X-Factor #3 annotations
We’re going to be running off the normal schedule for the next couple of weeks, so expect things to be running a few days late. As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-FACTOR vol 5 #3
“Project Paperclip”
Writer: Mark Russell
Artist: Bob Quinn
Colour artist: Jesus Aburtov
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Editor: Tom Brevoort
X-FACTOR
The team are being packed off to autograph signing at conventions, which does at least reflect the PR aspect of their official remit. Havok is still worried about what happened to Polaris after she was left behind with the Mutant Underground at the end of the previous issue. He claims that all he cares about is getting his team back safely, and that he no longer has any misgivings about fighting other mutants (presumably following his encounter with the Underground last issue).
Granny Smite gets a back story here: she lived to 86 without realising that she was a mutant, at which point she lost her entire family within six months in disasters that she survived unscathed. Or at least, that’s Broderick’s account. It does beg some questions: as described here, she’s apparently not just immortal but invulnerable. Could you really live to 86 without noticing that? And since she apparently does age, can she die of old age? Nonetheless, Broderick’s account seems to match her behaviour: she’s lost everything she cared about and she seems to be mainly interested in getting herself killed. She clearly takes some enjoyment in freaking people out – she signs her publicity photo “I welcome death.” Havok isn’t at all convinced that she should be on the team, but to be fair, she does have useful powers and she is perfectly co-operative in a crisis. Then again, she’s also mentally unstable and barely trained.
X-Men #6 annotations
We’re going to be running off the normal schedule for the next couple of weeks, so expect things to be running a few days late. As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-MEN vol 7 #6
“Bark”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Netho Diaz
Inker: Sean Parsons
Colourists: Marte Gracia & Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
THE X-MEN:
Cyclops is team leader, chairing the X-Men’s meeting. He’s a little more reluctant than Magneto to acknowledge Ben and Jennifer as proper mutants, but does accept them.
Temper spots that one of the protestors outside the Factory – and they’re a small group – has a child who makes the “Midnight Bark” (or “Midnight M”) hand signal at her. Rather than tell Cyclops, she decides to take maters into her own hands and asks Magik to help, presumably seeing her as someone else who likely to agree. Note that she doesn’t go to Kid Omega, her ex, who had already made clear to her that he wasn’t really interested in messing with the protestors. She evidently isn’t put off by the warnings that she might start some sort of incident by taking matters into her own hands.
Magik‘s long distance chess game from issue #4 gets another mention – her opponent in that story apeared to be Colossus. The game is apparently something she’s keeping private, but she doesn’t seem that upset that Temper knows about it. She seems mainly amused by Temper’s response to the girl – she cautions that it could be a PR trap but seems quite happy to leave it up to Temper to decide what to do about it. The risk of starting an outright fight with O*N*E doesn’t really seem to bother her either.
Housekeeping
Just a quick note to say that posts are likely to be running behind schedule for the next couple of weeks, so don’t expect annotations on day of release right now.
House to Astonish Episode 210
Another episode, another convention to bring you all the news from! This time round, Paul and I are talking about the return of Vertigo (with a detour into the state of Marvel’s Red Band), the launch of the Marvel Premiere Collection, Hush 2, Absolute Flash, Martian Manhunter and Green Lantern, Rise of Emperor Doom, IDW’s new logo and IDW Dark line, Andy Khouri becoming TMNT editor, and a multitude of Godzilla series. We’ve also got reviews of Moon Knight: Fist of Khonshu and Batman & Robin Year One, and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe introduces The Picture of Dorian Hay. All this plus the continuity links between Pride and Prejudice and Pilgrim’s Progress, Jack Kirby as a hologram AI NFT, and Adventures Of Weird You Know That Sort Of Thing.
The episode 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 T-shirts? Do we have T-shirts for you! Sorry, I mean, do we have T-shirts for you? I think yes, we do.
Daredevil Villains #40: Kerwin J Broderick
DAREDEVIL #104-107 (October 1973 to January 1974)
“Prey of the Hunter!” / “Menace From the Moons of Saturn!” / “Life Be Not Proud!” / “Blind Man’s Bluff!”
Writer: Steve Gerber
Penciller: Don Heck (#104-106), Jim Starlin (#105 Titan sequence), Bob Brown (#107)
Inker: Sal Trapani (#104, #106), Don Perlin (#105), Sal Buscema (#107)
Letterer: Charlotte Jetter (#104, #107), June Braverman (#105), Shelly Leferman (#106)
Colourist: Petra Goldberg (#104, #107), Janice Cohen (#105), George Roussos (#106)
Editor: Roy Thomas
Throughout Steve Gerber’s run, a mysterious shadowy figure has been giving super powers to oddballs like Angar and the Dark Messiah. Now, it’s time for Daredevil to meet this arch villain. It’s Kerwin J Broderick, the senior partner of the law firm of Broderick, Sloan and Murdock.
Until now, Broderick hasn’t been seen on panel, but Gerber has been building him up in a subplot. Matt is hired to defend a group of kids who are charged with robbery, and Jason Sloan keeps telling Matt that Broderick wants him to enter a guilty plea. The expectation seems to be that Matt Murdock, of all people, won’t merely persuade his clients to plead guilty, but will actually ignore their instructions. It’s a strange arc, since Gerber seems to think that this sort of thing would be classed as “slightly questionable” rather than “completely beyond the pale”, meaning that Matt reacts to it as simply a troublesome work problem.
Charts – 18 October 2024
Well, if you’re going to be number one for this long, you might as well go for the record.
1. Sabrina Carpenter – “Taste”
That’s eight weeks, which means that Sabrina Carpenter has now spent twenty weeks at number 1 this year. Only Frankie Laine’s 28-week total in 1953 stands in the way of that being an all-time record. You could make a case that Sabrina has benefitted from a low turnover of hits this year, and so a lower number of challengers – but then again, she held “Good Luck Babe” off the top for months on end, and that’s a huge hit in its own right.
7. Charli XCX featuring Ariana Grande – “Sympathy is a Knife”
The remix version of “Brat” – “Brat and It’s Completely Different But Also Still Brat” – is out this week, but since it also includes the entire original album, the OCC is classing it as a deluxe edition of “Brat” rather than a free standing album. The remixes are extensive. The original version of “Sympathy is a Knife” doesn’t sound much like this version at all, but for chart versions both versions count towards this streaming position – it’s just that the Ariana Grande version has now been nominated as the lead, so that she gets co-credit.
The X-Axis – w/c 14 October 2024
X-MEN: FROM THE ASHES INFINITY COMIC #19. By Alex Paknadel, Diógenes Neves, Arthur Hesli & Clayton Cowles. Well, here’s something I wasn’t expecting: a Lifeguard story. Lifeguard is a character who appeared in X-Treme X-Men in 2001-2002 and has essentially done nothing since then. As in, she had a minor speaking part in one issue of Excalibur in 2004 and had two background cameos during the Krakoan era, and that’s literally it. Her brother Slipstream is in the same boat, but he’s quietly packed off to White Room Krakoa in a flashback, leaving Lifeguard behind on Earth to look after their ailing stepmother. The story is basically Heather trying to resume a normal life in Australia despite the awkward gap in her CV, while people keep going down with a weird skin condition in her presence – I guess we’re meant to be wondering if it’s a threat that her powers are reacting to, or something that she’s actually doing to defend herself against the outside world. I’m quite happy to see obscure characters get an outing in the Infinity Comics, but it’s not really clear yet where all this is heading. And the art is unusually wonky – it really feels a bit rushed, with strange neck angles and fixed grins.
UNCANNY X-MEN #4. (Annotations here.) The penultimate issue of the “Red Wave” arc, and it’s built mainly around Sarah Gaunt fighting Rogue to build her up as a top tier physical threat. She’s starting to click for me as a villain – straight mystical threats don’t always fit in the X-books, but while Sarah has a lot of the magical trappings, it’s not actually clear quite what she is. And it feels like a deliberate piece of mystery, which the story can carry, since it’s starting to give us a clearer idea of what she actually wants. She strongly implies that Charles Xavier abandoned her with his child, but she’s also clearly mad, and there are at least some indications that there’s more to the story than that. I’m also pleasantly surprised to see the Graymalkin Prison characters – who have been decidedly one-dimensional so far – show a bit more range, and start to distinguish themselves from Orchis a bit more. Marquez’ art has enough cartooning to carry off Sarah’s exaggerated design (I suspect some artists might struggle with her in future), but the flashbacks are nicely pitched too. Good issue.
Wolverine #2 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
WOLVERINE vol 8 #2
“Blood and Debt”
Writer: Saladin Ahmed
Artist: Martín Cóccolo
Colour artist: Bryan Valenza
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Tom Brevoort
WOLVERINE:
Wolverine has accepted Nightcrawler’s argument from the previous issue that he can’t leave the world behind, if only because the things that he’s trying to avoid will just follow him. Nonetheless, for the moment he’s still hanging around in the wilderness, presumably because Cyber is still out there. Cyber doesn’t appear in this story, but the plot is driven by the murders he committed in issue #1. Nightcrawler doesn’t appear either: presumably he was taken to hospital after the end of the previous issue.
Wolverine decides to help the new Wendigo (see below), after reminding himself that he used to be an animal and that other people helped him to regain his humanity – a familiar Wolverine trope. He takes this idea to the point of fighting off the Department H soldiers who are trying to capture the Wendigo; he claims that he’s trying to avoid a fight in which the soldiers would just get slaughtered. Despite his dislike of Department H, he regards this squad as legitimate (if underwhelming) footsoldiers and tries to do minimal harm to them – but he suggests that he also fears that drawing blood would affect his self-control too. He seems to take it as read that Department H either wouldn’t or couldn’t help the Wendigo.
Uncanny X-Men #4 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
UNCANNY X-MEN vol 6 #4
“Red Wave, part 4: The Eye of a Hurricane”
Writer: Gail Simone
Artist: David Marquez
Colourist: Matthew Wilson
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
THE X-MEN:
Rogue confirms that there’s no logical explanation for her suddenly becoming aware of Wolverine’s injuries at the end of the previous issue. The suggestion seems to be that Sarah Gaunt deliberately lured her there after learning about Haven (and the Outliers’ presence there) when she defeated Wolverine in the previous issue. For some reason Rogue decides to stay and fight Sarah alone; maybe some more compulsion is at work, or maybe she just underestimates Sarah’s power even after seeing how badly she thrashed Wolverine.
Nightcrawler is now referring to Rogue as “sister”. When asked for some good news, he replies “Krakoa yet lives”, presumably meaning the spirit of the place rather than anything literal.
Charts – 11 October 2024
In which we have Netflix to thank for avoiding another completely dead singles chart.
1. Sabrina Carpenter – “Taste”
Seven weeks. This brings her total to 19 for the year, across her three number one singles. This either matches or beats Ed Sheeran’s total from 2021 (depending on how you feel about the chart announced on 31 December that year). The only solo act to spend more weeks at number 1 in a calendar year is Frankie Laine, who was number one for most of 1953. To match him, she’d have to stay at number one for another eight weeks, which seems wildly unlikely. Sales figures suggest a lot of the top 10 is about to be hit by the downweighting rule, so we might finally be due for a clearout.
14. KSI featuring Trippie Redd – “Thick Of It”
First time we’ve seen KSI this year. His last couple of singles both entered fairly strongly and plunged in the second week, which might suggest he’s becoming a fanbase act – but this single seems decent enough. He and Trippie Redd had a single in early 2020, “Wake Up Call”, which got to number 11; Trippie Redd’s only other top 40 single was his own “Miss the Rage”, which had a single week at number 32 in 2021.
