House to Astonish – Live!
It’s been a long time coming, but here it is – House to Astonish Live, recorded yesterday at the City Cafe, Edinburgh before a live audience. Paul and I are discussing the departures at Marvel Studios, the fallout from the Graphic.ly closure, the cancellation of Iron Patriot and the upcoming Avengers event. We’ve also got an interview with a comics legend, a live reenactment of scenes from a truly terrible recent comic and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook is coming soon. All this plus an incident with jam, the Windows 7 approach to continuity patches, an octopus with spears for arms and a small pea.
Between ticket sales and direct donations, we’ve now raised just over £700 for Alzheimer Scotland. Thanks so much to everyone who came along – if you’d like to help us push that even higher, please do consider donating at our donation page.
In the meantime, the podcast is here, or here on Mixcloud, or available through the embedded player below. Let us know what you think, either in the comments below, via email, on Twitter or at our Facebook fan page. Don’t forget too that you can get our fab and funky shirts at our Redbubble store.
Charts – 25 May 2014
It’s getting on in the week, better get this one finished while it’s still vaguely topical…
40. Zedd (featuring Foxes) – “Clarity”
This is a re-entry, having originally got to 29 at the start of last year, but I’m honestly not sure why it’s back. Foxes’ current single “Holding Onto Heaven” drops to 39 this week.
38. Nicki Minaj – “Pills and Potions”
This was an unpromoted midweek release, and it’ll be climbing once it’s had a full week on sale. It’s the lead single from her upcoming album “The Pink Print”, and it’s a curious choice – largely a mid-pace piano ballad.
35. Little Mix – “Salute”
“No Goats, No Glory” – Amazing X-Men #7
I’m running late this week, but hey, this one shouldn’t take long. Amazing X-Men #7 is notable more for what it isn’t than for what it contains. What it isn’t, is a comic that particularly matters – however you choose to define “matters” – because it’s a throwaway fill-in issue.
Firestar and Iceman are out shopping when they bump into an alien baby who’s being chased down by Spider-Man, who needs to retrieve him in order to get back a goat mascot who’s been abducted by aliens. (For reasons not shared with posterity, Spider-Man was looking after the goat.)
Chikara S14.1: You Only Live Twice
We’ve done a couple of previous posts about the Chikara indie promotion, which spent much of 2013 pursuing a remarkably audacious storyline in which the company itself closed down, and storylines were carried on through a mixture of micro-indie shows, social media, ARGs, and even a film. With the company now about to run its first official show in almost a year, this seems a good time to check in on them.
For those of you who read the WWE posts, Chikara are an interesting contrast. For one thing, there’s no equivalent of Raw or Smackdown; promotion between shows consists primarily of promos and recap videos on YouTube (and, in the past, blog posts on their website; no doubt we’ll see more of that in future). This changes the dynamic quite a bit; it means there’s more incentive for every match to count (both in storyline and in-ring terms), and no need to cycle through matches to fill hours of weekly television.
Charts – 18 May 2014
It’s Eurovision time, as the spillover from last Saturday’s song contest feeds its way through to the chart. If you’re wondering why none of the Eurovision songs were on last week’s chart, well, most of it is because there were only a few hours of sales between the contest itself and the cut-of period for sales. But another factor is that iTunes apparently failed to report sales data for last Saturday due to a technical glitch. The chart compilers’ protocol when a retailer fails to report properly is to extrapolate from its sales earlier in the week, but you can’t do that with records that only start selling on Saturday night, so… that’s a bunch of sales lost in the ether.
Inevitably, the Eurovision songs were doing quite well in the midweeks, but pretty much nobody was still buying them by Wednesday, so their end of week performance is rather more muted. Meanwhile, a couple of midweek releases shake things up a bit further…
40. Sanna Nielsen – “Undo”
X-Men: No More Humans
Marvel’s new line of graphic novels is an odd beast. After all, everything gets collected in trade paperback format anyway. So what makes a graphic novel different from a trade paperback collection of a four or five issue arc?
At one time, the answer would have been that a graphic novel was liberated from the requirements of monthly serialisation. Collections of single issues from the 1980s or even 1990s read like collections of single issues, dutifully pausing near around page 3 or 4 of every story to recap the plot for new readers. But writing for the trade has become so commonplace, and the traditional aspects of serial storytelling have become so unfashionable, that the differences have largely been eroded.
House to Astonish Episode 126
It’s our last episode before our big live show (which, in case you’ve missed our many, many reminders about it, is on May 31 at the City Cafe in Edinburgh, with tickets on sale now – at this link – for £12 and granting you entry to the live podcast, a buffet and the House to Astonish Comics Quiz, where there are bags of prizes to be won). We’re talking about Superior Spider-Man issues 32 and 33, Steven T Seagle and Mark Dos Santos’s Imperial, the new movie Batman costume, the trailers for Constantine and The Flash and the general state of the comics TV union for 2014/2015. We’ve also got reviews of Original Sin, Justice League United and United States of Murder, Inc. and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe has a brave new world to sell you. All this plus Josie and the Pussybats, a human turducken and Doris the tealady’s cybernetic leg.
You can find the podcast here, or here on Mixcloud, or available via the embedded player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments, via email, on Twitter or via our Facebook fan page. Don’t forget too that our beautiful Redbubble store has all the House to Astonish clothing you could ever require, plus some besides.
Charts – 11 May 2014
“That One Fella, He’s Trouble” – Savage Wolverine #18
With this issue, Savage Wolverine drops its format of rotating creative teams with each arc, and brings us a standalone story by Jen Van Meter and Rich Ellis. Van Meter’s a name I haven’t heard in quite some time – she’s best known for the Oni series Hopeless Savages, but that was a good while back.
Savage stories don’t have to take place in present day continuity, which gives the freedom to do stories set throughout the twentieth century. That’s clearly something that attracts a lot of writers, and here we have another historical story. It’s 1963, and there’s tension in a small town because the local bigots want to stop some people who aren’t white from going to a rally. Logan is passing through and sorts it out. Boil it down and that’s basically the plot.
Origin II
The first Wolverine Origin miniseries came out some twelve years ago, and time has not greatly altered my feelings about it. In a nutshell, the nicest thing to be said about Origin is that it can be easily ignored, because although it ads some pointless complications to the character’s history, none of them seem to matter sufficiently to require mentioning again. But of course, the very fact that it can be so easily ignored is testament to how ineffective it is as an origin story.
Kieron Gillen and Adam Kubert’s Origin II gestures towards keeping the tone of the earlier series, but fortunately doesn’t have to mess about with country house costume drama. It also comes somewhat closer to functioning as an actual origin story, in as much as it takes Logan from an outcast living with wolves in the wilderness through to a status somewhat closer to the way we know him today.
