Fallen Angels #4 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers are by the digital edition. And to be honest, there’s not all that much to say about this issue, annotations-wise…
COVER/PAGE 1. X-23 and Cable on the run from… some sort of weird shadowy things.
PAGE 2. Flashback. Young Kwannon is shown a dying man who was poisoned while trying to broker peace.
The moral, presumably, being “nice guys finish last.”
PAGES 3-6. Psylocke and X-23 discuss what to do.
Reasonably enough, X-23 has concluded that the whole scenario is being engineered by Apoth to lure Psylocke/Kwannon in, and that this means Psylocke shouldn’t trust the vision that she had in issue #1. For some reason X-23 suggests asking the other Psylocke for help, though it’s not clear what Betsy could really contribute, and it feels more like an excuse to raise her name so that Psylocke/Kwannon can reject her again.
(more…)X-Force #4 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
COVER / PAGE 1. Domino fires a gun and Sage uses a computer. Generic solicitation art, really.
PAGES 2-3. Recap and credits. This is “Blood Economics” by Benjamin Percy and Joshua Cassara.
PAGES 4-6. Soldiers attack a Krakoa drug station.
Xavier Pharmaxeuticals. The first time we’ve seen exactly how the legitimate drug channels operate. As you might expect, the handful of black market ships from Marauders aren’t serving the whole world; when they can supply openly, the Krakoans just go through gates. We’re told later that this station is 15 miles from the coast, in which case it’s (just) outside the US’s territorial waters. Presumably some regular US boats come and collect the stuff.
(more…)New Mutants #4 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
COVER / PAGE 1. Boom-Boom in a cornfield. The Krakoan letters are “NM” for “New Mutants”.
PAGES 2-3. Recap and credits. This is “Fast and Furious” by Ed Brisson and Marco Failla. Most of this issue speaks for itself, annotation-wise, by the way.
PAGES 4-5. Boom-Boom learns that Armor has been gone for three days.
This version of Boom-Boom, like the version in the recent New Mutants miniseries, is clearly an alarmingly heavy drinker if not an outright alcoholic. The seemingly incessant partying of Krakoa allows her to fit in without being too obvious. And again… just how party-centric is this place?
(more…)Excalibur #4 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
COVER / PAGE 1. Um… Captain Britain fights a dragon with flowers on it. It’s presumably meant to be one of the monsters that invades right at the end of the issue, but this doesn’t actually happen in the issue.
PAGES 2-3. Gambit checks in on Rogue, then goes to London to catch with Betsy, who is meeting the Queen.
All self explanatory. As Morgan Le Fey suggested last issue, the public is apparently not happy about the new Captain Britain being a mutant, so there are people protesting about it outside Buckingham Palace.
PAGES 4-5. Recap and credits. This is “Verse IV: Fall Back and Think of England!” by Tini Howard and Marcus To.
PAGES 6-8. Gambit gets into a fight with the protestors, and Captain Britain shows up to announce that they’re the new Excalibur.
(more…)Marauders #4 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers. Page numbers go by the digital edition.
COVER / PAGE 1. Storm, doing what Storm does.
PAGES 2-3. Recap and credits. This is “The Red Bishop” by Gerry Duggan and Lucas Werneck. The “public humiliation” strapline on the recap page refers to what’s coming up in the issue, rather than the recap it introduces.
PAGE 4. Data page. Another memo from the increasingly exasperated writer on the X-Desk, who complains with growing prominence that he isn’t being properly resourced, that other countries are throwing much more effort at it, and that he’s not sure anyone is even listening to him. This might just be a running joke, but it does seem like a plot point that the US government (particularly the current US government) is being so weirdly co-operative.
Krakoan drug delivery. The author says that there must be at least three Krakoan ships in order to account for all the drugs being delivered. That seems woefully inadequate to account for the whole supply – Krakoa’s leverage is based on actually being able to supply its drugs to companies that deal with it – so presumably he’s talking simply about the black market. Countries that will deal with Krakoa probably just get a gate.
(more…)House to Astonish Episode 180
We’re back (back! Back!) with a new episode, where we remember Tom Spurgeon, Howard Cruse and Tom Lyle, talk about delays at Marvel, the announcements of Hellions and Strange Academy, Chris Samnee’s Fire Power and Vault Comics’ Myriad line. We’ve also got reviews of Annihilation: Scourge – Silver Surfer and Dying Is Easy, and the audio from the SILENCE! To Astonish panel live at Thought Bubble 2019, with Gerry Duggan, Ram V, John Allison and Emma Vieceli. All this plus Shane McGowan’s very special set of skills, the Sliding Doors of dentistry and the ghost of Norris McWhirter.
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.
You can get our swish merch over at our Redbubble store, you can check out the SILENCE! podcast over here, and don’t forget, you can vote for your favourite comics and creators for our annual year-end Homies awards over here!
And if you’re in the market for another podcast with me in it, please do come over to check out Desert Island Discworld, where every episode I talk to a guest about their life and work, and the Terry Pratchett novel they’d take with them if they were cast away to a desert island.
Charts – 13 December 2019
You know where this is heading.
1. Tones & I – “Dance Monkey”
Eleven weeks. Can it hold on for the Christmas number one? Almost certainly not, because it peaked several weeks ago, and so the downweighting rule ought to kick in next week. Barring a miracle, “Dance Monkey” will land at joint seventh on the all time record list, alongside “Despacito” and Slim Whitman’s 1955 hit “Rose Marie”.
“Own It” by Stormzy featuring Ed Sheeran and Burna Boy climbs to 2 after a fortnight at number 3. “All I Want for Christmas is You” by Mariah Carey advances 8-6. “Last Christmas” by Wham moves 13-7. “River” by Ellie Goulding climbs 14-8 – it may be a Christmas single but it’s also her highest position since “On My Mind” reached number 5 in 2015.
11. Harry Styles – “Adore You”
(more…)Fallen Angels #3 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers are from the digital edition. This isn’t a continuity-heavy issue, and a lot of it is taken up with a fight scene… so this is probably the shortest annotations post yet.
COVER / PAGE 1. Psylocke/Kwannon, sheathing a bloody sword, surrounded by blossom, and with another woman apparently training behind her.
PAGES 2-3. Apoth’s internal monologue.
Apoth – which gets the computer font lettering – gives us a weird speech where the main points are (a) he is God; (b) God transcends morality, and birth and death are neither good nor bad but just part of the scheme of things; (c) he is lonely; and (d) Psylocke is his “mother” who created him. He apparently wants to draw in Psylocke so they can be together.
The stuff about birth and death lacking moral content echoes Kwannon’s training material from earlier issues. More generally, Apoth seems to be saying that people turned him into a God, in order that he in turn could elevate them. (There’s a man-machine version of the Sistine Chapel fingers to emphasise the point.) Again, this is squarely in the Hickman era’s theme of technological progress versus evolution.
(more…)X-Force #3 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
COVER / PAGE 1. Marvel Girl wearing the Cerebro helmet.
PAGES 2-3. Flashback to the bad guys removing skin from Domino to graft onto their lab-grown Reavers.
This is an intentionally horrific sequence accompanied by the lead bad guy – still unnamed – explaining that humans succeed by recognising their limitations and designing tools to transcend them. It’s all part of the general Hickman-era theme of mutants versus post-humanity (natural evolution versus technological progress). As we’ll see later, the damage which Domino takes in this story also seems to play into a revamp (probably short-term) of the character.
PAGES 4-5. Recap page and credits. This is “The Skeleton Key” by Benjamin Percy and Joshua Cassara. The title refers back to the lead bad guy’s line in the previous scene that Domino is a “walking skeleton key that will help us pick the lock of evolution”. That seems to point to something a bit more ambitious than merely sneaking past Krakoa’s defences – perhaps something akin to Grant Morrison’s U-Men, who tried to upgrade themselves using stolen mutant body parts.
(more…)New Mutants #3 annotations
As always, page numbers go by the digital edition, and this post contains spoilers.
PAGE 1 / COVER: Armor, Glob Herman, Maxine and Manon arrive at Beak and Angel’s door.
PAGES 2-3. Armor is troubled by the mutants who aren’t on Krakoa.
After two issues of the New Mutants in space, this issue returns to Krakoa for a story about some of the mutants for later generations of trainees – and by a different creative team, at that. No doubt it’ll all come together down the line…
Armor. Hisako Ichiki was introduced in Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men run in 2004. She’s another character who made it to main-team level for a while before drifting back into comparative obscurity – though she was used quite prominently in the Age of X-Man: NextGen miniseries, alongside her co-star Glob Herman.
(more…)