X-Force #21-26
X-FORCE #21-26
by Benjamin Percy, Joshua Cassara, Robert Gill, Martin Coccolo and Guru-eFX
Looking back over the last few months, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that some of the X-books have been spinning their wheels after Hellfire Gala, waiting for Inferno to come along and advance the status quo. Marauders is the biggest example of that, but X-Force is in that category too. What we have in these six issues is a bunch of unrelated stories that seem to be marking time, and don’t feel like a coherent overall series.
It doesn’t greatly help that the series’ most common penciller Joshua Cassara is missing for almost all of this run. He does some of issue #21 and that’s it. Cassara’s art is one of the more memorable features of X-Force; it’s a book unusually preoccupied with the concept of organic technology and weird plant-based things. Under Cassara, it generally manages to make all of that look rather seedy, grotesque and ominous in a way that then infects even the more conventional shots of Krakoa as an island paradise. And since most people are going to be reading this book as part of the wider X-lineup, that’s fine; the utopian setting is being established somewhere else, X-Force is free to get on with undercutting it.
The art in these issues isn’t bad at all, it just feels a little blander to me. Sometimes that works. The scenes of a dispassionate mind-controlled Colossus actually work well in that register, and it’s maybe better able to play Quentin and Phoebe’s relationship straight. But it’s less distinctive.
Excalibur #22-26
EXCALIBUR #22-26
by Tini Howard, Marcus To & Erick Arciniega
(Deep sigh.)
I mean, you can’t say it’s phoned in. It’s an elaborate thing, Excalibur. It’s going for a complex mythology of Otherworld, it’s clearly trying to be a big epic that repays effort. It’s done a reasonable job of extricating Betsy Braddock from a decades-long cul de sac, and that’s undeniably a positive. It’s not lazy. You don’t produce a book as odd as this by going the obvious route.
But does it actually work? Um.
Um.
Look, I’m willing to grant Excalibur a couple of things. It’s a fantasy book, which is not really what interests me about the X-books, and it’s fair to say that no matter how well this was done, there’s a pretty good chance it really wouldn’t be my thing. And it’s a UK book written by an American, which gives it a wonderful range of opportunities to irritate me that won’t apply to most readers. So I’m probably not the ideal market even for the book that Excalibur is trying to be. I’ll give you that. I’m trying to make full allowance for it.
Charts – 7 January 2022
The first post-Christmas chart is always… weird. Last week the chart was dominated by Christmas records, based on streams over Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. This week… all gone. The number one, Ed Sheeran and Elton John’s Christmas record, drops straight out of the top 100, and a veritable horde of songs flood in from the lower reaches to fill the space. Most of them are tracks that had been around before Christmas. But there are some genuine new entries here too – some new releases, some tracks that couldn’t make any headway until the holidays were over.
After a four week gap, “Easy On Me” returns to number one for its eighth week. To give you an idea of how insane this week’s chart is, it’s climbing from number 38. Anyway, time for our first new entry of 2022! Normal service is resumed!
4. Carolina Gaitán, Mauro Castillo, Adassa, Rhenzy Feliz, Diane Guerrero & Stephanie Beatriz – “We Don’t Talk About Bruno”
Ah.
Inferno #4 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
INFERNO vol 2 #4
“The Death of Moira X”
by Jonathan Hickman, Valerio Schiti, Stefano Caselli & David Curiel
COVER / PAGE 1. Mystique, changing into Destiny, stands over a gravestone. Nothing very much like this happens in the issue itself – it seems to be teasing that Destiny could die again, or perhaps that they both kill Moira. (It may be worth noting here that issue #3 had a cover of Professor X and Magneto fighting Nimrod, which doesn’t actually happen until this issue. That might suggest a bit of rewriting on the fly.)
PAGE 2. Opening quote from Omega Sentinel. This line comes from page 6, where it’s directed at Orchis. It could of course be read as a self-deprecating meta nod to this being Jonathan Hickman’s final issue, and the Krakoa status quo sailing on without him.
PAGE 3. Recap and credits. There’s so much to cover in this issue that it only gets one page!
PAGES 4-11. Nimrod and Omega Sentinel turn on Orchis, then fight Professor X and Magneto.
We’re picking up from the end of the previous issue, where Professor X and Magneto had been lured into a trap by following a tracker embedded in Moira’s arm, only to find that the arm had been cut off. At this point, Omega Sentinel and Nimrod show their hand. As foreshadowed in many previous issues of Hickman’s run, going back to House of X and Powers of X, this is a three-way conflict between humans, mutants and post-humans. Omega and Nimrod are post-humans – a cyborg and a robot animated by fragments of the personality of a human – so ultimately, their agenda does not align with Orchis.
X-Men #6 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-MEN vol 6 #6
“Whatever Happened to Captain Krakoa?”
by Gerry Duggan, Pepe Larraz & Marte Garcia
COVER / PAGE 1. A crowd of people photograph Captain Krakoa on their phones. We’ll find out during the issue who this guy is.
PAGES 2-4. Flash forward: Captain Krakoa debuts in New York.
He’s doing very conventionally heroic things indeed, and generally trying to be a welcome member of the New York community – precisely in line with the X-Men’s general approach to New York since they set up here at the start of the current volume. Obviously, rescuing a cat from a tree is an absurdly stereotypical piece of heroism.
“I’m kind of the greeter in these parts.” Particularly back in the 1980s, Spider-Man tended to show up at the start of a new series to cement it as being in the Marvel Universe.
PAGE 5. Recap and credits. The layout is modified to show the title in larger print, for some reason. The previous five issues were titles as chapters of “Fearless”, but this one isn’t. The solicitations say this issue is part of the first trade paperback, but you have to wonder.
Hellions #13-18
HELLIONS #13-18
by Zeb Wells, Rogé Antonio, Steven Segovia & Rain Beredo
We’re entering another season break, making it the perfect time to catch up on reviews. And we start with the X-book that probably had the strongest last six months in terms of what it actually delivered on the page – but it isn’t coming back for another run.
And I’m pretty much fine with that, because this feels like a good ending point for Hellions. Not necessarily an ending point for all the characters, some of whom will doubtless go on to other things. But certainly an ending point for the series, since Hellions has a bunch of inherent tensions in the whole premise. Sinister is a blatant lunatic who the team (or the Quiet Council) are only going to tolerate for so long. Psylocke’s only tolerating all this because she’s being blackmailed to get the back-up copy of her daughter back. None of this can go on for ever. At some point it all has to explode – which is pretty much what happens. Whatever the next logical step is for some of these characters, it isn’t Hellions. So fair enough. Eighteen issues seems the right lifespan for the book.
The early issues of Hellions have some grimdark tendencies which don’t do the series any favours. By this point, though, Wells has got the balance right. There’s a lot of black comedy here, but it’s mostly psychological rather than graphic.
House to Astonish Episode 196
It’s time for our annual look-back at the comics and creators of 2021, as they give out the gongs in the Homies awards. Will your favourites go home with a glittering prize? Only one way to find out!
Then it’s time for a trip back to Harrogate in November 2021, for the recording of the SILENCE! To Astonish panel from Thought Bubble, featuring Rachael Stott, Becky Cloonan, Al Ewing and Hannah Berry. What larks!
Thanks again for sticking with us for another year, and we hope you’ll join us this year as we keep bringing you the news, reviewing comics, making over low-level loser characters, rereading Thunderbolts, and so on, and so forth.
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. And look, what better way is there to prepare for the year to come than by buying a t-shirt that shows your support for this podcast? Other than buying in tinned food and bottled water? Exactly.
The Incomplete Wolverine – 1996
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
When we left off, Wolverine was reverting to a primal state of mind after losing his adamantium. But we’re building to issue #100, so… that’ll be the end of the story, right? Right?
X-MEN & SPIDER-MAN #3
“Clone Sagas”
by Christos Gage & Mario Alberti
March 2009
But first, time to check in again on this miniseries, where every issue took place at a different point in X-Men history. This time, the X-Men team up with Spider-Man (Ben Reilly, the clone of the original) to stop Mr Sinister getting hold of a DNA sample from Carnage (Cletus Kasady). Spider-Man asks Wolverine if his enhanced senses can tell whether he’s the original or the clone; Wolverine can’t, but says that Spider-Man’s performance in the fight showed that he’s the real thing in every way that matters. You know the routine.
Unfortunately, this issue creates a continuity error with Uncanny X-Men #339, where Ben meets the X-Men for the first time again. (Wolverine met him previously in Marvel vs DC.)
Charts – 31 December 2021
The final chart of 2021 covers the chart week 24-30 December – which means it includes both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Although the streams of Christmas songs generally fall off a cliff after Christmas itself, they do so well on the big day that this is another Christmas-dominated top 40. Next week, almost all of these Christmas records will vanish, and we’ll have a massive influx of new singles.
1. Ed Sheeran & Elton John – “Merry Christmas”
Well, of course people weren’t going to keep buying the LadBaby version. That track exists to be bought as part of a charity campaign or just as part of a narrative – it doesn’t exist to be listened to, and so it places this week at number 29. To be fair to him, that’s better than he managed in the previous two years, when he dropped from number 1 straight out of the top 40.
The proper version of the song returns to number 1 for a third week, but given the festive angle (and the fact it’s been out a month already) I doubt it’ll manage a fourth.
28. Fireboy DML & Ed Sheeran – “Peru”
This is an actual, regular new entry – it’s a new mix of a track that topped the specialist Afrobeat charts in November, but which hadn’t previously made the top 40.
Mighty Marvel Holiday Special: Iceman’s New Year’s Resolutions Infinity Comic #1
MIGHTY MARVEL HOLIDAY SPECIAL: ICEMAN’S NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS INFINITY COMIC #1
by Luciano Vecchio
Um, could we maybe have a think about coming up with more viable names for these things?
Anyway, with no regular X-books out this week, the X-Men round out the year with an Iceman Infinity Comic set on New Year’s Eve. Luciano Vecchio is best known as an artist; he’s worked on Ironheart and Champions. His previous writing credits for Marvel have been on short stories for the Voices anthologies, but this is closer to a full length story. And it’s absolutely fine, if squarely in the territory you’d expect from a holiday special comic.
It’s New Year’s Eve, and Iceman has decided to drop by Times Square to watch the ball drop. He’s on his own, so maybe the other mutants have stronger views on Covid. But the story was probably committed to this setting before Omicron took off, so fair enough.
