X-Men: Before the Fall – Mutant First Strike #1 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-MEN: BEFORE THE FALL – MUTANT FIRST STRIKE #1
“Mutant First Strike”
Writer: Steve Orlando
Artist: Valentina Pinti
Colourist: Frank William
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Jordan D White
COVER / PAGE 1: The Krakoan rescue squad search underground.
This is the second of four Before the Fall one-shots, all written by regular X-book writers. The first one was effectively the final issue of Legion of X. This one is… not obviously connected to anything much, but maybe it’ll play into something down the line.
PAGES 2-3. Milford, New Hampshire gets hit by something mysterious.
It’s a real town, population circa 16,000. It used to be famous for its granite quarries, although they’re almost all closed now.
PAGE 4. Hostile news coverage of the Milford incident.
Basically, this is a false flag attack by Orchis and the media is blaming the mutants. It’s a story where the Krakoans show up and act heroically, they impress the locals, and it has no impact on the wider media narrative. In fairness, it appears that Judas Traveller has planted faked evidence of mutant DNA being present at the attack, so there is at least some legitimate reason for people to think it’s a mutant attacker (though no particular reason to associate them with Krakoa). The point, presumably, is to illustrate the effectiveness of Orchis’s control of the narrative (which isn’t even presented as being contested within the media) and perhaps to get Judas Traveller established as an Orchis character, since thus far he’s been seen in that role only in somewhat peripheral books.
Immortal X-Men #12 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
IMMORTAL X-MEN #12
“Part 12: The Idiot”
Writer: Kieron Gillen
Artist: Lucas Werneck
Colourist: David Curiel
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Jordan D White
COVER / PAGE 1: Colossus fights Kate – not a scene which happens in the issue, though there is conflict between the two.
PAGE 2. Data page: the opening of Scrivener’s latest chapter.
This, of course, is Colossus’s spotlight issue, and so we come to the status quo that this book inherited from X-Force. Colossus is currently under the control of Scrivener, a Russian reality warper who can apparently control people by writing them into his stories. How this works has been somewhat inconsistent between different books, but we’ll come back to that shortly.
The author identifies himself simply as “a scrivener” and gives his name in Russian at the end of the issue (as he often did in X-Force data pages). There is a passing mention later on that Piotr is ultimately under the control of his brother Mikhail Rasputin, which again is the established set-up from X-Force. X-Force also clearly establishes that Scrivener is himself a prisoner of Mikhail, which is why he describes himself as “in a Russian cell”.
X-Men #23 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-MEN vol 6 #23
“When Cometh — The Stark Sentinels”
Writer: Gerry Duggan
Artist: Joshua Cassara
Colour artist: Dee Cunniffe
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Design: Tom Muller with Jay Bowen
Editor: Jordan D White
COVER / PAGE 1. The X-Men fight a Stark Sentinel.
PAGES 2-6. Mother Righteous visits Dr Stasis.
“[T]here’s nothing that Dr Stasis enjoys more than eating with clones of his family.” This is a callback to early issues, in particular issue #2, where Stasis is living in a suburban home and killing off each new family as they prove unsatisfactory. Evidently he’s now relocated full time to the Orchis Forge, but that hasn’t stopped him from recreating his throwback suburban household there.
Rebecca Essex was Nathaniel Essex’s wife before he became Mr Sinister. She appears in his origin miniseries, Further Adventures of Cyclops & Phoenix (1996). Her basic role is to become increasingly disturbed by his behaviour, die in chidlbirth, and refuse to forgive him, prompting him to turn to Apocalypse.
The Incomplete Wolverine – 2013
Part 1: Origin to Origin II | Part 2: 1907 to 1914
Part 3: 1914 to 1939 | Part 4: World War II
Part 5: The postwar era | Part 6: Team X
Part 7: Post Team X | Part 8: Weapon X
Part 9: Department H | Part 10: The Silver Age
1974-1975 | 1976 | 1977 | 1978 | 1979
1980 | 1981 | 1982 | 1983 | 1984 | 1985
1986 | 1987 | 1988 | 1989 | 1990 | 1991
1992 | 1993 | 1994 | 1995 | 1996 | 1997
1998 | 1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003
2004 |2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009
2010 | 2011 | 2012
We’re still in the phase when Wolverine is running the Jean Grey School. The end is drawing near, but you wouldn’t know it just yet, as Marvel continue to launch new books.
SAVAGE WOLVERINE #1-5
“Savage”
by Frank Cho & Jason Keith
January to May 2013
Savage Wolverine ran for 24 issues with rotating creative teams, but most of the stories are set at various points in the past, so it won’t generally be troubling the timeline. In this first arc, Wolverine and Shanna the She-Devil team up to deal with a mysterious island in the Savage Land which causes technology to fail. Amadeus Cho and the Hulk show up too. The island’s temple turns out to be a containment unit for an evil space god, the Dark Walker (Morrigan); they accidentally wake it, and in the epilogue it flies off into space to encourage its creator Visher-Rakk to attack Earth. Which never happens.
Wolverine and Shanna have met multiple times before but the script seems entirely unaware of that. The story is little more than an excuse for Cho to draw stuff, predominantly Shanna’s arse. Awful.
Charts – 2 June 2023
Ah, so this is going to be around forever, then.
1. Calvin Harris & Ellie Goulding – “Miracle”
That’s eight weeks, so it ties with “One Kiss” as Calvin Harris’s longest-reigning number one. Goulding broke her record a few weeks back. It’s been on the chart for a total of 12 weeks now. “Daylight” by David Kushner is a non-mover at 2 – it’s now spent a total of five weeks stuck behind “Miracle”. Perhaps more surprisingly, number 3 is “Calm Down” by Rema, which has been in the top 10 for 24 weeks now, and has been on the top 40 since September. I haven’t mentioned it in a while because it reached number 4 for the first time back in March – and thus hasn’t achieved a new peak since, until now – but it’s huge.
12. Taylor Swift – “Karma”
18. Taylor Swift – “Hits Different”
24. Taylor Swift featuring Lana Del Rey – “Snow on the Beach”
Taylor Swift is so big that she can get three tracks into the top 40 on the release of the deluxe edition of an album from six months ago. Who does that?
X-Axis – w/c 29 May 2023
Another unusually quiet week. Well, next week’s busier. In the meantime…
BETSY BRADDOCK: CAPTAIN BRITAIN #4. (Annotations here.) So we’ve reached the penultimate issue, and while there isn’t quite a mad scramble going on, it does feel like yet again we’ve jumped past a bunch of stuff and headed straight to the conclusion. The whole Fury-as-Captain-Britain thing gets brushed aside by having him get beaten up in a few pages by the Avengers, though admittedly he’s got a subplot with Brian to pick up next issue. Rachel’s Askani storyline suddenly leaps forward. Jamie does things to advance the plot… It is what it is, at this stage. And let’s be fair, between Excalibur, Knights of X and BB:CB, this storyline has managed 36 issues, which isn’t bad in the current market. But 35 issues down, I’m still not really very interested in Betsy as Captain Britain, and when the book is trying to be defiantly celebratory about her in the role, it far too often feels brittle and defensive. Let’s just wrap up the storylines and move on.
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #89. By Steve Orlando, Emilio Laiso & Rachelle Rosenberg. The X-Men fight Nature Girl – sorry, Armageddon Girl – and of course she takes them apart singlehandedly. After all, it would be a pretty underwhelming story if a bunch of characters who hadn’t otherwise been involved just rocked up and sorted it a few panels. This issue comes across more as a swing back to the earlier X-Men Green vibe of “the planet is very angry and Nature Girl has a point”. There’s not a huge amount more to it than that, but it’s got a story beat to hit and it does it well.
DEADPOOL #7. By Alyssa Wong, Luigi Zagaria & Matt Milla. There’s a lot that I like about this run on Deadpool – the art and story have a nice upbeat feel, the Atelier characters feel well designed, Valentine works as a foil for Deadpool. The tone is right. My main issue with it is pacing – it does some really long action sequences which mean that not a huge amount happens in each issue. That’s the main thing holding it back right now, but it’s still quite good fun in its own way.
X-23: DEADLY REGENESIS #3. By Erica Schultz, Edgar Salazar & Carlos Lopez. You expect these flashback minis to play the hits, but up to about two thirds of the way through this issue, Deadly Regenesis feels a lot like it’s re-treading the hits. Eventually we get to the hook, which is Kimura trying to exploit X-23’s new heroic values to get her back under control by means of hostage taking, and deliberately finding the most random and unimportant people she can find (in her eyes, at least) so as to rub it in that Laura is doing this in service of some abstract notion of the importance of human life. I can kind of see that as an angle for a certain point in Laura’s development, and Salazar’s art makes Kimura seem suitably smug, but I’m far from convinced that this is really adding much.
Betsy Braddock: Captain Britain #4 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
BETSY BRADDOCK: CAPTAIN BRITAIN #4
“Earth’s Most Furious”
Writer: Tini Howard
Artist: Vasco Georgiev
Colour artist: Erick Arciniega
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Design: Tom Muller with Jay Bowen
Editor: Sarah Brunstad
COVER / PAGE 1: Captain Britain and Askani under attack by Morgan Le Fey’s Furies and Dr Doom’s Doombots.
PAGES 2-4. Betsy Braddock and Tony Stark talk.
This scene picks up from the end of the previous issue, with Betsy visiting Tony to ask for his help as “an expert on Morgan Le Fey”.
“I went to Otherworld once upon a time. With Doctor Doom.” If this is meant to be referring to Iron Man vol 1 #150, then that was a time travel story, not a trip to Otherworld.
“I dueled King Arthur somewhat recently.” In Excalibur #26 (which came out back in December 2021).
“Terrible what happened to the West End.” Tony is referring the Fury attack last issue.
PAGE 5. Recap and credits.
Charts – 26 May 2023
Apparently it’s late-career hit week on the singles chart. But first…
1. Calvin Harris & Ellie Goulding – “Miracle”
That’s week seven. One more week for it to match “One Kiss” as Calvin Harris’s longest-running number one. “Daylight” by David Kushner returns to number 2 for a fourth week, after getting pushed down to 3 last time.
9. Lana Del Rey – “Say Yes to Heaven”
Lana Del Rey did have hit singles right at the start of her career – “Video Games” made number 9 in 2011, and “Born To Die” did the same the following year. In fact, that’s as high as she’s ever got with a regular single. Technically she has three higher placed singles to her credit – the 2013 remix of “Summertime Sadness”, which reached number 4; her inexplicable collaboration with Ariana Grande and Miley Cyrus on “Don’t Call Me Angel (Charlie’s Angels)”, which got to number 2 in 2019; and her guest appearance on Taylor Swift’s “Snow on the Beach”, which reached number 4 last year. But she hasn’t had a top 40 hit with one her own records since “Lust For Life”, which scraped the bottom of the chart in 2017.
The X-Axis – w/c 22 May 2023
Just one core book this week, so we’re straight on to the capsules.
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #88. By Steve Orlando, Emilio Laiso & Rachelle Rosenberg. Okay, so this is clearly us building to the big finale. Nature Girl has finally moved beyond eco-terrorism to outright atrocity, and the real X-Men finally show up to deal with her. It’s straightforward, and at this point Nature Girl isn’t what you’d call a subtle character – her back story and her previous established persona is doing a lot of the work here by providing some context for her. Laiso’s art, meanwhile, works hard to invest us in the mega-obscure Spider-Girl. As is often the case with X-Men Unlimited, it’s more of a scene than a story, but on a weekly schedule there’s nothing wrong with that.
NEW MUTANTS: LETHAL LEGION #3. (Annotations here.) I’m counting this as a core title because it’s basically a continuation of New Mutants, but if we’re being honest, we’re on the fringes of Krakoan continuity here too. It remains very much a book centred on Charlie Jane Anders’ new character Escapade, which I don’t really have a problem with, since I quite like Escapade – but the established cast are getting marginalised. The middle section has some awkward cutting back and forth between scenes mid-page, which might have worked better if they were coloured more distinctively from another, but winds up feeling a bit confused at times. Still, this is mostly good fun as things start escalating at Nefaria’s Mansion, with a bit of soap opera for Escapade, Morgan and Cerebella thrown in. There’s a lot of personality in both writing and art, and it’s a very likeable series.
House to Astonish Presents: The Lightning Round Episode 14
It’s time for another electrifying set of issues of Marvel’s most wanted superteam, the Thunderbolts, as we look at Thunderbolts Annual 2000, as well as Thunderbolts #38 and #39. Scourges! Hellstroms! Citizens V! It’s very much all go, as the storyline begun in issue 34 continues along its twisty-turny path.
The episode can be found here, or via the embedded player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments, via email, on Twitter or Mastodon, or on our Facebook fan page! And do you know what would really bring out your eyes? A House to Astonish T-shirt. It’s true!
