House to Astonish Episode 215
With NYCC in the rear-view mirror, it’s time to look back at some of the news coming out of the show, like the revamped Vertigo slate, Swamp Thing Is Killing The Children, DC K.O.’s unexpected crossovers, Marvel’s two upcoming symbiote-centric sagas, Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen’s Crowbound, the first wave of post-Age of Revelation X-books, the impending Spider/Super crossover and a smattering of other little newsy nuggets. There’s also reviews of Endeavour and DC K.O., and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe is a government man through and through. All this plus Warwick Davis’s bin rota, Jim Davidson’s Garfield and an unavoidable detour into “in a world…” voice.
The episode is here, or available via the embedded player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments, on Bluesky, or via email.
Charts – 17 October 2025
Well, she’s slightly less dominant this week.
1. Taylor Swift – “The Fate of Ophelia”
Two weeks. The album “The Life of a Showgirl” also gets a second week at number 1. There’s a significant second week drop in streaming, but that still leaves her with a very comfortable lead on both charts. Obviously, the enormous physical album sales from her first week aren’t repeated, and she’s now working mainly on streaming numbers. But that’s still enough to beat the number 2, 3 and 4 albums combined.
On the singles chart, the other tracks from the album do tail off a little bit more. Last week she locked up the top three, but this time “Opalite” is at 4 and “Elizabeth Taylor” at 6. She’d still be swamping the chart if it wasn’t for the three-song rule.
12. HUNTR/X – “How It’s Done”
This had three weeks on the chart in July, and got as far as number 29 before getting overtaken by “Soda Pop” and disqualified under the three song rule. “Soda Pop” gets hit by the downweighting rule this week, and so “How It’s Done” escapes disqualification and re-enters.
The X-Axis – w/c 13 October 2025
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #40. By Alex Paknadel, Tim Seeley, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. Well, this certainly feels like the series is wrapping itself up, with the heroes finally getting to fight the X-Cutioner and a greatest hits selection of his weapons from previous arcs. There isn’t that much more to it, though, and the background storyline about the X-Cutioner and Cassandra has always been rather less interesting than the individual stories along the way. This isn’t bad, but it feels more like an obligatory resolution than something that’s going to kick that overarching story up a notch.
UNBREAKABLE X-MEN #1. (Annotations here.) We’re in week two of the “Age of Revelation” proper – as opposed to the prologue one-shots – and they’re turning out to be a broader range of stories than I would have expected. There are four tie-ins this week, and only two of them really involve Revelation at all. The others are pretty much stories that you could do in any near future timeline, at least from what we’ve seen so far. I have no problem with that; I don’t want to spend three months reading a vast array of takes on a very specific story. How well it’ll sell is another matter, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
Rogue Storm #1 annotations
ROGUE STORM #1
“Deicide”
Writer: Murewa Ayodele
Artist: Roland Boschi
Colour artist: Neeraj Menon
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: A split image of Storm and Rogue, with Storm in what I’m guessing is a savannah, and Rogue in what looks like the Arctic but… well, we’ll come to that. Rogue is wearing the knuckledusters that Storm gives her in flashback during the story.
This is the stand-in book for Storm during “Age of Revelation”.
PAGE 1. Montage: “Five years into the Age of Revelation.”
The main time frame for “Age of Revelation” is ten years, so this is effectively a flashback.
The first panel shows a shattered Mjolnir in orbit, presumably to do with the fate of Thor in this timeline. We don’t know yet what might have happened to him.
The second panel is captioned as the Sahara Desert, but the art shows a snowy wasteland. We’re told later in the issue that Storm has frozen the desert.
Unbreakable X-Men #1 annotations
UNBREAKABLE X-MEN #1
“Guarding the Gate”
Writer: Gail Simone
Artist: Lucas Werneck
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: Age of Revelation Gambit, with the tombstones of Rogue and Marcus St Juniors, and… well, that looming face in the background might be Shuvahrak, but the green gloves seem more like Rogue.
This is the “Age of Revelation” title standing in for Uncanny X-Men.
PAGES 1-8. Rogue dies fighting Galactus.
“Seven years from now.” The main time frame for Age of Revelation is ten years into the future, relative to the present day. By this point, the Revelation Territories should be well established. However, this is Louisiana, and it’s not part of Revelation’s territory even in the main time frame.
Haven House. The base of the X-Men team from Uncanny X-Men. Evidently they’re still there years into the future – or at least they return there at some point.
The X-Men. The team at this point consists of Ransom (as team leader), Rogue, Gambit, Temper, Dome, Spider-Girl and Sentinel Boy. Taking them in turn:
Charts – 9 October 2025
Behold domination.
1. Taylor Swift – “The Fate of Ophelia”
2. Taylor Swift – “Opalite”
3. Taylor Swift – “Elizabeth Taylor”
In 2017, Ed Sheeran managed to get sixteen tracks into the top 20 simultaneously, because his fans were hammering the entirety of his album. The chart company responded by introducing the three-song rule, which limits each artist to three tracks (not counting features on other people’s records). Although the rule applies more broadly, its original justification was actually pretty reasonable: there’s a singles chart, and there’s an album chart, and if people are listening to the whole album then that ought to be reflected on the album chart, instead of counting as sixteen singles.
The X-Axis – w/c 6 October 2025
ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #39. By Alex Paknadel, Tim Seeley, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. Well, someone didn’t get the memo about “Age of Revelation”. Astonishing X-Men ploughs gamely on as normal. Then again, it might not have a choice, because this looks a lot like it’s meant to be drawing the book’s storylines to a head – Morph goes on trial after the previous arc, and the X-Cutioner attacks the court with a greatest hits selection of all the weapons he’s used in the series to date. So that sounds a lot like we’re getting to the pay off, and it wouldn’t be the first Infinity Comic they’ve wrapped up recently. Now, there’s an inherent problem in a marginal book like this trying to play the “mutant trial of the century” card – quite aside from the fact that Magneto and Cyclops have both been put on trial before – and it means that my plot problems with the previous arc are rolled forward to this one, since I don’t really buy that the ground rules of the Marvel Universe allow people to waltz in to nuclear facilities and launch missiles just because they happened to have a high security clearance a decade ago. And this book’s take on X-Cutioner has always been a bit one-dimensional as well. So… it clunks a bit, this. But we’ll see if it can pull everything together.
AMAZING X-MEN #1. (Annotations here.) It’s the first full week of “Age of Revelation”, and this is obviously the core series – the whole thing grows entirely out of MacKay’s X-Men. In many ways I’m happy to see that there’s a clear and contained core to the thing, rather than inventing all manner of busywork sidequests to justify all the tie-ins. From all we’ve seen so far, the answer to the question “Which Age of Revelation books do you really have to read to follow the event” is… this one. Just this one. And… great! It can outsource a bit of the world building to the other titles and focus on its own story, which ultimately seems to be an episodic road trip around the AoR, coupled with a mystery about why the future X-Men are clearly lying to Cyclops about at least some of this. And a subsidiary mystery about what’s up with the Beast; I suspect the twist here may be that he is from the past, but not from the same point in the past. I’m not entirely sold on Wolverine being so unstoppable that he can just get out of a black hole, and the art feels a bit muted at times… but then again, the sequence of Revelation reprogramming Wolverine is very nicely done. It’s a solid chapter of a relatively tight core story, anyway.
Laura Kinney, Sabretooth #1 annotations
LAURA KINNEY, SABRETOOTH #1
Writer: Erica Schultz
Artist: Valentina Pinti
Colour artist: Rachelle Rosenberg
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER: Laura as Sabretooth, in an overgrown city from Age of Revelation. Specifically, the sign says it’s Market Street, which is a main road in Philadelphia, Revelation’s capital.
Obviously, this is the Age of Revelation stand-in book for Laura Kinney, Wolverine.
PAGE 1-11. Laura asks Akihiro and Gabby to get her son Alex out of town.
Yes, it’s an 11 page scene.
“This is what mutants wanted all along…” Laura’s introduction to Age of Revelation Philadelphia presents it as a Krakoa-style utopia, which is basically how the Revelation himself portrays it. The ordinary inhabitants of Philadelphia certainly seem pretty relaxed here. It may not be significant, but for an all-mutant population, they skew much more heavily to human-passing than they ever did in Krakoa. Come to think of it, so did the Babels we saw in Binary.
“Before the government tried to destroy Revelation’s compound, they sent in super villains and assassins to stop us…” This comes from X-Men: Age of Revelation #0. Xorn’s narrative in that issue says that “when they gave up on soldiers and resorted instead to assassins, Revelation had any number of mutants to protect him” (and makes a point about the memory of Krakoa being a driving factor). The art shows Psylocke defending Revelation from Bullseye, but evidently Laura had joined him by this point.
Binary #1 annotations
BINARY #1
Writer: Stephanie Phillips
Artist: Giada Beluiso
Colourist: Rachelle Rosenberg
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Annalise Bissa
COVER: Binary, now with added Phoenix emblem.
This is another “Age of Revelation” miniseries, and I’m covering it in this feature because it’s standing in for an ongoing title, Phoenix.
Binary is a former identity of Carol Danvers (Captain Marvel), which she used as a member of the Starjammers after gaining cosmic powers. The reference is supposed to be to binary stars (hence the two stars on her normal costume motif, but that’s replaced here by the Phoenix emblem). As Binary, she was part of the extended X-Men supporting cast. Obviously Carol has had plenty of solo books under the titles Ms Marvel and Captain Marvel, but this is the first book to appear under the name Binary.
PAGES 1-4. Hank and co try to kill Binary, and fail.
This is a flash forward to “five days from now”, and we’ll see in a bit what Hank is up to – suffice to say that his insinuations that Binary has done something to deserve assassination are misdirection.
Amazing X-Men #1 annotations
AMAZING X-MEN vol 3 #1
“Flight”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Artist: Mahmud Asrar
Colourist: Matthew Wilson
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: The core cast, with Cyclops supporting Schwarzchild.
This is the third series to be called Amazing X-Men. The first was the miniseries which stood in for X-Men during the original “Age of Apocalypse” event back in 1995. The second was an ongoing series which ran for 19 issues in 2013-2015 – it’s the one that opens with Nightcrawler returning from the dead.
This one is the stand-in for X-Men during “Age of Revelation”. To all intents and purposes, last week’s one-shot X-Men: Age of Revelation Overture was the real first issue of this series, and this story picks up the plot in progress: Cyclops and Beast have been transported into the bodies of their future selves in ten years’ time, with Revelation ruling a “mutant land” which is spreading across America. They promptly got attacked by Wolverine, with only Cyclops, Beast, Animalia (Jen Starkey), Glob Herman and Schwarzchild escaping. That’s where this issue picks up.
