The X-Axis – 27 February 2011
If you haven’t listened to our latest podcast yet, then it’s just one post below. Reviews include Iron Man 2.0, Mission and Superman/Batman, so if you want more on those, download the show.
Meanwhile, it’s another classic week of scheduling from Marvel Comics. From time to time Marvel claim that they try to avoid having everything ship at the same time. Well, something’s clearly gone badly wrong this week, because Marvel have seen fit to ship all four ongoing X-Men titles in the same week – Astonishing X-Men #36, Uncanny X-Men #533, X-Men #8 and X-Men: Legacy #245 – plus the anthology title X-Men: To Serve and Protect #4. And that’s not all! The Legacy issue is chapter 1 of the “Age of X” crossover – and in the same week, Marvel have also shipped the second chapter, from New Mutants #22.
Nobody in their right mind could possibly have thought that this was a good idea, and my first thought was that this was some sort of rush to get material out for the February accounting period. But no – looking at the solicitations, they really did intend most of this material to come out in the same week. The exceptions are Serve and Protect #4 and Astonishing #36, both of which were meant to ship in the first week of February. (Yes, that’s right – keeping up the title’s proud tradition of non-existence, the new creative team are three weeks late with their first issue.)
House To Astonish Episode 55
We’re back! After a month away, we’ve got a lot of news to catch up on, beginning with a few words on the sad loss of Dwayne McDuffie. We’ve also got some chat on Marvel’s plans for Pixar and the Big Shots initiative, Boom! Kids’ rebranding and future, Telltale’s comics games, the Powers TV show, the Spider-Man musical being reworked and DC cancelling the First Wave line, as well as reviews of The Mission, Superman/Batman and Iron Man 2.0. All this plus swimming the Atlantic with your voice, generic bootleg armoured super-heroes and a villainous Every Which Way But Loose.
The podcast is here, or on Mixcloud here. Let us know what you think, either in the comments below, on Twitter, via email or on our Facebook fan page.
Charts – 20 February 2011
Last week, Lady Gaga released a single on Friday afternoon, it entered at number 3 on the strength of a day and a half’s sales, and I confidently predicted that it would climb to the top in its first full week of release. Well, so much for that idea.
As it turns out, what seems to have happened is that the hardcore Lady Gaga fans – of whom there are apparently quite a lot – ran out and bought the single in the first few days, but it’s taking longer to catch on with a wider audience. This shouldn’t actually have come as a surprise, since she has a track record of releasing singles that took a while to catch on before climbing to the top. Perhaps “Born This Way” will be the same. (I wasn’t sold on it at first, but it’s certainly growing on me.)
Regardless, the upshot is that although she was number one in the Wednesday midweek chart, Lady Gaga didn’t sustain her sales over the course of a second week, and Jessie J’s “Price Tag” outsold her again. At time of writing, “Born This Way” has dropped to 9 on the iTunes chart, while “Price Tag” continues to sell.
But neither of those singles is this week’s number one. Unexpectedly, this is.
The X-Axis – 20 February 2011
Another heavy week for X-books – six of them this time round, even without any of the regular X-Men titles coming out. There’s some decent stuff in there, though. Couple of new launches as well. And since I’m starting this rather later in the evening than I’d normally like to, I’ll get straight to it…
Astonishing X-Men: Xenogenesis #5 – My god, it’s finished! It’s actually finished! The first issue of this series came out last May, if you’re wondering. I’ll do a separate post looking back on the whole series, and I’m pretty confident that it’ll read a lot better in one go. The bottom line is that this was a pretty simple, straightforward, direct story, and one that’s far, far too slight to survive being stretched out over nine months. Frankly I expect it’ll still feel overextended as a graphic novel – in terms purely of story content, it could fit into an annual perfectly happily – but at least it’ll be intact. Of course, and Emma Frost gets a couple of nice moments, but the story is utterly unsuited for the serial format in which Marvel have shipped it and in which the majority of people will probably read it.
Elimination Chamber 2011
The WWE’s final pay-per-view before Wrestlemania used to be something of an awkward schedule filler, but in the last few years it’s been somewhat strengthened. Having two versions of the world title helps here, even if it’s counterproductive more generally. The Royal Rumble show in January determines one of the challengers for Wrestlemania; that leaves the February show with the job of deciding on the other challenger. Throw in the two obligatory title defences, and when this show ends, the company should have identified both champions and both challengers for the biggest show of the year.
The problem this year is that the viable candidates are few in number, so unless they throw in a major curveball, it’s really quite easy to predict who wins. Fortunately for me, this show is not a PPV in the UK, so I don’t have to worry too much about that. (Incidentally, I’m going to be out of the country for Wrestlemania itself, so you won’t be getting a preview for that.)
The Elimination Chamber is a glorified cage match. Six participants. Two men start, and every five minutes, another wrestler enters (or, more accurately, is released from their pod inside the cage so that they can join the match). Elimination occurs by pinfall or submission. Last guy left is the winner.
Charts – 13 February 2011
It seems that Lady Gaga enjoys making life unnecessarily difficult for herself. The chart week ends at midnight on Saturday, giving the compilers time to verify everything before the charts are announced on Sunday afternoon. (Sunday sales count towards the next week.) So when does Lady Gaga release her new single? Friday afternoon at two o’clock.
“Born This Way” dutifully shot to the top of the iTunes chart, which as we all know is based on a complicated formula involving very recent sales and water divination. Would it make number one on less than a day and a half’s sales?
Well, no, of course not. It may be the biggest new release of the week, but not by such a margin as to overturn a five day head start. Granted, “Candle in the Wine ’97” managed it, but that was a special case. “Born This Way” enters at number 3, but chances are it’ll climb to number 1 on Sunday. So we’ll come back to it then.
The X-Axis – 13 February 2011
Last week I reviewed a couple of completed storylines instead of doing the capsules, so we’ve got a couple of weeks’ worth of X-books to cover here – I’ll leave the miscellany of other books for another post. This fortnight’s theme: Wolverine. Loads of him.
Daken: Dark Wolverine #5 – The title may say this is “Empire Act 2, part 2 of 3”, but it actually seems to be the start of a new story. Last issue, Daken dropped by to visit the Fantastic Four, tie up a dangling subplot and pick up a new weapon; this time, he’s off to Madripoor to say hi to Tyger Tiger, a character we haven’t seen in years. It’s a strange book, this, and I honestly can’t make up my mind whether it’s being subtle, or whether it’s just a bit of a mess. Sometimes Daken seems to be written as a one dimensional psycho. At other points, as in this issue, we’re being invited to speculate on what he’s really up to and how much of his stated motivations are true. (The book has wisely disposed with his first person narration.) It’s obvious enough why the writers would want Daken to be in Madripoor; it’s a location strongly associated with Wolverine, so it keeps Daken in his father’s shadow without them actually having to interact. But why is Daken there? He says he’s there to start a new life with a new identity, but he’s also the one who’s chosen to go Madripoor, who dresses in a modified Wolverine costume, and who keeps bringing up Wolverine.
Charts – 6 February 2011
Welcome to a new chart era. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that some of the major labels were introducing a new system for promoting singles. Instead of hyping them for weeks before putting them on sale, they’re going to release new singles for download at the same time that they’re released to radio. So, in effect, no pre-release publicity at all. They call it “on air, on sale.” And this is the first chart to feature singles released under the new system.
You’d have thought that would mean singles entering low and working their way up. But, as it turns out, no. The first major release with an “on air, on sale” schedule goes straight in at number one – which, of course, you could read as evidence that the record industry has been completely wasting its time with the pre-release hype on singles for years now.
X-Force: The Apocalypse Solution
By this point, I have actually got last week’s comics. But I haven’t read them yet. And to be honest, I feel like breaking from format anyway and looking at some completed storylines. So, as promised, let’s look at another recently relaunched book, and the first arc of Uncanny X-Force. Again, beware spoilers – I’m assuming you’ve either read it or you don’t plan to.
The Apocalypse Solution
Uncanny X-Force #1-4
Writer: Rick Remender
Artist: Jerome Opena
Colourist: Dean White
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Axel Alonso
In their endless quest for short-term sales spikes, Marvel will relaunch a title these days for the most tenuous of reasons – or indeed for no reason at all, if needs must. But, at least relatively speaking, X-Force is a legitimate relaunch. They’ve changed most of the cast. They’ve changed the creative team. They’ve changed the style and tone beyond recognition. And it’s a clean slate for new storylines.
What remains is the very basic premise that X-Force are the black ops unit which the other X-Men don’t know about. True, the previous X-Force were exposed during the “Second Coming” crossover, to general disquiet among the ranks (and boy, there’s a storyline that seems to have petered out). But Scott disbanded that squad, and Wolverine’s re-formed it without telling anyone. So the idea of a secret team within a team has been restored.
Wolverine Goes To Hell
As I already mentioned on Twitter, I haven’t got this week’s comics yet, and so, in a fit of critical integrity, I’m not going to review them. For once, however, this coincides with a weekend when I do have time to write some reviews, and so I’m going to take the opportunity to look at length at the first arcs of two recently relaunched titles. Heavy spoilers ahead, by the way – I’m assuming that either you’ve read these arcs, or you’re not planning to.
Coming up in the next day or two, the first arc of Uncanny X-Force. But first…
Wolverine Goes to Hell
Wolverine #1-5
Writer: Jason Aaron
Main story penciller: Renato Guedes
Main story inkers: Jose Wilson Magalhaes and Oclair Albert
Main story colourist: Matt Wilson
Back-up story artists: Jason Latour and Rico Renzi (#1 and #5), Steven Sanders and Ronda Pattison (#2), Michael Gaydos (#3), Jamie McKelvie and John Rauch (#4)
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Jeanine Schaefer
The recent relaunch of Wolverine has been driven more by commercial than creative factors. The last big relaunch, a little over a year earlier, misfired spectacularly – more through overly tricksy marketing than due to any fault of the creative team. The idea was to soft-launch a new spin-off title featuring Wolverine’s son Daken. But rather than just launch Dark Wolverine #1, some bright spark thought it would be a terribly good idea to turn the existing Wolverine series into a Daken title, and shunt Wolverine himself off into a new title, Wolverine: Weapon X. Unfortunately, the way everything was timed meant that Weapon X, which was meant to be the lead Wolverine book, was universally perceived as his C-title, and sales duly crashed into oblivion.
While it may be heartening in some respects to see a needlessly complicated promotional stunt blow up in Marvel’s face, the result was rather unfair to Jason Aaron, who was writing rather good stories over on Weapon X. He’s got a good handle not just on the character, but also on the style that makes his stories work – shamelessly over the top, but still sane enough to shift gears and carry some dramatic weight when it’s needed. If nothing else, this latest relaunch gives him a well deserved second chance to find an audience.
