Belarus.
I think, during the podcast, we mentioned the magnificently misjudged Belarussian Eurovision entry, “I Love Belarus”. There’s kind of a protocol in Eurovision – humble and welcoming celebration of national culture, yes. Full-bore patriotic flagwaving, no. After all, you can’t vote for your own song.
Anyhow. This be it. Never has Belarus been more emphatically and catchily endorsed. The WWE ought to give someone a Belarus gimmick just so they can use this as theme music.
Charts – 17 February 2013
The X-Axis – 17 February 2013
Right! Back to business as usual!
And after a couple of quiet weeks, this time it’s the inevitable deluge…
Age of Apocalypse #12 – Just another two issues to go, and those are both part of the X-Termination crossover. As I recall, the previous issue seemed to make the pacing work for it, at the cost of de-emphasising some of the individual cast members’ storylines. With this issue, though, David Lapham appears to be back to trying to get through loads of outstanding plots in the time available. Logan has been defeated, at least in the sense that he no longer has Apocalypse’s power and he’s sane again. But of course that doesn’t just lead to his military apparatus vanishing, so the government is still pretty much in control. So what we get is an issue that reads like it started life as the idea for a second year of stories, with Monet emerging as the rival leader figure now that she’s got some chance of coming out on top. At around the same time, we’ve also got Graydon Creed confronting his father, Goodnight being exposed within the Hellfire Club (the actual role of which has never really been made terribly clear), and the scientists wondering what they’re going to do with the power of Apocalypse that they’ve managed to harness with their Big Machine. There are a lot of threads being drawn together here, as is inevitable when a series with longer term plans is being wrapped up, and in one sense Lapham is handling them all well – but it’s hard to shake the feeling that these are storylines which were intended to play out at a much, much more leisurely pace.
House to Astonish Episode 100
It’s finally here – the hundredth episode of House to Astonish! We’re joined by Carrie Kennedy, Susi O’Brien, Stu West and Amal El-Mohtar to discuss topic suggested by friends, listeners and comics pros, encompassing digital comics, boycotts, the greatest comics out today, what Marvel would be like if they’d done right by Kirby, favourite superhero movies, reinventions of Marvel characters, the Eurovision Song Contest, pie, monkeys and what goes on inside the human stomach. We’ve got contributions from Reilly Brown, Jeff Lester of Wait, What?, Steve Morris of Comics Bulletin, Steven Sanders, Al Ewing, Rich Johnston of Bleeding Cool, Heidi MacDonald of the Beat, Alex de Campi, Michael Kupperman, Stephen Wacker, Antony Johnston, Kieron Gillen, Justin Jordan, Lauren Sankovitch, Andy Khouri and Andrew Wheeler of Comics Alliance, Brandon Graham and Emma Rios. All this plus cake, booze, an alcoholic with a spanner, Wolverine vs Montessori and Wong’s hash brownies in our longest ever episode (by 25 seconds).
You’ll have noticed that we’ve had a spruce-up of our design – the immensely talented James Wendelborn has designed our new logos, and you may be pleased to learn that we’ve put those to good use already in our official House to Astonish Redbubble store – if you want to show the world your affinity for the show there’s now a way to do it! You can find it here – it’s the swankiest way to combine comics podcasting and sartorial excellence.
The podcast is here, or here on Mixcloud, or available via the embedded player below. Let us know what you think of the show, either in the comments, on Twitter, by email on our Facebook fan page.
Thanks to everyone who’s contributed to the show or who’s enjoyed it so far – here’s to many more episodes.
Elimination Chamber 2013
The WWE’s February show is always an awkward one. The Royal Rumble in January determines the challenger for (one of) the world title(s) at Wrestlemania; that show doesn’t come until early April. Meanwhile, there’s a show to fill. In recent years, that slot has been taken with Elimination Chamber, based on a six-man cage match. The idea is that two men start, another four enter at five minute intervals, elimination occurs by pinfall or submission, and the last person left is the winner.
Previously, the company has taken the extraordinarily ill-advised approach of putting both the Raw and Smackdown titles in the line in separate Elimination Chamber matches – thus rather undermining the significance of the Royal Rumble, by giving another ten challengers a shot the next month. This time round, sense has finally prevailed – they’ve dropped that idea, and finally gone for what they should have done all along: since Rumble winner John Cena has elected to go for Raw’s title at Wrestlemania, the Chamber will decide who challenges for Smackdown’s.
Of course, that also means that the rest of the card is free to feature more or less normal matches.
1. WWE Title: The Rock v CM Punk. Rock is going to be around until Wrestlemania, and as widely expected, he won the title at the Rumble in his big comeback, ending CM Punk’s year-plus title reign. This all makes perfect sense, since if you’re going to shell out for Rock to be on the show at Wrestlemania, you probably want him to be in the main event.
Charts – 10 February 2013
Don’t get too comfortable. We won’t be here long. The singles market remains weirdly moribund as we head into February, with only a single new entry on this week’s chart. We do have some big climbers, but in terms of actual new records, you’ll have Fall Out Boy or you’ll have nothing.
40. Jake Bugg – “Lightning Bolt”
38. Nickelback – “How You Remind Me”
36. One Direction – “Little Things”
30. The Fray – “How To Save A Life”
Since something’s got to replace the records dropping out of the charts, we have a few re-entries down at the bottom. Jake Bugg was still floating around just outside the top 40. “Little Things” is probably here because it was used on Dancing on Ice last weekend. I’ve no clue what the others are doing here. The Fray made number 4 with this single six years ago; Nickleback’s “How You Remind Me” dates back to 2002. Something has suddenly made them pick up sales again but I honestly don’t know what. Any suggestions, let us know in the comments thread.
The X-Axis – 10 February 2013
And so, in the week when people across Britain weighed up the unexpectedly related questions, “How do I feel about horses?” and “Can I be bothered cooking my own food?”, we find ourselves with another weird example of Marvel scheduling. Despite the large number of X-books released each month – the checklist lists 19, though that’s counting two Deadpool books – Marvel have only two of them coming out this week. Not that this is a complaint, as such; more a resigned bemusement at what could possibly be going through their minds.
I’d understand if they were moving stuff aside in order to give a major release like Uncanny X-Men #1 a clear run for our attention – that would make some degree of sense. Instead, we’ve got two middle chapters coming out, and presumably a vast deluge of X-related material in some later week to make up for it. I just don’t get the thinking.
(Oh, just a reminder that, as we mentioned on the last podcast, it’ll be another week before the Landmark Issue #100. Current plan is to record it next Sunday.)
Anyway. Comics! Both of them!
Charts – 3 February 2013
This week: basically nothing comes out, but some other records do climb! Exciting, I know!
33. Justin Bieber (featuring Nicki Minaj) – “Beauty and a Beat”
Re-entry – this dropped out of the top 40 last week. I’m going to hazard a guess that it’s picked up a few downloads from the version available on his “Believe Acoustic” album.
30. Amelia Lily – “Shut Up (And Give Me Whatever You’ve Got)”
I don’t normally mention fallers, but it’s worth flagging up that this drops 19 places on its second week – not a promising sign for Xenomania’s latest attempt to find a new vehicle.
29. Droideka – “Get Hyper”
Droideka is Ellis Carter, a teenager from Cambridge named after a relatively obscure Star Wars concept, and this is a dubstep track that (as best I can figure out) he initially put out as a copyright-free track a year or so back. This is a rather more polished version, though. Bouncy little number, kind of sounds like something that might turn up on a Flash game soundtrack. It’s been climbing from the lower reaches for a couple of weeks now but I’m not entirely sure why, to be honest.
The X-Axis – 3 February 2013
One of those weeks where I’m very, very pushed for time, but there are so few X-books out this week (as in, two) that I might as well just get them done…
X-Men Legacy #5 – The plot threads start to draw together, as tends to happen when you’re coming up for what will be the end of the first trade paperback volume. But Si Spurrier does manage to give that connection some sense of surprise, perhaps because he’d set up what seemed to be a fairly disparate set of storylines that looked as if they might somehow come together down the road. Instead, we get a lot of explanations here rather sooner than I would have predicted, so that while the overall pattern makes sense, it doesn’t feel like it’s been patiently lumbering towards us for months. (Spoilers ahead, by the way.)
Charts – 27 January 2013
A slightly odd week as we ease back into the regular chart schedule. There are a couple of full scale new releases at the top, but mostly it’s album tracks that are soon to be promoted to single status, starting their climb into the top 40.
37. Little Mix – “Change Your Life”
A vague and non-specific self-affirmation song about believing in yourself and such forth, with added references to sticking together and ignoring the critics? Why, it must be randomly assembled X Factor girl band Little Mix, doing what such bands do! (And – “Become what you’ve always known”? Really?)
