The X-Men had a big year in 2025, and if we’re being honest, it was remarkably uneven. Since editor Tom Brevoort took over the X-office, there have been some great stories and series, but so much of it has been mediocre to a lot of fans, especially when you look at how books like Wolverine have fallen down the sales charts. Brevoort had a chance to end the year with a bang with “Age of Revelation“, a story that basically aped classics like “Age of Apocalypse” and modern greats like “Sins of Sinister”. However, saying that the story made fans happy is a road too far.
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“Age of Revelation” had to do several things to be successful, but with the story’s end, it’s plain to see that they weren’t able to. This was the new X-office’s chance to knock readers’ socks off and it didn’t do that in the slightest. Looking at the three month story, it’s easy to see why ti all floundered and these five factors are why “Age of Revelation” is going to go down as a failure.
5) Most of the Series Did Nothing for the Main Plot
“Age of Revelation” tried to be “Age of Apocalypse”, a story that had numerous great installments that helped build the main plot. Astonishing X-Men, Amazing X-Men (Vol. 1), Generation Next, Weapon X, and Gambit and the X-Ternals all told disparate stories that build the main plot of the story; you could skip some of them, but you were missing something excellent and not getting the whole story. If you want to understand the main plot of “Age of Revelation”, you basically just have to read the bookends, Amazing X-Men (Vol. 2), and Book of Revelation. You can skip the vast majority of the event and lose nothing. That’s a huge problem, because Marvel put out a double digit amount of tie-ins and none of them make a good argument for their existence. “AoA” was full of stories that you can re-read endlessly; “AoR” is fill of filler you’re better off skipping.
4) The Main Plot Isn’t Interesting
“Age of Revelation” is one of the least interesting X-Men stories of all time. Nothing about it is unique; how many X-Men stories have you read about people trying to figure out a way to keep a bad future from happening? The answer to that question is too many. In fact, unless you read Book of Revelation #3 and Amazing X-Men (Vol. 2) #3, there’s really no main plot to make sense of; it’s just a bunch of alternate universe stories from a lame alternate universe. Add in how bad Revelation’s plan is (he wanted to make the planet and its inhabitants into a single organism, a la Ego the Living Planet), and you get a story that just wasn’t worth the effort of reading.
3) None of It Was Compelling
So, one of the strengths of “Age of Apocalypse” is how compelling each book was. You didn’t need to read Factor X, X-Universe, X-Calibre, X-Man, or X-Men Chronicles, but if you did, you got compelling stories that fleshed out the world. However, “Age of Revelation” has nothing compelling. This is a story that should have just been told in Jed MacKay’s X-Men, because the rest of it doesn’t matter to anything else. Each series is just kind of there and there’s no real reason to like any of them. This isn’t an interesting alternate world and very few of the characters matter at all to story. I honestly feel like Marvel figured that calling the story “Age of…” would be enough for fans to want to buy these books and forgot to make the whole thing interesting.
2) Revelation Is Not a Good Villain
Many fans questioned why Doug Ramsey was made into Apocalypse’s heir Revelation, and they were right to do so. Doug is an amazing character will all kinds of potential for creators to tell great stories about him, his husband Warlock, and his wife Bei the Blood Moon (yes, yes, he and Warlock aren’t married, but they might as well be). Instead of that, they tried to make him a generic dark lord mastermind, which doesn’t fit him at all. Reading the books that featured him show a character who was both really bad at being a villain and also somehow was a master manipulator who got everyone where he wanted them for the dumbest plan I’ve seen in an X-Men comic in years. Sometimes, you can take a bad idea, like turning Doug into an Apocalypse wannabe, and make it good. “Age of Revelation” was never able to do that. He’s not scary, his plan is bad, and he just doesn’t fit the role that was set out for him.
1) The Ending Was Bad
X-Men Omega #1 is one of the best endings in comics. It was infinitely re-readable (I read daily back in 1995 and never got tired of it), an exciting, action-packed, shocking ending to an amazing story. “Age of Revelation”‘s ending isn’t worthy of washing X-Men Omega #1’s jock strap. X-Men: Age of Revelation Finale #1 is a bad ending; there’s nothing exciting about it (except possibly the end reveal, which you’d only care about if you read MacKay’s X-Men) and even though I wouldn’t call it predictable, the fact that the ending is something of a surprise isn’t a good thing. It’s action-packed, but it’s hard to care. I might not have liked this story, but I wanted the ending to be great. Even if the rest of it was bad, if the ending was good, it would all have been worthwhile. However, instead of sticking the landing, the book blundered towards an ending that very few fans actually enjoyed.
What do you think of “Age of Revelation”? Leave a comment in the comment section below and join the conversation on the ComicBook Forums!
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