From the Ashes and the Present Day

Krakoa is gone. The X-Men go back to being hunted, scattered and small, and the rest of the line gets its own reset: vampires take Manhattan, Doctor Doom takes the world, and a second Ultimate Universe quietly becomes the best on-ramp Marvel has published in twenty years. This is the era you are living in.

Why you are reading this era

Two reasons, and they pull in opposite directions.

The first is that this is where the current story is. If you want to walk into a comic shop and buy something that came out this week, you need to know what the X-Men are doing now, why Doctor Doom ruled the Earth for most of 2025, and who is left standing after it. Everything in the previous twelve chapters was preparation for being able to read the present.

The second reason is that the present is the worst place to start, and this era knows it. Marvel knows it too, which is why it spent 2023 to 2026 running a whole second line - the Ultimate Universe - built specifically so a new reader could begin at issue #1 with no homework. That line is the strongest sustained work Marvel published in this window, and it is now finished, complete, and sitting on a shelf in six collections. If you read nothing else in this chapter, read that.

The main-line story is messier. From the Ashes strips the mutants of Krakoa and puts them back in a hostile world, which is the correct correction but not an exciting one. Fourteen months later Marvel blew that up too, with Age of Revelation, a three-month jump into a ruined future. Then it rebuilt again as Shadows of Tomorrow. Three status quos in twenty months tells you something honest: nobody had a plan the length of Hickman’s, and the line has been searching.

The threads that will matter later are the ones planted quietly. Thunderbolt Ross taking Latveria after Doom falls. The Origin Boxes crossing between universes. Doom’s bargain with Valeria. Those pay off in Armageddon, the mid-2026 event that is running as this book goes out, and past it into whatever 2027 is. You will be reading those as they publish, not as history. That is the point of getting here.

The reading list

The tracks run in parallel and barely touch. From the Ashes was built so the X-books stand apart from the Avengers line, so you can read Track A straight through 2024 to 2026 without needing Blood Hunt or One World Under Doom. Track G touches nothing at all until the very end, which is the whole point of it.

Track A: Mutant

Three status quos in twenty months. Read them in publication order, because each one is a reaction to the last.

Phase one: From the Ashes, July 2024 to September 2025.

Phase two: Age of Revelation, October to December 2025. The whole line stopped and was replaced for three months by sixteen three-issue miniseries set ten years in a ruined future. Doug Ramsey, as Revelation, has released the X-Virus and rules what is left. It is Age of Apocalypse run again with a different mask, and it is better than that sounds, but it is a lot of comics.

Phase three: Shadows of Tomorrow, January 2026 to now. The survivors come back to the present carrying knowledge of what they become. This is the status quo running as you read this.

Track B: Avengers and cosmic

Two line-wide events in two years, and they are not equal.

Blood Hunt is the one to be honest about. Larraz draws it beautifully and the premise is a good one: vampires do the sensible thing and put out the sun first. But the event arrives with almost no setup, the villain reveal is arbitrary, and the last issue resolves by having everybody punch until it stops. It is a competent summer crossover with dozens of tie-ins you should ignore. Read the five issues if the idea appeals. Nothing after it requires you to.

One World Under Doom is the opposite. North had been writing Doom for three years in Fantastic Four and understood that the interesting version of world conquest is the one where Doom is genuinely better at governing than anyone else. The event lets him win, holds the win for nine issues, and then makes him pay for the one thing he cannot bear to lose. Doom sacrifices himself to resurrect Valeria Richards. That ending is what the whole 2026 line is built on.

The Immortal Thor #1-25 is the pinned hidden gem of the era. Ewing writes Thor as a story about stories: the Elder Gods of Utgard are older than narrative itself and Thor’s only weapon is that he is a good enough tale to survive being retold. It ends with Loki killing Thor, which is not a stunt but the last beat of a prophecy laid down in issue #1. Then it becomes The Mortal Thor, in which a powerless man named Sigurd Jarlson walks an Earth that has forgotten Asgard existed. Read all of it.

Track C: Street level and Spider-Man

Merged, because neither has enough weight in this window to stand alone.

Spider-Man in the main line is in a holding pattern, and it has been for years. Joe Kelly’s relaunch is the most readable Amazing has been since Spencer, but it is a book that resets Peter’s job, apartment and love life rather than moving him anywhere. Read it if you are already invested. Do not start here. Start with Track G, where the good Spider-Man comic is.

Ahmed’s Daredevil #1-25 is the better street book of the two, and it is complete, which makes it easy to recommend. Phillips and Garbett only launched in April 2026 and there is not enough of it yet to judge. [UNVERIFIED as a verdict]

Track E: Fantastic Four

North’s Fantastic Four is the best sustained run of the 2020s outside Ewing’s Thor, and it works by refusing to be an epic. Most issues are a single problem, solved with science and decency, in twenty pages. The relaunch in July 2025 was timed to the film and changes the number on the cover, not the book. If you have read no Fantastic Four at all, vol. 7 #1-33 is a complete, self-contained argument for why this family matters.

Track F: Solo and standalone

Track G: The Ultimate Universe

This is the recommendation of the chapter. If a friend asks where to start with Marvel and you have one sentence, the answer is Ultimate Spider-Man #1.

Here is the argument. In 2023 Hickman set up a second universe with one rule: the Maker had spent decades stopping every hero from ever existing. So in 2024 they start existing, late, as adults, with everything already lost. Peter Parker is forty-two, married to Mary Jane, with two children, and he becomes Spider-Man on purpose - as a decision a grown man makes, not an accident that happens to a teenager. That single change makes every scene in the book carry weight the mainline version gave up decades ago. Checchetto draws it as a domestic drama that occasionally has a fight in it.

The line was designed so a reader could start at #1 and need nothing else, and because it ran only three years and then stopped on schedule in June 2026, it is now the rarest thing in superhero comics: a complete story. Six series, all finished, all collected. No prior reading. No event tie-ins. No cancellation mid-sentence.

Camp’s The Ultimates is the smartest of them, a book about people trying to rebuild a world after discovering their whole lives were engineered. Momoko’s Ultimate X-Men is the strangest and the most personal: Japanese horror, watercolor, one girl at a time, almost no connection to the X-Men you know. It will not give you the X-Men. It will give you something better than a fourth version of them.

Cross-book checkpoints

Raid on Graymalkin, four parts, December 2024 to January 2025. The only time the two flagship X-books share a story in phase one.

1. X-Men #8
2. Uncanny X-Men #7
3. X-Men #9
4. Uncanny X-Men #8

X-Manhunt, seven parts, March 2025. Charles Xavier escapes Graymalkin and every X-book chases him. There is no Alpha one-shot; the event opens in an ongoing title. Published order:

1. Uncanny X-Men #11
2. NYX #9
3. Storm #6
4. X-Men #13
5. X-Factor #8
6. X-Force #9
7. X-Manhunt Omega #1

Age of Revelation replaces the entire X-line for three months. Read X-Men: Book of Revelation #1-3, then X-Men: Age of Revelation Finale #1. Everything else is parallel and skippable.

Where Track G touches Track B. Ultimate Spider-Man: Incursion #5 ends with Miles Morales bringing Origin Boxes into the main Marvel Universe. That is the one thread from the Ultimate line that survives into Armageddon. You do not need Incursion to read Armageddon, but it is where the object comes from.

Where One World Under Doom touches Fantastic Four. Doom’s relationship with Valeria Richards, which decides the ending in One World Under Doom #8-9, was built across Ryan North’s Fantastic Four vol. 7. The event lands harder if you have read that run first.

Characters introduced

This era created fewer lasting characters than any since the 1990s, which is itself worth noticing. The exception is Simone’s Outliers.

Notable absence: Exceptional X-Men introduced a small cast of teenage mutants around Kitty Pryde, but the book ended at #13 and the characters have not carried forward in a load-bearing way. [UNVERIFIED]

Retcon notes

Adaptation notes

As of August 2026 the films and the comics are running the same play at the same time, which has not happened before.

Marvel Television’s 2026 slate: Wonder Man on 27 January, eight episodes. Daredevil: Born Again season two from 24 March to 5 May, eight episodes. A Punisher special presentation on 12 May. VisionQuest on 14 October, eight episodes. Born Again season two is the one worth your time, and its comics ancestor is Bendis and Maleev in Era 10, not the 2026 relaunch.

Where to go from here

Reading Marvel as a habit is a different skill from reading it as a back catalogue. Three rules.

Join a book, do not catch up on it. The instinct is to read everything before you start. Resist it. Pick a running series, buy the current issue, and accept that you will not know who two of the people are. Monthly comics are built to carry a new reader; the recap page exists for exactly this. Within three issues you will know enough. The reader who waits until they are ready never starts.

Follow the creator, not the character. Characters are permanent and their quality is not. Al Ewing, Ryan North, Kieron Gillen, Jonathan Hickman, Deniz Camp, Gail Simone and Chip Zdarsky are worth reading on whatever book they are handed. Batman is not a recommendation and neither is Wolverine. This is the single most useful filter in the medium, and it works retroactively: if you liked Immortal Thor, read Immortal Hulk and Loki: Agent of Asgard next, not more Thor.

Decide about events by asking who wrote them and what they change. Most crossovers are logistics. One World Under Doom was worth reading because North had a thesis about Doom and nine issues to argue it. Blood Hunt was not, because it had a poster and no argument. If an event’s own writer is not someone you already follow, and its tie-ins outnumber its core issues by more than three to one, skip it and read the summary later. You will lose nothing.

Two on-ramps, right now. First: the Ultimate Universe, all six series, complete and closed - the best entry point Marvel has published in twenty years. Second: Ryan North’s Fantastic Four vol. 7 #1-33, which asks nothing of you and gives you the whole family. If you want a book still publishing, make it Uncanny X-Men or The Mortal Thor. Then let the habit do the rest.

Checkpoint