Wolverine and the X-Men Annual #1
It’s a podcast weekend! But GarageBand has eaten it, so you’ll have to wait another week.
In the meantime, let’s have a look at the first and, it seems, only Wolverine and the X-Men annual. This is the X-books’ token contribution to the “Infinity” crossover, which it has otherwise managed to sit out, through the clever expedient of doing a crossover of its own. It seems we’re now back to the days when the X-books largely get special dispensation from participating in these books.
Podcast Update
Due to Garageband being an unutterable piece of garbage, we won’t have a podcast for you this week. Apologies. We’ll try to convene again next weekend if we can, where you’ll be able to hear the interviews with Kelly Sue DeConnick, Al Ewing and Kieron Gillen which were recorded at Thought Bubble.
Charts – 24 November 2013
Uncanny X-Men #14
A single issue story nestling between longer arcs, in which Brian Bendis turns his attention back to one of the rogue team’s students, Benjamin Deeds. He’s the one who, thus far, has merely demonstrated the ability to change shape to look like whoever’s standing right next to him. This is obviously not very useful.
The main thrust of this issue is to establish that what we’ve seen from him thus far is just the most visible aspect of a rather more useful power that he simply hasn’t got under control yet. (more…)
Savage Wolverine #9-11
Yes, this came out last week, but I’m running late.
Savage Wolverine is apparently meant to be a sort of Legends of the Dark Knight for Wolverine, with different creators taking turns to do their own stories without having to worry much about continuity. In practice, the previous two arcs weren’t the best demonstration of the format. Zeb Wells and Joe Madureira’s story was an off cut repurposed from Avenging Spider-Man, while Frank Cho’s vision for the character didn’t get much more elaborate than “here are some things that I think it’d be cool to draw.”
Survivor Series 2013
Survivor Series is meant to be one of the more important B-shows on the WWE’s PPV calendar, if only because it’s been around a good long while, but the line-up this year is, to put it politely, largely uninspiring. There are a couple of promising matches on the undercard, but not much to persuade people to shell out.
1. WWE Title – Randy Orton © v The Big Show. Common sense might have suggested that after several months of being screwed out of the title, Daniel Bryan had to win the thing at some point, if only to provide some sense of closure. Common sense, however, is in short supply among WWE writers, and so we’re simply moving on to another challenger.
Charts – 16 November 2013
If you haven’t heard our five-year anniversary podcast yet, with special guests Graeme McMillan and Jeff Lester from “Wait, What?”, then it’s one post down – and check out their latest episode over at Savage Critic. Many thanks to both of them – I think it’s a really good episode.
And now… stuff!
39. Rudimental (featuring Emeli Sande) – “Free”
House to Astonish Episode 114
It seems ridiculous to think that we’d ever hit this point, but here we are – it’s the fifth anniversary of House to Astonish, and we’re joined for our longest-ever podcast by Graeme McMillan and Jeff Lester of Savage Critics’ Wait, What? to talk about the Ultimate universe, Marvel’s Netflix deal, comics creators who’ve fallen by the wayside, the state of play at DC and a huge amount more. There’s Alicia Masters trying not to get pee on her shoes, a badly-pitched Daredevil story, a labrador writing Avengers, a low-rent Scooby Gang and Schrodinger’s Channel.
The podcast is here, or here on Mixcloud, or available via the player below. Get comfortable. This one’s long (and yes, very self-indulgent, but if you can’t be self-indulgent on your fifth birthday, when can you be?).
Let us know what you think, either in the comments below, on Twitter, via email or on our Facebook fan page. Don’t forget too that you can get our t-shirts on our Redbubble page, with its delightful range of sartorially smashing shirts.
Thanks for joining us for the past five years, and here’s to the future…
X-Men Gold
X-Men Gold is an anthology one-shot with former X-Men writers revisiting the title. Chris Claremont and Bob McLeod provide the main story, which plugs in somewhere just before Scott married Madelyne; everything else is pretty much a vignette, and a few only really work if you take them as deleted scenes.
It surely goes without saying that Claremont defined the X-Men in the 70s, 80s and even the 90s (since even when he left, the style didn’t drastically change until the Grant Morrison/Joe Casey relaunch). His task here is a thankless one and he pretty much confines himself to doing a nostalgia routine in which a classic X-Men line-up appear in a classic kind of X-Men story. Once you’ve decided to go down that route, I might have gone for an artist more directly associated with the X-Men than Bob McLeod, but hey, he co-created New Mutants, so close enough.
Arms of the Octopus
Goodness, I nearly forgot about this one. “Arms of the Octopus” is a crossover between the annuals (sorry, “Specials”) of three titles – All-New X-Men, Indestructible Hulk, and Superior Spider-Man Team-Up, presumably selected by chucking darts at the solicitations while blindfold. It’s getting its own trade paperback collection, which will be rounded out by the immortal Wolverine: In the Flesh (the one with the celebrity chef).
Stories like this always have more than a hint of schedule padding about them. But this actually isn’t bad. The people behind it seem to understand that inconsequential schedule filler presents an opportunity to have a bit of fun, and that if you’re going to do a random team-up between three unrelated heroes, the entertainment had better come from the way they interact with each other.
