Binary #2 annotations
BINARY #2
Writer: Stephanie Phillips
Artist: Giada Beluiso
Colourist: Rachelle Rosenberg
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Annalise Bissa
COVER: Binary turns to face a mysterious figure (presumably Goblin Queen).
PAGES 1-3. Flashback: Jean dies quarantining the Earth, and gives the Phoenix to Carol Danvers.
We were told last issue that Carol had been Binary for “almost ten years”, and this seems to confirm that she gets the Phoenix power (and the X-virus is released) a year into the future.
It’s fair enough that Phoenix wants to quarantine the X-virus on Earth. It’s not exactly obvious why she’s doing it on this scale when (at this point) the virus must be localised to a small area of North America. Nor does her barrier seem to be especially effective – we’ve seen teleportation between Earth and Arakko in X-Men: Book of Revelation #1 and Laura Kinney, Sabretooth #2, and aliens in Rogue Storm #1 and X-Vengers #1. Is it specifically a virus-filtering barrier? If she can do that, why not just purge the virus from Earth?
Amazing X-Men #2 annotations
AMAZING X-MEN #2
“A Duel of Truths”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Artist: Mahmud Asrar
Colourist: Matthew Wilson
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: The Darkchild, with the X-Men as prisoners.
PAGES 1-7. Cyclops accepts the Darkchild’s challenge.
We’re picking up directly from the end of issue #1, where the X-Men teleported into Providence apparently as a result of a teleporter accident. In X-Men: Age of Revelation #0, we were told that Magik died when the X-Men broke Fabian Cortez out of jail, but “the Darkchild did not”; and that Juggernaut quit the team soon after. The AoR X-Men basically confirm that account here (and throw in that this happened just one year into the future, relative to the mainstream titles). Apparently, Illyana literally died in this attack but was magically revived in some way, with just the Darkchild persona remaining. We’ll come to how that squares with the recent Magik series.
Juggernaut has been demonically transformed to some extent, which Darkchild ascribes to his role as “my demon knight”. He’s very protective of Illyana and gets frantically upset at the suggestion that she might be dead, something that doesn’t seem to bother Darkchild herself at all. It’s unclear whether he simply refuses to believe the story or whether he’s convinced that she fully returned from the dead. There’s a definite implication here of Cain being, at the very least, puppyishly loyal to Illyana, which we haven’t really seen in the present day.
Charts – 31 October 2025
This again?
“Golden” gets a ninth week at number one after a four week interruption by Olivia Dean and Taylor Swift. There are still two other HUNTR/X tracks in the chart, with “How It’s Done” at 10 and “What It Sounds Like” at 13. Streaming of the soundtrack album is up again (possibly because of the school half term), so “Golden” still hasn’t been hit by the downweighting ACR rule, even though it’s been in the chart since July. The Olivia Dean track has been hit by ACR at this point, but “Golden” would have beaten it anyway.
Taylor Swift still has tracks at 2, 4 and 8. We also have three by Olivia Dean (6, 7 and 22), three by Sabrina Carpenter (15, 21 and 29), two by Sam Fender (14 and 38), and two by Sombr (24 and 35). In fact, there are only five different lead artists in the top 10, and eleven in the top 20. This doesn’t feel entirely healthy. If you confined each lead artist to one track, the number 40 song this week would be “Come Find Me” by MK & Clementine Douglas, which is the official number 60. Except… that version of the top 40 would also include “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls (official number 48), “Mr Brightside” by the Killers (number 51), and “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac (number 58). Hmm.
5. Dave & Tems – “Raindance”
10. Dave & James Blake – “History”
11. Dave & Kano – “Chapter 16”
These are the top three tracks from Dave’s third album “The Boy Who Played The Harp”, which enters the album chart as his third number 1. It has hefty first-week physical sales but it would have placed high on streams alone. It’s all wildly out of place on the singles chart, and on that level, it’s very welcome.
The X-Axis – 30 October 2025
ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #41. By Alex Paknadel, Tim Seeley, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. Cancelled, although it does at least get to use its final arc to wrap up the overarching story. Marvel seem to be winding down the in-continuity spin Infinity Comics generally, although Astonishing Miles Morales: Spider-Man Infinity Comic is still around (as well as Marvel Rivals and Jeff, which I guess might be canon, though it doesn’t really matter one way or the other). I’ve always had my doubts about how far these books were actually helping to bring readers in to Marvel Unlimited, which is principally a back catalogue subscription service, and perhaps Marvel is taking the same view – especially as their current strategy for digital comics seems to be to give up on Amazon and sign up for rival platforms like GlobalComix and Neon Ichiban. The Infinity Comics would have made a lot more sense in a world where Marvel was selling its new digital comics directly on Marvel Unlimited, but that’s evidently not the direction.
Anyway, X-Cutioner shakes off Cassandra Nova’s control but doesn’t seem that different for it; I still don’t think anyone in recent years has actually understood the character. Vague mutterings about wanting to start a war don’t really fit with what Cassandra’s doing in 3K, and a random one-panel cameo by other Generation X characters who never got around to joining the regular cast feels a bit forced. Ultimately, I don’t think this worked; the better stories in this series have played off the idea of Cassandra exploiting, if not legitimate concerns, at least understandable anxieties. So if X-Cutioner is just as mad and only objects to Cassandra’s version of the plan because she’s a mutant, that falls a bit flat. Still, I did quite enjoy this book’s curiously cut-down version of Generation X, and Sean’s uncomfortable role as the outgrown mentor. There’s something in that I’d like to see more of.
Expatriate X-Men #1 annotations
EXPATRIATE X-MEN #1
Writer: Eve L Ewing
Artist: Francesco Mortarino
Colourist: Raúl Angulo
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: Simply a group shot of the cast – except that Colossus, at the back left, doesn’t actually appear in this issue, and Mystique, at the back right, is more of a supporting character who the X-Men are dealing with.
This is the stand-in book for Exceptional X-Men, although that book hasn’t been solicited to return in January. Still, it’s written by Eve Ewing and it features Rift, Melée and Bronze. As for the other Exceptional cast members, Kitty Pryde has appeared in X-Men: Book of Revelation #1; Emma Frost is co-starring in Iron & Frost; and I don’t think we’ve seen Iceman or Axo yet.
PAGES 1-5. Rift, Ms Marvel and Bronze attack a border post.
Rift is Reggie McNair, Trista’s crush from Exceptional X-Men. He turned out to be a mutant in the closing issues of Exceptional when his time portals sent the cast back to Kitty Pryde’s teenage years. He seems to be the narrator here, since the first caption has the same colouring and lightning-flash symbol that appears in his portals.
Daredevil Villains #62: The Congregation of Righteousness
DAREDEVIL #194 (May 1983)
“Judgment”
Writer: Denny O’Neil
Artist: Klaus Janson
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Colourist: Glynis Wein
Editor: Linda Grant
Following Frank Miller on Daredevil is not an enviable task. After two quite decent fill-in stories, the man who takes on the assignment is the book’s editor Denny O’Neil – not so much because he wanted the job as because somebody had to do it, it would seem. He’ll be with us until issue #226, give or take a few fill-ins scattered along the way.
This issue doesn’t read like the start of a planned run, though. The next issue starts some actual storylines, with issue #200 looming on the horizon, but issue #194 this feels like it was intended as the book’s third consecutive fill-in. The editor credit tends to confirm that the book was playing for time at this point. Officially, Marvel didn’t have writer-editors in 1983, but they may have been paying lip service to that policy here. Linda Grant, credited as “guest editor” on this issue and “special editor” on the next, was not a full-fledged editor, but O’Neil’s own assistant. She remains the credited editor up to issue #200, after which the book is finally reassigned to a different office.
Charts – 24 October 2025
A couple of interesting tracks at the lower end of the top 40, and a busy album chart.
1. Taylor Swift – “The Fate of Ophelia”
Three weeks. It’s the same on the album chart, with “The Life of a Showgirl” celebrating its third week at number one there. The same two album tracks round out her three-song limit on the singles chart, with “Opalite” at 5 and “Elizabeth Taylor”. But the margins are getting closer, particularly on the singles chart, where she leads Olivia Dean by a relatively managable 7%.
13. HUNTR/X – “What It Sounds Like”
The X-Axis – w/c 20 October 2025
ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #41. By Tim Seeley, Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. Mmm. This isn’t really working for me. At this point it feels like we’re mainly just going through what needs to be done to wrap up the story, and while the beats make sense, and the art is perfectly decent, it’s all a bit routine. Morph hasn’t been developed to the point where I care about him – as I’ve pointed out before, he was kept on the fringes of storylines that were supposedly about him, and at this point that no longer looks like a longer-term storytelling choice but just a weird decision. There’s a vaguely interesting idea about the X-Cutioner being under the influence of Cassandra Nova, since he was always weirdly cast in this role. His motivation was never meant to be that he hated mutants as such, so much as that he objected to them placing themselves above the law. Now, there’s a trope in X-Men books of “the bigots are actually just being corrupted by evil psychics” which dates back to the Shadow King in the X-Men and has never worked, because bigotry is not just a feature of a world where evil psychics exist. I can see something in using it as a radicalisation metaphor with characters like X-Cutioner who really do start off motivated by, well, legitimate concerns, and then get toppled into something else by Cassandra. But I don’t think it’s really landed. Plus, it runs up against the problem that your main villain winds up being Cassandra herself – and in this interpretation, she’s… not very interesting?
THE LAST WOLVERINE #1. (Annotations here.) We’re three weeks into the “Age of Revelation” tie-ins and… you know, this is going pretty well. I still think it’s wildly ambitious to try and get this many tie-in books out of an X-event in 2025. But the actual stories are holding up well, even though only two of the minis genuinely seem to be relevant to the core plot. Sixteen books written in the margins of another story sounds like a recipe for disaster, but it’s serving a couple of functions. For one thing, we’re only about ten years into the future, so you can use these stories to do some actual foreshadowing for the regular stories and it doesn’t feel like the total detour you might expect. For another, it gives some space to flesh out the Age of Revelation world, which leaves the core books free to get on with the plot. And since the vast majority of that world is not occupied by Revelation, it isn’t just a string of post-apocalyptics stories. This, instead, is a story about Leonard the Wendigo attempting to take up Logan’s mantle as the beloved local superhero of a still-basically-normal Vancouver. It’s remarkably upbeat, even if that comes with an undertow of the value in clinging to optimism when everything is falling apart on the horizon. For regular Wolverine readers there are obvious questions about why Leonard is still a Wendigo, which is why it feels relevant to that series even (mostly) in the absence of the lead character. Good fun.
X-Men: Book of Revelation #1 annotations
X-MEN: BOOK OF REVELATION #1
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Netho Diaz
Inker: Sean Parsons
Colourist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: Revelation stands before a crowd of supporters. Most of them are generics, but one has Akihiro-style claws (though we’ve seen him as a dissident in Laura Kinney, Sabretooth) and the one on the right is obviously Sunspot.
As a rule, I’m only doing full posts for the “Age of Revelation” books that map on to ongoing titles. This one doesn’t, but it’s written by Jed MacKay and it’s clearly much more central to the plot than any of the other books.
PAGE 1. Elbecca Voss in her bedroom.
This is effectively a flash forward which takes place between pages 7-8. As we’ll see later, Elbecca is the newest recruit to Revelation’s Choristers, the power-boosting mutants who enhance his powers to godlike levels. Since she’s too young to remember anything before Age of Revelation, she can’t be much more than ten years old and if she even exists in the present day, she’ll be an infant. I’m fairly sure this is her first appearance, and her unusual name doesn’t obviously map on to any established character.
The Last Wolverine #1 annotations
THE LAST WOLVERINE #1
Writer: Saladin Ahmed
Artist: Edgar Salazar
Colour artist: Carlos Lopez
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER: Leonard as Wolverine, with the original (in his Revelation-era costume) looming in the background.
This is the “Age of Revelation” stand-in title for Wolverine, obviously.
PAGES 1-4. Wolverine rescues kids from a burning building.
We’re in Vancouver, which is comfortably outside Revelation’s reach and seems to be carrying on pretty much as normal for now. The new Wolverine is Leonard, the kid who debuted in issue #2 of the current Wolverine series. He’ll recap his back story for us in the next scene, so we’ll come back to it. At this point, Leonard is wearing a Wolverine costume and seems to be very well established as the local superhero of Vancouver. He’s remarkably cheerful, in a Silver Age Superman kind of way, and it seems from dialogue later in the issue that he keeps this up whenever he’s in public, so it’s not just for the kids’ benefit. He’s just really keen to be a good old traditional superhero. (Given that he’s a Wendigo, it’s possible that making a conscious effort to keep up the persona also helps him stay in control.)
