Wolverine #38 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
WOLVERINE vol 7 #38
“Last Mutant Standing, part 2”
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Juan José Ryp
Colour artist: Frank D’Armata
Letterer: Cory Petit
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER / PAGE 1: Wolverine and Captain America in action, surrounded by … well, obscured figures, because the identity of the villain is a reveal halfway through the issue. They’re wearing the hats of typical Legacy House agents, though.
As with the previous issue, we get some actual lettering on the cover, which seems to be a thing for this “series of team-ups” arc. (If “arc” is the right word – it’s really more a series of linked one-shots.)
PAGES 2-4. Logan approaches Steve Rogers in a bar.
Logan’s explanation for how he’s evading the Orchis patrols is simply that people don’t recognise him out of costume. Which… Wolverine’s pretty recognisable, isn’t he? It’s not too hard to find stories where members of the general public recognise the short guy with the unusual hair on sight. It happens in the recent Fallen Friend one-shot when he shows up to Kamala Khan’s memorial service. I know you have to turn a blind eye to this sort of thing for the book to function at all during “Fall of X”, but maybe just go with “he’s good at dodging the patrols”?
X-Men Red #16 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-MEN RED vol 2 #16
“The Fall of Prometheus”
Writer: Al Ewing
Artist: Yildiray Çinar
Colour artist: Federico Blee
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Jordan D White
COVER / PAGE 1. The Horsemen pose in front of Port Prometheus.
PAGES 2-4. Craig Marshall’s ship approaches Arakko.
Craig Marshall was last seen in issue #14, with the two kids Loolo and Kobb. In that issue, he was simply wondering about leaving his part of Arakko for Port Prometheus, where Peter Corbeau had offered him a posting. Evidently he either accepted that posting, or otherwise made contact with Corbeau once war broke out. The fact that Kobb hasn’t talked since A.X.E.: Judgment Day was mentioned by Craig in issue #11.
Peter Corbeau makes his first actual appearance in X-Men Red here; he’s a NASA scientist who had some minor appearances in early Claremont X-Men. I don’t think he’s been seen on panel in years. He’s still wearing his yachting cap, which is nice.
Charts – 6 October 2023
Well, Ed Sheeran’s got a new album out. But…
1. Doja Cat – “Paint the Town Red”
That’s five weeks. It’s very, very unlikely to make six, because it’s way past its peak and so it’s due to be hit by the downweighting rule next week.
5. Jung Kook featuring Jack Harlow – “3D”
A second solo hit for BTS’s Jung Kook, following “Seven”, which reached number 3 earlier in the year. “Seven” had Latto on it, and this has Jack Harlow – they’re clearly aiming for the international audience here, and it’s working. K-pop tracks tend to be heavily frontloaded, with a lot of actual first-week sales to the fanbase. Still, “Seven” had enough wider appeal to stick around in the top 40 for ten weeks, so while I’d be surprised if “3D” climbed, I don’t expect it to plummet either.
The X-Axis – w/c 2 October 2023
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #107. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Lynne Yoshii, Fer Sifuentes-Sujo & Travis Lanham. This is the sort of thing you get in middle chapters of Infinity Comics. Sunfire goes to a place, gets into a bit of trouble, and then someone we recognise shows up at the end. Nothing wrong with that – it’s getting the story from A to B, and it’s re-establishing the idea that Otherworld is a place where random monsters can show up for no good reason. With fairly short chapters on a weekly schedule, you’re going to get issues like this, but there’s not much I can say about them individually. It’s fine.
X-MEN #27. (Annotations here.) Hideous cover aside – and I genuinely do loathe it – this is a definite step up from the last couple of issues, because it isn’t so relentlessly bleak. Instead, it’s an issue of the X-Men going to have a nice chat with the Fantastic Four on a farm, drawn by Phil Noto. And Orchis are barely in it. Of course, this still amounts to saying that this is one of the better issues of the storyline because it’s a detour from the storyline, and in plot terms it’s maybe a bit thin, but it still feels like a welcome tone correction from the last couple of issues. Part of that is probably because it’s Phil Noto on art, which is going to lighten most things up, but it’s not the art that made the last two issues so oppressive. Hopefully we’re sticking with something closer to this – I wouldn’t say it really engages me, but at least it doesn’t feel like a chore.
X-Force #45 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-FORCE vol 6 #45
“A Slip of the Pen”
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Robert Gill
Colour artist: GURU-eFX
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Design: Tom Muller and Jay Bowen
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER / PAGE 1. A weird image of Colossus, Quentin Quire and Wolverine (Laura) as prisoners of Mikhail Rasputin with multiple perspectives and a kind of 3D effect. The solicitation for this issue read: “X-Force is held captive. But what powerful force can keep Wolverine, Colossus, Omega Red and Quentin Quire from their compatriots, and what will this mean for the future of mutantkind? And, as the Chronicler focusses his powers on a new subject, how will his control shift the balance of power in the Fall of X era?” That last sentence is certainly in this issue, but Wolverine, Omega Red and Quentin Quire only have brief cameos in this issue (a single panel of each of them, on page 23).
PAGES 2-4. Chronicler recaps the plot, and Colossus kidnaps Jun Wei.
The Chronicler opens by reflecting on how Colossus was perfectly placed to be the first person narrator of his story about Krakoa precisely because he’s a secondary character in the grand scheme of things; it accords with his sense of how this sort of story ought to work, and as we’ve seen, Chronicler’s reality-warping powers are constrained by what he can rationalise as a sensible story. Mind you, given how often Chronicler has taken to writing directly about his control of Colossus and the way in which Colossus is being manipulated, this book must be a very strange read.
Immortal X-Men #16 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
IMMORTAL X-MEN #16
“The Island of Doctor Xavier”
Writer: Kieron Gillen
Artist: Lucas Werneck
Colour artist: David Curiel
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Jordan D White
COVER / PAGE 1. Apocalypse – or rather, the version of Apocalypse from the desert landscape – with the Phoenix Force in the background. I think it’s meant to be perching on his left arm (note the claws). His Pharaoh trappings reflect the role that he’s been cast in for this re-enactment of the Book of Exodus.
PAGE 2. Shaw and Selene monitor Krakoa.
Recap: The External Gate was created in Excalibur #12 from the (involuntary) sacrifice of most of Selene’s fellow Externals. Now that the mutants are out of the way, Selene wants to secure the Gate and bring back the Externals. Charles Xavier has been repelling all the landing parties by turning them back telepathically. Last issue, Selene and Sebastian Shaw tried sending a group of soldiers with psi-blockers. Professor X responded by tearing them apart, apparently with his growing telekinetic powers; that’s the red smear they see next to the External Gate. This is not what Shaw was trying to achieve, and while it’s unlikely he cares about the soldiers himself, it hasn’t advanced his goals of actually profiting from his notional ownership of Krakoa.
It’s worth saying here that we don’t actually see Professor X killing the soldiers last issue. We see the fight starting, and then the next panel takes place the following morning and shows their bodies scattered by the Gate. We’ll come back to that.
X-Men #27 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-MEN vol 6 #27
“Road Trip”
Writer: Gerry Duggan
Artist: Phil Noto
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Jordan D White
COVER / PAGE 1. A singularly unpleasant image of Cyclops as an Orchis prisoner with his eyes sewn shut, as seen in issue #25. This has very little to do with the content of the issue – Cyclops appears in it for one page, in which he’s asleep. The actual story mostly involves the X-Men going to ask the Fantastic Four for help. The solicitation for this issue, though, seems to suggest that this was meant to be a Cyclops story. (“When Cyclops joined this iteration of the X-Men, his pitch was simple – ‘I am the X-Men.’ If so, the enemies of the X-Men seem to have this fight all sewn up.”) That’s the second issue in a row where the cover and solicitation have born very little resemblance to the content.
PAGES 2-6. Shadowkat breaks into the Orchis facility at Randall’s Island.
Last issue, Emma Frost had asked Shadowkat to focus on finding Cyclops (something which Kate seemed to have been paying lip service to up to that point, in favour of her own priorities). They were going to leave together to look for him until Emma got derailed by her wedding subplot. Shadowkat headed off anyway, and apparently she has indeed turned her attention to it this time.
Daredevil Villains #4: The Purple Man
DAREDEVIL #4 (October 1964)
“Killgrave, the Unbelievable Purple Man!”
Writer, editor: Stan Lee
Penciller: Joe Orlando
Inker: Vince Colletta
Letterer: Sam Rosen
Colourist: not credited
“You’re about to meet possibly the most off-beat, far-out, ding-dong, rootin’-tootin’ crackerjack super-villain you just ever did see!”
Such was Stan Lee’s vision of the Purple Man, as set out on the splash page of his debut. Things have changed. Today, as the nemesis of Jessica Jones, the Purple Man is the most high profile character from Daredevil‘s early issues. But he’s also now a character who needs a trigger warning. Look, there it was. This is the debut of a character who goes on to be a horrific abuser – in the TV version, an unambiguous rapist. What the hell happened?
On his own account, Zebediah Killgrave was a “spy for a foreign power” who got caught sneaking into an army ordnance depot. He got drenched in an experimental nerve gas which turned him purple and gave him the power to make people obey him. Being a villain already, he decides to use this power for world domination. It’s never entirely clear how he thinks that’s going to work, given that his power only works at close range. But that’s the goal.
Charts – 29 September 2023
We’ve got some unexpected new entries in the singles chart this week.
1. Doja Cat – “Paint the Town Red”
29. Doja Cat – “Agora Hills”
Doja Cat gets a fourth week at number 1, but her album “Scarlet” is also out this week, and lands at number 5. That’s actually two places below her 2021 album “Planet Her”, but as we’ll see, it’s a busy week at the top end of the album chart. The somewhat less instant release week single “Agora Hills” also charts – her third track on the top 100 is the promotional single “Demons”, which only got to number 53 on release, and re-enters at 87 on the strength of the album.
The X-Axis – w/c 25 September 2023
EDIT: Oh, hey, I completely forgot about Ms Marvel: The New Mutant #2. That’ll happen when there’s still no functioning subscription mechanism for digital comics. Ideally, Marvel would dump Amazon entirely and use Marvel Unlimited as their primary vehicle for selling new comics, since for all its problems, it’s still a vastly better product than anything Amazon has to offer. But anyway, I’ll add Ms Marvel to the bottom of this post, and in the meantime…
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #106. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Lynne Yoshii, Fer Sifuentes & Travis Lanham. You might remember that the epilogue to X-Men #24 has Magik dropping off Sunfire in Otherworld so that he can look for the missing Redroot – and then jumped forward to “X Months Later” with Sunfire and Redroot on the verge of death in a blizzard. Well, this is the start of that storyline, which feels a lot more consequential than the last few issues already. After all the point of rescuing Redroot isn’t just to free her, it’s to let people talk to Arakko. Which seems like iti might be important to X-Men Red.
So, in this first part, a characteristically overconfident Sunfire shows up at the Crooked Market and simply demands that Jim Jaspers hand Redroot over. As it turns out, Jaspers has got so bored waiting for anyone to remember this storyline that he’s already got rid of Redroot, so he does a typically questionable deal with Sunfire and then packs him off on a quest across Otherworld to rescue her. And that’s what we’re getting, from the sound of it – Sunfire tours Otherworld. Fair enough, as an opening scene. I’m not the biggest fan of Otherworld, but nobody else is using it right now, and it feels like there could be some potential in putting Sunfire there, because he doesn’t exactly seem like the type to be charmed by whimsical fantasy either.
JEAN GREY #2. (Annotations here.) Well, it looks like we really are doing four issues of What If…? with Jean Grey centred storylines, the loose idea being that this is her personality reconstituting itself after death, or finding its way back to life, or something. That’s all fine with me, though I have to wonder if it’s really what people were expecting from a Fall of X tie-in.
