Welcome, X-Fans, to another uncanny edition of X-Men Monday at AIPT!
No, you haven’t slipped into an alternate universe — it is, in fact, Wednesday. But honestly, it’d cost a fortune to rebrand the column to “X-Men Wednesday,” so hopefully you’ll let this one slide. Plus, we’ve got the Conductor of X himself, Tom Brevoort! I think we can make an eXception.
X-Men Monday has already spoken to writers Jed MacKay, Erica Schultz, and David Marquez about their Age of Revelation tie-in series, and now it’s Tom’s turn to break down the event’s origins, as well as tease the future of the X-Men line. Read on to see what he has to say.
Courtesy of Marvel Comics
AIPT: Welcome back to X-Men Monday, Tom — and it’s not even an anniversary edition! I was wondering if we could start by going back to the origins of the Age of Revelation event and share how it came together. Because, if I remember correctly, X-Men: Heir of Apocalypse kicked off in Jordan D. White’s X-Office and was designed to bridge two eras — not set the stage for a celebration of the anniversary of the Age of Apocalypse.
Tom Brevoort: It’s two separate but connected things. Everything you said about X-Men: Heir of Apocalypse is correct. Jordan and the previous administration started it. They didn’t get that deep into it, but they got deep enough that the creative team — Steve Foxe and Netho Diaz — was on board. And they had at least some broad outlines. I think even the first issue may have been written and in production. They decided they were happy to hand that over to us and move on to the new stuff they were going to work on.
But they hadn’t worked out exactly what the finale was going to be. They’d set up that somebody was going to be the heir of Apocalypse, but they didn’t figure it out ahead of time because they didn’t know what our plans would be — and we didn’t know what our plans would be either. We were only starting to formulate them. So we looked over the 12 contenders and eliminated characters that were already spoken for in some major way.
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We landed on the idea that Doug Ramsey would become the chosen person. In part, we liked it because it was unexpected of all the characters in that list of 12. For years, he’s kind of been described as the X-Man with the useless power that can’t do anything. Why is he hanging around with these other cool New Mutants who can do stuff? He can’t fight anybody, so what good is he? I liked the idea just on the face of it — turning that upside down and taking the least dominant mutant character and putting him into a much more active place and role. But at that point, that was that.
But having made the decision that it would be Doug, I went back to the new group of X-writers and went, “Hey, we’re doing this thing here, and as much as this is a piece we’re kind of inheriting midstream, I’d kind of like it to not just be a thing that falls by the wayside.” You know, like the next time Doug shows up, he says, “Yeah, I got over that.”
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As we started to plan for 2025, one of the things that came up internally at Marvel more than anything else was it being the 30th anniversary of Age of Apocalypse. We should do something for that. And we had a couple of different notions that kicked around — more than one of which has actually ended up coming to fruition, which has its own problems and makes things a little more confusing. But coming out of those conversations, I again went back to the X-crew and went, “Hey, this thing is coming up, they’d be interested in us doing something to commemorate this in some fashion.” And at that point, Jed MacKay said, “Well, I think I have an idea for a thing.”
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So very quickly, that became Age of Revelation. It was a nice-sounding name and similar enough in its construction to Age of Apocalypse, where you stop all the books, go to a different place, all the characters are in weird spots, and it’s interesting to see what’s happened to everybody and how this is all going to shake out. But it wasn’t just doing the same story again, where the Age of Apocalypse mechanism was Legion goes back into the past and accidentally kills Professor X, changing X-history and turning the present into this awful dystopia ruled by Apocalypse. Our take was we’ll move 10 years into the future and see what has become of the world that we’re in now, which still lets us get kind of the same sort of experience that you had from Age of Apocalypse, without it just being the same thing all over again.
And then, of course, at the same time, I started talking to Jeph Loeb about doing an actual Age of Apocalypse follow-up. And for a bit, it looked like that might not happen or might not happen fast enough, because Jeph was working on a bunch of other things. That’s one of the reasons we first started talking about Age of Revelation. I think I said maybe we do it for a month, which was crazy and stupid of me. Everyone got enthused about it, and we thought if we’re going to do this, we should commit and go big with it in the same kind of way they did with Age of Apocalypse.
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Once everything was underway and we were starting to work on this, all the stuff going on with Jeph cleared up. That was good news, except that now I have two things that are similar that have to come out at the same time, but are completely separate from one another. So I’ve just been trusting the intelligence of our audience to be able to differentiate between X-Men of Apocalypse and Age of Revelation.
AIPT: I feel like there are comic book readers who assume there’s a master plan for all these characters, but Doug’s unexpected journey just reflects the collaborative fun of comics. Under the previous X-Office, Rictor, for instance, could have become the heir.
Tom: Yeah, he absolutely could have been, had the books never come to me and stayed with Jordan. If Jordan worked out the post-Krakoan era, I’m sure the ending of X-Men: Heir of Apocalypse would’ve been different, but all the books would’ve been different.
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AIPT: Some of the Age of Revelation series focus on the wider Marvel Universe. X-Fan Mario B is curious about the process for determining which characters get involved beyond the mutants, such as Spider-Man and Cloak and Dagger.
Tom: Well, once we took the bull by the horns and went, OK, this is going to be bigger than just a little one-month thing, at a Marvel Editorial Summit, Jed walked through the initial sort of skeleton superstructure of Age of Revelation. We said we’re doing this, it’s mainly an X-thing, but we’d be open to and happy to have some stuff that’s outside of X in the wider Marvel Universe, because this future that we’re going to isn’t just an X-future — it’s a Marvel future.
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So a lot of people showed up with ideas and wanted to play. Some saw places where doing stories in this world could help tee up stuff they wanted to do down the road. So really, the books and the characters that got used as much as anything were because the creators and editors working on those titles saw an opportunity here or saw something they thought was cool and fun and wanted to join in. So it’s very collaborative in how we build these things.
AIPT: X-Fan HED points out that during your tenure as Conductor of X, you’ve brought back a number of classic and obscure X-Men logos. With Age of Revelation, you’ve dusted off the Classic X-Men and X-Men Archives logos. What considerations went into choosing those logos?
Tom: Well, some of it is I have a certain fondness and a certain nostalgia for a lot of the old iconography, because these are times when I was reading comics just like anybody else. My first instinct was to use the spindly X-Men logo that ran on Classic X-Men. I felt it’s sort of a quasi-dystopian future, and things aren’t so good, so it’s like our X-Men logo, but it’s this more fragile version.
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My initial impulse was to use it on all the X-Men books, but while we were planning to do that, Jay Bowen, who is one of our designers and did all the design work on Age of Revelation, went into the file at Marvel with all those other X-logos. So, rather than going with one logo for five or six books, Jay came back with a bunch of other logos from the archives in case we wanted to have different logos on all of these things. I looked at the different logos and said, “Son of a gun, that actually does look better and makes them more distinct.” So that was all Jay’s doing — by just doing it and showing me that it was better than what I had been thinking up to that point.
AIPT: The big question X-Fans Alex, Jason, and Kenny are asking — just how long exactly is the Age of Revelation? And X-Fan Jason asks if it’ll all come to a close with an “Omega” issue.
Tom: Well, depending on who you are, it will be an eternity or it’ll be over too quickly. But it’s going to run through the end of December, and then in January, we’ll enter a new phase.
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The event won’t end with an “Omega” issue per se, largely because we’re doing X-Men of Apocalypse, and that started with an Alpha and will end with an Omega. I didn’t want to have two Alphas and two Omegas. So Age of Revelation cleverly begins in an Overture issue and ends in a Finale issue, which is totally different from an Alpha and an Omega. So don’t be confused, these are completely separate things. But yes, there will be a Finale issue, and it will be done by Jed and Ryan Stegman, who are also doing X-Men: Age of Revelation Overture. It will bring all of the threads and story back to some hopefully cohesive and satisfying big climax that will set things up for us to move forward into January.
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AIPT: I know you can’t play favorites, but who are some of the characters to watch in Age of Revelation? What new takes on beloved characters will X-Fans be talking about?
Tom: There are a lot of characters, and it’s a lot to keep in your brain all at once. But going into Age of Revelation, one thing we talked about early on, and the reason why skipping 10 years ahead was so appealing to us, is that we’ve introduced a lot of younger characters in this era of X-Men. Not just in the X-Men books, but other titles like Wolverine, so this is a chance to take things 10 years into the future, age all those characters 10 years forward, and make them more prominently X-Men in a way that’s difficult in the current stories, because they’re the newbies right now in the same way the Academy X kids were newbies once and are now just established X-characters. So right there, there’s a whole strata of characters that are going to be prominent in this.
Outside of that, to give some specifics and some characters that have a little more history than guys we’ve just introduced in the last year and a half, I think people, and especially fans who have been hungry for more of a deep dive on Gambit, are going to be very satisfied with the Gambit journey in Unbreakable X-Men.
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In the course of the story, I think people will be a little taken aback by it at the beginning and find Rogue Red‘s story very interesting in Rogue Storm.
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There’s a very different version of Kamala Khan in Expatriate X-Men — it’s a Kamala that’s lived 10 more years and had some experiences that are different from the Kamala of today, and that will hopefully make her an interesting player. That series also has a really cool take on Colossus of all people. I don’t think we get to him until the second month, but once he’s around, he’s kind of got a nice presence that’s unexpected.
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Glob Herman in Amazing X-Men has turned out to be a particular standout among all characters, and that’s as much as anything because Jed really gravitates to the more fringy weirdo characters, which you can kind of see looking back at things like his Moon Knight, where all of a sudden 8-Ball was a big player and somebody that people liked seeing.
And in X-Men: Book of Revelation, the Ghost of Philadelphia will be something that hopefully people will like.
AIPT: And the Ghost of Philadelphia is a character we know?
Tom: Who can tell? I would be remiss to say anything.
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AIPT: X-Fans Alex and Harry G ask how you and the X-Office decided which characters would go where, and whose side they’d be on in Age of Revelation.
Tom: To some degree, it was kind of like a draft pick, because we had these conversations generally amongst the core X-writers, but as other writers got involved, they too had thoughts. And there was a hierarchy in that Jed writing the spine of this also meant Jed had first pick. Jed had a bunch of X-characters that are the ones he’s been writing every month, Gail Simone has a bunch, Saladin Ahmed has his, and so forth.
But very early on, we sort of took the position of mixing and matching a little bit. Let’s mix things up and let’s get some characters into places that you wouldn’t necessarily ordinarily see them, and let them bounce off of different characters than the characters that we’ve been having them interact with all along. Because that can’t help but be interesting, and maybe you’ll get something out of that. That could be a thing that we develop more going forward.
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So there were really very few cases where two people wanted the same toy. And even in those cases, we were able to find ways to more or less make everybody happy. It honestly was a fairly easy process because the various X-creators are very professional, get along with one another reasonably well, and they’re united in their hatred of me. So it gives them a common enemy to push against.
AIPT: You need those Revelation powers to get everyone in line.
Tom: Well, being an editor, I kind of have those in a way. But like Doug, I’m slightly reluctant to use them.
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AIPT: X-Fan Kelly is curious about R-LDS. So far, Magneto is the only character to suffer from this disease, despite the fact that it’s supposedly linked to Krakoan resurrection. We haven’t heard anything about R-LDS in a while, so are we due for any plot developments/revelations about it in Age of Revelation?
Tom: You won’t necessarily see any R-LDS stuff during Age of Revelation. There’ll be other stuff. There’s certainly 3K stuff in Age of Revelation. But you’ll get the next move on the R-LDS stuff pretty soon afterward, going into the early months of 2026. It’s about ready to pop, so people will start to get a sense of at least a broader idea of what’s actually going on as opposed to what maybe seems like is going on.
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AIPT: X-Fan Barrett Owen wonders if the drastic changes characters like Cyclops, Gambit, and Cypher go through in the Age of Revelation will have ramifications on their characters beyond the event’s conclusion.
Tom: At least in certain instances, yes. And very definitively, there are at least two present-day X-Men who end up in this world and experience these events firsthand, and they’ll take back those experiences with them to the present. And again, that will help to vector things toward or away from the events that we will have experienced here. People will be carrying these experiences with them. In other cases, it’ll portend. You may see characters that are together here, and that’s either a thing that maybe will happen in the course of the next few years of storytelling, or maybe that’s a horror that must be avoided in the next few years. And again, knowing X-Men fans, the answer will be both because there’ll be some who are all up for it, and there’ll be others who think that’s the worst thing ever. But everything that happens here, we’re treating like it’s genuine.
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I think I’ve talked about this with you in the past — maybe not. But my standing directive to the X-Men writers, the thing that I say over and over again, more and more than anything else, like my one abiding commandment, is to make the readers cry. I want there to be enough emotional truth in these stories that the characters resonate and feel real, and their situations provoke a strong emotional response from the audience. That’s what I want in every issue of every book. I want to reduce all of the X-Fans to tears every single time. We don’t necessarily always get there, and not every story is cut from the same cloth, but that’s the point that I keep hammering on more than any other, and Age of Revelation is no different.
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AIPT: Speaking of looking beyond Age of Revelation, X-Fan 1407 Graymalkin Lane the living memory of the X-Men says every big X-event aims to reset the stage in some way. What do you hope Age of Revelation accomplishes for the franchise as a whole — whether that’s tightening continuity, refreshing character arcs, or setting up the next era of mutant storytelling?
Tom: Well, there are a couple of things to that. Sometimes, the fans approach this stuff or think about this stuff in ways that are different from me. I was asked a stumper question at San Diego Comic-Con this past year, where somebody came up and said, “You know, during the Krakoan era, there were a lot of really weighty subjects that were discussed and debated, and the characters grappled with these. What are the big issues that your characters are grappling with now?” And it was like, “I’m sorry, I’m telling superhero stories. I’m not trying to lay out philosophies on living.” That usually comes from the writers and the artists.
So, in terms of a specific thing — what am I looking for Age of Revelation to achieve? I want it to be big, bold, and exciting. I want it to be moving. I want people to love it and not know what’s going to happen. Because certainly, we’ve entered a world in which nobody should be considered safe, because I don’t have to keep them around for comics next month, necessarily. And so, all bets are off. I want readers to find the books fun and intriguing.
And given the number of titles, it helps to unify the X-world and the Marvel Universe a little bit. It brings those two a little closer together by involving a larger set of characters. As you said, we’ll see Spider-Man, the Avengers, and the Fantastic Four. We’ll see what happens to this other iconography of the MU in this and then coming out of it.
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Then, going into January and beyond, we’re kind of in the shadow of tomorrow, where the events going forward will all kind of live in the umbra of these events that we have just witnessed.
That’s kind of it. You know, Nightcrawler had to grapple with what faith means in a world in which death no longer exists. Yes, he did, and that was fun. But I’m not looking to unlock the meaning of life in this story.
AIPT: Based on what you just said, I’m getting the sense that the stories following Age of Revelation will almost have a darker tone to them. Is that accurate?
Tom: I don’t know that it’s necessarily going to be any darker than the books have been beforehand. It’s all going to kind of be sitting in a reflection of the events that we’ve just witnessed. We’ve just seen things that have happened to all these characters 10 years down the line. And as far as we’re approaching this, these are all legitimate futures. This isn’t a what-if world. These things exist, as far as even the present-day characters are concerned. So, you’ll see a certain amount of reflectivity in what happens.
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That having been said, you’ll also see us start to launch a bunch of new projects in January, with more in February and March as we restock the line again and have a bunch of new things. We’ll spotlight some characters that haven’t been spotlighted in a while and reshuffle the deck with characters that are now sort of momentarily on the sidelines. Hopefully, that keeps the line feeling fun and exciting and having new cool things for people to check out.
AIPT: I’ve seen a lot of X-Fans concerned about series ending ahead of Age of Revelation. Is there a chance we’ll see some series return?
Tom: A bunch of titles are coming back just like series came back after the Age of Apocalypse. Other titles are going to come back with a bit of a refresh. Some of them are going to transform and essentially be new titles coming out the other side. It’s going to kind of be a little of everything, and there’ll be stuff that didn’t exist before this that will now be launching. So it’s kind of something from every possible category. But until we actually get to the nitty-gritty of it in a month, it’s premature to say, “Oh yes, these are all coming back and these creators are all going to be there.” But if you look at Age of Revelation and what creators are playing in that pool, you start to get a sense of how we’re going to look come January or February. It won’t be exactly the same, but it’s not going to be like we turned everything over, and it’s a whole new crop of people here.
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AIPT: Thanks for sharing that. I was wondering if some of the newer writers in the Age of Revelation mix might stick around after the event passes.
Tom: Going into January, February, March, and even beyond, we’ll definitely see an additional influx of new creators that haven’t been working on the books regularly up to this point. They’ll start to come in and do new projects and be involved in existing projects.
AIPT: Now, for X-Fans Alex Dee, Andre, Bejeweled, Chris G., Egera, Fatimah al-Zahra, Gabe Summers, Grevling, Jenn, Justin Lance, Leo Polonia, Pedro Gonzalez, PhoenixOscura, Make Mine Marvel, Mental Manipulator, Morlock-19, Purplehairedknight, Starlight, Stefano, Taylor K., Tazirai, and Zack Sevilla — hold on, need to take a sip of water — uh, any Betsy Braddock updates?
Tom: I have no news. I really do appreciate their enthusiasm and their effort. Not a day goes by that I don’t get a couple of emails and see a couple of things on social media where people are laying out that they want more Betsy Braddock. And certainly, they want her in a specific way — it’s just not consistently one specific way. 10 different people have 10 different versions of their idealized Betsy. So what I could say is we’re getting to it. We’re not ready right this second, but we’re getting to it.
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AIPT: Alright, there you have it, Betsy fans. And finally, is it safe to assume we can expect to learn a lot more about the next X-era at New York Comic Con in October?
Tom: I think certainly in New York. We’re going to be doing an X-Men panel, so we’ll definitely show off all of our pretty new artwork and a couple of our new things there for sure. So around then, I would definitely expect to see a bunch of stuff start to come out. Because otherwise, it’s going to be a very long hour on that panel.
AIPT: No one likes a dull convention panel, so fingers crossed that pretty artwork is ready in time. But on that note — thanks for taking the time to stop by X-Men Monday, Tom!
And good news, X-Fans, you don’t have to wait until New York Comic Con to see some new art. Keep scrolling for an eXclusive look at the covers to the final issues of each Age of Revelation series, courtesy of our friends at Marvel!
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Next X-Men Monday – September 15, 2025
In the next edition of X-Men Monday, writer Saladin Ahmed will make his X-Men Monday debut to discuss his upcoming Age of Revelation tie-in series, The Last Wolverine!
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Until next time, X-Fans, stay eXceptional!
