Charts – 18 November 2012
I haven’t had a chance to properly read most of this week’s X-books yet, so in the meantime, here’s this week’s chart post to be getting on with.
The number 1 single from September. It’s back because of the overspill of hype from their new single, which we’ll come to in a bit.
37. Example – “Close Enemies”
This is the follow-up to “Say Nothing”, which reached number 2 in September. Considering that it’s had over a month of promotion, number 37 is hugely weak (and since it was 31 in the midweeks, it’s a fair bet it won’t be going further).
Survivor Series 2012
As I believe we mentioned on the last podcast, Al’s off at Thought Bubble this weekend, so we’ll be back next week (possibly with some interviews, you never know).
X-Axis will… yeah, that’ll probably be Monday, the way things are going. Busy weekend.
But this article is a preview of something that airs tomorrow, so let’s run it down.
Historically, Survivor Series was the WWE’s fourth-biggest show of the year (behind Wrestlemania, Royal Rumble and Summerslam), but nowadays it’s just a monthly show with a particularly well-established gimmick, the ten-man elimination tag team match. The downside with ten-man tags is that they really do chew through a lot of wrestlers, so at a time like this, when roster depth is not at an all-time high, there’s a certain degree of lip service being paid to the concept. We do have one as the semi-main event, but it’s been painfully obvious that the company is making it up as they go along right now…
Charts – 11 November 2012
You may or (more likely) may not be interested to know that this is the week that the Official Charts Company chooses to deem the sixtieth anniversary of the chart. Strictly speaking, it’s a bit of a fudge. The current “official” chart, which is official in the sense that it’s recognised by the British record industry, actually dates from 1969. Before that, there were various unofficial and frequently contradictory charts. But because of the obvious desirability of having a list of “official” number 1s stretching back to the dawn of rock and roll, the OCC recognises two of the earlier charts as being retroactively official. So what actually happened sixty years ago was the first appearance of the NME chart – though even that’s a rather grand description of a bloke ringing round some record shops and preparing a top 12 (it was meant to be a top ten, but the sample size was so low that there were several ties).
But hey, from small acorns and so forth.
40. Pink – “Try”
The X-Axis – 11 November 2012
It’s another heavy week, but then that’ll happen when you’re churning out material.
Age of Apocalypse #9 – Isn’t it a bit odd that, nine issues in, this book still has a “From the pages of Uncanny X-Force” banner emblazened across the cover? I mean, if anyone cared how the book was launched, you’d think they’d have picked up on it by now.
Anyway, the plot of this series suddenly seems to be going somewhere more definite. After last issue’s encounter with the local version of Dr Doom, our heroes have got hold of Doom’s clever device to divert all Wolverine’s power away from him and get him back to normal, thus presumably saving the world, I guess. Now they just need to figure out how to use it, and for that, Prophet enlists the aid of Monet St Croix, picking up on a storyline from earlier in the series. Meanwhile, Jean and Graydon go on that date she promised a while back, since Graydon did technically go to speak to his father as requested. Even if he did hit him a bit.
Charts – 4 November 2012
The X-Axis – 4 November 2012
There’s a podcast this weekend, as House to Astonish celebrates its fourth birthday! Check it out just one post down.
Meanwhile, over at the X-office, one new title this week – well, sort of – while two books get wrapped up as we head into Marvel NOW.
A+X #1 – The cover design and recap page present this book as a successor to AvX: Versus, the all-fight-no-plot miniseries that mainly demonstrated that that sort of thing wears thin rather quickly. It’s hard to believe that this book hasn’t just been conjured into existence in an attempt to capitalise on Versus‘s surprisingly decent sales, and equally hard to believe that it will succeed in doing so.
House to Astonish Episode 94
Join Paul and I as we celebrate the four-year anniversary of House to Astonish, with discussion of the effect of Hurricane Sandy, the purchase of Lucasfilm by Disney, Bryan Singer on X-Men: Days of Future Past, the next two Marvel Now! teasers and Before Watchmen: Dollar Bill. We’re also reviewing Joe Kubert Presents, Multiple Warheads and Bedlam, and answer questions we’ve solicited at the last minute on Twitter. All this plus the Maniac Consumer, utopian futuristic fly-y people and the most unexpected Ant-Man villain of them all.
The podcast is here, or here on Mixcloud, or available on the embedded player below. It’s also available through iTunes or via Stitcher.com and their free iOS and Android apps. Let us know what you think, either in the comments below, on Twitter, via email or on our Facebook fan page.
Thanks for listening, and here’s to the next four years.
Charts – 28 October 2012
And the turnover of number 1 hits continues.
39. David Guetta featuring Sia – “Titanium”
Back again, for the obvious reason at this time of year – somebody did it on X Factor. Specifically, it was Lucy Spraggan, though since she wrote completely new verses for it, it’s more a kind of sampling job.
That’s because he performed it on Graham Norton’s show last week. It made number 5 in June.
36. Swedish House Mafia – “Save The World”
Originally a number 10 hit last year. Kye Sones did it on X Factor (and nearly got eliminated for his troubles). Meanwhile, current single “Don’t You Worry Child” is holding up well at number 2.
23. The Lumineers – “Ho Hey”
The X-Axis – 28 October 2012
Quite the grab-bag we have this week – some second-tier X-books, a new title from the Max imprint, a blaring novelty.
A-Babies vs X-Babies – Do you need me to tell you that this is the novelty? I can’t be the only person who saw this in the solicitations and groaned at the prospect of yet another rehash of a joke Chris Claremont coined in the late 80s, and which has been relentlessly beaten to death over the years by a company seemingly oblivious to the fact that, when Claremont revived the one-shot joke X-Babies (originally just the X-Men de-aged in Silver Age style for a comedy one-shot) as actual characters, he did so as a not-even-remotely-veiled parody of Marvel’s money-grabbing dilution of his beloved franchise.
Hell in a Cell 2012
Hell in a Cell is one of the most talked-about pay-per-views in wrestling circles for quite a while. Granted, much of that talk focusses on the questions “What were they thinking?” and “How are they going to get out of it?” But people are talking.
This show is a hangover from the WWE’s experiment with giving every PPV a theme. That idea didn’t work out so well. It didn’t do much for sales (in fact, sales have increased this year after the theming concept was dropped), and it resulted in gimmick matches being shoehorned into storylines that didn’t really want them, to the mutual disadvantage of both gimmick and storyline. This show illustrates the problem rather neatly.
Once upon a time, the Hell in a Cell match was a heavily protected gimmick that carried a bit of weight in its own right. Essentially, it’s just a cage match, but great effort went into presenting it as a particularly brutal cage match. Of course, when you start wheeling it out for whatever title defence happens to seem suitable in October, the veneer starts to fade.
