Charts – 25 August 2023
As anticipated, Billie Eilish only manages a single week – which means she’s now had two 1-week number ones. We’re still in Barbie territory, though.
1. Dua Lipa – “Dance the Night (From Barbie the Album)”
Climbing to number 1 in its thirteenth week on chart. This has grown on me somewhat, but it still strikes me as something of a generic Dua Lipa track. It’s her fourth number 1, following “New Rules” (2017), “One Kiss” (2018) and “Cold Heart” (2021). The Billie Eilish track is at number 2, and we’ve also got “Barbie World” at 9, “Speed Drive” at 15, and “I’m Just Ken” at 22. Overall, the Barbie wave seems to have crested, and given how long it took Dua Lipa to get here in the first place, I suspect she won’t be here too long.
In an absurdly quiet week for new singles, there is just a single new entry on the top 40. There’s also a slightly baffling re-entry for “Dog Days are Over” by Florence & The Machine at number 27, which appears to have had its downweighting reset on the very tenuous basis that it’s in a film soundtrack on Disney+ – but it already reached number 21 earlier in the year.
But what about that new entry? Ah. Well.
The X-Axis – w/c 21 August 2023
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #101. By Steve Foxe, Stephanie Williams, Noemi Vettori, Pete Pantazis & Travis Lanham. Somewhat bizarrely billed as part of “the countdown to Fall of X“, which of course is well underway. The idea seems to be to do a spotlight story on each of the characters from the abortive X-Men team, and rely on the Gala issue to add some poignancy, but what it amounts to in practice is “Sam visits his home town and helps out with a flood because he’s nice.” It’s perfectly competent but I just don’t understand what the point is.
X-FORCE #43. (Annotations here.) Unlike most of the “Fall of X” books, we’re jumping back to the Gala itself here, as Colossus’ storyline finally comes to a head. Kind of. The basic idea is that Colossus was meant to be helping Mikhail Rasputin to mount his own completely unrelated attack on the Gala, only for Orchis to charge in first and make everything that Mikhail’s spent years working on utterly pointless. It’s hard to figure out whether this was always the plan or whether it’s an actual change of direction in response to the Gala, but it works surprisingly well – Mikhail’s plan going off the rails and leading to a bemused X-Force winding up on his doorstep is a more interesting direction than either having Mikhail sign up with Orchis, or having him duplicate their scheme. I’m less convinced about just plugging Kid Omega back into his old role, and Percy seems to have no real role for Omega Red – though he is Russian, and he does have a history with Mikhail, so maybe that’ll come to the fore in the next couple of issues. X-Force can be hit and miss but on the whole I’m quite liking this.
Realm of X #1 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
REALM OF X #1
“The White Witch”
Writer: Torunn Grønbekk
Artist: Diógenes Neves
Colour artist: Rain Beredo
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Lauren Amaro
REALM OF X is a 4-issue miniseries tying in to “Fall of X”… though possibly only in the sense that “Fall of X” provides the occasion for the story to happen in the first place.
COVER / PAGE 1: Mirage and Magik charge into action through a Krakoan gate. More of a misdirection cover for the solicits than anything much to do with the contents.
PAGES 2-10. The cast wake up in Vanaheim in the middle of a fight.
The name characters, and a bunch of random generics, evidently wound up here after being marched through the Krakoan gates by Professor X in X-Men: Hellfire Gala 2023. This is plainly not the alien landscape where we saw Forge in X-Men #25, or the featureless desert where Exodus and co wound up in Immortal X-Men #14 – despite Exodus claiming in that issue that the “whole population of Krakoa” was there. To be fair, they were a much larger group than the one we see here, so they may well be the vast majority of the Krakoan population; this issue’s recap page refers to “a handful of other mutants” accompanying the name characters, and Dani later mentions a “dozen” being wounded. We still don’t know why the mutants have been scattered in this way, although some sort of scheme involving Destiny and Manifold seems a realistic possibility.
Jean Grey #1 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
JEAN GREY vol 2 #1
“Mind Maze”
Writer: Louise Simonson
Artist: Bernard Chang
Colour artist: Marcelo Maiolo
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Design: Jay Bowen
Editor: Sarah Brunstad
JEAN GREY. I’d completely forgotten that there was a volume 1, to be honest. It was an ongoing series about the time-travelling Silver Age version of the character, which ran for 11 issues between 2017-2018. I dimly remember it being something to do with her touring the Marvel Universe to prepare herself to become Phoenix. Anyway, it’s nothing we need concern ourselves with.
COVER / PAGE 1. Symbolic image of the face of Jean Grey over the sea, I guess. Lovely image. Nice logo, too.
PAGE 2. John Romita tribute page.
PAGE 3. Jean wonders where she is.
Jean was killed while fighting Orchis in X-Men: Hellfire Gala 2023. She wasn’t wearing the costume shown here, which is her standard present-day costume from X-Men. The idea seems to be that Jean’s consciousness has somehow survived the death of her body, perhaps by decamping to the astral plane, and a disoriented Jean is experiencing visions as she tries to figure out how she got to this point. With the possible exception of this page, nothing in this issue takes place in the “real” world.
“I’m dying… Been there … so many times before.” The most obvious examples are X-Men #100-101 (1976), where she’s dying from cosmic radiation exposure until Phoenix comes along to save her; and New X-Men #150 (2004) where she’s killed by Xorn/Magneto. Jean also has the memories of the deaths of her duplicates Phoenix in X-Men #137 (1980) and Madelyne Pryor in X-Factor #38 (1989). And of course she’s been resurrected during the Krakoan era too.
X-Force #43 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-FORCE vol 6 #43
“Friend, Farmer, Soldier, Spy”
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Robert Gill
Colour artist: GURU-eFX
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER / PAGE 1. X-Force in action, with Colossus in the leadership role. For some reason the group includes Domino but not Sage.
PAGE 2. John Romita tribute.
PAGES 3-4. Colossus prepares for the Hellfire Gala.
We’re back on the night of X-Men: Hellfire Gala 2023, before all the unpleasantness happens. Unlike the other X-books, this one doesn’t jump forward ten weeks to catch up with Fall of X – it’s a belated Gala tie-in.
Again, there’s some ambiguity about whether the narrator here is meant to be Chronicler (or at least reflecting the inner voice that Chronicler is writing for Colossus). The particularly odd moment is on page 3 panel 4, when Colossus briefly lashes out in frustration – Immortal X-Men #12 spent a whole issue hammering the idea that Colossus is locked in, after all. Is Chronicler acting it out to be true to his understanding of the character? Or does Chronicler just let his guard down for a moment?
Charts – 18 August 2023
At long last, “Sprinter” by Dave & Central Cee is comfortably past its peak and gets hit by the downweighting rule – with the result that it drops straight to number 10 after a ten-week run at number 1. Thanks to that, our new number one is…
1. Billie Eilish – “What Was I Made For”
Not by a huge margin, admittedly. Dua Lipa is number 2, and the midweeks have her taking the slot next week. But it’s Billie Eilish’s second number one, and a very good record, too. The other one was “No Time To Die”, which had a single week at number one in 2020, so she’s in the odd position that her two biggest hits both come from film soundtracks. This one is more characteristic of her normal work, though. And hey, she’s had another 7 top ten hits to go with them both.
House to Astonish Episode 204
What’s that coming over the hill, is it a podcast, is it a podcast? Yes, it is, and it’s also a music reference to a song that came out in 2006, so that’s some added value for you there at no additional cost. This time round, Paul and I are wishing Jeff Smith well in his recovery from cardiac arrest, and have chat for you about Tom Brevoot’s intra-Marvel move, the upcoming Sentry, Speed Force and Spider-Man: Reign 2 series, and the strange case of the possibly disappearing IDW Originals line. We’ve also got reviews of Uncanny Avengers and The Cull, and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe is a motley selection. All this plus the length of a day on Mars, a bit of unexpected format-breaking and a dog with its head stuck in a basketball.
The podcast is here, or available via the embedded player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments below, on Twitter (we are still calling it Twitter), Bluesky, via email or on our Facebook fan page, and look, if you’ve been holding off getting a House to Astonish t-shirt, you might want to do it now, not saying they’re going to be taken off Redbubble soon or anything, but you never know (they are not going to be taken off Redbubble soon but you should definitely get one anyway).
The X-Axis – w/c 14 August 2023
This is the most absurdly busy week we’ve had in ages. And alarmingly, this isn’t due to slippage – this is how it was solicited. That’s not a good thing, and hopefully it won’t be repeated any time soon.
Anyway, I’ve done annotations for four of these books already, so we’ll run through things quickly.
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #100. By Steve Foxe, Stephanie Williams, Noemi Vettori, Pete Pantazis & Travis Lanham. There’s also a thing called X-Men: Hellfire Gala Last Rites Infinity Comic #1 added to X-Men Unlimited this week, but that’s just an Infinite Comics edition of the trailer strips with X-Men election candidates, so we’ll pass that by. This is an anniversary issue, and rather than launch a major storyline, it’s more of a farewell to the Krakoan era. Prodigy learns that resurrected mutants need more than just the bare facts of what’s happened in their absence, and so starts collating some more emotional memories that can help people to understand better. It’s a perfectly solid idea, decently executed in a montage sequence, and a nice alternative to the more obvious way of doing an anniversary issue.
X-MEN: RED #14. (Annotations here.) We skip forward a few months to join the Arakki civil war in mid flow. And for the most part this is scene-setting for what that looks like. It’s the points of detail that elevate it above that, and Sunspot’s recap of Hellfire Gala works as an emotional sequence even if you’ve already read the original. I’m still not especially interested in Genesis, but I’m not entirely sure the story is either – she’s very much an off panel figurehead for the enemy forces, and a foil for the people we are interested in. X-Men: Red is somewhat detached from the rest of “Fall of X”, but since that means it’s continuing to pursue its own story, that’s not a bad thing.
Alpha Flight #1 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
ALPHA FLIGHT vol 5 #1
Writer: Ed Brisson
Artist: Scott Godliewski
Colour artist: Matt Milla
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Mark Basso
ALPHA FLIGHT. Canada’s government-sponsored superhero team – an X-Men spin-off in the sense that they debuted in X-Men but not normally viewed as X-characters. I wouldn’t normally do Alpha Flight, and I might not do the whole of this run, but it is coming from the X-office, and it is a “Fall of X” tie-in, so let’s at least do the first issue.
COVER / PAGE 1. The official Alpha Flight team in the foreground, with the rest of the cast looming in the background, foreshadowing the twist. The logo is the one used on Alpha Flight vol 1 #1-17, though with the addition of a distressed background to fit the Fall of X theming.
Uncanny Avengers #1 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
UNCANNY AVENGERS vol 4 #1
“Truth & Justice”
Writer (main story): Gerry Duggan
Writer (G.O.D.S. page): Jonathan Hickman
Artist: Javier Garrón
Colour artist: Morry Hollowell
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Tom Brevoort
UNCANNY AVENGERS. I don’t normally do Avengers books – and this is edited by the Avengers office – but it’s a five-issue Fall of X tie-in complete with the X-books design and written by Gerry Duggan. Despite the title, it’s really a second X-Men book with Captain America guest starring.
This is the fourth run of Uncanny Avengers. The other three involved mash-up Avengers and X-Men team (the “Avengers Unity Squad”) designed to promote human-mutant relations. Duggan wrote volume 3 for 23 issues, and Captain America, Deadpool and Rogue were all featured prominently in that run.
COVER / PAGE 1. Pin-up of the team.
PAGES 2-3. Tribute to John Romita.
PAGES 4-6. Flashback: Dr Stasis and M.O.D.O.K. revive a mystery man.
This scene seems to be a parody of Captain America emerging from stasis and being told about how much things have changed, except this guy is being informed that it’s a dystopian future that needs to be reversed. The obvious implication is that the man being revived here is the new Captain Krakoa who debuted in Free Comic Book Day 2023: Avengers / X-Men. and who appears later in this issue.
