X-Men: Age of Revelation Overture #1

History

Jed MacKay, who had been writing the flagship X-Men (vol. 7) ongoing since its 'From the Ashes' launch in July 2024, served as the designated 'event architect' for Age of Revelation, and the Overture one-shot is drawn by his regular X-Men collaborator Ryan Stegman — meaning the same creative team that had been building toward Doug Ramsey's elevation to Heir of Apocalypse across the preceding run delivered the event's kickoff chapter. The event was publicly teased by Marvel in early July 2025 and formally announced as a 30th-anniversary homage to the 1995 'Age of Apocalypse,' with a surprise prelude issue (#0, illustrated by Humberto Ramos) distributed as a retailer shadow-drop shortly before Overture #1 hit stands on October 1, 2025. Editor Tom Brevoort oversaw the Overture issue, and MacKay's stated intent — voiced in the zero issue's letter column — was that Age of Revelation would honor the AoA anniversary while functioning as a genuinely forward-looking story with lasting consequences for the main X-Men line.

Trivia · 8 facts

• Published October 1, 2025 (cover-dated December 2025), written by Jed MacKay, pencilled by Ryan Stegman, inked by JP Mayer, colored by Edgar Delgado, lettered by VC's Clayton Cowles, and edited by Tom Brevoort.
• The issue is a 37-page one-shot that serves as the opening 'alpha' chapter of the Age of Revelation crossover event, functioning as the structural equivalent of X-Men Alpha #1 (1995) for the Age of Apocalypse.
• First appearance of Earth-25221 characters Locus (Rayna Piper) and Elbecca, along with the Earth-25221 versions of Forge, Schwarzschild, and other X-Men within the Revelation Territories continuity.
• The issue's central plot device involves Magneto (leading the future X-Men resistance) having the consciousnesses of present-day Cyclops and Beast mentally transported into their future bodies, because the future versions of both characters had their minds erased by Revelation — an inversion of the 'Days of Future Past' template where the past, not the future, is targeted for change.
• Several Earth-25221 X-Men die within the issue, including Forge, Xorn, Bei the Blood Moon, and Archangel, establishing the lethality and urgency of the alternate timeline.
• The event was explicitly announced by Marvel as a commemoration of the 30th anniversary of 'Age of Apocalypse' (1995), though where AoA was an alternate present that ran for approximately four months, Age of Revelation is framed as a dark-future story set a decade after X-Men #22 and ran for a compressed three-month window.
• The issue received a second printing (released November 19, 2025) and a wide array of variant covers at launch from artists including Artgerm (Stanley Lau), Mark Bagley, Aaron Kuder, Cory Smith, Rickie Yagawa, and Adi Granov, with additional NYCC 2025 exclusive variants.
• The event that Overture #1 kicks off drew in both the current 'From the Ashes' writer cohort (MacKay, Gail Simone, Eve Ewing, Stephanie Phillips, and others) and returning Krakoan-era writers including Jonathan Hickman and Gerry Duggan, broadening its creative scope beyond the immediate ongoing X-line.

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Variants (6)