Dazzler: X-Song
The review backlog is really building up, so time to start the catch up.
And this is a Dazzler one-shot, which is a bit random. It’s the sort of thing that once upon a time would have ended up in X-Men Unlimited, since it’s a bit too far off to the side to get away with calling it an X-Men Annual. And it’s a welcome outing for a creative team we don’t normally see in these parts: Magdalene Visaggio, who got an Eisner nomination for Kim & Kim, and Laura Braga from DC Comics Bombshells.
So Dazzler is now playing club gigs with a band called “Lightbringr”, billed on their posters as “music for the meta/mutant revolution”. The solicitations describe them as a Brooklyn punk band, which would fit reasonably well with recent takes on Dazzler, though the book actually goes for a more traditional design that muddies the message a bit. But mainly, Dazzler isn’t that interested in being a superhero right now, and just wants to get back to performing.
Charts – 22 June 2018
Another new number one! Two weeks running!
1. Clean Bandit featuring Demi Lovato – “Solo”
Last week Jess Glynne reached number one, with the awkward footnote that it was thanks to “One Kiss” getting hit by the downweighting rule for older hits. As it happens, even without that rule coming into play, “One Kiss” would have fallen off the top this week. But Jess Glynne doesn’t hang on to purge that footnote from their record; instead, Clean Bandit get their fourth number one, following “Rather Be” (2014 – yes, it was that long ago), “Rockabye” (2016) and “Symphony” (2017). There’s also now an acoustic version of the video available, if you’re looking for confirmation of what the first line of the chorus says underneath the vocal effects.
X-Men Blue #23-28 – “Cry Havok”
When we left off X-Men Blue, the X-Men were tied up in a crossover with Venom, which does not interest me in the slightest. Since Jean Grey returns to the cast just fine in issue #29, and something happens to Jimmy Hudson in the interim as well, apparently I’m meant to have read that Venom series, but I’m not going to because I have less than zero interest in Venom and it’s Not Technically An X-Book.
So with its core cast otherwise occupied, X-Men Blue gives us that old favourite, the stand-in team arc. It wouldn’t be fair to call this filler; it’s not. It pays off the Mothervine subplot which has been building for months. And it finally does the only thing you can possibly do with Inverted Havok: change him back, and make enough of a fuss about it to pretend it’s a big deal rather than just hitting the reset button on a dodgy idea.
Charts – 15 June 2018
Well, it’s movement.
1. Jess Glynne – “I’ll Be There”
Number one with an asterisk. For the second time this year, a long-running number one single stays at the top long enough to get whacked by the “accelerated chart ratio” rule that downweights the streams of tracks that have been out for ten weeks, and which are three weeks past their peak. So the hammer falls on Calvin Harris & Dua Lipa’s “One Kiss”, which swandives from 1 to 7. It would otherwise have managed another week at number one, and since all this is a lot more visible than it was meant to be – the rule was meant to target older tracks that needed a helping kick on their way out of the top 40 – you suspect they’ll tweak the rule soon, so as to fade it in a little bit more gently.
House to Astonish Episode 164
Paul and I are back with a compact and bijou hour and twenty of comics chat for you, with discussion of the departures of Diane Nelson and Geoff Johns from DC, Johns’s new imprint and his recently-announced 3 Jokers and Shazam series, Vertigo’s relaunch, the DC Zoom and DC Ink slates, Ellis and Howard’s Cemetery Beach, Brandon Sanderson’s partnering with Vault Comics, Edge of Spider-Geddon and Asgardians of the Galaxy. We’ve also got reviews of Immortal Hulk and Justice League, and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe knows that eight is enough. All this plus the Greg Land hurricane warning, Organ Theft Aquaman and Daredevil Dinosaur.
The podcast is here, or here on Mixcloud, or available via the embedded player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments below, on Twitter, via email or on our Facebook fan page.
As a reminder, you can come and see me teaming with Kelly Kanayama of the Frank Discussions podcast at Glasgow Comic-Con on 30 June, where we’ll be giving the Punisher a live makeover (strange as that may sound). Tickets are on sale here.
And hey, it’s June! I love how that House to Astonish t-shirt looks on you… wait, you don’t have one? How embarrassing. Here, click on this link before someone sees you.
Charts – 8 June 2018
Another week to quietly give thanks for the Ed Sheeran rule…
1. Calvin Harris & Dua Lipa – “One Kiss”
Okay, now this is getting boring. This is eight weeks and counting.
10. Kanye West – “Yikes”
11. Kanye West – “All Mine”
17. Kanye West – “Ghost Town”
X-Men Red Annual #1
Or, as the logo has it, Annual X-Men Red. I haven’t actually reviewed the first arc of X-Men Red yet, because it’s still going. But this turns out to be a sensible place to start, because it’s a transition issue by regular writer Tom Taylor that bridges the gap from Phoenix Resurrection #5 to X-Men Red #1. It’s the connective tissue that gets Jean Grey in place for the start of the series, shunted off into an annual to stop it bogging down those early issues.
Let’s start with the art. It’s… well, it’s got its problems. Pascal Alixe has been around for a while, though it’s been getting on for twenty years since he did anything on the X-books. He’s a pro. And page one looks nicely dramatic. He does a really nice firebird for the Phoenix. Once we get into the story proper, though, things get a bit clumsier.
Legion: “Trauma”
Given the success of the Legion TV series (which I’ve never actually seen), it’s unsurprising that Marvel would figure that a Legion mini made sense. Except of course that the Legion TV show is on FX, as part of the X-Men rights package, to which Marvel’s attitude in recent years has been… whatever the opposite of corporate synergy is. That.
X-Men: Legacy ended with Legion more or less wiping himself from history, which is not an ideal starting point. Legion deals with that little problem by ignoring it entirely. On the other hand, there’s nothing to stop you plugging it into history as a flashback story if you want, so let’s run with that.
Charts – 1 June 2018
Not much happening, to be honest, but hey, we’ve got a format to keep up…
1. Calvin Harris & Dua Lipa – “One Kiss”
Seven weeks, so it’s now clearly Calvin Harris’s longest-running number one, outlasting the six weeks of Rihanna’s “We Found Love” back in 2011. And that was a “featuring” credit, anyway.
20. George Ezra – “Shotgun”
Old Man Logan #39-40 – “Glob Loves, Man Kills”
Old Man Logan must surely be on its way to publishing graveyard, most likely by killing off its imminently redundant lead character. From this book’s point of view, you might have thought it would make sense to tie him into the real Wolverine’s return; but in the bigger picture, the spare Wolverine is better kept to the margins, so that the return of Wolverine can feel a bit more returnish.
So we’re getting time-marking stories like this, in which Logan returns to the Xavier Institute to have his health problems checked out, and happens to be around for a two-part Glob Herman story. Glob is one of those students who’s been around for years because the visual is so strong, but rarely gets much to do besides being a recognisable background figure. Here, he’s going on a date.
