Previously On X-Men: ‘Age Of Revelation Finale’ #1 Is A Successful Conclusion To An Unsuccessful Event

And so we come, at last, to the end of “Age of Revelation”, an event that is somehow shorter than “Age of Apocalypse” (three months vs four) yet feels much, much longer.

X-Men: Age of Revelation #8

By Alex Paknadel & Edoardo Audino

Glob battles Quentin Quire before being recruited by the X-Men

• I kinda love that in this timeline, Punisher sacrifices himself for Glob Herman of all people.
• Magneto shows up to recruit Glob into the X-Men, and he is really the one that sets Glob down the “shoot first, ask questions later” path, not the Punisher, which is another little irony I enjoy.
• By all accounts, this is the conclusion of the X-Men Infinity comic — both the “Age of Revelation” version of course, but the series as a whole, with both Paknadel and Audino moving on to other work inside the X-office.

Using Quentin as the antagonist of this three-parter is smart, given their history together, and adds a little something, however unintentionally, to their showdown in the finale issue.

X-Men: Age of Revelation Finale #1 – Book of the Week

By Jed MacKay, Ryan Stegman & Netho Diaz.

Apocalypse and his Arakkoan army unite with the X-Men to defeat Revelation’s plan to transform the world into a sole entity. They fail.

• The opening page is a repeat of the scene shown in Amazing X-Men #3 and Book of Revelation #3, though with new dialogue.
• It’s more or less confirmed here that the X-Virus was intended to simply transform everyone into mutants, not affect humans sporadically and cause deaths (this is the cause of the millions of deaths Revelation cited in Book of Revelation #3). As a plus, this means that present day Doug isn’t so far gone as to be irredeemable (ie the plan being “make everyone mutants” is a lot more reasonable/walkback-able than “unleash a virus which may kill a lot of people but not mutants so its okay).
• In a rare of bit of cross-event continuity, Wolverine shows up here following the events of Last Wolverine #3, freed of Revelation’s control and down an arm.
• He kills a bunch of nameless Seraphim, though Dragoness appears to be amongst them.
• Quentin calls on his Omega Kids to help him defeat Professor Xavier (a rematch of their battle in X-Men #13, as stated), saying he’s learned from Xavier the importance of having kids do your dirty work for you. Except all the all the Omega Kids were killed in the last issue of his miniseries and the new ones he called up there would presumably not be ready to do much against Xavier.
• I get that Glob is immune to telepathy, but it feels weird that he can hold his own against Quentin when Quentin could just rip him apart telekinetically.
• Fun to see Apocalypse as the pitcher in a fastball special.
• As Revelation begins his whole “merge the world into one being thing, we see Phoenix from Binary, Rogue & Gambit from Unbreakable X-Men, and Spider-Man from Radioactive Spider-Man.
• Also, sure seems like a fully-powered Phoenix, as she was left at the end of Binary, should have been able to stop Revelation’s plan here.
• Missing anywhere in the issue is anyone from Expatriate X-Men, despite that book concluding by pointedly sending its cast to Philadelphia.
• The big reveal here (and, ultimately, the thing to which its been building given the whole event is an alternate timeline that was altered the moment the story began) is that Krakoa Beast is the 3K Chairman, and it was his mind who went into the future, not the X-Men’s Beast. Which means now 3K — whose goals include making humans into mutants — knows about the X-Virus.
• The Chairman apparently has a “synthetic body,” which is why he doesn’t physically look like Beast, and has countermeasures in place to prevent psychic takeover (which is why the Future Beast doesn’t know where he was).
• It’s never made clear, but presumably, the “sending back Beast’s mind to his past self” bit didn’t work because there are TWO Beasts in the “past” — which would also suggest that in the original “Age of Revelation” timeline, the X-Men hadn’t yet learned that the 3K Chairman was Krakoa Beast.

Well, that wraps up everything about as expected (ie not good). Everyone dies, essentially (except Doug, who becomes an Ego), which is probably the only way this could have ended but doesn’t do much to shake the feeling that this an issue of What If? (in which “everyone dies” is consistently the answer to the question posed in a given issue’s premise) turned into a 40+ issue event. The core story here, of Doug trying to square Apocalypse’s mission with his own morals and inadvertently creating an “everyone dies” future that has to get wiped from existence — isn’t bad, and on paper, is of a piece with similar kind of X-Men stories dating back to “Days of Future Present.” As a conclusion, this issue is a bit like the Lost finale — whatever problems existed in the story existed before the final chapter and weren’t able to be addressed by it, so it did the best it could with what it could.

Because where “Age of Revelation” falters is the decision to turn that initial story idea into an event with over a dozen tie-in series, especially when none of them really have much to do with the overarching story. I’ve been saying this all along (and I’m hardly alone), but “Age of Revelation” as a little mini-event, with Stegman’s X-Men double shipping (to cover the Book of Revelation material) along with a pair of bookend one-shots, would ultimately work much better than this bloated event does.