The X-Axis – 15 May 2011
Once again, the wise schedulers at Marvel bring us three X-Men titles in a single week (plus two second-tier X-books, one of which is a crossover, and one of which is the launch of a new direction). They certainly don’t make it easy for books to get noticed, do they? You’ve almost got to admire the way Marvel gratuitously make life harder for themselves.
Also this week, DC kicks off its own summer crossover. And John Layman and Rob Guillory present one of the more bizarre promotional tactics of recent years.
Astonishing X-Men #37 – This is only Daniel Way’s second issue, so it doesn’t bode well that fill-in art is already creeping in, with Sara Pichelli taking over from Jason Pearson towards the end of this story. Even more strangely, the book is about to start a new format where alternate issues feature chapters of a different story by a different creative team featuring a different cast. It’s not impossible that this might work – Thunderbolts and Hercules have both tried something similar in the past – but on any view it’s a very odd way of putting a comic together.
Eurovision: the winner
Well, that was one I didn’t see coming. The 2011 contest winner is an 80s-style duet from Azerbaijan – admittedly one with a decent chorus. I wouldn’t have picked this as a standout, but I suppose it didn’t have much competition in its genre, which is always a help.
The contest actually credits the act as “Ell & Nikki”, but their names are Eldar Gasimov and Nigar Jamal. Ms Jamal is an ex-pat living in London. Azerbaijan only started entering in 2008, but they’ve made the top 10 every year since, so perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised by this.
Countries like Azerbaijan take winning the Eurovision seriously, and not without good reason. They’re well aware that the rest of Europe doesn’t pay them much attention, couldn’t place them on a map, and vaguely suspects they’d be a poor choice of holiday destination. But as winners of Eurovision 2011, they get to host the 2012 show. That’s great publicity. (For an illustration of this attitude, see the excellent documentary Sounds Like Teen Spirit about the Junior Eurovision Song Contest, and the segments about the girl from Georgia. It’s on Netflix.)
Technically, they’ll put on a perfectly decent show. The real question is whether they’ll screw it up with bad publicity from their human rights record. This is, after all, a country where people are still jailed for mocking the President. There is certainly a risk that they won’t get on well with the travelling retinue of Eurovision fans. Of course, there’s also the possibility that a bit of international attention will encourage the authorities to get their act together; they’ll certainly have to relax their visa rules, which would currently prevent the Armenian entry from showing up at all.
Eurovision 2011
Saturday is Eurovision Song Contest day, when people from around the continent of Europe gather around the television to wonder what on earth people in other countries were thinking when they submitted this stuff!
I won’t be following the show live, but having seen the semis, here’s a few quick pointers for the show.
The consensus seems to be that there isn’t a stand-out obvious winner this year. My bet, though, would be on Sweden’s Eric Saade, the Scandinavian Zac Efron, which is a big electropop stomper, looked great at the semifinals, would actually sell in the real world, but manages to be Extremely Eurovision at the same time.
Charts – 8 May 2011
This won’t take long – it’s another dead week on the chart.
LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem” is number 1 for the fourth week, but it’s dodged a bullet. The highest new entry, at number 3, is “Where Them Girls At” by David Guetta featuring Flo Rida and Nicki Minaj. It could very easily have been number 1, but there was a screw-up with iTunes that cost it a couple of days sales there.
This is a rush-release after a bootleg remix of the song was leaked, so there isn’t a video yet. Supposedly somebody obtained the vocal track illegally and put out a dodgy version with a rubbish backing track that Guetta wanted to distance himself from. Whether this is true or not, the record company has certainly used it as the promotional hook for the track. There doesn’t seem to be an audio version on YouTube (of decent quality), but let’s be honest, it sounds like a lot of other recent David Guetta records, so you’re not missing much. Here’s the official trailer from Guetta’s YouTube channel, which gives you the general idea.
The X-Axis – 9 May 2011
Not only is this a day late, but last week’s X-Axis was another postal-disruption catch-up affair… so we’ve got two weeks worth of X-books to get through. And Marvel are fairly churning them out at the moment, so two weeks is a lot of X-books.
If you’re looking for reviews of things that aren’t X-books, may I direct your attention a couple of posts down, to the latest episode of House to Astonish, where Al and I are discussing Moon Knight, Gladstone’s School for World Conquerors, and Spontaneous. But for now – X-books, X-books, X-books!
Age of X: Universe #2 – I can appreciate the desire to get maximum mileage out of Mike Carey’s “Age of X” storyline from X-Men: Legacy and New Mutants. Marvel certainly put a lot into promoting it. But if ever a story was unsuited for spin-offs, “Age of X” is it. The central conceit of the storyline is that at first it looks like just another dystopian alternate Earth, with the X-Men holed up in a citadel fighting meaningless battles, only for it to turn out that there’s literally nothing out there beyond the fortress itself. And now, Marvel brings us Age of X: Universe – a two issue miniseries about what’s beyond the fortress.
Now, yes, technically, it’s what the X-Men think is beyond the fortress – but even that is a bad idea, because in “Age of X” proper, the villains are intentionally generic, and that’s a plot point. Theoretically, Si Spurrier and Khoi Pham’s story is meant to be explaining where the “force walls” idea came from, but the whole set-up leaves them wrestling with an impossible task, and by this point in the crossover we know that it doesn’t matter anyway. They end up with an over-the-top “dark” Avengers team trying to assassinate Magneto, only for Captain America to learn an Important Moral Lesson in the form of a lecture about tolerance. Even if you disregard the context of the wider crossover, it’s just a rather generic dystopia story.
Housekeeping
Reviews tomorrow night, I think. Way too much other stuff keeping me away from it today…
House To Astonish Episode 59
We’re back on schedule with a brand new podcast, with talk about Free Comic Book Day, the release of the Thor movie and Marvel’s future filmic plans, Rise of Arsenal‘s surprising PRISM award win, Mike Cotton leaving Wizard, Tokyopop’s rights issues and the Ultimate line relaunch. We’ve also got reviews of Moon Knight, Gladstone’s School for World Conquerors and Spontaneous, and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe hits a high note. All this plus The Fastest and the Furiousestest, Kate Moss’s crimefighting career and the power of a turban.
The episode is here, or here on Mixcloud – let us know what you think, either in the comments below, on Twitter, via email or on our Facebook fan page.
Charts – 1 May 2011
After last week’s deluge of new entries, it’s a relatively quiet week this time round. Lots of climbers, not much in the way of new songs.
LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem” stays at number 1 for a third week, making it the second single of the year to do so. The biggest challenge comes from Bruno Mars’ “The Lazy Song”, which climbs from 15 to 2 in its second week. But as of right now, LMFAO are still number 1 on iTunes (with no new releases anywhere in sight), so they could well manage a fourth week to match Adele. Also climbing in the top ten, albeit only by one place, are Chris Brown at 4, Snoop Dogg at 5 and Katy Perry at 6.
This week’s highest new entry is “Guilt” by Nero at number 8, which is another dubstep crossover record. This is at the more commercial end of the spectrum, given the radio-friendly vocal – many purists apparently prefer their dubstep completely instrumental, I hear – but it’s a great piece of production, with the slow build to a ridiculously overpowered bassline about a minute in.
The X-Axis – Catch-up #2
Thanks to the nuptials of our beloved overlord, it’s a holiday weekend here in the UK. And that means disruption to the postal service, which in turn means that I haven’t got this week’s comics yet. Not that I’m particularly bothered about that, to be honest – I’m still catching up on the books that came out while I was on holiday.
In the meantime, let’s catch up some other new books that started while I was away. We already talked about Butcher Baker, Journey into Mystery and Super Dinosaur on the last podcast, but here are a few other new titles from the last few weeks:
Dark Horse Presents #1 – The direct market has never been entirely sympathetic to anthology titles, but the original Dark Horse Presents was an exception to the rule, which managed to carve out a space for itself for 157 issues. Admittedly, this was a period when the market was also strong enough to support Marvel Comics Presents, of which the less said the better, but DHP had a fairly impressive track record of big name contributors producing high profile work like “Sin City” and “Hellboy”.
WWE Extreme Rules
Since I was out of the country for Wrestlemania, it’s been a couple of months since I’ve written one of these PPV previews. And we return with a show that is not exactly a classic.
“Extreme Rules” is a lame duck show for several reasons. First, it’s the show that has to follow Wrestlemania. It’s the time of year when the company goes into a rebuilding phase, having completed its major storylines and not given much thought to the new ones. Often that results in a show full of desultory rematches to tie up loose ends.
Second, this is the show that started life as “ECW One Night Stand”, and then went on to become a themed show full of (supposedly) ultra-violent gimmick matches. But the WWE has moved away from that sort of thing in recent years, partly in order to keep their TV PG-rated (which goes down well with the sponsors and toy license holders), and partly because the long-term injury rate to wrestlers just wasn’t worth it. So “Extreme Rules” has drifted some way from its roots; it’s still a show full of gimmick matches, but not necessarily ones that are particularly out of the ordinary.
