Wolverines vol 4: “Destiny”
The fourth and final collection of Wolverines is a very, very strange comic. Granted, “final” in that sentence should come with an asterisk, for reasons I’ll get to, but Charles Soule and Ray Fawkes’ story winds up building to a bizarre anticlimax that makes the book read like an exercise in trolling the readers.
Not that trolling the readers is necessarily a bad thing, mind you. X-Statix did it all the time. But in this case, it winds up with a comic which leaves us with the intriguing puzzle of trying to distil it down to the key elements that presumably looked promising at the pitch stage. After all, Soule clearly knows how to put a story together; if he produces something as odd as this, it’s presumably by design. A misconceived design, possibly, but still a design.
Charts – 7 June 2015
A busy week on the album chart; another largely dead one for the singles. The addition of streaming data really seems to be helping to slow down the charts, for better or worse – probably better, actually. We’ll come to an example of why in a bit. First…
30. The Weeknd – “The Hills”
House to Astonish Episode 133
A busy little week of news for you, with chat about the Wicked and the Divine heading to TV, Tilda Swinton potentially joining the cast of Doctor Strange, the Lumberjanes movie landing at Fox, Stephen Amell’s dalliance with WWE, Mark Paniccia’s step up to X-Men senior group editor, the post-Secret Wars Marvel teasers, Brian Bendis and David Marquez’s Invincible Iron Man and DC’s half-page ads. We’ve also got reviews of The Covenant, Bizarro and Airboy, and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe is what it eats. All this plus Gary Oldman Logan, Rage Twix and Fear Twix, and Formula One’s legendary piranha pit crews.
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All-New X-Men vol 7 – “The Utopians”
The final volume of Brian Bendis’ All-New X-Men is a bizarre affair. If you were expecting Bendis’ final volume to build to anything in particular, you’re going to be disappointed. This grab-bag of stories feels more like somebody who’s running down the clock. If anything, these stories – and their counterparts over in Uncanny – seem to be mainly concerned with setting things up for whatever comes after Secret Wars.
What you actually get in this volume is five rather random issues – a single issue story from issue #37, the Utopians two-parter from issues #40-41 (if that can really be called a story), and sandwiched between them, parts 4 and 5 of the thirteen-part “Black Vortex” crossover. It’s hard to imagine that people reading the series in the trades will be thrilled about this, nor should they be.
Charts – 31 May 2015
This is the post-Eurovision chart, which in recent years has resulted in some oddities making one-week appearances. This year, not so much. And since the release schedules were otherwise quiet, it’s a placid week.
30. Charles Hamilton featuring Rita Ora – “New York Raining”
Charts – 24 May 2015
Storm vol 2 – “Bring the Thunder”
Storm‘s second volume, covering issues #6-11, looks to be the end of the series – it could technically be a Secret Wars hiatus, but given the sales, I wouldn’t hold your breath. This, of course, makes it only the latest in a long line of X-Men solo titles to go from launch to scrapheap within a year, an outcome which one can only assume Marvel regards as satisfactory, as otherwise they’d have stopped doing it. The thinking, I suppose, must be that at least they know they’ll get a few months of acceptable sales out of a book like this.
Like many of the characters who wind up in these solo series, Storm was never designed to fill this role; she was conceived as a member of an ensemble cast. More to the point, her roles in that cast have largely been “heart of the team”, “bonding mainstay”, and “emerging (later veteran) leader”. None of this particularly suits her to be a solo lead, since all three roles define her largely in relation to her position in the team.
Charts – 17 May 2015
Schedule? What schedule? Luckily, it’s another insanely quiet week, with a grand total of three new entries. Nothing much happening in the lower half of the chart (well, “Trap Queen” climbs nine, if that excites you), so we can skip directly to…
17. David Guetta featuring Nicki Minaj & Afrojack – “Hey Mama”
Spider-Man & The X-Men
Once Marvel decided to kill off Wolverine, there were obvious knock-on effects for the other titles that he appeared in. Of course, in most of those books, he basically stood in the background padding out the roster, so his disappearance wasn’t such a big deal. For Wolverine and the X-Men, not so much. That book was really about the X-Men’s students, not Wolverine – its name seems to reflect a conviction on Marvels part that the problem with books like Young X-Men was positioning them too explicitly as not proper X-Men titles – but still, he’s there in the title.
Throw in the fact that they only had six issues to pad out before Secret Wars – meaning that any sort of wider relaunch was going to be held off for a while to come – and you have a recipe for glaring filler. And indeed, when solicitations appeared billing Spider-Man & The X-Men #1, you could pretty much hear the collective groan across the internet.
