Daredevil Villains #61: Willow
DAREDEVIL #193 (April 1983)
“Bitsy’s Revenge”
Writer: Larry Hama
Artist: Klaus Janson
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Editor: Denny O’Neil
Frank Miller’s run ended with issue #191, and by most standards he left the book in a much healthier state than he’d found it. Sales had turned around, it was back on a monthly schedule, and it was a book everyone was talking about. But all of that rested heavily on Miller himself, and left Marvel with the question: what now?
Klaus Janson stuck around for a few more issues on art. That gave the book some degree of visual continuity during this transition, although to be honest, less than you might expect. His layouts are more traditional and his issues feel a little more restrained, though there are still visual flourishes to be found. But it’s still Klaus Janson, and there’s still some consistency.
Who would even want to put themselves forward as the next regular writer of Daredevil, though? As it turns out, the answer seems to have been “nobody”. After two issues by fill-in writers, editor Denny O’Neill wound up writing the book himself – in his own words, “mostly because there didn’t seem to be (m)any other viable candidates for it”. But we’ll get to that next time.
Charts – 3 October 2025
Olivia Dean finally gets her week at number one.
1. Olivia Dean – “Man I Need”
9. Olivia Dean – “So Easy (To Fall In Love)”
This has had a long wait for “Golden” to run out of steam – it entered at number 8 in August, and then spent the next five weeks waiting at number 2 while its figures kept growing. After marginally missing out last week, it wins handily this week, with a margin of over 15%. The release of her second album “The Art of Loving” obviously helps – it enters the album chart at number 1. Its predecessor reached number 4 in 2023 but didn’t stick around for a second week. Then again, its total sales are a fraction of “Art of Loving”‘s first week numbers, so I expect this one to show more staying power.
The X-Axis – w/c 29 September 2025
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #38. By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ Diaz & Clayton Cowles. This will be a short week – in scheduling terms, it’s set aside as the launch week of “Age of Revelation”, with just the one lynchpin book. Aside from that, we’ve got the final issue of Deadpool / Wolverine and we’ve got this. It’s a sort of epilogue to the Morph arc, but I can’t say it leaves me much the wiser about the point of it all was. Of course, every arc in this book ends with the X-Cutioner or Cassandra Nova turning out to be pulling the strings, and that comes with the territory. Here it’s Cassandra Nova, but whatever they were trying to do with Morph seems if anything to be less interesting if it’s just Cassandra calling the shots. And why is Cassandra Nova trying to start a nuclear war anyway? What does that have to do with 3K’s agenda? It seems to be trying to set up Banshee as the opposition to Cassandra’s siren song, but in a way that doesn’t have much of anything to do with X-Men, and isn’t desperately interesting on its own terms either. The art is lovely – Audino really does do a great shapeshifter – and comes very close to carrying it, but the direction of this book is losing me.
X-MEN: AGE OF REVELATION OVERTURE #1. (Annotations here.) So I liked this. It’s a little weird to be having a second lead-in book when we already had Age of Revelation #0 a few months ago, but on the whole I think the story benefits from having shifted a lot of the outright infodumping into that book. It sets up the basic plot of Cyclops and Beast arriving in the future and being told that they’re going to kill Revelation, it sets up some mystery about what Bei has discovered, and it sketches out the basic of this future in a way that suggests MacKay has a clear idea of how it all works. Ryan Stegman gets the right balance between post-apocalyptic and quasi-utopian, depending on how you’re seeing the world, and I quite like the subtlety of setting up that something’s not right here by throwing in an outright contradiction to the previous issue and not flagging it up. Some commenters here seemed inclined to take that as a continuity error, but I’ve read enough Jed MacKay by this point to have confidence that he’s doing it on purpose (and I gather the previews for next week confirm it).
X-Men: Age of Revelation Overture #1 annotations
X-MEN: AGE OF REVELATION OVERTURE #1
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Ryan Stegman
Inker: JP Mayer
Colourist: Edgar Delgado
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: Simply an assortment of characters from the “Age of Revelation” timeline.
This is the opening one-shot for the “Age of Revelation” event. As things stand, I’m only planning to do annotations for the quasi-ongoing titles: Amazing X-Men, Binary, Laura Kinney: Sabretooth, Rogue Storm, Unbreakable X-Men, Last Wolverine and Expatriate X-Men. But we’ll see how things turn out.
PAGES 1-4. Glob Herman kills Topaz.
“X Years Later.” The X-books started using this formula during the Krakoan era, but it’s explicit later in the issue that in this case, “X” is 10.
“The Revelation Territories.” The general set-up of this world was previously established in July’s X-Men: Age of Revelation #0, though the essentials are all repeated anyway in the course of this issue. That issue consists of an account of the history of the timeline written by the future Xorn for the benefit of the present-day Cyclops, who the (future) X-Men are planning to bring to their timeline in the style of Days of Futures Past. In very brief outline, X:AoR #0 tells us that Revelation seized control of the X-Men after joining the team; that he used power-boosting mutants like Fabian Cortez to increase his powers so that he could control the environment as well as just forcing people to obey his instructions; that a mystery “X-Virus” was unleashed in Philadelphia, which killed most humans and turned the rest into mutants, and which was blamed on 3K; that the virus terraformed the environment to become hostile to humans; that Revelation has tried to make this world into a quasi-Krakoa; and that Revelation rules as a dictator.
Daredevil Villains #60: The King of the Sewers
DAREDEVIL #180 (March 1982)
“The Damned”
Writer, penciller: Frank Miller
Finisher, colourist: Klaus Janson
Letterer: Sam Rosen
Editor: Denny O’Neil
Frank Miller’s first run as writer covers issues #168 to #191, but it’s built heavily around the trinity that we’ve already covered: Elektra, the Kingpin and the Hand. There are some edge cases in the rest of Miller’s run who might have qualified for this feature, to be sure. The Kingpin’s mayoral candidate Randolph Winston Cherryh gets a major speaking part, but he’s still basically a Kingpin pawn. There’s a subplot about the board of Glenn Industries trying to seize control of the company from Heather, but they’re mostly anonymous white collar criminals. And there are generic drug dealers and the like who drive the plot of individual stories. But these are gimmick-free criminals with a single story, and they all share the spotlight with more recognisable characters.
Once we score all of those guys off the list, this turns out to be our final entry from the Miller run. For those of you who might be wondering, issue #177 doesn’t have a villain – it’s an issue of Stick helping Daredevil to get his radar back. Issues #178-179 are the Kingpin. Issue #181 is Bullseye. Issues #182-184 have the Punisher as guest villain on loan from Spider-Man. Issue #185 is the Kingpin again. Issue #186 is Stilt-Man. Issues #187-190 are the Hand and the Kingpin. And issue #191 is Bullseye.
Charts – 26 September 2025
A week with two high new entries and… yeah, pretty much nothing else.
Eight weeks total. Last week I said that this track had peaked and Olivia Dean’s “Man I Need” was in track to overtake it. Well, it’s started growing again – just enough to avoid being overtaken, with a margin of victory of fractionally over 1%. The Olivia Dean track is still growing faster, so there’s still a strong chance that this week will be it, but… who knows.
3. Lewis Capaldi – “Something in the Heavens”
Why yes, that is an AI-generated video – perhaps the highest-profile example I’ve seen to date. To be fair, it’s one of the better examples I’ve seen, but that’s because it leans into the dreamlike vibe that leverages the uncanny valley effect. I’ve yet to see a successful AI video that wasn’t in some way trying to turn the technology’s weaknesses into advantages by building around them. You’ll notice nobody wanted to take their chances with putting the actual Lewis Capaldi into the video.
The X-Axis – 26 September 2025
ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #37. By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ Diaz & Clayton Cowles. You know, sometimes a plot makes so little sense that it’s hard to see past that to anything else. The basic idea here is that Changeling and Morph are a split personality who don’t realise that they’re the same person – okay, fair enough. Changeling wants to start a nuclear war so that mutants can rebuild civilisation in the ruins – bit mad, but okay, it’s what he was trying to do back in the Silver Age as a member of Factor Three. Changeling wants to use his shape-changing powers to impersonate someone with high enough security clearance to get into a military base and fire the missiles – I’m going to doubt that there’s any one military type who can do that, but sure, I’ll go with it. But… the guy in question is a SHIELD agent? Who retired twenty years ago? And he can just waltz in with a bit of facial scanning? What? No, this is silly. Nice art on the shapechanging, and I get that there’s some kind of point being made about Banshee’s attitude to rehabilitation, but… no.
X-MEN #22. (Annotations here.) Okay, now this is good. I was saying last week that most of the line wasn’t doing a great job of building up to “Age of Revelation”, and to be honest I still see it as basically an X-Men storyline that seems to be interrupting the other titles. But as an X-Men storyline, I’m quite looking forward to it. This is pretty much an entire issue of conversation, picking up on a series of character subplots, and it even sells me a bit more on Juggernaut killing Ocelot last issue – I’m still not convinced that that’s in character, but there’s follow-up which feels more convincing. C F Villa’s art keeps a very talky issue interesting and I’d really like to see more from them. The pay-off of all this is Doug Ramsey showing up to join the X-Men, which we already know from the Age of Revelation one-shot is a slippery slope towards disaster. I’m not quite sure whether he’s meant to come off smug as the art makes him look here – he didn’t come across this way in issue #19, his spotlight story. But then again he’s talking to a different audience here, and trying to sell his alpha male status to an audience who aren’t used to thinking of him that way so… I guess it makes sense. Anyway, this was fun, and it was one of those stories where there turned out to be a lot more to say about it in the annotations post than I thought there would be. And it does raise my interest in “Age of Revelation”.
Storm #12 annotations
STORM vol 5 #12
“Thunder War Ends”
Writer: Murewa Ayodele
Artist: Mario Santoro
Colour artist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER. Storm confronts Hadad, who is perches on a dead Galactus.
This is the final issue of the current run of Storm, but the book continues into “Age of Revelation” as Rogue Storm and seems to be getting a fresh issue #1 in January for its next season.
PAGES 1-2. Doctor Voodoo and…
Actually, hold on. The cosmic plotlines in this series are so incredibly convoluted that we’re best off just trying to draw them all together. So, rather than attempting to annotate this conventionally, I’m just going to attempt to draw together all the threads from the cosmic plotline in this series and see if we can make it make sense.
Spoilers: it does more or less hold together if you read it all in one sitting and put it in order, even though the plot hinges on a murderous rivalry between Eternity and Oblivion that seems out of character for both of them.
X-Men #22 annotations
X-MEN vol 7 #22
“Dawning of an Age”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Artist: C F Villa
Colour artist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER. A split image of Cypher and Cyclops, with their symbolic predecessors Apocalypse and Professor X in the background.
This is the final issue of X-Men before it goes on hiatus for “Age of Revelation”; the story continues into the stand-in mini Amazing X-Men.
PAGES 1-2. Magik collects Cyclops from the Merle town jail.
Chief Robbins arrested both Cyclops and Agent Lundqvist in issue #20 when they got into a fight in a diner. She tells us here that she was putting on a show to demonstrate that the authorities will treat mutants (and Lundqvist) just like anyone else. She’s well aware that Cyclops could have left at any time, and once Lundqvist is out of the way, she’s willing to say so openly.
Charts – 19 September 2025
Well, Ed Sheeran’s got an album out, and it’s a reasonably big deal, but not as big a deal as it used to be.
“Golden” gets a seventh non-consecutive week at number one, but it is past its peak and Olivia Dean’s “Man I Need” came very close this week. If “Golden” manages another week, it will be a surprise.
16. Ed Sheeran – “Camera”
This is the release week single from his album “Play”, which predictably becomes his ninth consecutive number 1 album. “Camera” is the album’s token epic ballad, and it becomes the fifth top 40 track from the album. Most people can only dream of getting that many hit singles off an album.
