Charts – 23 August 2024
I remember the days when there were more than two new entries a week on the singles chart…
1. Chase & Status and Stormzy – “Backbone”
Two weeks, though the gap is closing. Number 2 is “Good Luck Babe” by Chappell Roan, which has been at that position before, three weeks ago. “Hot to Go” also climbs 12-10 to become her second top 10 hit. And let’s take a moment to acknowledge that “Austin” by Dasha is spending its twentieth week in the top 10; it’s currently at number 6, and it peaked at 5.
7. Lady Gaga & Bruno Mars – “Die With A Smile”
Although Lady Gaga’s name comes first in the credit, this really feels more like a Bruno Mars song to me – it’s a soft rock ballad which is a little too interested in faithfully recreating the past to quite work for me as a song, but only because the strings seem a bit too visible for my liking. If you don’t mind that, then it’s a good single.
The X-Axis – w/c 19 August 2024
X-MEN: FROM THE ASHES INFINITY COMIC #11. By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Arthur Hesli & Clayton Cowles. Part 2 of the Omega Red arc, which seems to be mostly concerned with giving the guy a home town and some sort of vaguely normal background. Given the way he’s being used these days, that seems like a worthwhile exercise. There’s a bit of rustic Russian cliche going on here, and maybe it takes itself a little seriously, but on the whole I’m enjoying the way that this story is letting Omega Red do something more grounded and low key than we’re used to seeing with him.
SAVAGE WOLVERINE INFINITY COMIC #4. By Tom Bloom, Guillermo Sanna, Java Tartaglia & Joe Sabino. Another depressed small town arc, and this one is turning out quite well too. Logan finds himself in a town where somebody’s been using anti-mutant paranoia to “innoculate” the locals with a supposed cure, with predictably disastrous results. The weird body horror designs are well done and the take on Logan is nicely understated. Okay, there’s an action sequence with an overturning car that doesn’t work at all – I honestly can’t figure out what’s supposed to make it flip. But that aside, this arc is much better than I expected from a Wolverine Infinity Comic.
Phoenix #2 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
PHOENIX #2
Writer: Stephanie Phillips
Artist: Alessandro Miracolo
Colour artist: David Curiel
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Annalise Bissa
PHOENIX:
She’s still running around answering every interstellar distress call she can find, and she’s still terrifying to all the aliens she’s trying to rescue. We’re told that she doesn’t require food, oxygen and so forth, but that she’s still “exhausted” – presumably emotionally, though I suppose it could mean that because she has a human mind, she still needs sleep. She doesn’t much like or trust Corsair, but see below regarding this book’s take on Corsair.
SUPPORTING CHARACTERS:
Corsair is rescued by Phoenix from a damaged spaceship which is about to explode. According to Corsair’s account – which it’s strongly suggested that we should be very sceptical about – the Starjammers have abandoned him “for no good reason”. This has prompted him to try and become a hero. He started investigating a series of disappearances from Gameworld (the casino planet that featured prominently in Gerry Duggan’s X-Men run), and discovered that the captives were being smuggled away by the Black Order to a small moon in a nearby star system. He says that the Black Order shot at his ship, which is why it was damaged when Phoenix found him.
House to Astonish Episode 209
There’s a bunch of news out of San Diego Comic Con, and you can hear what we think about it all here! And now! If you like! We’re chatting about Black Canary: Best of the Best, The Question: All Along The Watchtower, Batgirl, New Gods, JSA, Hellverine, West Coast Avengers, Laura Kinney: The Wolverine, Psylocke and Lower Decks, plus the announcement of Amazing Comics. We’ve also got reviews of S.I.R. and Iron Fist 50th Anniversary Special, and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe is the ultimate helicopter parent. All this plus Batman’s least deranged friends, Tony Hawks singing a Marvel comic and a different sort of arsehole.
The podcast is here, or available via the embedded player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments, on Bluesky, via email or on our Facebook fan page. And wait… what year is this? 2024, you say? My God… then it’s not too late… for you to get yourself a great House to Astonish t-shirt over at our Redbubble store!
Daredevil Villains #35: Mister Fear III
DAREDEVIL #90-91 (August-September 1972)
“The Sinister Secret of Project Four!” / “Fear is the Key!”
Writer: Gerry Conway
Penciller: Gene Colan
Inker: Tom Palmer
Letterers: Sam Rosen (#90), Artie Simek (#91)
Colourist: not credited
Editor: Stan Lee (#90), Roy Thomas (#91)
We’ve skipped five issues with returning villains, so let’s get up to speed.
Issue #85 is a Gladiator story and it doesn’t matter in the slightest. Issue #86 brings back the Ox, but it’s an important issue for other reasons: Matt Murdock and Karen Page briefly reunite, it all goes wrong, and they decide that they were never meant to be together after all. Matt then decides to move to San Francisco and pursue his relationship with the Black Widow which is where the book will stay for a while to come. The existing supporting cast are completely jettisoned. Karen joins the cast of Ghost Rider for a while, but doesn’t return to this book until issue #227. Foggy Nelson won’t appear again until the book returns to New York in issue #108.
In their place are the Black Widow, her sidekick Ivan Petrovich (who comes with Natasha as a package deal), and a bunch of new Californian characters mostly forgotten by posterity, such as irascible police commissioner Ironguts O’Hara.
Clearly either Conway or his editors decided that the book wasn’t working and that drastic steps were needed. After all, Daredevil had been on the verge of merging with Iron Man. So far, Conway has struggled to find a hook on Daredevil himself; moving to San Francisco doesn’t change that, but it does make Daredevil into Marvel’s token west coast book, and it means that the Black Widow can be mined for story ideas.
Charts – 16 August 2024
We don’t get many one-week number ones these days, but “Guess” by Charli XCX featuring Billie Eilish turns out to be one of them. It’s only the second of the year – the other was “Fortnight” by Taylor Swift. “Guess” drops straight to number 4 in its second week, and gets overtaken by Billie Eilish’s album track “Birds of a Feather”. But that only climbs to 2.
1. Chase & Status and Stormzy – “Backbone”
Chase & Status released their first single in 2005, and had their first hit single in 2009. They had a long fallow period in chart terms between 2014 and 2022, but had a real resurgence last year when they had top ten hits with “Disconnect” and “Baddadan”. In total, they’ve had a respectable six top 10 hits prior to this record, but none of them got above number 5. So for their comeback phase to give them their first number one is a pleasant surprise.
The X-Axis – w/c 12 August 2024
X-MEN: FROM THE ASHES INFINITY COMIC #10. By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Arthur Hesli & Clayton Cowles. This is the start of another three-parter, and this time it’s an Omega Red arc. Thanks to Krakoa, Omega Red has been somewhat rehabbed to the point where you can now write a relatively sympathetic story about the guy. Arkady has been mellowed by his time on Krakoa to the point where he decides to go back and see his home town again. He gets a rather mixed reaction, and the story deals with that reasonably well. It looks like we’re getting some kind of story about odd things happening to local kids over the years, which feels like it could be looking to retcon some of his back story, but we’ll see where that goes. I’m not particularly up for toning down his history, I have to say. Anyway, all this is ultimately a lead-in to Sentinels #1, which is the real context for anything we’re doing.
X-MEN #2. (Annotations here.) The X-Men head to San Francisco to help a new mutant whose powers have emerged in the middle of an apparent alien invasion, which remarkably enough turns out not to be a coincidence. Actually, that makes more sense than you’d think – even in Marvel Universe logic, “his powers created the alien invasion” is a lot less likely than “it’s a stressful event that triggered his powers manifesting”, so I don’t think the X-Men come across as too silly for not jumping straight to the right conclusion.
X-Factor #1 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-FACTOR vol 5 #1
“Red Carpet”
Writer: Mark Russell
Artist: Bob Quinn
Colour artist: Jesus Aburtov
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Editor: Darren Shan
X-FACTOR:
This is the fifth volume of X-Factor, a name which has been attached to all sorts of unrelated concepts. Volume 1 started as a reunion book for the original X-Men and changed direction completely in the early 90s to become a book about a team working for the US government. Volume 2 was a miniseries about the Mutant Civil Rights Taskforce, volume 3 was Jamie Madrox’s X-Factor Investigations, and volume 4 was the Krakoan group who investigated mutant deaths. (EDIT: For those asking in the comments, the book about a corporate X-Factor team isn’t in the volume count because its official title was All-New X-Factor.)
This new version of X-Factor is essentially the 1990s government team, but hybridised with Peter Milligan and Mike Allred’s X-Force/X-Statix – though tonally, a better comparison might be Justice League International. That said, it repeats the trick from the first issue of X-Force of introducing a team and promptly killing most of them off, which feels like it might be a homage. To be fair, what we’re actually told is that the team members are “dead or clinging to life”, which leaves a back door for anyone who wants to bring the characters back.
X-Men #2 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-MEN vol 7 #2
“Invasion”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Ryan Stegman
Inker: JP Mayer
Colourists: Marte Gracia & Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
This issue also includes a back-up strip: the eighth and final chapter of “Weapon X-Traction”, which is basically a Deadpool & Wolverine comedy strip. I’m not going to be covering that.
THE X-MEN:
The X-Men have access to a Cerebro, presumably from one of the satellite locations of Krakoa.
Cyclops is very clear that even in the midst of an alien invasion, the X-Men’s primary concern is rescuing the new mutant that they’ve detected. He does insist that they’re still going to do the superhero stuff and help San Francisco, and acknowledges that the city has been good to mutants in the past (i.e., in the Utopia era), but he makes plain that it’s a secondary objective at best. His interest in relations with the humans seems to be largely instrumental: on a purely practical level, it’s good for the X-Men to be liked.
When he realises that the aliens are a projection of his new mutant, Cyclops’ main concern is to cover it up so that the humans don’t find out. He goes to the length of faking the new mutant’s death. Of course, this is the sort of thing that might count as a legitimate worry about uncontrolled mutant powers, but Cyclops feels there’s a bigger picture. (He surely can’t be that surprised to learn that there’s a connection between his new mutant signal and the alien invasion, but maybe he just figured that mutant powers often emerge for the first time under stress.)
Charts – 9 August 2024
Just one major new entry this week, but…
1. Charli XCX featuring Billie Eilish – “Guess”
Technically this is Charli XCX’s second number one, because she had a featured artist credit on Icona Pop’s “I Don’t Care”. That’s an odd one, since she doesn’t actually feature on the record in any normal sense – apparently she’s doing backing vocals somewhere, but the credit mainly relates to her writing the song. Anyway, that was in 2013. Since then, she’s been a steady presence in the singles chart, mostly in the mid range and with the occasional bigger hit, but her peak as a lead artist was number 6 (with “Boom Clap”, over a decade ago).
