House to Astonish Episode 181
It’s awards time! Paul and I are taking a leisurely saunter through our picks for the best series, creators and moments of 2019, as well as taking a look at the ones which you voted for. WHO managed to pull off a narrow win for Best Writer? WHICH Marvel series pulled off a clean sweep? DID we mention any manga (yes!)? HOW many comments did we read out on the show from the listener votes (none, sorry, by the time we recorded there wasn’t time to collate them)?
The podcast is here, here on Mixcloud, or available through the player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments, via email, on Twitter or on our Facebook fan page.
Our beautiful t-shirts are, as ever, available here, and if you’d like to hear me talking to Matt Lune about Thunderbolts 1 on the Shelfdust Presents… podcast, you can find that over here.
The Complete Moira: Part 2
Last time we covered Moira’s history before the recruitment of the X-Men. This time, I’m going to go through her appearances from there through to her first published appearance, near the start of the Claremont run. This is, if anything, even more piecemeal than part 1 – that’s largely because these are mostly one-off stories published in no particular order. It settles down once we get to her debut.
Classic X-Men #43 (back-up) by Chris Claremont, Mike Collins & Joe Rubinstein (“Flights of Angels”, January 1990). This is the back-up strip which appeared alongside the reprint of X-Men #137, the climax of the Dark Phoenix Saga. The first page has a montage of flashbacks to the life of Jean Grey. They include an unexplained panel of young Jean Grey protecting Charles Xavier from an unseen attacker, while Moira bundles him to safety.
This ties into the vexed question of what on earth Charles and Jean were doing together before Jean joined the X-Men. X-Men #1 (1963) shows Jean arriving at the school with the rest of the team already formed, and seemingly not knowing much about it. Claremont established a back story where Xavier actually met her first, long before the other X-Men, and helped her to control her powers. What he didn’t establish was any good reason for the two of them to conceal that fact from the rest of the team. But occasionally he hinted at some sort of secret pre-X-Men adventuring career for Charles and Jean, which presumably contains the answer – and this flashback seems to be part of that. The most explicit reference is in Uncanny X-Men #381 (2000), where Jean talks about finding a secret cave full of treasure “before the founding of the X-Men, during a period when Charles Xavier and I worked alone.” It remains an undeveloped part of continuity, but apparently Moira’s involved in it somewhere.
(more…)Charts – 10 January 2020
Last week’s chart was quite eventful, what with all the post Christmas stuff. This one, though… this is a proper dead week. This really isn’t going to take us long.
1. Stormzy featuring Ed Sheeran & Burna Boy – “Own It”
Two weeks, and his album “Heavy is the Head” climbs to number 1 as well (on its fourth week on release). There’s a bit of an asterisk next to these, mind. Stormzy is number one on the singles chart because “Dance Monkey” by Tones & I is far enough past its peak to have its streams downweighted under the chart rules – but it is the best selling and best streamed track of the week. The album’s a bit less contentious – it was at number 2 already, but it did have some one-week discounts to push it over the line.
The rest of the top 4 is static, and this week’s highest new entry is…
5. Justin Bieber – “Yummy”
Read moreNew Mutants #5 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
COVER / PAGE 1. Deathbird fights Cannonball and Sunspot… which doesn’t really happen in the issue.
PAGES 2-3. Sunspot recaps the plot.
Two pages of in-story recap is a lot, but it’s been three issues since we were last dealing with this cast and this storyline. In plot terms, at least, there’s still no apparent connection between the two strands of this series. Sunspot’s recap of the plot is basically accurate, despite all the comedy egotism – and note that Sunspot doesn’t actually name any other characters in this entire sequence.
(more…)Charts – 3 January 2020
You might think there’d be nothing going on in the post-Christmas chart, but you’d be wrong – because nobody plays Christmas songs after 25 December, and so half the top 40 vanishes. That allows a bunch of displaced records to get back to where they were a month ago. Last week’s number one was itself a Christmas track (and it drops straight to 28), so…
1. Stormzy featuring Ed Sheeran & Burna Boy – “Own It”
This has already spent five weeks hovering in the top five (and it was at 2 in the Christmas number one chart), so it’s hardly a surprise to see it rise to the top as the chart returns to normal. It’s the second Stormzy & Ed Sheeran number one, following “Take Me Back To London” last year. How many Stormzy & Ed Sheeran songs do we need? This one is good enough, but it’s hardly essential.
(more…)The Complete Moira: Part 1
One of the big ideas of House of X and Powers of X is the massive retconning of Moira MacTaggert. Under Jonathan Hickman, Moira is no longer just the X-Men’s scientist friend; she’s actually a mutant with the power to start life over again, every time she dies, and with perfect recollection of her earlier lives. Plus, she has knowledge from those earlier lives of things like Nimrod, the Technarch and so on.
How well does any of this actually fit with the established history of Moira MacTaggert? On one level, it doesn’t really matter all that much. The idea that the Marvel Universe fits together seamlessly is a fiction; as long as it feels like it works, that’s probably good enough for most purposes. Which means it’s generally good enough to be consistent with the broad strokes, and with any details that the readers are likely to remember. It’s hardly a big problem if there’s an inconsistent line of dialogue in a long forgotten fill-in story.
Still – how does this retcon fit together with Moira’s established history? In this series of posts, I’m going to look back over every Moira MacTaggert appearance and see what emerges – both in terms of how it fits with Hickman, and in terms of whether it ever really fitted together in the first place. I’ve been working here mainly from the list of Moira MacTaggert appearances on the Marvel Chronology Project.
Basically, we’ll be running through Moira’s appearances in more-or-less chronological sequence, though I’ll skip her prior lives since they’re entirely documented in House of X and Powers of X, and I’ve written about that already. As it turns out, Moira’s back story is both quite detailed and full of enormous gaps, so it’s going to take us two posts just to get up to her first published appearance. This time round, we’ll follow her current life up to the formation of the X-Men. Since these are mostly appearances that were intended to flesh out her back story, there’s a lot to cover here; the pace will pick up in future chapters when we get to stories where she’s just hanging around in the supporting cast or explaining the plot. She does that a lot.
So we kick off with…
(more…)Marauders #5 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
COVER / PAGE 1. Iceman and Christian Frost on Christian’s submarine.
PAGES 1-5. Bobby visits White Bishop Christian Frost on his submarine.
The Anthropocene is a proposed term (though the proposal is a very serious one) for a new geological epoch marking the period in which human activity is the dominant influence on geology and ecosystems. Bobby treats it as synonymous with climate change, which isn’t really correct.
Christian Frost, Emma’s brother, was a throwaway character from New X-Men #139 who was later expanded upon in the Emma Frost solo title (which established that he was gay) and the recent Iceman solo title (which established him as a mutant with vaguely-defined psychic powers). So Iceman already has an established acquaintance with Christian. Since Bobby is hanging around on Christian’s submarine and wearing Christian’s monogrammed dressing gown, the obvious implication is that their relationship now goes further than that.
(more…)X-Men #4 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
PAGE 1-2 / COVER & RECAP. Professor X, Magneto and Apocalypse, apparently walking out of a Davos meeting (attended by rather more people than we see in the story itself).
PAGES 3-4. Professor X, Magneto, Apocalypse, Cyclops and Gorgon arrive at Davos.
Davos. Davos is a ski resort in Switzerland, best known for hosting the annual World Economic Forum meeting (which is what people normally mean by “Davos”). The World Economic Forum itself actually consists of corporations, but the annual meeting is routinely attended by politicians, celebrities and the like. This is, pretty obviously, a show of power by the mutants; they’re going through the motions of being normal global citizens, but at the end of the day, it’s Apocalypse in a suit.
(more…)Charts – 28 December 2019
Well, it’s that chart again. A week too late for the Christmas number one (that’s the record which is already at number one on Christmas Day). But still a week where everyone was hammering the Christmas playlists. This week Christmas fell on a Wednesday, so those playlists were in full effect for six days of the chart week. And with nothing else going on… well, it’s a very Christmas chart. (I may as well mention now that there’s nothing on the album chart at all. Rod Stewart is still number one.)
The Ladbaby single, always a novelty, turns out to be a particularly extreme sort of novelty, dropping straight from number 1 to number 57 in its second week. That’s not a record, but it’s second place behind “Three Lions”, which made number 1 during the 2018 World Cup and fell to number 97 the following week after England were knocked out. Instead, the slightly surprising number one is…
1. Ellie Goulding – “River”
(more…)Charts – 19 December 2019
The Christmas number 1 is… less interesting than you might hope.
1. LadBaby – “I Love Sausage Rolls”
Apparently Britain enjoyed YouTuber Mark Hoyle’s sausage-roll-themed rewrite of “We Built This City” so much when it made it last year’s Christmas Number One that it’s decided to go with the same joke two years running. You’d think diminishing returns would be setting in here, but it’s had a pretty clear run to the top.
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