The X-Axis – 5 February 2012
Our main event this weekend, it would seem, is the Before Watchmen piece in the post below. But we also have some X-books out this week, so let’s cover those.
Before we start, fair warning: there’s a common theme with all five of this week’s books, which is that it’s the middle chapter of a storyline, and in most cases my views remain much the same as they were last issue. But here we go anyway…
Avengers: X-Sanction #3 – You may have seen that the early January sales charts are out, and DC took a clean sweep of the top 10. As it turns out, X-Sanction tailed in somewhere around number 15, quite some way off being even Marvel’s top seller for the month. Which, on the one hand, is maybe not a good sign for interest in the upcoming Avengers vs X-Men crossover that this book is supposed to be building to. On the other hand, it could just be that Loeb and McGuinness aren’t the draw they used to be, and everyone knows that preludes are disposable, and so a lot of people decided to skip it. After all, Fear Itself tie-ins didn’t do much business, but people still bought the regular series.
Before Watchmen
Since it’s going to be woefully stale news by the time we reach the next podcast, I’ll throw out a few thoughts on this one now.
If you haven’t seen the official announcement, a brief summary: DC has announced a line of seven interconnected Watchmen prequel miniseries to ship this summer. There are some pretty respectable creators on there – Darwyn Cooke, Brian Azzarello, Adam Hughes, JG Jones. Some would argue that J Michael Straczynski still counts, though I find most of his recent comics work toxically smug.
Needless to say, fandom is incensed.
There are broadly two strands to that reaction. The first is to do with the widely-held view that DC has generally screwed Alan Moore in relation to Watchmen, which is old territory, and not something I’m inclined to go over here. And the other aspect can best be summarised as “For god’s sake, why?”
Charts – 29 January 2012
Time for another new number 1 single – and to judge from the iTunes chart, another one that’s likely to spend a single week at the top. This time, it’s “Twilight” by Cover Drive, a Bajan group who like to style their music as “Cari-pop”.
Hey, guys, you couldn’t work some really incongruous product placement for the Mini into your video, could you?
Thanks.
The X-Axis – 29 January 2012
It’s a busy weekend here on the blog. This week’s podcast is a couple of posts down, and there’s a wrestling preview just below. But now, comics.
Astonishing X-Men #46 – Greg Pak and Mike McKone’s fill-in arc is proving to be very much in the vein of the cancelled Exiles. Cyclops is kidnapped by X-Men from another earth, and finds himself leading a makeshift team composed of other captives from yet further parallel worlds. So we’ve got a civilian schoolboy version of Nightcrawler, a military version of Wolverine, and such like.
This issue, Pak spells out the high concept. It’s a world where the X-Men finally triumphed over the bad guys, only to find that the world was so horribly damaged by the battle that it needed special machines to keep it going. By the magic of plot contrivance, those machines need to be powered by mutants sacrificing their lives. And having run out of willing sacrifices on their own world, they’ve started harvesting.
Royal Rumble 2012
Welcome back, for the first wrestling PPV preview of 2012!
Although this is not the easiest show to preview. The Royal Rumble is traditionally the second biggest show of the year. The winner of the titular 30-man battle royal gets to challenge for the world title (or, these days, one of the world titles) in the main event at Wrestlemania. It is, therefore, the point where storylines kick into gear to start the long build to Wrestlemania in the spring. It’s been in that role for 25 years now. And, aware that the Royal Rumble pretty much sells itself, the WWE has more or less left it to do that. They’ve announced a couple of title matches and something for John Cena; they’ve pushed the Rumble itself in general terms; but they haven’t announced anything else for the undercard, nor have they announced a full list of participants for the Rumble itself. Apparently there is actually a reason for this. We shall see.
1. The 2012 Royal Rumble. The design of the Royal Rumble match – with wrestlers drawing numbers at (ahem) random and entering in sequence over the course of an hour – is a masterstroke, allowing them to tell a range of stories during the hour. A straight 30-man battle royal, with everyone starting in the ring at the same time, is usually just turgid. Until the field is thinned out, there’s no room to do anything. The Royal Rumble solves that problem brilliantly.
Sure, the element of random luck would make it a ludicrous way for any real sport to choose its top title contender. But in wrestling, built-in unfairness is a positive boon.
House to Astonish Episode 77
Slightly earlier than usual (because it’s my wedding anniversary this weekend so I’m going to be away), we’ve got just shy of an hour and a half of chat for you on DC and Oni’s new logos, the public bust-ups on Infinite, Static Shock and Ashes and at Archie and a look at April’s solicitations. We’ve also got reviews of Infestation 2, Secret Avengers and Prophet and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe gets its buttons mashed. All this plus Arms-Stick-On Boy, a kid whose head is on fire and a look behind the scenes at an early meeting of the Image founders.
The podcast is here, or here on Mixcloud, or accessible via the embedded player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments, on Twitter, via email or on our Facebook fan page.
Charts – 22 January 2012
Well, I don’t much care for it, but what do I know? “Domino” by Jessie J is number 1 for a second week, which must be heartening news for anyone who has money invested in Katy Perry’s next album. It helps, of course, that the release schedules are still pretty quiet, so that she doesn’t have much competition. Still, the last song to spend two weeks at the top was “We Found Love” by Rihanna back in November, so she must be doing something right.
The X-Axis – 22 January 2012
It occurs to me that some of you may be wondering why I didn’t review Magneto: Not a Hero #3 when it came out a couple of weeks back. Well, the short answer is that it didn’t show up in my delivery, but since I didn’t notice, and nor (it seems) did any of you, I’m kind of figuring nobody else really cares. Such is the reality of X-Men spin-off minis these days. Which, to be fair, is one reason why Marvel seems to be giving up on such projects – albeit in favour of extra issues of the core titles. Because hey, when you’ve got a nice basket, put all your eggs in it. That’s always worked, down through history.
Anyway! This week, we have four X-books and a couple of other titles of interest, at least one of which may well show up on next week’s podcast too.
Generation Hope #15 – Bleeding Cool has an advance copy of the April solicitations and rightly points out that this book doesn’t seem to be on it, which would imply cancellation at issue #17. If you’ve been reading the sales charts, this won’t come as much of a surprise. For whatever reason, despite extensive promotion in Uncanny X-Men with an entire lead-in story, the book never found the audience you might expect, and the Regenesis relaunch had only a minor effect on sales. And writer James Asmus had previously said that Marvel were guaranteeing him one story arc. And pretty much everything down at the bottom end of Marvel’s range has been axed in the Great Scouring. So… that’s where we are, it seems.
Charts – 15 January 2012
An odd week. The midweek charts were practically dead, with a scattering of new entries right at the bottom. All of them have picked up pace significantly in the second half of the week, presumably because radio is now returning to normal, and listeners are slowly picking up on the new songs that are entering rotation.
We also have a new number 1, as “Domino” by Jessie J climbs to the top on its third week. Regular readers will have picked up that I’m rather underwhelmed by it. It’s catchy enough, I guess, but there’s something about Jessie J herself that I find rather unconvincing. I feel like I’m watching a string of tried-and-tested ideas that she’s picked up from studying other artists, with no real soul holding it together. If you fed a load of pop songs to a computer and told it to make more based on the patterns it could discern, it’d come up with something like Jessie J. This month’s template: the complete works of Katy Perry.
The X-Axis – 15 January 2012
It’s a podcast weekend, so don’t forget to check out the show, one post down. This week’s reviews are Fatale, Scarlet Spider, and Transformers: More Than Meets the Eye. And now… other comics!
Batwoman #5 – This book gives me something of a dilemma. On the one hand, it’s absolutely beautiful. It’s great to see that DC are happy to give JH Williams III a book to use as a vehicle where he can cut loose, and the art is arguably enough in itself to justify the price of admission. On the other hand, the actual story doesn’t do much for me at all – it’s a rather confused tale of mad ghosts stealing children, with a subplot about a dodgy government agency trying to enlist Batwoman as an agent. These things are fine as far as they go, and it’s nice to see Williams dusting off characters from his much-loved series Chase, but it’s hard to deny that the art and the story in this book aren’t playing at the same level. And that kind of undercuts the effectiveness of the art, since I’m not sure there’s enough substance to ground the visual pyrotechnics.
