Wolverine #42 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
WOLVERINE vol 7 #42
“Sabretooth War, part 2”
Writers: Benjamin Percy & Victor LaValle
Penciller: Cory Smith
Inker: Oren Junior
Colourist: Alex Sinclair
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER / PAGE 1. Sabretooth, with Wolverine’s head on a platter. Don’t worry, kids, it’s symbolic.
This one won’t take long.
PAGES 2-5. The Sabretooths capture Wolverine, and Sabretooth Prime has him strung up.
This continues directly from the end of the previous issue.
“I made a promise. Before you all tossed me in that Pit.” In House of X #6, Sabretooth’s last line before being dragged into the Pit was: “You think I’m just going to take this? I’m making a list and now you’re on it, along with your kids. And then their kids. I will make your line extinct.” He makes fairly generic threats to the Council throughout the scene, but nothing in this scene relates specifically to what he said in House of X #6.
Omega Red‘s tentacles are normally carbonadium, not adamantium. For most practical purposes, nothing turns on this.
House to Astonish Episode 206
Merry Chri… er… Happy New Y… um… Happy February? Welcome to the joint 15th anniversary and end of year wrap-up episode of House to Astonish, as Paul and I chat through the news of the past few weeks, including Blood Hunt‘s polybagged “Red Band” editions, Jason Aaron taking on the relaunched Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the 40th anniversary of Usagi Yojimbo and Criminal coming to Amazon Prime. On top of that, we have the 2023 Homies awards, where we (and you) give our picks of the best things we read last year, and the complete audio of the SILENCE! To Astonish panel from November 2023’s Thought Bubble festival. All this plus Alan Sugar action figures, being turned evil by a bop on the head with a bowling ball, and every comic character who is legally not Captain Marvel. There’s almost too much here! Don’t eat it all at once!
The episode is available here, or through the embedded player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments below, on Bluesky or (I guess) Twitter, via email or on our Facebook fan page. And look, if you don’t already know how good you would look in a House to Astonish t-shirt, I don’t know how much more I can emphasise that fact.
Daredevil Villains #13: The Gladiator
DAREDEVIL #18 (July 1966)
“There Shall Come a Gladiator!”
Writer, editor: Stan Lee
Penciller: John Romita
Inker: Frank Giacoia
Letterer: Sam Rosen
Colourist: not credited
Early Daredevil doesn’t have a large supporting cast. It’s just Foggy Nelson and Karen Page. And the heart of the book is the romantic triangle between Foggy, Karen and Matt.
Today, Karen has been out of the picture for many, many years. She was killed off in the late 1990s. Foggy’s established role for decades now has been the solid, dependable, long-suffering best friend who’s stood by Matt all through the years. And to be fair, that’s basically how he was set up in issue #1.
But in the early Silver Age, Foggy Nelson’s main function is to get in the way of Matt and Karen. Foggy loves Karen. Karen loves Matt, and she’s quite keen on Daredevil too. Matt loves Karen, but thinks she just feels sorry for him because he’s blind. Matt thinks Foggy is better husband material for her, and she’s willing to entertain him as a fallback option.
This role isn’t a promising starting point for Foggy. To make matters worse, he spends a lot of time in the early issues bitching about Daredevil whenever Karen mentions him, or even privately hoping that Matt doesn’t get his sight back, because it’d ruin his chances with Karen. Foggy does at least feel guilty about such things crossing his mind. From time to time he gets to show some decency and integrity. But fundamentally he’s a blocking character, not a supportive rock.
Charts – 26 January 2024
It’s the end of January and the charts are now firmly back in their normal rhythm.
1. Noah Kahan – “Stick Season”
Four weeks, and having seen off Ariana Grande, he seems to be settling in for the long haul. This week’s biggest challenge, for example, comes from…
5. Noah Kahan & Sam Fender – “Homesick”
This is the latest in a series of reissues of Kahan’s album tracks with guest verses by other singers – basically the equivalent of the single remix with the guest rapper. This time it’s Sam Fender, who understandably has completely different lyrics for his verse because he plainly did not grow up in New England. They didn’t change the chorus, though, making him a weird fit.
The X-Axis – w/c 22 January 2024
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #123. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Phillip Sevy & Yen Nitro. Another relatively quiet week, then. And this is a pace of X-output that I’d be very happy with. Anyway, over at X-Men Unlimited, the plot moves beyond simple punching into… well, um, stuff. We’re told that Orchis aren’t just kidnapping mutants on the reservation. They’re doing it everywhere. Well… yes, isn’t that the whole premise of Fall of X? Aren’t Orchis meant to be arresting every mutant in sight? I guess it’s the involvement of the Externals that’s supposed to be a hook, but the story never actually explains why we should care about them. They don’t seem to be doing anything materially different from what Orchis was doing anyway. It’s not like anyone’s been holding their breath all these years for a Crule and Gideon story. The reservation setting previously gave this some sort of focus, but now we’ve got Shatterstar, and El Aguila (a Spanish mutant superhero from Power Man and Iron Fist), and … Betsy is still active as Captain Britain, despite Orchis? What? And she’s doing media interviews? At this point, I’m just lost – I don’t understand at all what this story is trying to do.
X-FORCE #48. (Annotations here.) The Beast storyline kicks up a gear, and not in the way I expected. When they mentioned that Beast had erased all his back-ups after the period when he was a shiny happy bouncing character, it seemed pretty obvious that the end game was to resurrect him with the older personality. Then the next writer could do a story where Hank comes to terms with what he did, but no longer remembers and can’t even understand wanting to do. But instead, the bouncing Beast is brought back as a clone, and that’s a much more interesting way of doing it. I still suspect we’re going to wind up killing them both off and resurrecting them in one body, or something of that sort, but the idea of leaving Hank Classic as a copy actually feels like a better way of getting a viable Beast back into circulation – it’s less of a reset button because this Beast genuinely didn’t do anything from the last few years. I kind of hope they just stick with that. After all, they replaced Kraven the Hunter with a clone, didn’t they?
Resurrection of Magneto #1 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
RESURRECTION OF MAGNETO #1
“The Lightning Path”
Writer: Al Ewing
Artist: Luciano Vecchio
Colour artist: David Curiel
Letterer: Joe Sabino
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Jordan D White
RESURRECTION OF MAGNETO is a four-issue miniseries, which effectively replaces X-Men Red. It’s not exactly a renamed X-Men Red arc – as we’ll see, it’s a rather different book – but it does feature Storm and it continues the plot thread of Magneto’s death.
COVER / PAGE 1. Storm, with Magneto in the background.
PAGE 2. Storm’s dream about Magneto.
Storm confirms on page 19 that this is what she sees in her dream, and tells us fairly directly what she singles out as important: “He was standing on a strange shore, readying himself to enter a ruined city – his face turned away but in torment. It was more than a dream. It was a distress call.” She also notes the five helmets at his feet. We see a version of this same page with Storm on page 29.
The city, river and bridge are the same in both images, as are the positions of the helmets (which are replaced in Storm’s version by five versions of her headdress). Magneto has three identical versions of his traditional helmet, together with the less common black and white versions. As in Storm’s picture, the three helmets on the left appear to have pools of blood next to them, although in Magneto’s case, one of the pools is green. All of Storm’s are red.
X-Force #48 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-FORCE vol 6 #48
“Game Recognizes Game”
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Robert Gill
Colour artist: GURU-eFX
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER / PAGE 1: Beast in a forest, leaping towards someone who’s looking at him through the scope of a sniper rifle. Quite a loose interpretation of the actual story.
The first half of this issue is pretty much self explanatory, by the way.
PAGES 2-4. The Beast breaks into the Greenhouse.
X-Force set up their new Greenhouse base last issue, and Beast showed up at the end of the issue with his gun. From the look of it, whatever it is that he fires at Omega Red is meant to incapacitate.
That’s Aurora and Northstar on page 4, who also arrived here last issue.
PAGE 5. Recap and credits. We’re expressly told that this comes before the current Wolverine storyline, and also before Fall of the House of X and Rise of the Powers of X – all of which was clear from the last issue of Wolverine anyway, but there’s no harm in making it clear in this book too.
Daredevil Villains #12: The Masked Marauder
DAREDEVIL #16-17 (May & June 1966)
“Enter… Spider-Man” / “None Are So Blind”
Writer, editor: Stan Lee
Penciller: John Romita
Inker: Frank Giacoia
Letterers: Artie Simek (#16) & Sam Rosen (#17)
Colourist: not credited
Sixteen issues into the series, Daredevil has had a steady stream of bad guys. But only the Ox has appeared more than once. That changes here, as this two-parter introduces Daredevil’s first recurring enemy. He’s the main villain through to issue #27 – and after that, he never appears in the series again. Meet the Masked Marauder, a villain exactly as generic as he sounds.
When we first meet the Masked Marauder, he’s already an established supervillain. He wears a purple jumpsuit and a green cape, the standard colours of Silver Age villainy in the Marvel Universe. He has a gang of thugs who do all the hard work for him. They wear purple too. He is, as advertised, Masked. If we’re being honest about it, though, he doesn’t do much Marauding. He’s a high-tech master planner, who creates elaborate devices and conceals them in trucks. But the Masked Planner didn’t have the same ring to it.
In this story, the Masked Marauder’s unspectacular nature isn’t such a problem. The real focus is Spider-Man. He and Daredevil don’t get on, they fight, they team up – you know the drill. It’s Spider-Man that the kids want to see, and it’s Spider-Man that they get.
Charts – 19 January 2024
Well, I didn’t see this coming.
1. Noah Kahan – “Stick Season”
That’s three weeks at number one, and a total of 13 weeks in the top 10. Consecutive weeks, even during the Christmas deluge. This is a very big hit, but it’s been around for a while now, so you’d expect it to be easy prey for a big new release by now. Nope.
2. Ariana Grande – “Yes, And?”
This is the lead single from her next album. I must admit I expected her to take number 1 almost by default, particularly since her last album was in 2020. Apparently we’re doing Madonna homage now, and why not? It’s probably due for a revival. I’m not wild about the song, though – lyrically, it’s pretty hamfisted.
The X-Axis – w/c 15 January 2024
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #122. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Nick Roche & Yen Nitro. Well, this is certainly a slimmed-down phase for the core X-titles, which is no bad thing in itself. This is the second part of the Thunderbird arc and… well, it’s mostly just random fighting, honestly. The Proudstar brothers assume that Crule is working with Orchis so they attack him. Crule is apparently there for his own reasons, which is something to do with stealing the refugee mutants himself, but there’s nothing to flesh that out. And if you want people to take Crule seriously, that does need some legwork, because nobody cared about this bozo even back in the early 90s. Nick Roche draws some nice punching, but it really is one-dimensional as a story.
X-MEN #30. (Annotations here.) Oh boy.
So issue #29 ends with a cliffhanger where the other X-Men get back from Latveria, find the base trashed and covered in blood, and Synch and Talon missing. The next issue caption says we’ll find out in this issue where they are. And… this issue has nothing to do with that at all, unless I’m missing something fundamental. After an opening scene with Scott (which is pretty good, and the best thing in the issue) it shifts to a completely unrelated story about how to distribute the cure to the killswitch that Orchis placed in Krakoan medicines… which I don’t think has been mentioned at all until now, but somehow involves Spider-Man and Norman Osborn. Aside from a couple of pages of subplot with Firestar, what we then get is Synch and Talon visiting the High Evolutionary – and the exercise of getting to him is compressed to a single page – to recover a device last mentioned in issue #3. The entire confrontation lasts four pages, and at the end it turns out that Talon died and Synch is keeping her alive in his mind.
