Charts – 16 July 2021
Sometimes the lag in a weekly chart is more noticeable than normal…
1. Ed Sheeran – “Bad Habits”
Three weeks at number one. It’s still growing, too.
3. Dave featuring Stormzy – “Clash”
First-time collaboration by two of the big names of UK rap, so it was bound to do well. It’s musically compelling even if you have no idea what they’re going on about (I don’t pretend to pick up references to trainers without resorting to the annotations, and I have no idea where Jeremy Corbyn fits into anything). I’m sure he’s a big fan of Aston Martins too.
X-Corp #3 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-CORP #3
“The Madrox Workflow”
by Tini Howard, Valentine de Landro & Sunny Gho
COVER / PAGE 1. Corporate Madrox, with a bunch of dupes tessellated behind him.
PAGES 2-3. Who is Dr Jamie Madrox?
This is a more or less straight recap of Madrox’s back story. Madrox’s family tie to Los Alamos, and his powers emerging at birth, both come from his debut in Giant-Size Fantastic Four #4, as does the panel of him with Professor X and Mr Fantastic. I’m pretty sure the bit about his childhood interest in science is new. When first introduced, Madrox’s gimmick was that he was a naive farmboy (his parents moved to Kansas soon after he was born) whose parents had died and who was living alone on the farm as a community of one.
The idea that some Madrox duplicates were going out to learn about entire skills and then return with what they had learned, contributing to the skills of the whole, comes from Peter David’s X-Factor. Howard entirely ignores the usual depiction of Madrox as a bit of a comedy figure or (at the very least) everyman, which admittedly wouldn’t make much sense for something written in the tone of X-Corp pseudo-advertising. The idea that Madrox is “brilliant” is, um, novel. Still, the idea that his accumulated skills would allow him to work efficiently by churning out the duplicates and then reabsorbing them periodically to work as a one-man team… that makes sense.
Way of X #4 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
WAY OF X #4
“Heirs and Graces”
by Si Spurrier, Bob Quinn & Java Tartaglia
COVER / PAGE 1. Nightcrawler keeps Professor X and Legion separated, while Onslaught’s face looms in the background.
PAGE 2. Data page – a detail of the map of Arakko previously seen in Planet-Size X-Men #1. “Tharsis” is a volcanic plateau on Mars.
Beneath it, a quote from Nightcrawler’s book of philosophy (the title of which continues to be redacted for some reason). As so often in this book, Way of X offers a rather more sceptical view of the grand achievements which Planet-Size X-Men was praising.
PAGES 3-4. Lost’s story.
A fairly straightforward parable about a wronged girl whose demands for revenge are rejected by elders who want an amnesty for the greater good. Nightcrawler draws the fairly obvious conclusion that the girl is Lost herself, the bad guy is Fabian Cortez (given her reaction to him last issue), and the amnesty is the general amnesty that Krakoa extends to all ex-villains.
Excalibur #22 annotation
As always, this post contains spoilers and page numbers go by the digital edition.
EXCALIBUR vol 4 #22
“Treasures of Britain”
by Tini Howard, Marcus To & Erick Arciniega
COVER / PAGE 1. Excalibur as prisoners of Merlyn.
PAGES 2-5. Excalibur and the Beast visit Blightspoke.
Blightspoke. This is one of the various Otherworld realms that we saw during the “X of Swords” crossover. Generally, it’s been depicted as a sort of dumping ground for things from failed realities, with plenty of useful stuff there if you can get at it safely. The suggestion that the land is actively poisonous comes from a data page in Cable #5, though this is the first time it’s really come up.
The Beast is taking scientific measurements of samples from Blightspoke, which in itself seems like a perfectly innocuous thing to do. But over in X-Force, the Beast is mainly being written these days as a dangerously overconfident amoral schemer, so god only knows what he wants with this stuff, but it can’t be good.
“Logan says this place can be unwelcoming in more ways than one.” Wolverine fought Summoner in Blightspoke in Wolverine #7.
Charts – 9 July 2021
This is what you call a dead week.
Two weeks. And for our highest new entry we find ourselves going all the way down to…
32. Brent Faiyaz featuring Drake – “Wasting Time”
X-Men #1 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-MEN vol 6 #1
“Fearless, Chapter One: In Threes”
by Gerry Duggan, Pepe Larraz & Marte Gracia
COVER / PAGES 1-2. The new X-Men team in battle in New York. That’s the main cover, obviously. There are tons of variants.
PAGES 3-5. The back story of Feilong.
This is the first appearance of Kelvin Heng, a self-made scientific genius who was on the verge of beginning his own project to terraform Mars when the Krakoans marched in and took the place over in Planet-Size X-Men #1. Though we didn’t see Feilong himself in that issue, we did see the probe sent by the company that shares his name. The word “feilong” refers to a flying dragon and isn’t particularly unusual as a name for a Chinese company. We establish here that Feilong went to the trouble of altering his own body so that he could live on Mars – an effort now entirely redundant following the Krakoan terraforming.
Nikola Tesla. We’re told that Feilong is a descendent of Nikola Tesla via his mother, described as “a Nobel Prize winner from Serbia”. Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) was indeed ethnically Serbian (though he was born in modern-day Croatia), but he emigrated to the United States in 1884 and had no children – indeed, no known relationships. However, Tesla’s name should be ringing alarm bells in a Hickman-adjacent comic, since he was a major character in Hickman’s much-delayed S.H.I.E.L.D.. In that series, he has super powers and goes by the name “Night Machine”. And he does have an adoptive son, Leonid.
X-Force #21 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-FORCE vol 6 #21
“Fear of a Green Planet”
by Benjamin Percy, Joshua Cassara, Robert Gill & Guru-eFX
COVER / PAGE 1. X-Force fight Man-Slaughter.
PAGES 2-9. Flashback: X-Force encounter a Man-Thing.
More fully: Sage despatches X-Force to the Warroad site on the coast of Washington, which is spilling chemical and nuclear waste into the sea. Their job is to clean up the spill because, apparently, it could somehow threaten Krakoa. (It’s not really made clear why this is any more of a concern for Krakoa than any other global environmental issue, but perhaps X-Force are just feeling especially heroic today.) They encounter a Man-Thing-type creature, which they mistake for a bad guy, but which is actually trying to save the locals from mutated sea creaturs.
As usual, there’s an obvious parallel between the visuals for Krakoa (complete with red spherical things in the plantlife) and the long-established design for Man-Thing, particularly in the grimier style which this book tends to favour, and which plays down Krakoa’s island-paradise tropes.
Warroad is not, as far as I can tell, a real facility in Washington. There’s a town called Warroad in Minnesota, which doesn’t seem to have any particular significance here. Washington State does have a significance, because it was the setting for various scenes in Weapon Plus: World War IV – more on which below.
Hellions #13 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
HELLIONS #13
“Don’t Look Back, part 1: Weary Travellers”
by Zeb Wells, Rogé Antônio & Rain Beredo
COVER / PAGE 1: The returned Sinister clone stands triumphant over the “original.”
PAGE 2. An epigraph from Nightcrawler. These show up repeatedly in Hellions, even though the character himself rarely appears, but we haven’t seen one since issue #10. Obviously, they anticipate his spiritual leader role in Way of X. In this story, of course, it’s Sinister whose past is catching up with him.
PAGES 3-5. The Right despatch their Zeta team.
This is going back to the Hellions’ battle with the Right in issues #7-8. Since there are two entire storylines that have passed since then, either the rest of the Right have only just got around to investigating what was going on here, or this is technically a flashback. We’re told later on that over a month has passed since this story.
The specific Right members seen here appear ot be new, including Zeta Team. Zeta Team are wearing facepaint with the traditional Right smiley faces, but don’t have any of the other familiar high-tech armour. For whatever reason, their facepaint is in green and yellow, normally the colours of HYDRA rather than the Right.
Children of the Atom #5 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
CHILDREN OF THE ATOM #5
“Reinforcements”
by Vita Ayala, Paco Medina & David Curiel
COVER / PAGE 1. The Children of the Atom backed up, but also overshadowed, by the actual X-Men. And Maggott.
PAGES 2-3. Daycrawler escapes while the other Children of the Atom are captured by the U-Men.
Each issue so far has spotlighted a different member of the team. By elimination, we’re left with Daycrawler – but since the plot builds to a climax in this issue, there’s not as much space to focus on his character as there has been with some of his colleagues. Much of Jay Jay’s perspective in this issue is filled in by narration rather than flashbacks or scenes devoted to him.
This scene is a retelling of page 20 from the previous issue, from Daycrawler’s perspective rather than Marvel Guy’s – those the shift of perspective doesn’t make much difference. We already know from the remainder of issue #4 that the bad guys are a new version of the U-Men, the group that harvests mutant organs to try and upgrade humans; and that Daycrawler will return to rescue his teammates with the actual X-Men in tow.
House to Astonish Episode 192
It’s been a long old time, but we’re finally back, with discussion of X-Force: Killshot, Phoenix Song: Echo, the creative changeover on Amazing Spider-Man, Human Remains at Vault, Party and Prey at Aftershock, and Jeff Lemire’s upcoming pair of miniseries Mazebook and Primordial. We’ve also got reviews of Catwoman Annual and Black Cat Annual, and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe Loves You. All this plus a mouthful of bugs, sad knitwear of tragic lives and a Reebok-clad Scottish indie band from 2001.
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, and remember that there’s still plenty of summer days to come, so a swell House to Astonish t-shirt might be just the thing you need.
