Psylocke #8 annotations
PSYLOCKE vol 2 #8
“Into the Snow”
Writer: Alyssa Wong
Artist: Moisés Hidalgo
Colour artist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Editor: Darren Shan
PSYLOCKE
She’s returned to the bamboo forest where she and Mitsuki used to train as children. Her apparent aim is to hunt down and kill Master Hayashi in order to free the ghost of Mitsuki. However, when she reaches the compound, she finds a likely hallucination of an adult Mitsuki who greets her as an old friend.
More training flashbacks include Kwannon and Mitsuki being despatched to kill a Hand traitor (more of him below). This seems to be a different mission from the one in the previous issue, as they look a little older and Mitsuki’s relationship with yokai is more clearly established between them. Kwannon doesn’t know at this stage about her psychic powers, but they seem to emerge briefly during the fight with theoni.
She used to regard her scars from her training as a reminder of her childhood (apparently in a positive way), but they’ve been lost through resurrection. That might have been a deliberate choice, since Krakoan resurrection generally preserved such things. Perhaps she simply didn’t want to volunteer their significance to her and allowed the Five to assume that they were merely injuries.
Wolverine #10 annotations
WOLVERINE vol 8 #10
“All Happy Families”
Writer: Saladin Ahmed
Artist: Javier Pina
Colour artist: Bryan Valenza
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso
WOLVERINE
Okay, so I’m busy today, and this issue is a real blessing, because at least in terms of annotations, there’s not that much to say about it.
Just to recap, issue #8 ended with Logan getting a letter supposedly from his mother, asking for his help. Issue #9 then saw him crossing paths with a yokel in a bar, then running into Department H before driving back to the ruins of the Howlett Estate. On arriving, he defeated Harpoon and Vertigo, and the issue ended with him claiming to pick up Sabretooth’s scent in the building.
X-Men #18 annotations
X-MEN vol 7 #18
“Invitation”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Artist: Emilio Laiso
Colourist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
THE X-MEN
Cyclops. His prediction last issue that the 3K X-Men would fall apart once their leader was taken out proves to be correct. He claims to recognise this sort of internal tension from his years leading Wolverine (presumably referring mainly to the 70s and early 80s stories, which is really when Wolverine was troublesome as a team member).
Magik, Juggernaut, Psylocke and Temper help wrap up the 3K X-Men but don’t get much more to do.
SUPPORTING CAST
The Beast. Wyre has come to offer him membership in 3K. This Beast, of course, is a copy of the Krakoan Beast who was restored from a much earlier back-up, and therefore doesn’t remember any of the previous Beast’s activities in X-Force and Wolverine during Krakoa. But a key part of his character is now the fear of ending up like that again. Wyre’s pitch to the Beast is that he clearly is a monster and should embrace it and join 3K. Presumably this is at least in part mind games, since if they’re even vaguely aware of the Beast’s status quo – and Wyre’s dialogue suggests that he is – then they must know that he’s unlikely to buy into this idea right away. However, he doesn’t throw away their business card just yet…
Charts – 13 June 2025
We’re saved!
1. Sabrina Carpenter – “Manchild”
This is the lead single from her upcoming album “Man’s Best Friend”, and it finally liberates us from Alex Warren’s “Ordinary”, which had been number 1 since March. The margin is less than 5% but I’ll take it. “Manchild” is a perfectly good Sabrina Carpenter single in the vein established by the previous album (and it helps if you stick with it to the middle eight, which acknowledges that if she’s running into this many incompetents, the issue might actually be with her taste in men).
It’s her fourth number one, following last year’s triumvirate of “Espresso”, “Please Please Please” and “Taste”.
The X-Axis – w/c 9 June 2025
EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #10. (Annotations here.) It’s a skip week for the X-Men’s Infinity Comic, before you ask. So, first up we have Exceptional X-Men, as the three kids finally get to do something. I’m all for the slow pace and character focus that Eeve Ewing brings to Exceptional, and while it’s questionable to bill it as an X-Men comic, I’m happy to see the current X-books doing something as commercially… stubborn as this. The flip side, though, is that it has taken an awfully long time for the kids to actually do anything, and even when they have, they’ve remained in the shadows of the established cast. Axo does get his moment in the sun here: Sinister’s goth Alice in Wonderland mindscape is fun and nicely realised by Carmen Carnero, and Axo gets to save the day by bringing to bear a level of empathy that Emma just can’t summon. Bronze and Melée still feel like they haven’t had their chance to shine, though, and ten issues in, it’s starting to feel like the book needs to kick it up a gear. As the coming out moment where the three teens declare themselves X-Men this… works for one of them? It’s still fine but it’s not really the book at its strongest.
PHOENIX #12. (Annotations here.) Mostly an account of how Sara Grey got here, which calls for an awful lot of fudging of the timeline in order for it to work – and on top of that, we’re pretty much encouraged to doubt the whole thing. Visually, it feels a bit punchier than the previous issue, but I’m a bit puzzled by what we’re doing here. Sara Grey is a dropped subplot from the 1980s given a throwaway resolution in the 1990s – she’s hardly someone that was crying out for a second go. Perhaps the idea is to give Sara someone from home to relate to, but retooling Sara as a messiah figure for a world cuts against that. The issue doesn’t do a great deal to make me interested in Sara as a character – there’s a history here but no real hook.
Magik #6 annotations
MAGIK vol 3 #6
“The Road Back Home”
Writer: Ashley Allen
Artist: Jesús Hervás
Colour artist: Arthur Hesli
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Editor: Darren Shan
And let’s welcome new cover artist Pablo Villalobos, who actually thinks Illyana’s most noteworthy features are from the neck up.
MAGIK.
She still feels guilty about letting down Cal last issue, and is upset that Dani hasn’t contacted her since they last met. X-Men work has been keeping her mind off it.
We get a brief recap of her giving up the rulership of Limbo to Madelyne, in order to give them both a chance at a fresh start, in New Mutants #25-28. Magik also reminds us of the parallels between Belasco using her as a weapon, and Mr Sinister using Madelyne – she claims to see Madelyne as a kindred spirit.
Despite having surrendered the throne, Magik remains linked to Limbo, and the bombing of the Limbo Embassy by demon rebels causes her pain. Even the demons who are loyal to Madelyne still regard Magik as having an equal claim to the throne. Faced with both Magik and Madelyne together, the demons try to look to Magik for instructions.
Phoenix #12 annotations
PHOENIX #12
Writer: Stephanie Phillips
Artist: Roi Mercado
Colour artist: Java Tartaglia
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Editor: Annalise Bissa
PHOENIX
Jean doesn’t appear much in this issue, which mostly consists of Sara giving her account of how she came to be in Greyhaven. She appears briefly at the end, to look overwhelmed by her sister’s return, and to react to Cable’s entrance.
Jean also appears briefly as a child in Sara’s flashback, when she challenges Sara on deliberately throwing a baseball match. From Jean’s point of view, the significance of the scene probably lies mainly in the fact that she can verify it as a real incident. Well, if she does – it’s minor enough that she might think it’s something she doesn’t remember, and she doesn’t actually tell us that she remembers it.
Exceptional X-Men #10 annotations
EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #10
Writer: Eve L Ewing
Artists: Carmen Carnero & Federica Mancin
Colour artist: Nolan Woodard
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Tom Brevoort
Quite a short one for annotations, to be honest.
THE CORE CAST
Emma Frost. The end of the previous issue apparently involved Emma sacrificing herself to free Axo from Sinister’s machine (not something that was terribly clear from the previous issue), and then Emma’s mind being sucked into Sinister’s mindscape. She believes that she made a heroic sacrifice for Axo, and is rather put out by him coming after her – she claims he’s overshadowing her, but obviously her sacrifice would be in vain if he got killed too. She does make a point of getting him to safety first, before following back to the real world.
She claims that a major event in her personal development was meeting Kitty Pryde as a teenager and being shaken by the level of confidence she had. (Emma’s own back story has her only becoming that assertive later on.) The flashback shows Emma with Kitty in a Hellions costume. This is not actually the first time that Emma met Kitty – which would be X-Men #129 – but rather a scene from New Mutants #16, when Kitty was briefly at the Massachusetts Academy. That’s the first story where they spend an extended amount of time together.
House to Astonish Episode 213
Two weeks in between episodes? What is this, 2014? Whatever it is, it’s me and Paul talking about Peter David, Marvel and DC’s upcoming Deadpool and Batman crossovers, David Marquez’s The UnChosen, Superman: The Kryptonite Spectrum and Punisher: Red Band. We’ve also got reviews of Imperial and Be Not Afraid, and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook hunts alone (in a group of five). All this plus Skrull bin collections, Bruce Banner’s canonically accurate coat and the Space RNLI.
The episode is here, or available via the embedded player below. Let us know what you think in the comments, on Bluesky, or via email, and don’t forget to treat yourself to one of our frankly lush t-shirts, right now, while you remember.
Charts – 6 June 2025
Oh god…
Twelve weeks. The chart company is getting very excitable about how this compares to American artists of the past, but it’s not very meaningful, because they were working in the sales era, and so their runs at number one weren’t measuring continued listening.
At this point we need to get into the tedious details of the downweighting rule. I normally summarise it here as meaning that a record gets downweighted if it’s been out for ten weeks and it’s more than three weeks past its peak. It’s a bit subtler than that: it’s three weeks in which the change in consumption from week-to-week is consistently below the market average. Alex Warren has benefitted from this, because he has had three consecutive weeks where consumption went down, but in some of them the whole market was down, so he was still above average. The result is that he is still not in any imminent danger of being downweighted.
If he makes a thirteenth week – and by all appearances he will because he still has nearly double the consumption of the number 2 single – then that will match the run of “Shape of You” by Ed Sheeran in 2017, which is before the downweighting rule was introduced, and so isn’t directly comparable. God help us all.
6. Tate McRae – “Just Keep Watching”
