The Homies 2022
‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, except this one mouse who was rereading issues of Saga to see if it wanted to nominate the book for Best Continuing Series. That’s right, it’s time to put forward your nominations for the Homies, our annual awards!
As always, Paul and I will individually be choosing a winner for each category, but there’s the usual proviso – we want YOU to help, so you all name your picks in the comments, and Paul and I each choose our own, and we talk a bit about each of the three on our awards show.
We’re likely to be recording mid-January, so we’re giving you until midnight UK time (7pm Eastern, 4pm Pacific) on January 14 2023 to make your choice. When you list your picks, don’t just name names either, because we’ll be reading out the best comments on the show, so let us know your thinking!
BEST NEW SERIES
This one’s pretty self-explanatory – any comic whose first issue was published between 1 January and 31 December 2022 is eligible. What new series got your attention the most this year?
BEST ACTUALLY NEW SERIES
This one’s a little less self-explanatory – what series, again first published during 2022, did you think was best, with the proviso that it has to be something where the property wasn’t in existence prior to the start of 2022. We’re counting re-use of titles as well as concepts, so Strange or Rogues wouldn’t be eligible, but (for example) Earthdivers or Know Your Station would.
BEST CONTINUING SERIES
The counterpart to the categories above, which covers books whose first issue was published in 2020 or before. They’ve been around the block, but they’ve still got what it takes.
BEST MINI, ONE-SHOT OR OGN
These are explaining themselves by this point, right? We’re looking for OGNs, one-shots and minis published in 2022 (or partially in 2022, in the case of minis).
FAVOURITE WRITER
FAVOURITE ARTIST
FAVOURITE COLOURIST
Each of these three is pretty self-explanatory – whose name on the cover or credits box of a book makes you want to pick it up? Whose work do you most look forward to seeing?
MOST WANTED
This is for the comic, series or graphic novel that saw print this year which you’d want to see more of, whether that be a book that was cancelled before its time, a one-shot or mini that just begs for a follow-up, or an OGN that you’d love to see a sequel to.
MOST PLEASANT SURPRISE
It may have seemed unappealing when you read about it online, and those preview pages may have looked unremarkable, but when you finally got the winner of this category in your hands you were ready to eat your words. What comic, series or graphic novel did you find yourself enjoying much more than you thought you would?
OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT
This is exactly what it says – which creator, creative team, publisher or other contributor to the world of comics really knocked it out of the park this year?
Let us have your picks in the comments thread below, along with your thinking on each one – we’ll read out a range of the responses on our big end-of-year show. Happy nominating!
Charts – 23 December 2022
Christmas comes but once a year, and when it comes it brings deep sighing.
1. LadBaby – “Food Aid”
And you thought it was tiresome when Simon Cowell got the Christmas number one every year. Mark Hoyle has now had the Christmas number 1 five years running, which, yes, means he’s beaten the record that he previous set with the Beatles. This had a certain fluke charm in the first year, but it’s now starting to feel like someone trying to establish himself as a national institution even though you probably never hear of him the rest of the year.
Sabretooth & The Exiles #2 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
SABRETOOTH & THE EXILES #2
“Chimera Protocols”
Writer: Victor LaValle
Artist: Leonard Kirk
Colour artist: Rain Beredo
Letterer: Cory Petit
Design: Tom Muller with Jay Bowen
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER / PAGE 1. Sabretooth, Nekra, Toad and Oya, with Sabretooth striking a leaderly pose, all in a rather rickety dinghy compared to the vessel in the story itself.
PAGE 2. Stan Lee tribute page.
PAGES 3-5. Nekra and Sabretooth fight.
When we left off, Barrington and the Creation had just abducted Orphan-Maker, and Sabretooth had shown up to offer the team a ride. It’s not directly explained why Nekra has attacked Sabretooth, but the recap page indicates that she’s mainly just taking her revenge for him abandoning the group at the end of the Sabretooth miniseries. At any rate, her attention quickly shifts to the fact that Sabretooth isn’t healing in the way that he ought to.
Wolverine #28 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
WOLVERINE vol 7 #28
“The Beast Agenda: Savage”
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Juan José Ryp
Colour artist: Frank D’Armata
Letterer: Cory Petit
Design: Tom Muller with Jay Bowen
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER / PAGE 1: Wolverine is pulled into the Pit. Which is… the cliffhanger, so an odd decision to stick it on the cover and then whack a caption on it to explain what’s happening.
This issue is going to be pretty light on annotations. That’s not a criticism, it’s just the nature of the story.
PAGE 2. Stan Lee tribute.
PAGES 3-6. Beast brings food to Wolverine.
Evidently Beast’s influence is simplifying Wolverine’s thoughts and making him loyal to the Beast – though it doesn’t seem to have had much effect on his self-loathing. That said, whatever it is he thinks he’s “bad” for, it’s not his body count, which is apparently “good”. We’ll see in the data page later in the issue that there’s apparently more to this than just the control collar.
The previous issue also has a very similar scene where Beast brings Wolverine an animal to kill and eat, but this is a different Krakoan animal. His costume was already torn up in that scene, so either this scene takes place first, or Beast keeps giving Wolverine new costumes and Wolverine keeps destroying them. The latter is entirely possible, since Beast does give him a new costume when he takes Wolverine on a mission in the next scene.
X-Men Annual #1 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-MEN ANNUAL vol 4 #1
“Radiant”
Writer: Steve Foxe
Artist: Andrea Di Vito
Colourist: Sebastian Cheng
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Design: Tom Muller with Jay Bowen
Editor: Jordan D White
COVER / PAGE 1. Firestar fighting alongside Cyclops.
PAGES 2-4. Firestar argues with the Hellions.
The Avengers. Firestar was a member of the Avengers during the Busiek/Perez run in the late 90s and early 2000s. The wider point being made here is that although she’s a mutant, she’s rarely been featured in X-related comics. In the Hellions’ eyes – or at least Roulette and Bevatron’s, since Catseye and Jetstream seem more ambivalent – she’s ignored the mutant struggle in favour of an easier life for herself. Moreover, as a member of the X-Men, she’s now been selected as a supposed representative of their nation anyway. They aren’t impressed.
Meanwhile, some housekeeping…
It’s obvious to anyone that Twitter is at the very least becoming unstable and unreliable, and quite possibly on its way to uselessness and/or implosion. I can see that a fair amount of traffic comes to this site directly from Twitter, so it’s clearly time to make contingency plans. I’d like to imagine that most of you who come here via Twitter would probably just check in regularly anyway, but let’s assume that’s not the case or that there’s a convenience issue for you.
That’s why this post exists: to invite comments from you, YES YOU, on the alternatives.
You can find the same links on Hive, where I’m @ifdestroyed, and on my Mastodon account https://mas.to/@ifdestroyed.
But… I don’t honestly think either of those platforms is going to replace Twitter (or that they could cope with the infrastructure and moderation demands if they did), and I don’t know how much use any of you are likely to make of them. And if you’re going to check in on them once a week to see what I’ve posted there… well, you might as well just come here in the first place.
I have also have accounts as @ifdestroyed on Post.News and Cohost which are currently dormant. If there’s a lot of you out there who’d actually find it helpful for me to post links on those platforms then let me know.
The other option is Substack. Using that just to send out alerts of a new post seems a bit clunky, but I could do a weekly round-up, maybe with a bit of extra material thrown in. Or I could go the whole hog and have every post on Substack as well as on here.
Thoughts?
X-Men Legends #3-4
X-MEN LEGENDS vol 2 #3-4
Writer: Ann Nocenti
Artist: Javier Pina
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Colourist: Jim Campbell
Editor: Mark Basso
You can’t say X-Men Legends lacks range. The previous arc was Roy Thomas doing mid-70s continuity patching. The next arc is Whilce Portacio doing the early 90s. And here we have Ann Nocenti revisiting Longshot. Those are three very, very different creators. In fact, you have to wonder what the market is, beyond completists like me, for a book whose premise boils down to “literally anything from over 25 years ago”.
Although Ann Nocenti was the X-Men’s editor for most of the 1980s, her own writing was always very unusual – technically within the bounds of the superhero genre, but satirical, brittle and almost abstract at times. Nocenti is a writer of ideas, and her stories often function more as concept delivery systems than as character studies. The original Longshot series is very much like that, the core being the contrast between the pure and naive Longshot whose luck powers distort the plot in his favour, and the grotesque Mojo. Both of them are rather one note characters, but it’s the way they react with one another.
Longshot and Mojo both became incorporated into the X-Men, with Mojo settling into the role of media satire. That’s certainly an element in the original series – Mojo makes movies, Longshot is a reluctant stuntman – but Mojo started off as a somewhat broader force of anti-life. The stuff about flowers dying in his presence has been largely forgotten over the years, but it makes a return here.
Charts – 16 December 2022
And there was me thinking that Mariah Carey was guaranteed to sit at number 1 through to Christmas. But no! We have a surprise!
1. Wham! – “Last Christmas”
I mean, kind of. After all, this was number 3 last week, and it also sneaked a week at number 1 over Christmas 2020. But still, it’s some sort of turnover at the top, which is nice.
The march of Christmas singles slows down this week, simply because there are so many in the top 40 already that there’s no room for any more. The result is a very quiet singles chart with one notable exception…
X-Men Legends #1-2
X-MEN LEGENDS #1-2
“Interim for Mutants”
Writer: Roy Thomas
Artist: Dave Wachter
Colourist: Edgar Delgado
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Editor: Mark Basso
We’re going to get through the reviews backlog, really we are. And with that in mind, here’s the first arc from the second volume of X-Men Legends. Quite why you renumber an anthology title from #1 is a bit hard to follow, beyond the obvious hope that it boosts sales for a couple of months, but I guess that’s reason enough.
Originally, Legends was pitched on the idea of classic X-Men creators returning to their own runs; with Gambit and X-Treme X-Men, that seems to be the format now for Chris Claremont minis. This arc, though, is something else. Roy Thomas wrote the X-Men in the 1960s, and his issues with Neal Adams are pretty significant. That’s not the period he’s going back to. Instead, this is an exercise in bridging the gap between Incredible Hulk #181 and Giant-Size X-Men #1 for Wolverine.
From a continuity nerd’s perspective, there kind of isn’t a gap between those two stories, because Daniel Way already filled it in Wolverine: Origins #28-29… but fair enough, there are other stories that say he went on several more unspecified missions in that period. Still, is it a gap that needs filled? It’s not like Wolverine changes radically between those two issues.
Legion of X #8 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
LEGION OF X #8
“Family Ties”
Writer: Si Spurrier
Penciller: Netho Diaz
Inker: Sean Parsons
Colourist: Federico Blee
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Design: Tom Muller with Jay Bowen
Editor: Sarah Brunstad
COVER / PAGE 1: Mother Righteous, surrounded by images of the cast (and focussing in particular on the transformed Nightcrawler. She isn’t actually in the issue, but her influence is apparent. We saw her with these sorts of viewing globes in the previous issue.
PAGE 2. Stan Lee tribute page.
PAGE 3. Chamber and Husk waver over whether to go into the room.
We’re picking up here from the cliffhanger, where Nightcrawler, Dr Nemesis and Pixie showed up at Archangel’s office only to find him demonically transformed and locked in battle with the Black Knight. At the start of the previous issue, Nightcrawler despatched Chamber and Husk to visit Archangel, in response to a “hazy” request for an investigation. This is them showing up separately.
