA KINNEY: SABRETOOTH #3
Writer: Erica Schultz
Artist: Valentina Pinti
Colour artist: Rachelle Rosenberg
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER: Laura fights Apocalypse.
This is the final issue of Laura Kinney: Sabretooth, which was the stand-in book for Laura Kinney: Wolverine. That book isn’t returning in 2026, though Laura is moving over to a new title called Generation X-23.
PAGES 1-3. Revelation sends Laura to Arakko.
Last issue, Laura failed to stop dissident mutants from escaping through their gate to Arakko, a group that included Gabby, Akihiro, Laura’s son Alex, and Shark Girl. Laura sustains a head injury in that story, which she rather oddly ascribes here to “Sage’s force field”. Sage did have a sort of energy bubble thing in the previous issue, but it injured Laura’s arm, not her head.
At any rate, the basic idea seems to be that when her healing factor repairs damage that affects her mind, it also shakes off some of Revelation’s control over her. That would be consistent with Revelation’s need to reprogramme Wolverine in Amazing X-Men #1.
Binary #3 annotations
BINARY #3
Writer: Stephanie Phillips
Artist: Giada Belviso
Colourist: Rachelle Rosenberg
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Annalise Bissa
COVER: Um… well… it’s a woman running away from Phoenix. I assume she’s meant to be Carol Danvers, but she looks absolutely nothing like Carol Danvers beyond the fact that she’s white and blonde (as far as you can tell given that she’s coloured entirely in grey-blue, which means there’s a murky shape as the centre of focus). Her expression doesn’t seem scared, but more like she’s leading the Phoenix after her. I have no idea what it has to do with the story.
This is the final issue of Binary, which in turn was a continuation of Phoenix. That book isn’t returning in January, so the series truly does end here.
PAGES 1-7. Binary realises that she’s dealing with Madelyne Pryor, and Jean Grey manifests.
The basic plot so far is that Carol Danvers inherited the Phoenix Force after Jean Grey apparently burned herself out while containing the X-virus on Earth; that Carol has been using the Phoenix Force to protect her home town of Beverly, Massachusetts by shielding it from the X-virus in a psychic dome; that she started seeing Jean again last issue, since Jean and the Phoenix are one and the same as per Rise of the Powers of X; and that Madelyne Pryor has been scheming against Carol in an attempt to get the Phoenix powers for herself. (more…)
