Charts – 20 March 2026
The thing about Harry Styles is that he does have fanbase sales. So while he still has three tracks in the top 20 – at numbers 3, 5 and 15 – he doesn’t get a second week at number 1 with “American Girls”.
1. Sam Fender & Olivia Dean – “Rein Me In”
Yes, this again. It’s a fourth non-consecutive week at number 1, but for the first time there’s no asterisk attached – it would have beaten Olivia Dean’s “Man I Need” even if rthat track wasn’t subject to downweighting. This one isn’t because, inexplicably, it continues to grow (however slowly) after 40 weeks on sale.
We’re still in the unhappy position of having a top ten where five of the tracks feature either Olivia Dean or Harry Styles. However, “Rein Me In” has a very small lead over Bella Kay’s “iloveitiloveitiloveit” at number 2, so it probably won’t stay on top much longer.
11. Sienna Spiro – “The Visitor”
We really are in an era of minimalist music videos, aren’t we? But you have to wonder where the return on investment is, in doing anything more than this. This is the fourth single from her upcoming album, and she still has “Die on This Hill” on the chart at number 29. (more…)
The X-Axis – 18 March 2026
X-MEN #27. (Annotations here.) Part 2 of “Danger Room” is an issue devoted to introducing the members of Maxine Danger’s think tank – the X-Men themselves don’t get that much to do, since a lot of the issue is flashbacks setting up their back story and recruitment. They’re unusual villains to get so much time, since none of them actually has any particular interest in the X-Men or even in mutants in general – they’re just psychos who have been enlisted by Maxine Danger, who herself doesn’t actually have an obvious interest in the X-Men beyond charging for her services. I’m in two minds about this arc, right now – they all get a nice enough introduction, and Diaz’s art gives them a neat contrast with Maxine’s lunatic office manager. Colton and Jackson are rather similar characters, too, though I do like the other two being (likely) delusional killers who are convinced that they’re Skrulls trapped in human form. But as an X-Men story it does feel at the moment like we’re just chucking random stuff at the team for them to fight. Still, Jed MacKay gets the benefit of doubt that this is heading somewhere more than that, since it wouldn’t be his style.
CYCLOPS #2. By Alex Paknadel, Rogê Antônio, Fer Sifuentes-Sujo & Joe Caramagna. Well, this is fun. Sure, having Cyclops lose his visor and have to work around his uncontrollable powers is a well established routine, but it’s one we haven’t done in a good long while, and Paknadel and Antônio do it rather well. The plot may hinge on a massive coincidence of Cyclops stumbling upon the new Reavers’ scheme, but now that we’re here, we’ve got an escaped mutant who was never that keen on Krakoa and isn’t immediately in awe of Scott, which gives him someone to win over. Mostly, though, we’ve got the new Reavers squabbling among themselves as Donald Pierce tries to keep them all in line, and they’re turning out to be quite entertaining. We’re not dealing with professional soldiers any more, just wide-eyed cultists who’ve signed up for dubious cyborg conversion. They’ve got the equipment but they have no real idea what they’re doing, and Pierce seems to be making do with a bunch of underlings who have been powered up to the point where they can at least shove some non-combatants about. Paknadel gives him a sort of weary disdain that somehow feels a bit more developed to me than he has in a while. It’s a good take on the character.
X-Men #27 annotations
X-MEN vol 7 #27
“Danger Room, part 2”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Netho Diaz
Inker: Sean Parsons
Colourist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: Ben Liu, Animalia, Kid Omega and Temper react with shock as something with bloody hands approaches the Factory – it’s possibly meant to be Glob Herman staggering home, since nobody actually attacks the Factory in this issue.
THE X-MEN:
This is mostly an introducing-the-villains issue, so the X-Men themselves don’t actually do or say that much.
Cyclops, Juggernaut, Magik and the Beast are shown defiantly fighting Beyond’s techno-organic monsters.
Psylocke. We only see her in the Marauder as it comes under missile fire while she’s on her way to Greycrow. (Come to think of it, why didn’t she just get Magik to teleport her there before the mission?) According to Charlene Jackson (see below), the Danger Room’s “stated objective” in going after Psylocke was to separate her from the X-Men in order to weaken the team, by depriving them of her psychic abilities and her second-in-command role. Jackson and Maxine Danger both seem strongly inclined to see her dead anyway, which begs the question of why the stated objective was anything else – is it simply for plausible deniability, or does Frank Bohannon not actually want the X-Men dead? He didn’t spell out last issue what the Danger Room were meant to achieve, after all. See also the position with Glob Herman.
Daredevil Villains #75: The Trixter
DAREDEVIL #241 (April 1987)
“Black Christmas”
Writer: Ann Nocenti
Penciler: Todd McFarlane
Inker: Al Milgrom
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Colourist: Christie Scheele
Editor: Ralph Macchio
With Daredevil still lacking a regular artist, this issue features guest art from a pre-stardom Todd McFarlane. Not all that pre-stardom, mind you – he’d been working for Marvel and DC for a couple of years by this point, and his run on Incredible Hulk started the same month. He’s still not an obvious fit for an Ann Nocenti story. But this is fill-in work, so it’s quite conservative and largely in line with Marvel house style. (The generic cover art, which is by Mike Zeck and Klaus Janson, looks nothing like the interior.)
It’s Christmas Day in New York, and the Trixter is spending it alone in a 42nd Street hotel room. According to his monologue, he’s a world famous magician and master of disguise, whose real name is a secret. He implies that he doesn’t even remember his own real name, having spent so much of his life subsumed in his Trixter persona or his various disguises. He finds his life empty. He’s fascinated by Daredevil, who he regards as “a bit of a trickster, a stuntman” – but who chose to be a hero instead of an entertainer. So, apparently hoping to learn something, he decides to meet Daredevil and let him “decide my fate.” He seems to be contemplating suicide depending on how his meeting with Daredevil goes.
Charts – 13 March 2026
Harry Styles has an album out, and nobody else is going to take that on.
1. Harry Styles – “American Girls”
5. Harry Styles – “Ready, Steady, Go!”
Together with former number 1 “Aperture” (which rebounds to number 4), these are the maximum three tracks from the album “Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally”, which enters as his third number one album. (His second album, “Fine Line”, only got to number 2, but still spent over a year in the top 10.) If it wasn’t for the three-song rule, the entire album would have charted.
The X-Axis – 11 March 2026
X-MEN UNITED #1. (Annotations here.) Well. I liked Exceptional X-Men, even if it did have a languid approach to pacing, and even if it did have a rather handwavy approach to the plot making sense. This is obviously the successor to that book, and continues to give prominence to the Exceptional cast, but it’s an odd series. The premise is to set up a school and (perhaps more significantly in the grand scheme of things) a meeting place where the disparate parts of the X-books can interact. But it’s not exactly a school because it’s training grown adults too. And because it has to be the successor to Exceptional, those characters can’t just fade into the background and instead have to be given a senior role… which might make sense if everyone else was a rookie, but seems downright weird when you’re using long running background characters like Dryad and Wolf Cub. Exceptional ran for thirteen issues! Wolf Cub’s a nonentity, but he’s still been around for over twenty years!
The concept of Graymatter Lane doesn’t come across either. It shouldn’t be that hard just to explain directly whether people are physically travelling to this space or whether it’s some sort of psychic conference call. It shouldn’t take me multiple readings to figure out something that basic about the core premise. It seems to be a physical space, but other dialogue doesn’t really fit with that answer, so… how hard would it have been to spend a few panels just explaining the premise directly? It’s needlessly confusing. And the art doesn’t really take advantage of the visual showcase opportunities either. It’s fine but it’s nothing exceptional. If this is some sort of psychic dreamscape then it ought to be possible to go nuts, and this doesn’t.
Storm: Earth’s Mightiest Mutant #2 annotations
STORM: EARTH’S MIGHTIEST MUTANT #2
“All Your Favorite Sorcerers are Tricksters”
Writer: Murewa Ayodele
Artist: Federica Mancin
Colour artist: Java Tartaglia
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: The FBI super-agents surround a containment tank with Storm inside. This has pretty much nothing to do with the story.
Interestingly, the story then opens with an actual recap page explaining the plot with actual cross-references to individual issues (and the book doesn’t have its usual symbolic splash page duplicating the credits).
STORM:
The Scarlet Witch believes that although she has some affinity for magic, her level of actual knowledge is so low as to be practically useless – worse, Storm thinks she knows more than she does because she has magical allies. Storm is not dissuaded by the Scarlet Witch’s lecture about her magical limitations, and basically dismisses the idea that Akujin could be relied upon to honour the bargain. She seems to believe that fighting Akujin alone and without allies will somehow save everyone – conceivably, her logic is that if she dies in battle then Akujin will give up on attacking Earth because it will no longer provide leverage.
X-Men United #1 annotations
X-MEN UNITED #1
“Welcome to Graymatter Lane”
Writer: Eve L Ewing
Artist: Tiago Palma
Colour artist: Brian Reber
Letterer: Joe Sabino
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: Well, that’s assorted X-Men standing around. This book is loosely the successor to the previous series Exceptional X-Men. Despite what British readers might reasonably expect, it is not about a football team.
GRAYMATTER LANE:
The name is obviously a play on “Graymalkin Lane”, the address of the original X-Men Mansion.
The X-Men’s new school is, shall we say, not very clearly explained. Emma describes it as a “mind palace”, which doesn’t really take us very far because a mind palace is a memorisation technique. There seems to be a co-ordinated time when invited mutants are telepathically contacted by Emma and invited in. (However, Juggernaut can get in, so evidently non-mutants can also be invited.) We’re told that “a doorway attuned to your individual psyche will appear before you”, but it’s unclear whether this is a literal doorway or some sort of mental projection technique. Later in the issue, Mariama seems to get there simply by thinking, without any doors involved. Beast says that an “altered mental state” is required to get in, though everyone seems normal once they’re inside.
Daredevil Villains #74: Rotgut
DAREDEVIL #239-240 (February/March 1987)
Writer: Ann Nocenti
Artist:Louis Williams
Inkers: Al Williamson & (#239 only) Geoff Isherwood
Colourists: Christie Scheele (#239), Bob Sharen & Petra Scotese (#240)
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Editor: Ralph Macchio
We’ve skipped another couple of issues. Issue #237, as I mentioned last time, is the one issue that Steve Englehart wrote before quitting, and appears under his “John Harkness” pseudonym. It features Klaw as the guest villain, so it doesn’t concern us. Issue #238 is the official start of Ann Nocenti’s run (since issue #236 was meant to be a fill-in), but it’s a Mutant Massacre tie-in, and the guest villain is Sabretooth.
So that brings us to this two-parter, where Nocenti starts to get into her stride. She’ll be working with rotating artists for the first year or so, until John Romita Jr finally comes aboard with issue #250. The most frequent contributor is Louis Williams, who also drew the Englehart issue, and returns for another two-parter in issues #243-244. Daredevil was his first work at Marvel, and his other credits seem to be fairly limited. I’m not sure why – he was certainly up to the job. He’s a good fit for this story, with plenty of atmospheric detail and suitably seedy and horrific qualities to his work.
Charts – 6 March 2026
Okay, we’re into March and the singles chart is finally starting to pick up a bit.
1. Sam Fender & Olivia Dean – “Rein Me In”
Three weeks. “Rein Me In” has been on the top 40 for 37 consecutive weeks, and it’s not that unusual for big tracks to hang around that long. But it’s actually growing – this is as big a weekly score as it’s ever had. It’s still only number one because “Man I Need” is on ACR, but even that is now marginal.
3. Alex Warren – “Fever Dream”
The previous Alex Warren single, “Eternity”, also entered at number 3. This is certainly a change of tack from his previous singles, since at least it’s an upbeat track. The video is very much Trying Too Hard, but the single itself is acceptable in a Maroon 5 kind of way. “Ordinary” is still hanging around at number 16, which is insane.
