Charts – 31 May 2015
This is the post-Eurovision chart, which in recent years has resulted in some oddities making one-week appearances. This year, not so much. And since the release schedules were otherwise quiet, it’s a placid week.
30. Charles Hamilton featuring Rita Ora – “New York Raining”
Charts – 24 May 2015
Storm vol 2 – “Bring the Thunder”
Storm‘s second volume, covering issues #6-11, looks to be the end of the series – it could technically be a Secret Wars hiatus, but given the sales, I wouldn’t hold your breath. This, of course, makes it only the latest in a long line of X-Men solo titles to go from launch to scrapheap within a year, an outcome which one can only assume Marvel regards as satisfactory, as otherwise they’d have stopped doing it. The thinking, I suppose, must be that at least they know they’ll get a few months of acceptable sales out of a book like this.
Like many of the characters who wind up in these solo series, Storm was never designed to fill this role; she was conceived as a member of an ensemble cast. More to the point, her roles in that cast have largely been “heart of the team”, “bonding mainstay”, and “emerging (later veteran) leader”. None of this particularly suits her to be a solo lead, since all three roles define her largely in relation to her position in the team.
Charts – 17 May 2015
Schedule? What schedule? Luckily, it’s another insanely quiet week, with a grand total of three new entries. Nothing much happening in the lower half of the chart (well, “Trap Queen” climbs nine, if that excites you), so we can skip directly to…
17. David Guetta featuring Nicki Minaj & Afrojack – “Hey Mama”
Spider-Man & The X-Men
Once Marvel decided to kill off Wolverine, there were obvious knock-on effects for the other titles that he appeared in. Of course, in most of those books, he basically stood in the background padding out the roster, so his disappearance wasn’t such a big deal. For Wolverine and the X-Men, not so much. That book was really about the X-Men’s students, not Wolverine – its name seems to reflect a conviction on Marvels part that the problem with books like Young X-Men was positioning them too explicitly as not proper X-Men titles – but still, he’s there in the title.
Throw in the fact that they only had six issues to pad out before Secret Wars – meaning that any sort of wider relaunch was going to be held off for a while to come – and you have a recipe for glaring filler. And indeed, when solicitations appeared billing Spider-Man & The X-Men #1, you could pretty much hear the collective groan across the internet.
Charts – 10 May 2015
X-Men vol 5 – “Burning Earth”
If you have four issues to fill before Secret Wars, plainly you could do a lot worse than call upon the services of G Willow Wilson, who’s been delivering on Ms. Marvel. In fact, anyone looking for a Marvel Universe title to try could do a lot worse than Ms. Marvel.
As it turns out, though, G Willow Wilson can also do a lot worse than Ms. Marvel. “Burning Earth” is not especially bad, but it’s safe to say that this is one to be filed in the Minor Works section of her bibliography.
House to Astonish Episode 132
It’s a relatively quiet week for comics news, but Paul and I have got a bit of chat for you regardless, as we look at the announcement of We(l)come Back at Boom!, the CBLDF’s new “Comics Connector” programme, the cancellations and renewals of a bunch of Marvel and DC TV shows and Bill Jemas’s new Ultimate imprint (now with added zombies!). We’ve also got reviews of Secret Wars and Swords of Sorrow, and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe treads lightly, for it treads upon your dreams. All this plus Mike Deodato the Multiple Man, a garage with stairs and the Conspiracy Theory Channel.
The podcast is here, or here on Mixcloud, or available via the player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments, on Twitter, via email or on our Facebook fan page. And don’t forget our Redbubble store, where we can help you finally look as good as you feel.
Charts – 3 May 2015
Amazing X-Men vol 3 – “Once and Future Juggernaut”
(NB: This volume also covers the Axis tie-in and Annual #1, but we’ve covered them separately.)
As Secret Wars looms, and the second-tier X-Men books find themselves with an arc to kill before they get there, filler mounts. Chris Yost isn’t even writing one of the stand-in Battleworld X-books, but here he is with “Once and Future Juggernaut”.
But for whatever reason – perhaps he’s carrying out an editorial remit, perhaps he just wanted to set something up for future writers to use – there’s actually a point to this one. It’s an exercise in rehabbing (and re-setting) the Juggernaut, and to a lesser extent Colossus.
