Charts – 30 January 2011
The midweek charts suggested a fairly quiet week. As it turns out, there are ten new entries this week – but six of them are between 31 and 40, so the midweeks weren’t entirely wrong.
One of those new entries is at number one – “We R Who We R” by Ke$ha. This is the lead single from “Cannibal”, a companion EP promoting a re-release of her album “Animal”. Basically, it’s the old “special edition” schtick, except they’re going to sell the same album packaged alongside the new EP. Since the new EP is available separately, it’s actually a fairer way of treating the people who bought the album the first time round. Although as a rule, these days, they can just download the extra tracks if they’re that bothered.
The X-Axis – 30 January 2011
This week: X-books, X-books, X-books. It’s not that I didn’t buy anything else – it’s that Marvel shipped ten X-books this week, in one of their periodic bursts of demented scheduling insanity. Those would be: Age of X Alpha, Chaos War: X-Men #2, Howard Chaykin’s Magneto one-shot, New Mutants #21, Uncanny X-Force #4, Uncanny X-Men #532, X-23 #5, X-Men #7, X-Men Forever 2 #16, and X-Men: To Serve And Protect #3.
This is the definition of saturating the market. If you’re going to produce this many X-Men titles, it’s completely ludicrous to put them all out in the same week. But so it goes. Some of these books are the concluding parts of storylines, and I’ll try to come back to them later in the week once I’ve re-read the whole arc. For the moment…
Age of X Alpha – This is the first part of Mike Carey’s alternate reality storyline, which is running over the next three months in X-Men: Legacy and New Mutants (a book which is between regular creative teams and thus able to join in without interrupting anyone’s story). As Carey explains in his afterword, the approach here is to just to throw us in with the story in progress, and fill in the back story with hints as he goes along. Even the question of why we’re doing an alternate reality story isn’t addressed here, though since this is Carey, and I trust him, I figure all will become clear in due course.
Royal Rumble 2011
Yes, after the usual Christmas break in the PPV calendar, the wrestling posts are back. The majority of you may move on with your lives now.
Still here? Okay, then. Tonight’s show is the 2011 Royal Rumble, traditionally the second-biggest event in the WWE’s pay-per-view schedule. For those of you who don’t follow wrestling (and yet are still inexplicably reading this), a brief recap. The biggest show of the year is Wrestlemania, which is on April 3. The Royal Rumble in January is headlined by a battle royal, and the winner goes on to challenge for the title at Wrestlemania. Now, battle royals tend to be rather dull events because if you’ve got thirty guys in the ring at once, they can’t really do much of anything. The great idea of the Royal Rumble is that the wrestlers draw numbers and enter in sequence every two minutes or so (and boy, there’s a lot of latitude in that “or so” – there’s a good reason why they don’t leave the clock on screen throughout). This is, of course, a ridiculous way to choose a top contender for the biggest show of the year because, if it were real, the element of random luck would be enormous. But it makes for a much better match, because the number of wrestlers in the ring can be kept under control, and because the regular entrances give the match structure and the fans plenty of opportunities to wonder who’s coming next.
Charts – 23 January 2011
The post-Christmas lull is definitively over this week, as 2011’s first wave of major releases results in ten new entries. Despite that, Bruno Mars clings on at the top for a second week with “Grenade”. Since he was at number 2 in the midweeks, it’s fair to assume that it was a close run thing.
The unfortunate single which was number one on the midweeks only to fall short at the end of the week is “Rolling in the Deep”, the lead single from Adele‘s second album. And it’s really very good.
House To Astonish Episode 54
We’re about to take a short hiatus because of my impending nuptials and subsequent honeymoon, so here’s an extra episode of House to Astonish to tide you through the next month. There’s chat on the closure of Wizard and ToyFare and the launch of Wizard World, David E. Kelley’s Wonder Woman, the death of the Comics Code Authority, a run through April’s solicitations and some clearly-walled-off spoilery chat about the big Fantastic Four death. No reviews, but the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe drags up, and this podcast also contains Gareb Shamus’s piranha pit, Savage Sword of Ka-Zar and Paul Simon’s run on Action Comics.
The podcast is here, or here on Mixcloud. Let us know what you think, in the comments below, on Twitter, via email or on our Facebook fan page.
Thanks to all for the kind words on the wedding, and we’ll speak to you again at the start of March.
The X-Axis – 23 January 2011
It’s a pretty good week for new books. From the X-books, we’ve got the conclusion of the “Wolverine Goes to Hell” arc in Wolverine #5, the launch of Kathryn Immonen and Phil Noto’s Wolverine & Jubilee miniseries, a very strange Darwin story in X-Factor #214, and X-Men Legacy #244, in which some minor characters fight a giant astral squid. Plus, the final issue of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8, and the debut issues of Daredevil Reborn, Infinite Vacation and Memoir. Shame we’re not doing a podcast this weekend, actually.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 #40 – The main storyline for Joss Whedon’s notional eighth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer actually ended last issue, so this is more of an epilogue designed to tie up loose ends and signal the direction of Season Nine. For, yes, there will be a Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 9 in the not too distant future.
Now, I’ve rather been losing patience with this series, which seemed at times to have lost touch with what made Buffy work in the first place, in favour of a lot of globetrotting and warmongering that wasn’t all that successful. Interestingly, Joss Whedon’s closing editorial suggests he tends to agree with some of those criticisms. “I was so excited to finally have an unlimited budget that I wanted to make the book an epic,” he says, “but I realised along the way that the things I loved the best were the things you loved the best” – the characters. And indeed, this issue seems to be setting us up for a much more low-key Season 9 with a much more restricted central cast, something that can only be for the best. The remaining characters are relocated to San Francisco, lots of magic-users have been depowered as a result of last issue’s destruction of the Enormously Important Macguffin, and some of the ones who remain aren’t very happy about Buffy wiping out so much of the world’s magic. It’s not a reset button – the change of location and the embittered ex-followers are enough to avoid that – but it’s a back-to-basics approach which is very welcome at the end of a series that laudably tried to stretch the format with mixed success.
It also turns out that one of Whedon’s main aims for this series was, of all things, to try and reconcile Buffy the Vampire Slayer continuity with the sci-fi spin-off comic Fray (the question being, given how the TV show ended, why are there no slayers left in Fray?). Technically that’s a valid question but it does feel like a loose end rather too minor to merit such extended attention. Still, the practical effect – somewhat to my surprise – is a final issue that pretty much convinces me that Season 9 will be much more to my tastes than Season 8. I was planning to jump off after this issue. He’s got me reconsidering now. Damn you, Whedon.
Charts – 16 January 2011
The singles chart is still somewhat becalmed in the post-Christmas lull, with a relative handful of new singles this week, most of them at the lower end. This is all fairly standard, because UK record companies like to promote new singles for weeks before actually releasing them, and there’s no point trying to do that over Christmas.
But apparently things are about to change, because today Universal and Sony announced a change of strategy. Starting in February, it seems, they’re going to “make singles available for sale on the same day that they’re released to radio stations”. If it’s on the radio, you’ll be able to buy it. This seems to be an anti-piracy initiative, the theory being that if you promote material which can’t be legally obtained then you’re creating an additional incentive for illegal downloading. I suspect it’s a minor factor at best where piracy is concerned, but it’s certainly true that weeks of pre-promotion can easily backfire by creating a situation where interest peaks before the single is on sale.
The X-Axis – 16 January 2011
There’s a new podcast up today, and you’ll find it at the next post down. Reviews include Who is Jake Ellis? (of which more below), Weird Worlds and a more-or-less random issue of Deadpool Team-Up, since at least it was self-contained. Meanwhile, here in the X-Axis, it’s a fairly restrained week for X-books – we’ve got X-Factor, the penultimate issue of X-Men Forever, and the second issue of Wolverine: The Best There Is. Will it be any better this time round? And there’s a couple of other books to round out the numbers…
Knight & Squire #4 – Back at the year-in-review show, somebody asked if there are any books that Al and I disagree over. Well, this is one. Paul Cornell and Jimmy Broxton’s extremely tongue-in-cheek miniseries about the British versions of Batman and Robin is the sort of thing you’ll either find endearing or thoroughly irritating; it’s got nothing to do with real Britain, so much as the sort of weird chewed-up mess of pop culture references that might have resulted if the UK had produced comics in the spirit of Silver Age DC. Following through with the warped logic of an inverted Batman and Robin, this issue introduces the Knight’s loyal butler: Hank, a stereotypical American with a wandering accent (“Y’all for tea, sir?”).
So far this has miniseries been a series of standalone stories, but notionally it’s supposed to be a six-parter, and this is the point where Cornell changes gear and starts to draw stuff together. The Shrike from issue #1 returns as Squire’s love interest, and the main story – in which Knight’s armour comes to life animated by a copy of his repressed feelings – is played basically straight, even if the central idea is that good old-fashioned repression saves the day. (Come to think of it, a gag which also worked rather well when they did it with Cyclops in Uncanny X-Men a year or so back…) There’s a balancing exercise with the tone here; the series has been so deliberately silly thus far that it’s slightly odd to have us suddenly take the characters more or less seriously for an issue. To some extent Cornell is trying to have his cake and eat it here, and it doesn’t feel entirely comfortable. Still, if the two sides of the book don’t entirely come together, they do each work on their own terms – and the difficult task of drawing them together had to be attempted at some point.
House To Astonish Episode 53
The first House to Astonish of 2011 is upon us, and we’ve got discussion of the Marvel editorial shake-up, the Flex Mentallo collection and the new Spider-Man and Captain America movie costumes, as well as reviews of Who Is Jake Ellis?, Deadpool Team-Up and Weird Worlds, while the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe keeps it all in the family. All this plus Joe Quesada’s left-hand man, the Gerry Adams of Marvel and food stamp fraud.
The podcast is here, or on Mixcloud here – let us know what you think, either in the comments below, via Twitter, by email or on our Facebook fan page.
Charts – 9 January 2011
The charts are still in something of a post-festive lull, but things are starting to get back to normal as new material begins to creep into the lower end of the chart. And with the X Factor sales tailing off, there’s a change at the top. Having spent the last three weeks stuck at number two, 2011’s first number one single is…
…“What’s My Name” by Rihanna featuring Drake, finally completing a tortuously slow 18-10-8-4-2-2-2-1 climb to the top that began at the tail end of November.
