House to Astonish Episode 123
We’re making the most of a quiet but spider-heavy couple of weeks this time round, with discussion of Original Sin 3.1-3.4, Original Sins, Spider-Man 2099, Spider-Verse and Amazing Spider-Man‘s huge preorders, along with Grant Morrison and Rian Hughes’ new comic for the BBC and Vertigo’s new detective series Bodies. There are also reviews of Inhuman, Aquaman and the Others and Dead Letters (and as a minor warning, we do talk about one of the two twists in Dead Letters, so if you’d rather not be spoilered on that then skip 48:32 to 57:28), and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe has got the cutest little babyface. All this plus Aquaman Etc, the X-Men’s door-to-door pamphlet campaign and tips for House to Astonish cosplay.
Don’t forget that House to Astonish Live is taking place in Edinburgh on May 31; tickets are available here, with all profits going to Alzheimer Scotland. They’re going faster than we anticipated, so if you’ve been holding off buying yours then maybe don’t do that any more.
I also got interviewed this week by Amiable Alasdair Stuart of Bleeding Cool, about the live show and about the podcast in general, so you can check that out here.
On top of that, there’s our regular Redbubble store – the profits from that go to helping keep this show on the air. Internet. Whatever.
The podcast is here, or here on Mixcloud, or available via the embedded player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments, on Twitter, via email or on our Facebook fan page.
Charts – 30 March 2014
The parade of plugs continues – once again, I direct your attention to the post about the upcoming live show, and where to buy tickets!
Coming up sooner or later, a look at Marvel Knights: X-Men, but first…
33. Haim – “If I Could Change Your Mind”
A+X #13-18 – “Outstanding”
Before we go further, I repeat the gratuitous plug. You can now buy tickets for our live show on 31 May – details in this post.
A+X, then. The anthology has finally succumbed to the inevitable. These six issues will make up the anthology’s final collection (which is where the title comes from, in case you were wondering).
It’s a series that has always been more interesting for what it says about Marvel’s publishing philosophy than for the actual stories it contains. You could be forgiven for thinking that A+X is a series that was only launched to try and capitalise on the surprising success of AvX: Versus, in an attempt to squeeze yet more money out of the company’s two top franchises. At first glance, that’s very much what it looks like.
Amazing X-Men #1-5 – “The Quest for Nightcrawler”
Let’s start with the Obligatory Plug (though Al does this stuff so much better than me) – don’t forget that you can now buy tickets for our live show on 31 May. The details are all in this post.
Moving on…
When Marvel announced that Nightcrawler was returning from the dead, my reaction was at best ambivalent. Not that his death in “Messiah Complex” was some sort of inviolable classic, of course. Far from it; it was a classic example of writers killing off a beloved character because they had no plans for him and his accrued cachet might lend the story an illusion of weight. It provided no sort of resolution to the character’s life, and frankly, it was a surprisingly cheap move considering the writers involved in that story.
Charts – 23 March 2014
House to Astonish – Live!
We’ve been teasing a big announcement for a while on Twitter, and it’s time to unveil what we’ve been up to.
We’re incredibly pleased and proud to announce our first live show, on 31 May, in aid of Alzheimer’s Scotland.
Join me and Paul at City2, downstairs at the City Cafe, Edinburgh, for the recording of a very special episode We’ll be discussing the great and the good (and the not so good) of the world of comic books and answer the burning questions of the day. There will be a live Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, and possibly even special guests from the world of comics…
PLUS: How much do you REALLY know about comics? Do you know your Beetle and Booster from your Maggie and Hopey? Can you tell a New Warrior from a New Teen Titan? And how many Robins have there been anyway? Test your knowledge out with the House to Astonish Comics Quiz, and be in with a chance to win some sweet comics and graphic novels.
Tickets are £12, which includes admission to the live House to Astonish podcast, entry to the Comics Quiz and a buffet, and all profits from the sale of tickets will be donated to Alzheimer’s Scotland. Tickets are available to purchase here.
We really hope you’ll be able to join us, and whether you are or not, please spread the word!
House to Astonish Episode 122
We’ve got a whole load of great chat for you this time round, with discussion of DC’s top brass moving to California, Oni press’s upcoming projects, the Harley Quinn SDCC one-shot and the new Star-Spangled War Stories series, as well as the June solicitations. We’ve also got reviews of Daredevil, Sovereign and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe goes to Hell’s kitchen. All this plus fakeaunches, Paper and Staples magazine and kicking Hitler in the nuts.
The podcast is here, or here on Mixcloud, or available via the embedded player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments below, on Twitter, via email or on our Facebook fan page.
We’ve also got a big announcement, but that’s for its own post…
X-Men #7-12 – “Muertas”
“Muertas” is a storyline that starts off strongly and ends up as a bit of a mess all round.
Even the titling suggests confusion. Issue #7 clearly gives the title as “Muertas, part 1 of 6”. But issue #10 – sorry, “issue #10.NOW” – which ought to be “Muertas, part 4”, is instead titled as “Ghosts, part 1”, despite being manifestly a middle chapter, apparently for no reason other than to justify the dodgy promotion.
It starts with a decent idea, though. Ana Cortes, a rich Colombian teenager, gets hold of the disembodied consciousness of Lady Deathstrike. Before anyone asks, I couldn’t remember where she died either, and an explanation might not have gone amiss. (As best I can figure, it’s meant to be Uncanny X-Force #5.1, where she escaped X-Force by uploading her consciousness to the internet – she’s appeared elsewhere since, but if she’s a downloaded consciousness these days, I guess there’s no reason why there can’t be several of her.)
Charts – 16 March 2014
Since the UK music industry likes promoting records for weeks before they’re released, but doesn’t much care for promoting records over Christmas or the early new year, it’s round about this time that we start seeing a deluge of new releases. And lo and behold, there’s a lot of very forgettable stuff out this week…
39. One Direction – “Midnight Memories”
X-Men Legacy #300 – “ForgetMeNot”
Marvel has long viewed numbers as less a counting system and more a promotional opportunity, and here we have a prime example of that – a comic labelled as X-Men Legacy #300, devoted to celebrating ninety-three fabulous issues of X-Men Legacy.
Bizarre as it may seem today, the series that became X-Men Legacy started off back in 1991 as X-Men vol 2, spent many years as the flagship of the line, and changes its name to New X-Men for a while in order to play host to the Grant Morrison run. But then it became X-Men Legacy, which was essentially a vehicle for solo series to be branded under the X-Men name.
