After last week’s deluge of X-Men titles, this week Marvel change tack to ship three Wolverine titles.  Yes, okay, one of them is Daken.   But still…

Avengers Academy #10 – Well, that’s odd.  The cover of this issue is the Academy trainees and the cast of New Avengers teaming up to fight magic thingies, with a big “Magic 101” banner over the top.  And the interior… features Hazmat spending a day off with Leech, and Speedball delivering a lesson about how he feels about the Stamford disaster from Civil War.  And that’s a perfectly good story, albeit of a rather deck-clearing sort.  It addresses the obvious question of why Hazmat doesn’t just get her hugely inconvenient powers removed for good, using one of the various well-established techniques available in the Marvel Universe for such endeavours.  And it continues the detoxification of Speedball, who’s going to require a lot of that sort of thing before he’ll be anything other than the poster child for really inane ideas, but points for trying.  What it doesn’t do… is bear the slightest resemblance to the story advertised on the cover.  Strange choice.

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I’ve got a week and a half’s worth of X-books to cover here (thanks to Diamond UK splitting the week-before-last’s shipment in two), and there’s a ton of them… so let’s get to it.  Below the cut: Astonishing Spider-Man & Wolverine #4, Astonishing X-Men: Xenogenesis #4, Chaos War: X-Men #1, Daken: Dark Wolverine #4, Generation Hope #3, New Mutants #20, X-23 #4, X-Men Forever 2 #14, and X-Men: To Serve and Protect #2.  Needless to say, we’ll be kind of rushing through some of these…

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No reviews tonight.  Working.  Plus, there’s about two weeks’ worth of books and I only got them yesterday.

Maybe reviews tomorrow.  Maybe not.  We shall see.

Also, we’ll try and let you know shortly when the next podcast is being recorded. (We were going to do one this weekend, but, yeah, working.)

It’s taken us longer than we expected to find a recording slot for the podcast so, uh, yeah… maybe Monday?  We’ll keep you informed.

In the meantime, thanks to the snow disruption in the UK, our retailer didn’t get any new books this week at all.  Fortunately, I’m a week behind with the X-Axis anyway, so I’ll have some (week late) reviews up today or tomorrow, including Generation Hope #2 and the debuts of Wolverine: Best There Is and Heroes for Hire.

We’ll get back on schedule soon, hopefully…

And as it turns out, even if I’d been in Edinburgh, the comics wouldn’t have arrived yet anyway.  So an excellent weekend to go away after all.

Just a reminder (or an announcement, for those of you who didn’t make it to the end of the last epic podcast) that Al and I are both out of town this weekend, so you’ll have to wait a bit longer for the next podcast and reviews.

Still waiting on this week’s comics, which I probably wouldn’t have had time to read anyway – so reviews will be, ooh, some time during the week.  Frankly, I’m mainly glad of the extra time.

Before anyone else asks: no, I’m not especially thrilled to hear that we’re getting yet more Astonishing X-Men, whoever’s writing it.  Four X-Men books a month is at least two too many.

Oh, and if any of you know WordPress – I’ve set the “Add New Post” screen to one column, and when I try to go back to two columns, the right-hand column is blank.  Doesn’t seem to matter which browser I use.  Any idea how to fix that?

No reviews this weekend, because I haven’t got this week’s books yet, and it’s hard to review them when they’re still in the post.  Some time during the week, probably…

Still a few weeks to go before I catch up with these!

The number 1 for this week was “Dynamite” by Taio Cruz.

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Continuing our catch-up with the UK singles charts, we’re up to the charts for 22 August 2010, and another new number 1.  (As I say, there’s quite the turnover these days.)

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