S.W.O.R.D. #9 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
S.W.O.R.D. vol 2 #9
“Friends in High Places”
by Al Ewing, Jacopo Camagni & Fernando Sifuentes
COVER / PAGE 1. Henry Peter Gyrich holds Abigail Brand, Manifold and Frenzy in a globe, with the Orchis symbol behind him. Don’t worry, it’s purely symbolic.
PAGES 2-4. Guardian and Gyrich talk.
Guardian. We last saw Guardian in issue #6, leaving the Hellfire Gala. He was overwhelmed by the terraforming of Mars, and Henry Gyrich was moving in to recruit him for Orchis. It’s interesting that Gyrich chose to make his pitch in the name of Orchis, rather than in his official capacity as commander of Alpha Flight. It’s still not exactly clear how much Guardian knows about Orchis, or what he’s been told about their agenda – we know from issue #3 that aspects of Orchis’s organisation are internally confidential and that even Gyrich has only seen a redacted version of their organisation chart.
Way of X
WAY OF X #1-5 / X-MEN: THE ONSLAUGHT REVELATION
by Si Spurrier, Bob Quinn & Java Tartaglia
Another short-run series, then – six issues, in practice, despite the rather odd and arbitrary branding of issue #6 as an X-Men one-shot. (It isn’t.) But this ends by explicitly promising a sequel in the new year, and it’s not a gathering-of-the-team arc so much as a coming-up-with-the-premise-in-the-first place. It makes a certain sense to present like this, as a separate story in its own right.
Nightcrawler has been on the Quiet Council since the Krakoan era began, but prior to this series he had actually done very little, beyond serving as a Council member who readers could definitely trust to be sensible and decent. One issue of X-Men, clearly the set-up for this book, had him wavering about newly-coined rituals like Crucible and the casual approach to resurrection, and talking about setting up a mutant religion.
Which wouldn’t have made sense. Kurt is religious already; it’s one of his core traits. He’s hardly going to show up on Krakoa and jettison those beliefs in order to contrive a syncretic religion for purposes of social control.
Charts – 22 October 2021
Now this is something different.
1. Adele – “Easy On Me”
25. Adele – “When We Were Young”
34. Adele – “Someone Like You”
Adele hasn’t released anything since 2016, and her last single, “Water Under the Bridge”, reached number 39. Admittedly, it wasn’t exactly heavily promoted. Still – five years is a long time, and you could be forgiven for thinking that fourteen years into her career, Adele might become an elder statesman on the album chart.
Quite the opposite. A new Adele single, it turns out, is huge. The previous weekly streaming record was 16.9 million; “Easy On Me” shatters it, at 24 million. The other two Adele singles in the chart aren’t B-sides or tracks from the album (which isn’t out yet). People have just been inspired to go out and listen to her back catalogue. They aren’t the obvious choices, either – “Someone Like You” was a number 1 in 2011, but “When We Were Young” wasn’t one of her biggest hits; it got to number 9 in 2015.
X-Men: The Trial of Magneto #3 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-MEN: THE TRIAL OF MAGNETO #3
“Schrödinger’s Corpse”
by Leah Williams, Lucas Werneck, David Messina & Edgar Delgado
COVER / PAGE 1. Magneto, with the scales of justice balancing his helmet against the Scarlet Witch’s headdress. The perspective is a bit confusing – it doesn’t seem to be drawn as if it’s tilting one way or the other, but the pan with the headdress seems to be resting on the ground. I’m honestly not sure whether it’s meant to be balanced or not.
PAGES 2-6. The Scarlet Witch is overwhelmed, and Northstar attacks Magneto.
The Scarlet Witch returned at the end of the last issue, assured everyone that she was all right and kissed the Vision while saying that she wanted to “get back to normal”. The implication, confirmed later in the issue, is that she was resurrected from an old back-up. That’s essentially confirmed in this story, where Wanda appears to have been resurrected with her memories reset to some earlier point in continuity. She evidently believes that she’s still in a relationship with the Vision – I’ll come back to when exactly this is meant to be.
The Vision says that he had “not finished grieving my late wife” at the start of this story. He’s referring to Virginia, from the Tom King / Gabriel Hernandez Walta Vision series that ran from 2015-16 (long, long after this Wanda’s memories end). She died in Vision vol 2 #12, roughly five years ago now. Vision was seen working on a new body for her at the end of that series, but nothing ever came of it. At any rate, it seems a slightly odd thing for him to say about a character who’s been dead for five years, even allowing for Marvel’s sliding timeline.
X-Corp
X-CORP #1-5
by Tini Howard, Alberto Foche, Valentine De Landro & Sunny Gho
Well. They can’t all be winners.
And look, that’s a more serious point than it sounds. X-Corp is not a well received book. Not among the commenters here, not more broadly, so far as I can tell. The consensus seems to be that it ranks with Fallen Angels as one of the Krakoa era’s few outright duds. Like that book, it ends after a single arc which was blatantly designed as a gathering-of-the-cast. Maybe it’s heading for a reboot in 2022, but the sales estimates for August at Comichron have it as the lowest-selling X-book by quite some margin.
But they can’t all be winners. They shouldn’t all be winners. If you’re taking risks to any degree then by definition some of them are going to go badly. And I can absolutely see why this got commissioned. In theory, it sounds promising. It probably looked great as a pitch.
A key part of the Krakoan premise is the inversion of power thanks to the mutants’ drugs. Sure, this requires us to believe that a public who can’t even be persuaded to get vaccinated against Covid will be absolutely on board for mystery drugs whose safety testing regime consists of a napkin signed “Trust me – Magneto”, but that’s the schtick. It’s still a premise that means the mutants’ unaccustomed upper hand is based on economic power, and (in part) on what they can do with mutant powers when they actually have the chance to do it right. It’s also an economic power that rests very narrowly on one product, so you can see why they’d want to diversify it given the chance.
Charts – 15 October 2021
At last, deliverance is upon us.
1. Elton John & Dua Lipa – “Cold Heart”
In its 9th week on the top 40, and following three weeks at number 2, “Cold Heart” climbs to the top and spares us all a sixteenth week of Ed Sheeran. Bryan Adams remains unmatched.
I explained all this back when “Cold Heart” first charted, but it’s the latest in a series of tracks by the Australian trio Pnau, constructing new dance tracks from chunks of the Elton John back catalogue. In this case, that’s supplemented by original vocals from Dua Lipa, but still sticking to Elton John elements. The main sources for “Cold Heart”, and the most immediately recognisable, are “Rocket Man” and “Sacrifice”, but it also draws on two more obscure tracks, “Kiss the Bride” and (in the fade out) the album track “Where’s the Shoorah?”
X-Force #24 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-FORCE vol 6 #24
“The Pen is Mightier than the Cerebro Sword”
by Benjamin Percy, Martin Coccolo & Guru eFX
COVER / PAGE 1: Colossus with (literally) blood on his hands.
PAGES 2-4. Mikhail Rasputin intimidates the Chronicler.
This is the sort of scene I’m used to seeing as a thinly veiled complaint from writers about editorial interference, but I can’t imagine it’s the actual intention here. Still, if I’m being honest, it’s the first thing that these tropes bring to mind.
This issue contains the first semi-clear explanation of what the Chronicler’s powers actually are, but we’ll come to that. In terms of what hold Mikhail has over him, it seems to be mostly a matter of threats of violence, though apparently this guy is also really keen on wine to the point of abject desperation – is he meant to be an alcoholic?
Mikhail gets another speech to claim that his manipulation of Colossus is in keeping with a long Russian tradition of secret police forces which, he says, are a constant throughout years of Russian change. The examples he gives don’t really support that claim, since they’re all secret police forces from the Soviet era:
X-Men #4 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-MEN vol 6 #4
“Fearless, Chapter 4: Nightmare on 86th Street”
by Gerry Duggan, Javier Pina & Erick Arciniega
COVER / PAGE 1. Nightmare rears up on his horse, holding the severed head of Cyclops.
PAGE 2. Data page. Opening quotes about Nightmare from Dr Voodoo (currently in the cast of Strange Academy) and Magik.
Nightmare is a Doctor Strange villain, and the fairly self-explanatory ruler of a magical Nightmare Realm.
“He’s conquered a splinter realm…” This is just referring to the Nightmare Realm. The term “splinter realms” comes from the 2000 Magik miniseries.
“…once succeeded in trapping Eternity.” Doctor Strange vol 2 #13, published in 1976.
PAGE 3. Night at the Treehouse.
The pumpkin with a single eye is a cute touch.
X-Men Unlimited Infinity Comic #1-4
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #1-4
by Jonathan Hickman & Declan Shalvey
So here’s a thing that exists!
A few people have asked me about this book. Mainly, “will you be annotating it”. The answer, obviously, is no, for reasons which will be very very obvious to anyone who’s actually read it.
The Infinity Comics line is a series of digital-only exclusives for Marvel Unlimited subscribers. You can’t buy them separately, and it wouldn’t even be possible to print them as conventional comics. What they are is vertically scrolling comics in the model of Webtoons, optimised for viewing on a phone.
When I say “optimised for viewing on a phone”, I’m not kidding. You can read them on a tablet if you really want, but I wouldn’t. The lettering is enormous, and the app fills the whole screen – which is unlikely to have precisely the same dimensions as a phone screen and means that you often find it’s impossible to view in one go everything that the artist plainly intended you to see. (Artists might want to be a bit more cautious about what they assume to be the dimensions of the screen, to be honest. It’s not like all phones are the same shape either.)
House to Astonish Episode 194
We’ve got a bit of NYCC-dodging news chat for you this time round, as we discuss the Ditko lawsuit, creative changes on the X-books, Kurt Busiek’s new Image slate and Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese coming to Disney Plus. We’ve also got reviews of Amazing Spider-Man, We Have Demons and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe is a little dark. All this plus Spidey and the Family Stone, a little girl that swears and the Scott Snyder/John Allison crossover project you didn’t know you needed.
The episode is here, or here on Mixcloud, or available via the player below. Let us know what you think, either in the comments below, on Twitter, via email or on our Facebook fan page. And don’t forget that our fab shirts are available over at our Redbubble store! We will remind you if you do forget, it’s okay.
