Charts – 23 July 2021
It’s one of those singles charts that would be dead if it wasn’t for the spillover from album releases.
1. Ed Sheeran – “Bad Habits”
Four weeks. It’s still not growing on me.
14. Pop Smoke featuring Dua Lipa – “Demeanor”
This is the lead single from “Faith”, which enters the album chart at number 3. It’s his third album, two of which were posthumous. Posthumous albums are a dubious exercise at the best of times, at least when they go beyond completing a final product to pillaging the archives for material that the artist consciously chose not to release during life. This single is perfectly fine on its merits, but it’s hard to look past the fact that it’s essentially an unreleased Pop Smoke fragment plastered over a Dua Lipa track.
New Mutants #20 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbersgo by the digital edition.
NEW MUTANTS #20
“Secrets & Lies”
by Vita Ayala, Alex Lins & Matt Milla
COVER / PAGE 1: The Shadow King looms over Scout. Seems like a cover that would have fit better an issue or two back.
PAGES 2-4. Anole, Cosmar, Rain Boy and No-Girl decide what to do with Scout.
The previous issue ended with them finding Scout’s body. The strong implication was that Scout had been killed by the Shadow King, after she confronted him in issue #18 about her concerns over his influence over these four.
The group is named later in the issue as “Lost Club”.
“Cosmar asked for their help, and they gave her platitudes.” Issue #15. Cosmar, who believes that her distorted appearance is not a feature of her powers but merely a self-inflicted injury when her powers were out of control, asked Dani to kill her in the Crucible so that she could be resurrected in her original form. Dani refused and gave her a mutant-pride speech, which went down very badly.
Marauders #22 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
MARAUDERS #22
“The Morning After”
by Gerry Duggan, Matteo Lolli, Klaus Janson & Rain Beredo
COVER / PAGE 1: Lourdes Chantel and Emma Frost stand over a chessboard, with Emma laying a figure of the Black King (Sebastian Shaw) on his side. Normally in chess you’d put your own king on its side as a way of resigning, but okay. The other identifiable chess piece represents former Black Bishop, Harry Leland.
This is a callback to the cover of issue #2, in which Sebastian and Emma are shown in the same poses, with Emma using the same… whatever you call it, the shoving thing… to move a figure of Kitty and Lockheed over a map.
PAGE 2. News coverage of the aftermath of the Hellfire Gala.
“I’m glad I never wanted to visit the fifth planet in our solar system.” Referring to the terraforming of Mars in Planet-Sized X-Men #1. Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun (the fifth is Jupiter), so it’s a Fox News joke.
“Feilong Industries.” Referencing a storyline from Duggan’s own X-Men #1.
Charts – 16 July 2021
Sometimes the lag in a weekly chart is more noticeable than normal…
1. Ed Sheeran – “Bad Habits”
Three weeks at number one. It’s still growing, too.
3. Dave featuring Stormzy – “Clash”
First-time collaboration by two of the big names of UK rap, so it was bound to do well. It’s musically compelling even if you have no idea what they’re going on about (I don’t pretend to pick up references to trainers without resorting to the annotations, and I have no idea where Jeremy Corbyn fits into anything). I’m sure he’s a big fan of Aston Martins too.
X-Corp #3 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-CORP #3
“The Madrox Workflow”
by Tini Howard, Valentine de Landro & Sunny Gho
COVER / PAGE 1. Corporate Madrox, with a bunch of dupes tessellated behind him.
PAGES 2-3. Who is Dr Jamie Madrox?
This is a more or less straight recap of Madrox’s back story. Madrox’s family tie to Los Alamos, and his powers emerging at birth, both come from his debut in Giant-Size Fantastic Four #4, as does the panel of him with Professor X and Mr Fantastic. I’m pretty sure the bit about his childhood interest in science is new. When first introduced, Madrox’s gimmick was that he was a naive farmboy (his parents moved to Kansas soon after he was born) whose parents had died and who was living alone on the farm as a community of one.
The idea that some Madrox duplicates were going out to learn about entire skills and then return with what they had learned, contributing to the skills of the whole, comes from Peter David’s X-Factor. Howard entirely ignores the usual depiction of Madrox as a bit of a comedy figure or (at the very least) everyman, which admittedly wouldn’t make much sense for something written in the tone of X-Corp pseudo-advertising. The idea that Madrox is “brilliant” is, um, novel. Still, the idea that his accumulated skills would allow him to work efficiently by churning out the duplicates and then reabsorbing them periodically to work as a one-man team… that makes sense.
Way of X #4 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
WAY OF X #4
“Heirs and Graces”
by Si Spurrier, Bob Quinn & Java Tartaglia
COVER / PAGE 1. Nightcrawler keeps Professor X and Legion separated, while Onslaught’s face looms in the background.
PAGE 2. Data page – a detail of the map of Arakko previously seen in Planet-Size X-Men #1. “Tharsis” is a volcanic plateau on Mars.
Beneath it, a quote from Nightcrawler’s book of philosophy (the title of which continues to be redacted for some reason). As so often in this book, Way of X offers a rather more sceptical view of the grand achievements which Planet-Size X-Men was praising.
PAGES 3-4. Lost’s story.
A fairly straightforward parable about a wronged girl whose demands for revenge are rejected by elders who want an amnesty for the greater good. Nightcrawler draws the fairly obvious conclusion that the girl is Lost herself, the bad guy is Fabian Cortez (given her reaction to him last issue), and the amnesty is the general amnesty that Krakoa extends to all ex-villains.
Excalibur #22 annotation
As always, this post contains spoilers and page numbers go by the digital edition.
EXCALIBUR vol 4 #22
“Treasures of Britain”
by Tini Howard, Marcus To & Erick Arciniega
COVER / PAGE 1. Excalibur as prisoners of Merlyn.
PAGES 2-5. Excalibur and the Beast visit Blightspoke.
Blightspoke. This is one of the various Otherworld realms that we saw during the “X of Swords” crossover. Generally, it’s been depicted as a sort of dumping ground for things from failed realities, with plenty of useful stuff there if you can get at it safely. The suggestion that the land is actively poisonous comes from a data page in Cable #5, though this is the first time it’s really come up.
The Beast is taking scientific measurements of samples from Blightspoke, which in itself seems like a perfectly innocuous thing to do. But over in X-Force, the Beast is mainly being written these days as a dangerously overconfident amoral schemer, so god only knows what he wants with this stuff, but it can’t be good.
“Logan says this place can be unwelcoming in more ways than one.” Wolverine fought Summoner in Blightspoke in Wolverine #7.
Charts – 9 July 2021
This is what you call a dead week.
Two weeks. And for our highest new entry we find ourselves going all the way down to…
32. Brent Faiyaz featuring Drake – “Wasting Time”
X-Men #1 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-MEN vol 6 #1
“Fearless, Chapter One: In Threes”
by Gerry Duggan, Pepe Larraz & Marte Gracia
COVER / PAGES 1-2. The new X-Men team in battle in New York. That’s the main cover, obviously. There are tons of variants.
PAGES 3-5. The back story of Feilong.
This is the first appearance of Kelvin Heng, a self-made scientific genius who was on the verge of beginning his own project to terraform Mars when the Krakoans marched in and took the place over in Planet-Size X-Men #1. Though we didn’t see Feilong himself in that issue, we did see the probe sent by the company that shares his name. The word “feilong” refers to a flying dragon and isn’t particularly unusual as a name for a Chinese company. We establish here that Feilong went to the trouble of altering his own body so that he could live on Mars – an effort now entirely redundant following the Krakoan terraforming.
Nikola Tesla. We’re told that Feilong is a descendent of Nikola Tesla via his mother, described as “a Nobel Prize winner from Serbia”. Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) was indeed ethnically Serbian (though he was born in modern-day Croatia), but he emigrated to the United States in 1884 and had no children – indeed, no known relationships. However, Tesla’s name should be ringing alarm bells in a Hickman-adjacent comic, since he was a major character in Hickman’s much-delayed S.H.I.E.L.D.. In that series, he has super powers and goes by the name “Night Machine”. And he does have an adoptive son, Leonid.
X-Force #21 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-FORCE vol 6 #21
“Fear of a Green Planet”
by Benjamin Percy, Joshua Cassara, Robert Gill & Guru-eFX
COVER / PAGE 1. X-Force fight Man-Slaughter.
PAGES 2-9. Flashback: X-Force encounter a Man-Thing.
More fully: Sage despatches X-Force to the Warroad site on the coast of Washington, which is spilling chemical and nuclear waste into the sea. Their job is to clean up the spill because, apparently, it could somehow threaten Krakoa. (It’s not really made clear why this is any more of a concern for Krakoa than any other global environmental issue, but perhaps X-Force are just feeling especially heroic today.) They encounter a Man-Thing-type creature, which they mistake for a bad guy, but which is actually trying to save the locals from mutated sea creaturs.
As usual, there’s an obvious parallel between the visuals for Krakoa (complete with red spherical things in the plantlife) and the long-established design for Man-Thing, particularly in the grimier style which this book tends to favour, and which plays down Krakoa’s island-paradise tropes.
Warroad is not, as far as I can tell, a real facility in Washington. There’s a town called Warroad in Minnesota, which doesn’t seem to have any particular significance here. Washington State does have a significance, because it was the setting for various scenes in Weapon Plus: World War IV – more on which below.
