House to Astonish Episode 138
Plenty of juicy comics chat for you this time round, with discussion of Fox’s two new X-Men TV shows, the upcoming Power Man & Iron Fist series, AfterShock Comics’ announcement of American Monster, DC’s new Wonder Woman digital series, and all the recent comings and goings on Marvel’s movies and TV shows. We’ve also got reviews of I Hate Fairyland and Uncanny Avengers, and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe hasn’t worked out all the bugs. All this plus Marc Alessi’s crossword solving service, the canon of the Gruffalo extended universe and the weird soapy taste of the Inhumans.
The podcast is here, or here on Mixcloud, or via the embedded player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments, via email, on Twitter or on our Facebook fan page. There’s also top-flight tops available at our fabulous Redbubble store.
We’ve got a few other bits of promotion to do, but I think I’ll split those out into another post. No point burying the lede.
What If? Infinity: X-Men #1
Some questions can only really be answered with another question. Take, for example, the X-books’ contribution to a load of What If? one-shots based on 2013’s Infinity crossover.
The book asks the question: “What if the X-Men were the sole survivors of Infinity?” To which the obvious response is, “Why would anyone want to know that?”
Old Man Logan
It is the nature of big crossovers – even of the type Marvel do nowadays – that sometimes a tie-in book pops up, whose remit is to move a character from A to B. This isn’t always a bad thing; often, a remit like that is so minimal that it makes it perfectly possible to wrap a decent story around it. A plot point for the big story can double as a macguffin for the small one.
Old Man Logan is a series that exists to get a character from A to B. But when you get down to it, that’s pretty much the sum total of what happens in the book.
Watch With Father #3: Bing
“Round the corner, not far away / Bing is [Insert Subject Here] today.” So begins – give or take a subject – every episode of Bing, in which an animated three-year-old bunny encounters and learns to overcome the challenges of toddler life.
Bing‘s five-minute episodes have a pretty standard formula. Bing is doing something that makes him happy; something goes wrong; Bing is upset, or scared, or angry, or some such thing; but the gentle guidance of Flop helps Bing come to with things, and all is well again. Then Bing recaps the story to end the show. (Who’s Flop? We’ll come back to Flop.) All scenarios are completely realistic – Bing is scared of fireworks, Bing accidentally breaks Flop’s phone, Bing isn’t patient enough to be quiet so that he can feed the ducks properly. That sort of thing.
E is for Extinction
While much of Secret Wars may be taken up with callbacks to the great crossovers of yesterday, but E is for Extinction turns its attention to Grant Morrison’s New X-Men run from 2001-2004. (Strictly speaking, “E is for Extinction” was just the first arc of his run, but you can’t really call a book Grant Morrison’s X-Men when Grant Morrison isn’t doing it.)
In its way, of course, Morrison’s run was far more significant to the X-Men than any “event” book. For the first time since the 1975 relaunch, it broke with the idea that the X-Men was a single, ever-growing saga. Not everything in the preceding decade had been a straight emulation of Chris Claremont – the Seagle/Bachalo run was in that period, for example – but it was all positioned as a continuation. Morrison’s run, both at beginning and end, is a break point.
Inferno
Back in the day, What If…? used to do nothing but imagine what might have happened if a high-profile story had turned out differently. The answers tended to be pretty similar: something terrible would have happened – otherwise, what would it say about the stakes in the original story? Bad things would ensue, alternate versions of major characters would probably die, and some sort of bittersweet redemptive ending would follow. It’s where the premise tends to lead you.
So with the Secret Wars X-books playing such a straight bat in terms of revisiting old stories, maybe it was inevitable that we would end up with a dystopia glut. It’s more surprising to see two separate books both built around the set-up of the X-Men quarantining an island.
Charts – September 2015
So then. As promised when I stopped the weekly chart posts, I’m going to do a monthly round-up of what’s been in the singles chart – plus, in this case, the last two charts of August, since I didn’t cover them either. That’ll cover the number 1 singles and a brief run-down of what else has made the top 40 during this period, picking out anything actually notable. Annoyingly for my purposes, it’s been a period with a heavy turnover of number one singles…
21 August 2015: Jess Glynne, “Don’t Be So Hard On Yourself”
X-Tinction Agenda
If Years of Future Past was a confused book with some good ideas, X-Tinction Agenda is a simpler beast. By all appearances, it’s here to fill the pages.
“X-Tinction Agenda” is not immensely fertile territory for a Battleworld mini. The original story, way back in 1990, was notable mainly for wrapping up two long-running stories – it finally reunited the X-Men after a lengthy period when the cast were scattered around the globe, and it tied up the original Genosha arc, in which the country was a thinly veiled allegory for apartheid-era South Africa. Neither of those is a particularly pressing issue today. Of course, the story also opened the era of Genosha as a basket case state on the verge of collapse, and that’s effectively what Marc Guggenheim and Carmine di Giandomenico are running with here.
Years of Future Past
The X-Men do so love a nice dystopia. In fact, vast tracts of X-history are built on either the threat of the world becoming one, or a side trip to some alternate world which already is one. So with Secret Wars being based largely on What If…? stories spinning off from old event stories (at least in the case of those books which are steering clear of the patchwork mechanics of Battleworld itself), it’s perhaps unsurprising that the X-books find themselves largely contributing an array of parallel-world misery.
On paper, Years of Future Past should be one of the most promising. For one thing, the reference point here is “Days of Future Past”, which is the story that sent the X-Men down this path in the first place. And for another, it’s by Marguerite Bennett and Mike Norton, which is a pretty strong creative team.
House to Astonish Episode 137
A slightly chunkier episode than usual for you this time round, with just over 90 minutes of chat about Batman Day, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brian Stelfreeze’s Black Panther, DC’s recent cancellations (and un-cancellations), Marvel’s news out of the Diamond summit (including Moon Knight, Mockingbird and Silver Surfer, along with the Master of Kung Fu omnibus news); the return of Gail Simone and Jim Calafiore’s Leaving Megalopolis, and the Gambit movie’s woes. We’ve also got a jaunt through December’s solicitations, reviews of Wild’s End: The Enemy Within and Exit Generation, and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe is the little engine that couldn’t. All this plus the comic with the most distinguished regnal numbering, a ferret in a hat in a hat, and Tom DeFalco’s massive Scooby-Doo sandwich.
The podcast is here, or here on Mixcloud, or available via the embedded player below. Let us know what you think, either in the comments, on Twitter, via email or at our Facebook fan page. And hey, the nights are starting to draw in – why not keep yourself warm with a t-shirt from our always-open Redbubble store?
