The X-Axis – 20 January 2013
Okay, so let’s take stock… I’ve still got several of last week’s books to do, which I didn’t get around to reviewing during the week. And as for this week’s books, so far I’ve only read the ones that I’m buying digitally. (That leaves X-Men #40 and X-Factor #250 to be picked up later, basically.) Still plenty to cover right now, though…
Age of Apocalypse #11 – Marvel have confirmed that the book is officially being cancelled with the “X-Termination” crossover, and while “cancellation” is a relative concept these days – another run of X-Men? Really? – a quick glance at the sales figures, not to mention the sudden haste with which it’s moving to wrap up its storylines, rather suggests that the book is genuinely being put to sleep.
Charts – 13 January 2013
We’ll get to the rest of last week’s comics in due course; for now, let’s get up to speed on the chart. The music industry’s festive season shutdown is finally over, and normal service is resumed! Well, kind of.
And the first new entry of 2013 is, appropriately enough…
39. Matrix & Futurebound (featuring Baby Blue) – “Magnetic Eyes”
The X-Axis – 13 January 2013 (part 1)
Podcast weekend! The podcast is just below this post, and has plenty of reviews. Go listen to it.
I’m still waiting for some of the books that I’m buying in physical form, so this is going to end up split over the course of the week. But let’s do the two recent relaunches now. (Actually, I’ve been toying with posting individual capsule reviews as separate posts anyway, rather than doing them all in a bunch on Sunday night. We’ll see about that.) Meantime…
Cable & X-Force #3 – This series got off to a rather slow start, but with this issue, it feels like it’s getting to the point. Thank heavens it had the accelerated shipping schedule for those first few issues.
Cable’s premonitions become rather more precise here. He’s expecting some sort of biological attack through a chain of fast food restaurants which kills humans but not mutants. This, apparently, is going to be an important tipping point in history which leads to, etc, etc, you know the drill.
House to Astonish Episode 98
We’ve a nice little hour and a quarter of comicy chat for you this time out, with discussion of Titan’s new comics line, the Phoenix going digital, the proposed DC “dark” movie, the SHIELD and Hulk TV shows and the Superman appeal decision. We’ve also got reviews of The End Times of Bram & Ben, Superior Spider-Man and Mara, and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe is suffering from an inferiority complex. All this plus Batman’s successful plastic surgery, an epidemic of constipation and a small cat caught in the middle of a war between estate agents and bacon.
The podcast is here, or here on Mixcloud, or available via the embedded player below. Let us know what you think, either in the comments below, on Twitter, via email or on our Facebook fan page.
Charts – 6 January 2013
Listen, what’s that sound? Why, it’s the sound of tumbleweed, as virtually nothing happens on the top 40 for the second week running! The result is a chart with no new entries whatsoever, and four re-entries.
40. Rudimental featuring John Newman & Alex Clare – “Not Giving In”
36. Ellie Goulding – “Anything Could Happen”
35. Florence + The Machine – “Spectrum”
These are all just records that were still floating around outside the top 40, and thus move up to fill the space left by the Christmas singles. Nothing more to be said.
15. Calvin Harris featuring Tinie Tempah – “Drinking From The Bottle”
All-New X-Men vol 1: Here Comes Yesterday
It’s been a weirdly quiet couple of weeks for the X-books. Pretty much the whole industry took last week off, but even with the X-books’ overabundance of output, this week is also quiet, with only All-New X-Men #5 coming out. As it happens, that’s also where the first collection is due to end (it ships in February), so let’s take this as our cue to look back at the first arc.
All-New X-Men is the product of one of Marvel’s now-familiar marketing strategies: cancel a book, launch what appears to be a replacement, and then relaunch the actual book a couple of months later. The idea, presumably, is that this creates two books that inherit the sales of the original title. In reality, All-New X-Men is taking the place on the schedule of the unwanted, unloved, unadjectived X-Men, which stumbled on for a couple of fill-in issues for no apparent purpose other than to distract from that fact. And it ought to work; they’ve taken a book that even the most avid completist would regard as supernumerary, and replaced it with a book that will be seen as a flagship setting the direction that Brian Bendis will take as the X-Men’s new lead writer.
Charts – 30 December 2012
Welcome to 2013! This is the dead week of the charts, when nothing came out and virtually nothing happened. There’s one re-entry at the bottom end, but that’s just existing material filling the space left by the sales of Christmas songs coming to their habitually abrupt halt. And with the big push for the Christmas number one out of the way, the Justice Collective single also drops to 5, leaving James Arthur to return to number one with “Impossible”, thus also making himself the first number one artist of 2013.
So, since I can hardly fill a whole post with that, let’s take this opportunity to look back over the number one singles of 2012, some of which you have quite probably already forgotten about, due in no small part to a resurgence of the phenomenon of well-timed new releases with weeks of advance promotion taking turns to have a single week at number one. Most of these records, it should be said, proceeded to hang around the chart for a good long while afterwards. But records with a dominant run at the top have been rare, and the year has seen a total of 36 number one singles. Here they all are.
House to Astonish Episode 97
It’s the most wonderful time of the year – the time when comics pundits online post their picks of what stuff they thought was great and/or rubbish!
Paul and I are no exceptions to this tendency, and this year we’re attending the glittering night of the stars that is the Homies awards. Live from the green room of a very unusual venue, we’re rounding up our choices in a variety of categories, and going live to the main award ceremony where a dazzling cast of comics creators and personalities will be awarding the prizes to the comics, publishers and creators that won the listener vote, as chosen by YOU here, on CSBG and via email.
No news, reviews or Official Handbook this time round, just 95 minutes of the best and worst of 2012. The podcast is here, or here on Mixcloud, or available via the player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments below, on Twitter, via email or on our Facebook fan page.
Have a happy new year, and we’ll see you in 2013.
Charts – 23 December 2012
Merry Christmas! Yes, this is the Christmas chart, and you know what that means – everybody in their right mind runs a mile, leaving us with a two horse race between a charity record and a bloke who won X Factor but told everyone they should buy the charity record. (Despite which, he was still ahead on iTunes for some of the week – so it wasn’t a complete thumping.)
But further down the chart, it’s a bit of a wasteland, truth be told. Quite simply, releasing a record in the week before Christmas is almost entirely the province of charity records, novelty acts, and lunatics, giving us one of the stranger charts of the year. All part of the glorious tapestry, though.
36. Chris Rea – “Driving Home for Christmas”
35. Wham! – “Last Christmas”
Two belated re-entries from the Christmas back catalogue. “Driving Home for Christmas” was the lead track from an EP that Chris Rea released in 1988, but didn’t make the top 40 until the download era, when it achieved the dizzy heights of 33. Even so, it keeps coming back (perhaps because a lot of people genuinely don’t own it). “Last Christmas” spent five frustrating weeks at number 2 in Christmas 1984, stuck behind Band Aid.
The X-Axis – 23 December 2012
It’s the week before Christmas, and the scheduling bunnies are on acid. Perhaps it’s a rush to get all this month’s remaining books out before the holiday season hits, but the result is a full-on deluge of X-books if ever there was one – ten books in a single week, surely more than anyone could actually want.
A+X #3 – The stories in this anthology title have generally been pretty decent so far, but I still struggle to believe that it’s a format that will sustain sales once readers and retailers figure out what it actually contains. If it does, so much the better – that would imply that it’s selling on entertainment value (of which it has some) rather than significance to continuity (of which it has virtually zero), and that would be no bad thing.
