The X-Axis – 24 October 2010
Why, what’s this? Yes, it’s an X-Axis post actually showing up on Sunday, when it’s meant to. Isn’t life great?
If you’re looking for the preview for tonight’s WWE show, that’s one post down (though if you want the short version, it sounds like a dud). As for the comics, this week’s X-books are New Mutants, X-23 and X-Factor, and there’s, uh, some other stuff too.
Enjoy the reviews in their full glory behind this space-saving cut!
Bragging Rights 2010
I’m writing this on Thursday night, before Smackdown airs, so by the time you read this post, it may well be out of date. But probably not. Bragging Rights, Sunday’s WWE pay-per-view, is a classic example of a show that’s only on the schedule because the company stubbornly refuses to accept that it didn’t work last year – and so they’re going to do it again this year, in order to prove that it definitely, absolutely doesn’t work.
In the event, the company seems to have rather lost interest in the business of wrestling this last week, preferring to hurl itself into a frankly ludicrous tantrum over some of the negative press coverage arising from Linda McMahon’s Senate run. Strictly speaking the WWE isn’t allowed to campaign for the boss’s wife, but Vince McMahon is apparently so incensed by what he sees as unjustified attacks on his beloved business that he’s started devoting airtime to an absurd campaign which he calls “Stand Up For WWE”, in which fans are invited to sign some sort of online petition. Unfortunately for him, most of the criticisms of the WWE are entirely justified, and he doesn’t have any convincing rebuttal to offer. Some of them are a bit outdated – the company has actually being doing PG programming for at least a year now – but they’re perfectly valid if your point is to criticise what the company was like when Linda was CEO.
So, while the company embarks on a high-profile attempt to make itself look stupid, it’s unlikely we’ll being seeing any last-minute moves to flesh out this half-baked card. (Not least because Smackdown is taped on Tuesday nights, so we already know everything that happens in the ring.) There’ll probably be a couple of last-minute additions to fill time, but that’s about it.
Charts – 17 October 2010
This week’s number 1 is still Cee Lo Green, for the second week. I covered that single in the previous post, if you haven’t read it yet. It’s an odd race for the top, with the number 2 slot going to Bruno Mars’ “Just the Way You Are” – another former number one, and according to the midweeks, currently likely to return to the top on Sunday.
This is also the first chart to come with something of an asterisk attached. We are now into the X Factor live finals, and this year, the performances are available for download on iTunes. But the record company has opted to exclude from the chart. (More accurately, you need to register a single with the Official Chart Company to opt in. But same difference.) From Simon Cowell’s point of view, there are good reasons for this. If it becomes clear that somebody’s a runaway leader, there’s no tension going into the final.
But we know that songs can re-enter the charts on the strength of X Factor performances; and we know that even Sky One’s Must Be The Music was able to propel three singles into the top ten, with a much lower audience. The chances are good, then, that if the X Factor downloads were eligible for the charts, several of them would have made it in – even with the first week giving audiences sixteen tracks to choose from. (They’re doing double eliminations in the first few weeks to get the numbers down to a more sensible level.)
Would any of these tracks have made number 1? My guess is, probably not. X Factor winners inevitably get to number 1 (Joe McElderry made it on his second week of release), but their singles are part of a grand narrative. These ones aren’t. The audience is split between sixteen acts. They’re released on Saturday nights, so the sales will be split between two chart weeks. And as we’ll see shortly, there’s a limit to the promotional power of a single performance on the show.
Meanwhile, this week’s highest new entry…
Charts – 10 October 2010
And I had such high hopes of staying up to date. Ah well. At least this number one managed two weeks at the top, so we’re kind-of-sort-of still current. And it’s a slightly unexpected number one, because the same week saw the release of “Shame” by Robbie Williams and Gary Barlow. That single was generally assumed to have a clear run at the top, if only for the gimmick factor of having them both appear on the same track.
But no. The new number one is Cee Lo Green‘s viral YouTube hit, which the Official Chart Company is electing to call “Forget You.” That’s the name of the radio edit – and to be fair, judging from the iTunes chart, people are actually buying that version too, in pretty substantial numbers. But, understandably enough, most people are going for the original.
The song does have a proper video now, but here’s the original animated-typography version.
Caution: there will be swearing once we get past the cut.
The X-Axis – 17 October 2010
It’s a podcast weekend, so don’t forget to check out this week’s show, where Al and I talk about Deadpool Max, Vision Machine and Knight and Squire, as well as rounding up the news and looking at the all-important pricing debate.
I’m a week behind with the reviews, so tons of X-books to write about, plus a couple of other recent releases. Behind the cut, you’ll find Daken, Deadpool Max, Knight and Squire, the CBLDF Liberty Annual, New Mutants Forever, Superior, X-Force, Wolverine, X-Men and X-Men Forever.
House To Astonish Episode 48
Time for another episode of House to Astonish, and we’re looking at all the news out of NYCC, with lots of chat about Marvel and DC’s repricings and what it actually means. We’re reviewing Deadpool Max, Knight & Squire and Vision Machine and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe goes to the crazy side of the Golden Age. All this plus 1970s funk band wars, the Red Lanterns in the pub and Marvel trademarking the letter D.
The podcast is here, or on Mixcloud here. Let us know what you think in the comments below, on Twitter, via email, on the Facebook fan page or by having Bart write it on the board in a specially re-drawn Simpsons opening credits sequence.
Housekeeping
Still waiting on this week’s comics, which I probably wouldn’t have had time to read anyway – so reviews will be, ooh, some time during the week. Frankly, I’m mainly glad of the extra time.
Before anyone else asks: no, I’m not especially thrilled to hear that we’re getting yet more Astonishing X-Men, whoever’s writing it. Four X-Men books a month is at least two too many.
Oh, and if any of you know WordPress – I’ve set the “Add New Post” screen to one column, and when I try to go back to two columns, the right-hand column is blank. Doesn’t seem to matter which browser I use. Any idea how to fix that?
Charts – 3 October 2010
Right – this time I really, really will bring things up to date!
This week’s number 1 is “Written in the Stars” by Tinie Tempah. It’s on EMI, so the YouTube video isn’t embeddable, but hey, hop over there if you want to see the man himself standing on a rooftop in New York looking moody. Or, if it works in your jurisdiction, here’s the Daily Motion version, which is also uploaded by EMI and is embeddable, because they can’t make up their bloody minds.
While we’ve had a huge turnover of number one singles this year, “Written in the Stars” is one of the top sellers, shifting 115K in its first week.
Charts – 26 September 2010
And I was so close to catching up. Oh well, we’ll get there eventually.
After two weeks at number 1, Alexandra Burke surprisingly dropped all the way to number 5 (though supposedly it was a very close run thing between numbers 3, 4 and 5, so she was a bit unlucky there). The new number 1 – another one-week occupant – was “Just The Way You Are” by Bruno Mars.
In this video, you can see him flirting with a coy actress, while the video director livens things up with animated tape from a cassette. Yes, a cassette. Probably a bit hard to animate a wax cylinder.
The X-Axis – 3 October 2010
It’s been a couple of weeks since I last wrote one of these. But fortunately, they’ve been a quiet couple of weeks. So I’m just going to do the X-books, because to be honest, there isn’t a great deal else going on. Check the podcast this week – you’ll find it two posts down – for our reviews of Skullkickers (it’s quite good) and Matt Fraction’s first issue of Thor (it’s very good) along with… well, something from the back catalogue.
Astonishing X-Men: Xenogenesis #3 – In which we get a recap of the origin story of Dr Crocodile (a character from the 1980s Captain Britain series, if you didn’t know), a brief discussion of how cash-strapped African countries might deal with crazy mutant babies, and a wander into the woods where some more weird stuff awaits. There’s actually an interesting idea at the heart of this story; what do you do with incredibly dangerous mutant kiddies when you really don’t have the resources to do anything but kill them? Not that there’s any real doubt about the morally approved answer, granted, but Joshua does have an understandable point of view here.
A couple of points come to mind, though. First, this is another illustration of why M-Day was a bad idea. The dilemma here is basically “what does the developing world do with mutants?”, with the Warpies serving as a workaround to dodge M-Day. Frankly, it would be a stronger X-Men story with actual mutants in it. Ellis has managed to get around that problem. But it shows, once again, that far from opening up interesting story ideas, M-Day has just created obstacles for writers to clamber over.
Second, there are still real issues with the pacing of this as a monthly series. It’ll look great in the collected edition, to be fair. But four splash pages, one of which just shows cast members running into a forest? It’s fair enough if you regard the selling point as being Kaare Andrews’ art – and it’s certainly beautiful stuff – but it really does feel dragged out in this format.
Namor: The First Mutant #2 – Not that I’m planning to keep buying this series, you understand. However many logos you stick on it, Namor is not an X-book. But it’s part of the “Curse of the Mutants” crossover, so I ordered it anyway. And after I panned the first issue, it’s only fair to say that this is better. Having got the actual “Curse of the Mutants” tie-in out of the way, Stuart Moore and Ariel Olivetti are moving on to the story they really want to tell, which is about the new Atlantis going to war with a tribe of underwater vampires. Something which looked like a plot hole in the last issue turns out to be deliberate, and there’s some attempt to build up an idea of Atlantean society. A scene with an eccentric geriatric soothsayer telling embarrassing stories about Namor’s childhood is very good.
But there are still problems. Namor says that he killed the vampires’ leader because “I thought it would end the Aqueos’ attacks on us and our colonies” – but didn’t they spend most of last issue telling us that he was breaking a peace treaty? (The recap page certainly thinks so.) The opening scene has an interesting idea about Atlanteans using their Atlantis off the coast of San Francisco to break from their cultural past, but it comes off as a clumsy “coming to America” moment. And Olivetti’s work remains hit and miss, lacking the grace I’d expect in a Namor story. Still, better than the first issue.
Uncanny X-Men #528 – “The Five Lights” continues, and this time we’re introducing a girl with fire and ice powers in Nigeria. This is a very episodic arc – the unifying element is actually the subplot with Emma Frost figuring out how to get rid of Sebastian Shaw – and boy, wouldn’t it be nice if the recap page bothered to remind us of why she needs to get rid of him, because I’m certainly struggling to remember. Something about Namor thinks she killed him already? I think? I don’t remember why… Still, I like the scenes with Emma and Kitty in this issue – there’s a great rapport between these two that Fraction writes rather well.
The introduction of the “five lights” characters isn’t really working for me so far, because we’re not really getting to know them as characters. The problem, I think, is that since we’re meeting them all in a state of absolute panic, there’s not much room for anything else to come through. I’m sure once they calm down a bit we’ll see a bit more from them (and it looks as though Idie is being set up for a Wolfsbane-type role in the new group), but for the moment it’s mostly the local colour that makes the characters distinct.
As for the art, while I’ll happily take Whilce Portacio over Greg Land, whose work seems untouched by human hand, I have to admit there are problems here. Portacio does the Nigerian scenes quite well, perhaps because the setting holds his interest, but from there we go into a scene with Bobby Drake and Kate Kildare which is little short of abysmal – the opening panel makes Bobby look like Charlie Chaplin, and the rest of the scene somehow manages to take place in a completely blank room except for a single prop that was presumably mentioned in the script. It’s a really bad scene, and the issue as a whole is frustratingly uneven.
X-Men Forever 2 #8 – The Marauders versus the X-Men and the Starjammers, again. Halfway through this story, I was wondering whether Claremont had botched his cliffhanger last issue – by bringing back Wolverine only to expose him as a clone and kill him immediately. But no, he’s going to be around for a while, presumably as one of Sinister’s deranged henchmen. There’s some oddities in Claremont’s attitude to clones (why doesn’t it matter if you kill them, and how the hell can Sabretooth smell the difference between Wolverine and his clone?). But still, the last couple of issues have been an enjoyable romp of a fight scene, and that’s fine in a book like this.
X-Men Legacy #240 – Continuing the “Children of the Vault” story. Clay Mann’s art in this story doesn’t seem to be up to the standards of earlier – perhaps the deadlines are catching up with him, but it means that the story launches with a rather confused action sequence. A splash page unveiling the Children’s big plot-driving machine works quite well, but overall it’s a step down. Paras’ big act of self-sacrifice is a bit melodramatic too, but there’s a twist near the end that works better. Still, not the strongest chapter of this storyline, which has generally been pretty good.
X-Men vs Vampires #1 – Frankly mystifying anthology series in which a bunch of writers have been asked to do stories where members of the X-Men fight vampires, and only a couple of them seem to have been told that they should tie in with “Curse of the Mutants” in any way. James Asmus and Tom Raney’s “From Husk Till Dawn” is a thuddingly uninspired few pages in which Husk is looking for the captured Jubilee, and fights some vampires, and that’s literally it. Really, truly dreadful. Christopher Sequeira and Sana Takeda’s story is better, with Dazzler meeting a bunch of blaxploitation vampires, but it really has nothing whatsoever to do with the crossover, and even taken in isolation it’s no more than diverting. As you can probably imagine, Peter David does better, teaming with Mick Bertilorenzi in a story about a vampire who’s come to San Francisco with his own agenda, though again it doesn’t gain anything from the wider crossover and would be a better story taken completely in isolation. Rob Williams and Doug Braithwaite go for a similar idea, with Magneto encountering a vampire he knew in life. Good concept, not really developed into a story, but it looks nice. And rounding it off, there’s a reprint of the first half of Uncanny X-Men #159, the X-Men/Dracula story (the second half will be in the next issue), where you can see Bill Sienkiewicz back when he did house style. The Peter David story is worth reading, but as a package, it’s a bit of a dud.
