Wolverine #11 annotations
WOLVERINE vol 8 #11
“Only a Mother”
Writer: Saladin Ahmed
Artist: Martín Cóccolo
Colour artist: Bryan Valenza
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso
PAGES 1-2. Wolverine and Sabretooth start to fight.
So, okay, let’s stick with this format…
“He’s found us!” Elizabeth’s comment doesn’t make much sense logically – they’re in the room where she was kept chained up. If Sabretooth was her captor, what would he need to find? But the whole point of this story is that the sense memories cause Wolverine to gloss over the logical problems, as we’ll see.
PAGES 3-5. Wolverine and Sabretooth fight.
“Disappointed I ain’t dead?” Wolverine killed Sabretooth in Wolverine vol 7 #50, just last year.
“This ain’t the first time you proved too stupid to die, Victor.” Sabretooth has indeed come back from apparent death on plenty of previous occasions. He was beheaded in Wolverine #50; mind you, he was also beheaded in Wolverine vol 3 #55, and that turned out to be a clone. Oh, and he was beheaded for real in War of the Realms: Uncanny X-Men #3, but that was just before Krakoa, when everyone was conveniently dropping dead. Since it was presumably resurrection that brought him back that time, he ought to be dead for real this time, but… come on, it’s Sabretooth.
Phoenix #13 annotations
PHOENIX #13
Writer: Stephanie Phillips
Artist: Roi Mercado
Colour artist: Java Tartaglia
Letterer: Joe Sabino
Editor: Annalise Bissa
You know, I’m thinking maybe I’ll go back to the scene-by-scene format, especially now that the post-Krakoan books have been around long enough to build up a bit of continuity. As with the last time I did this, I’m going to use the story page numbers, since Kindle still can’t count.
Page 1. Flashback: Jean raises Nathan Summers.
This is an original (and largely generic) scene which takes place somewhere during the 1994 miniseries Adventures of Cyclops & Phoenix. It’s attempting to set up Jean and Cable’s relationship without getting too far into the weeds of 90s continuity. For anyone not familiar, however:
Nathan is the child of Cyclops and Madelyne Pryor, who was a clone of Jean. In X-Factor #68, Nathan is sent into the far future so that the Askani can save him from a techno-organic virus; after some back and forth, it turns out that he returns to the present day as Cable to try and avert that future timeline. In Adventures of Cyclops & Phoenix, Scott and Jean are brought forward in time to that future and wind up spending several years raising Nathan as his adoptive parents, though Cable only discovers this later on.
Uncanny X-Men #18 annotations
UNCANNY X-MEN vol 6 #18
“Corn Dogs and Carnage”
Writer: Gail Simone
Artist: Luciano Vecchio
Colour artist: Rachelle Rosenberg
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
THE X-MEN
Calico. Either she’s having nightmares about Mutina following the previous issue, or Mutina is genuinely stalking her. These encounters prompt her to sleepwalk, something she’s been doing “almost every night of late.” The very strong implication is that Mutina really is teleporting into Calico’s room to threaten her at night – when Gambit and Jubilee try to take her back to her room, they find the bed slashed, along with the painting on the wall. It was fine when she got up to start her sleepwalking a few pages earlier.
According to Gambit, she’s a hopeless cook (“she don’t know how to cook toast”), presumably because her rich family always had people to provide her with food. Despite this, she tries to make pancakes while sleepwalking, and seems at least to be vaguely aware of the correct ingredients. While sleepwalking, she recites some of Mutina’s threats, but also says “Everyone cooks, everyone cleans”, which are two of the Haven house rules from issue #3.
House to Astonish Presents: The Lightning Round Episode 26
We’re on the home stretch of TBolts Volume 1, as we look at Thunderbolts #65-68. There’s a whole new squad of ‘bolts, a brand new costume for Moonstone and a fresh new minty taste (that’ll be the Verdant Green). Plus! The logistics of Hydro-Man’s stogie! The Continuity Sugababes! and the unfortunate wording of early 2000s soft drink ads!
The podcast is here, or available via the embedded player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments, via email or on Bluesky, and if you want one of our lovely shirts then we recommend getting it now while we reconsider what we’re doing with the Redbubble shop.
Daredevil Villains #55: Edwin Cord
DAREDEVIL #167 (November 1980)
“…The Mauler!”
Writer: David Michelinie
Penciller: Frank Miller
Inker: Klaus Janson
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Colourist: Glynis Wein
Editor: Denny O’Neil
So here’s what happened since our last instalment. Issues #163 and #164 don’t have villains: the first one guest stars the Hulk, and the other is the story where Daredevil admits his secret identity to Ben Urich, who decides not to publish. Issue #165 has Dr Octopus, on loan from Amazing Spider-Man. Issue #166 brings back the Gladiator. And that’s the end of Roger McKenzie’s run as writer.
By this point, Denny O’Neil has taken over as editor, and as of issue #168, Frank Miller will be writing as well as pencilling. But first, we have another fill-in.
This one is a rather better fit than the Steve Ditko story we looked at last time. For a start, it still has the regular art team of Frank Miller and Klaus Janson. But this time, our guest writer is David Michelinie. At this point, he’s about 30 issues into his run on Iron Man, and he’s already completed “Demon in a Bottle”. So this feels like a contemporary Marvel comic from 1980.
Charts – 18 July 2025
This would be a quiet week if it wasn’t for Justin Bieber.
1. MK featuring Chrystal – “Dior”
Two weeks. Here’s some chart trivia I skipped over last week: MK’s first credited top 40 hit was “Always” in February 1995. Since he didn’t have an artist credit on the Storm Queen track that he remixed – which is fair enough, because it really was just a conventional remix – he had a wait of 30 years and 6 months from his first chart entry to his first number 1.
There are only three artists with longer gaps than that, and they all had slightly freak circumstances. The all time record holder is Tony Christie at 34 years, but that’s on the strength of the charity reissue of his back catalogue track “Show Me The Way to Amarillo”. Number 2 is Ozzy Osbourne, if you measure from Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid” in 1970, rather than his own first solo credit in 1980. Oh, and the number 1 was his duet with daughter Kelly.
The X-Axis – w/c 14 July 2025
ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #29. By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. Right, so the story really is just that the island is run by people who hate mutants, and somehow they’ve got their hands on a symbiote? That’s… not very interesting, honestly. There’s the occasional glimmer of a story about how some people might see mutants using their Krakoan drugs for political leverage, but really it’s just the usual in a slightly different location, isn’t it? If it’s doing something more than that, I really don’t get it – and I’m afraid this is a story where I’m getting less interested with each chapter.
EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #11. (Annotations here.) Since the book is set in Chicago, it was only a matter of time before Eve Ewing brought in Ironheart. Here she seems to be picking up on a dropped plot from her Ironheart run six years ago, though it’s simple enough to repeat the set-up for new readers – the original story pretty much just established Tank as a mysterious guy who was interested in small portals for some unclear reason, and then never got back to him before the book was cancelled six issues later. Remarkably, this means we get an actual action sequence for the second story in a row, something that hasn’t exactly been common in this book – much as I like its focus on character scenes, it’s odd to see everyone talking as if the kids have proved themselves on the strength of a single encounter with Mr Sinister and that time they helped to evacuate a shop.
X-Men: Age of Revelation #0 annotations
X-MEN: AGE OF REVELATION #0
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Humberto Ramos
Inker: Victor Olazaba
Colourist: Edgar Delgado
Editor: Tom Brevoort
This one-shot is basically an extra issue of X-Men, acting as a prologue for the upcoming “Age of Revelation” crossover. It’s a 20 page story with some promotional material at the end. Since the story basically consists of Xorn narrating how this timeline came about, it doesn’t really lend itself to a character-by-character breakdown. So we’ll do it page by page.
Kindle’s page numbering for comics is still broken – it still insists that they start on page 2 – so I’ll just go with the story page numbers. (When does this Neon Ichiban thing start, anyway?)
PAGES 1-3. The Seraphim down a Quinjet.
Xorn. Our narrator throughout this issue is Shen Xorn, who’s been hanging around in the background throughout Jed MacKay’s run, not doing a great deal. We’ll come to why he’s potentially important to the “Age of Revelation” storyline.
Exceptional X-Men #11 annotations
EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #11
Writer: Eve L Ewing
Artist: Federica Mancin
Colour artist: Nolan Woodward
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Tom Brevoort
THE CORE CAST
Axo. He recognises Bronze’s crush Reggie (see below) – it’s not immediately clear how, but presumably she pointed him out somewhere along the line. He seems to be bringing it up to change the topic from a game that he clearly has no interest in playing, but it seems that he and Thao already know about Reggie, and there’s no suggestion that he’s embarrassing Trista just by pointing him out.
His reaction to encountering a tiny energy phenomenon in the park is to say that they should call Kitty or Emma. (Yes, he says “Kitty.”) As he points out, not only is he the most naturally cautious of the trio, but he was also the one who was most directly at risk of death in the previous arc; not unreasonably, he thinks that this gives his view on the matter some weight.
He’s seen the 1971 film A Clockwork Orange, or at least recognises the notorious Mojo-style eye scene.
Charts – 11 July 2025
If nothing else, we seem to be back to normal turnover at the top of the chart.
1. MK featuring Chrystal – “Dior”
I still don’t much like this record – I don’t think it functions as a song and it feels like a track with some sort of mental block that prevents it moving on and resolving. It makes my skin crawl, to be honest. But hey, it’s not “Ordinary” by Alex Warren, so let’s be grateful for what we have.
It’s Chrystal’s second hit, after “The Days” reached number 4. MK’s track record is more interesting, since he’s been around for years – he’s 52, for god’s sake – and this is his first number one. Officially, anyway. His first releases were in 1989, and his first credited hit on the top 40 was in 2014. Until now, his biggest hits were “17” (2017) and “Asking” (2023), both of which got to number 7.
