Extraordinary X-Men #6-7
Well, this is all very traditional, now isn’t it? I’m used to ongoing titles lurching from one arc to the next, trade paperbacks for the collecting-in. But when you’ve got a big crossover coming up midway through the first year, it’s maybe better to get a couple of stories under your belt first. And here we are – a two-parter, nestling between the opening arc and the Apocalypse crossover.
And it’s a two-parter very much designed to get the plates spinning, and establish a direction for the series. Subplots abound.
X-Men: Worst X-Man Ever
Max Bemis, the singer from Say Anything, has written a fair few comics down the years, but Worst X-Man Ever is his first miniseries to land in my remit. It’s weird. There are two very different ideas jostling for space in this series, and while they’re plainly meant to dovetail, they don’t quite make it. The result is ambitious and often entertaining, but in the end result it falls frustratingly short of hitting all its targets.
Fair warning, by the way: I’m going to give away the ending, because it’s kind of key to how the whole thing fits together (or is meant to, at any rate). And it is an interesting book, if nothing else, so there are certainly good reasons why you might want to read it first.
House to Astonish Episode 142
There’s an absolute ton of news to get through this time round, and we’re looking at DC Rebirth; Wal-Mart’s move into graphic novels; the Hanna-Barbera comics revamp; the mess that was this year’s Angoulême; Si Spurrier and Dylan Burnett’s Weavers, the return of Steve Rogers as Captain America; the Supergirl/Flash TV crossover and the Legion show casting. We’re also reviewing Spider-Man and Mirror, and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe makes our heart sing. All this plus mutant potatoes, the long leg of the law and one of 1992’s worst SF movies immortalised in limerick form.
The podcast is here, or here on Mixcloud, or available via the player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments below, on Twitter, via email or on our Facebook fan page. And remember, there are some exceptionally cool shirts for sale over on our Redbubble store.
Watch With Father #9: Balamory
Yes, last time I said this was going to be Katie Morag. But there are two shows on CBeebies set in the Inner Hebrides, and they couldn’t have much less in common, which is kind of interesting. Balamory is aimed squarely at the nursery crowd. And Katie Morag isn’t. And it makes sense to do Balamory first.
Balamory was one of the first major commissions of the fledgling CBeebies station in 2002. It doesn’t show its age too badly – some of the CGI in the credits is starting to look a bit ropey, and the nursery computer is visibly of an earlier generation, but otherwise it holds up. It ran for four years, and while the precise number of episodes seems to vary depending on which source you look at, everyone seems to agree that it’s somewhere north of two hundred and thirty. And by some accounts, even then, the main reason for ending it was that the cast wanted to move on.
Charts – January 2016
Well, what an interesting month. I think this year we’ll loosen up the format and go a bit more freeform, yes? Alright.
So. We left off with the Christmas chart, and with the Lewisham & Greenwich NHS Choir at number 1 with “A Bridge Over You”. Normal service was swiftly resumed as “Love Yourself” by Justin Bieber, which had already been number one for three weeks, returned to the top for a further three. Admittedly, that’s during the normal early-January dead season for new releases. But since Bieber also had the immediately preceding number one (“Sorry”), the NHS Choir wind up as the sole week of respite in nine weeks of Justin Bieber.
All-New X-Men #1-3 – “Ghost of the Cyclops”
The most striking thing about the opening arc of Dennis Hopeless and Mark Bagley’s All-New X-Men might be how low key it is. A three parter, instead of the traditional six – this will be the first half of the first trade paperback collection. No big name villains. No big villains at all, in fact – the bad guys here are pretty much at the bottom of the pecking order. The stakes, at least in that sense, are determinedly low.
Which is actually quite a pleasant change. It’s not that there isn’t melodrama and hand-wringing in here – of course there is, Cyclops is in the book. But this series turns out to be an open-ended teen road trip, entirely unbothered about the whole Terrigen Mists thing.
Chikara 15.11: “Aniversario: A New Attitude”
Chikara’s birthday was on 25 May 2002, which it celebrates every year with Aniversario – sometimes a show, sometimes a weekend tour, it varies. It’s one of the fixtures in their calendar, but some way behind King of Trios, or for that matter the season finale; it’s more of a well established marker post in the year. Frankly, the Challenge of the Immortals tournament format that dominated 2015 doesn’t lend itself to a major show at this point, since virtually every story is building to something much further down the line. The result is a relatively normal looking card, but with a bigger than normal crowd.
When and where: It’s 24 May 2015 (the day after the previous show), and we’re in the Palmer Center in Easton, Pennsylvania. This is essentially Chikara’s home venue, if you leave aside their actual training facility. It’s a community centre gym, but a pretty substantial one. We’ll be back here for King of Trios later in the year. It’s a sell out. There’s a prominent advert at the back of the hall for Electric Monkey energy drink, which is a real thing, and is product placement. Remember that, it’ll be coming up in a bit.
1. Elimination match: N_R_G (Race Jaxon & Hype Rockwell) v. The Battle Hive (Amasis & Worker Ant) v. The Nightmare Warriors (Frightmare & Silver Ant) v. Kevin Condron & ???.
House to Astonish Episode 141
We’re back to normal operations this time round (by which I mean “recorded with sound errors” – for some reason the laptop didn’t pick up the mic so the show recorded using the internal mic on the Macbook, which means a slightly echoey experience that long-time listeners will remember from our first year). We’ve got a good bit of chat about Civil War II, the newly-announced Poe Dameron ongoing, the all-new Wasp, Netflix’s potential Punisher series, titbits of info on the Wonder Woman movie and the creative team change on A-Force. We’re also casting a critical eye over the December sales charts, reviewing Green Lantern Corps: Edge of Oblivion and Spider-Man/Deadpool and the _fficial Ha_db_ _k _f the _fficial Ha_db_ _k _f the Marvel U_iverse. All this plus Barney Stinson: Hitler’s Wingman, a ham & egg breakfast and the Green Lantern Corps Rotary Club AGM.
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. And remember, there are super-awesome House to Astonish t-shirts on sale at our Redbubble store, and they really suit you.
Extraordinary X-Men vol 1: X-Haven
So here we go again.
This time around, Extraordinary X-Men is the flagship of the X-books, which is to say that it’s the one that actually has the X-Men in it, as opposed than the time travelling teens or a rebranded X-Force. And so it’s the book that has the task of dealing head on with the new status quo, in which the Terrigen Mists are empowering Inhumans while wiping out the mutants. I wrote last week about why that’s a pretty bad idea, and I may come back in another post to look in more detail at how it messes up the formula that the X-Men’s popularity was built on. No point repeating all that again here; you can take it as read for now.
What’s really striking about this book, though, is how traditional it is in pretty much every other respect.
The X-Axis: State of the Nation
It’s been a while.
This, of course, is a happy side effect of Marvel deciding to have two line-wide break points in 2015 – at the start and end of Secret Wars – giving nice long breaks where everything’s in mid-storyline and I can put my feet up and recharge. Because the current relaunch has rolled out so slowly, we should get back to a more regular schedule from here on – Uncanny X-Men launched this week, just as Extraordinary X-Men is about to finish its first arc. Soon we’ll be back to five regular X-books – Uncanny, All-New, Extraordinary, Wolverine and Old Man Logan.
That’s still taking us back to the levels of 1989. For better or worse, after a long period of treading water, it does feel like the X-Men are entering a new phase of their history – one that’s going to be based around adjusting to reduced circumstances in more ways than one.
