House to Astonish Episode 209
There’s a bunch of news out of San Diego Comic Con, and you can hear what we think about it all here! And now! If you like! We’re chatting about Black Canary: Best of the Best, The Question: All Along The Watchtower, Batgirl, New Gods, JSA, Hellverine, West Coast Avengers, Laura Kinney: The Wolverine, Psylocke and Lower Decks, plus the announcement of Amazing Comics. We’ve also got reviews of S.I.R. and Iron Fist 50th Anniversary Special, and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe is the ultimate helicopter parent. All this plus Batman’s least deranged friends, Tony Hawks singing a Marvel comic and a different sort of arsehole.
The podcast is here, or available via the embedded player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments, on Bluesky, via email or on our Facebook fan page. And wait… what year is this? 2024, you say? My God… then it’s not too late… for you to get yourself a great House to Astonish t-shirt over at our Redbubble store!
Daredevil Villains #35: Mister Fear III
DAREDEVIL #90-91 (August-September 1972)
“The Sinister Secret of Project Four!” / “Fear is the Key!”
Writer: Gerry Conway
Penciller: Gene Colan
Inker: Tom Palmer
Letterers: Sam Rosen (#90), Artie Simek (#91)
Colourist: not credited
Editor: Stan Lee (#90), Roy Thomas (#91)
We’ve skipped five issues with returning villains, so let’s get up to speed.
Issue #85 is a Gladiator story and it doesn’t matter in the slightest. Issue #86 brings back the Ox, but it’s an important issue for other reasons: Matt Murdock and Karen Page briefly reunite, it all goes wrong, and they decide that they were never meant to be together after all. Matt then decides to move to San Francisco and pursue his relationship with the Black Widow which is where the book will stay for a while to come. The existing supporting cast are completely jettisoned. Karen joins the cast of Ghost Rider for a while, but doesn’t return to this book until issue #227. Foggy Nelson won’t appear again until the book returns to New York in issue #108.
In their place are the Black Widow, her sidekick Ivan Petrovich (who comes with Natasha as a package deal), and a bunch of new Californian characters mostly forgotten by posterity, such as irascible police commissioner Ironguts O’Hara.
Clearly either Conway or his editors decided that the book wasn’t working and that drastic steps were needed. After all, Daredevil had been on the verge of merging with Iron Man. So far, Conway has struggled to find a hook on Daredevil himself; moving to San Francisco doesn’t change that, but it does make Daredevil into Marvel’s token west coast book, and it means that the Black Widow can be mined for story ideas.
Charts – 16 August 2024
We don’t get many one-week number ones these days, but “Guess” by Charli XCX featuring Billie Eilish turns out to be one of them. It’s only the second of the year – the other was “Fortnight” by Taylor Swift. “Guess” drops straight to number 4 in its second week, and gets overtaken by Billie Eilish’s album track “Birds of a Feather”. But that only climbs to 2.
1. Chase & Status and Stormzy – “Backbone”
Chase & Status released their first single in 2005, and had their first hit single in 2009. They had a long fallow period in chart terms between 2014 and 2022, but had a real resurgence last year when they had top ten hits with “Disconnect” and “Baddadan”. In total, they’ve had a respectable six top 10 hits prior to this record, but none of them got above number 5. So for their comeback phase to give them their first number one is a pleasant surprise.
The X-Axis – w/c 12 August 2024
X-MEN: FROM THE ASHES INFINITY COMIC #10. By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Arthur Hesli & Clayton Cowles. This is the start of another three-parter, and this time it’s an Omega Red arc. Thanks to Krakoa, Omega Red has been somewhat rehabbed to the point where you can now write a relatively sympathetic story about the guy. Arkady has been mellowed by his time on Krakoa to the point where he decides to go back and see his home town again. He gets a rather mixed reaction, and the story deals with that reasonably well. It looks like we’re getting some kind of story about odd things happening to local kids over the years, which feels like it could be looking to retcon some of his back story, but we’ll see where that goes. I’m not particularly up for toning down his history, I have to say. Anyway, all this is ultimately a lead-in to Sentinels #1, which is the real context for anything we’re doing.
X-MEN #2. (Annotations here.) The X-Men head to San Francisco to help a new mutant whose powers have emerged in the middle of an apparent alien invasion, which remarkably enough turns out not to be a coincidence. Actually, that makes more sense than you’d think – even in Marvel Universe logic, “his powers created the alien invasion” is a lot less likely than “it’s a stressful event that triggered his powers manifesting”, so I don’t think the X-Men come across as too silly for not jumping straight to the right conclusion.
X-Factor #1 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-FACTOR vol 5 #1
“Red Carpet”
Writer: Mark Russell
Artist: Bob Quinn
Colour artist: Jesus Aburtov
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Editor: Darren Shan
X-FACTOR:
This is the fifth volume of X-Factor, a name which has been attached to all sorts of unrelated concepts. Volume 1 started as a reunion book for the original X-Men and changed direction completely in the early 90s to become a book about a team working for the US government. Volume 2 was a miniseries about the Mutant Civil Rights Taskforce, volume 3 was Jamie Madrox’s X-Factor Investigations, and volume 4 was the Krakoan group who investigated mutant deaths. (EDIT: For those asking in the comments, the book about a corporate X-Factor team isn’t in the volume count because its official title was All-New X-Factor.)
This new version of X-Factor is essentially the 1990s government team, but hybridised with Peter Milligan and Mike Allred’s X-Force/X-Statix – though tonally, a better comparison might be Justice League International. That said, it repeats the trick from the first issue of X-Force of introducing a team and promptly killing most of them off, which feels like it might be a homage. To be fair, what we’re actually told is that the team members are “dead or clinging to life”, which leaves a back door for anyone who wants to bring the characters back.
X-Men #2 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-MEN vol 7 #2
“Invasion”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Ryan Stegman
Inker: JP Mayer
Colourists: Marte Gracia & Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
This issue also includes a back-up strip: the eighth and final chapter of “Weapon X-Traction”, which is basically a Deadpool & Wolverine comedy strip. I’m not going to be covering that.
THE X-MEN:
The X-Men have access to a Cerebro, presumably from one of the satellite locations of Krakoa.
Cyclops is very clear that even in the midst of an alien invasion, the X-Men’s primary concern is rescuing the new mutant that they’ve detected. He does insist that they’re still going to do the superhero stuff and help San Francisco, and acknowledges that the city has been good to mutants in the past (i.e., in the Utopia era), but he makes plain that it’s a secondary objective at best. His interest in relations with the humans seems to be largely instrumental: on a purely practical level, it’s good for the X-Men to be liked.
When he realises that the aliens are a projection of his new mutant, Cyclops’ main concern is to cover it up so that the humans don’t find out. He goes to the length of faking the new mutant’s death. Of course, this is the sort of thing that might count as a legitimate worry about uncontrolled mutant powers, but Cyclops feels there’s a bigger picture. (He surely can’t be that surprised to learn that there’s a connection between his new mutant signal and the alien invasion, but maybe he just figured that mutant powers often emerge for the first time under stress.)
Charts – 9 August 2024
Just one major new entry this week, but…
1. Charli XCX featuring Billie Eilish – “Guess”
Technically this is Charli XCX’s second number one, because she had a featured artist credit on Icona Pop’s “I Don’t Care”. That’s an odd one, since she doesn’t actually feature on the record in any normal sense – apparently she’s doing backing vocals somewhere, but the credit mainly relates to her writing the song. Anyway, that was in 2013. Since then, she’s been a steady presence in the singles chart, mostly in the mid range and with the occasional bigger hit, but her peak as a lead artist was number 6 (with “Boom Clap”, over a decade ago).
The X-Axis – w/c 5 August 2024
X-MEN: FROM THE ASHES INFINITY COMIC #6. By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Arthur Hesli & Clayton Cowles. Pretty much what you’d expect from the previous two issues: yes, Madelyne deliberately botched Havok’s magical resurrection in Dark X-Men, but she says it was to keep him safe by making sure he stayed by her side. If you’re going in that direction then this is handled perfectly well, even if the art seems to be struggling a bit to sell Alex’s decay in a PG way – I buy it for the characters, and that’s the key thing. Still, it’s obviously a story that exists primarily to extricate Alex from a fairly recent storyline and free him up for X-Factor, and there’s an unavoidable issue here of being able to see the strings. Needs must, I suppose.
UNCANNY X-MEN #1. (Annotations here.) So there’s a lot to like here, but I’m not entirely sold yet. On the plus side, Gail Simone has always been strong on characterisation and interaction, and I like her takes on the main cast. Rogue as leader has been done before, but it’s still fair enough to play her as someone who doesn’t see herself as suited to the role, and I like the idea that she’s mainly looking to reassure herself that the whole X-Men thing had some sort of point to it. It’s good to see the X-Men doing some normal things in the real world for a change, and put them more in the everyday. David Marquez’s art is absolutely fantastic, and if I’m not quite sure why we’re devoting so much of issue #1 to a fight with Sadurang, the establishing shot of him on the pyramid is just beautiful.
Uncanny X-Men #1 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
UNCANNY X-MEN vol 6 #1
“Red Wave”
Writer: Gail Simone
Artist: David Marquez
Colourist: Matthew Wilson
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
This is the sixth ongoing book with the Uncanny X-Men title; the last one was the Matthew Rosenberg run that preceded the Krakoan era back in 2019. The Free Comic Book Day one-shot for this year is effectively an issue #0 of this book, though the opening scene is a flashback to Corrina Ellis’s arrival at the X-Men Mansion, so at least that scene takes place before the FCBD one-shot – in fact, the whole issue probably does.
THE X-MEN:
Wolverine. He hasn’t been keeping in touch with the other X-Men, although he does show up for the death of Miguel, an “old army buddy” we haven’t seen before. They apparently had a bet about who would die last, and Logan feels guilty for cheating by Krakoan resurrection. He advises against joining Cyclops’ group – we saw him leave that group in X-Men #1, and he suggests here that it’s a closed community which is too far under Cyclops’ thumb.
Daredevil Villains #34: Mr Kline
DAREDEVIL #84 (February 1972)
“Night of the Assassin!”
Writer: Gerry Conway
Artist: Gene Colan
Inker: Syd Shores
Letterer: Artie Simek
Colourist: not credited
Editor: Stan Lee
We’ve skipped issues #80-81, which feature the Owl, acting at the behest of Mr Kline. That story also introduces the Black Widow to the cast, which will shortly lead to a radical retooling of the whole series. We’ve also skipped issues #82-83, where Daredevil and the Widow fight android duplicates of the Scorpion and Mr Hyde, built by, you guessed it, Mr Kline.
That brings us to this issue, where Daredevil finally meets Mr Kline after some six months of build-up. And defeats him in one issue.
Context, then. At this point, Gerry Conway was writing both Daredevil and Iron Man. Both titles gave Mr Kline an extended build up over the course of several months, with Kline sending an assortment of seemingly random villains to carry out missions with little or no discernible link between them. In Daredevil, he’s also a blackmailer, extorting money from Foggy Nelson for some vague and unspecified mistake. Eventually, after the whole arc is over, we do get an answer to this question: it’s something to do with papers that Crime-Wave prepared when he was working in the DA’s office circa issue #59, and that Foggy signed without reading them.
