House to Astonish Episode 98
We’ve a nice little hour and a quarter of comicy chat for you this time out, with discussion of Titan’s new comics line, the Phoenix going digital, the proposed DC “dark” movie, the SHIELD and Hulk TV shows and the Superman appeal decision. We’ve also got reviews of The End Times of Bram & Ben, Superior Spider-Man and Mara, and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe is suffering from an inferiority complex. All this plus Batman’s successful plastic surgery, an epidemic of constipation and a small cat caught in the middle of a war between estate agents and bacon.
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 below, on Twitter, via email or on our Facebook fan page.
Charts – 6 January 2013
Listen, what’s that sound? Why, it’s the sound of tumbleweed, as virtually nothing happens on the top 40 for the second week running! The result is a chart with no new entries whatsoever, and four re-entries.
40. Rudimental featuring John Newman & Alex Clare – “Not Giving In”
36. Ellie Goulding – “Anything Could Happen”
35. Florence + The Machine – “Spectrum”
These are all just records that were still floating around outside the top 40, and thus move up to fill the space left by the Christmas singles. Nothing more to be said.
15. Calvin Harris featuring Tinie Tempah – “Drinking From The Bottle”
All-New X-Men vol 1: Here Comes Yesterday
It’s been a weirdly quiet couple of weeks for the X-books. Pretty much the whole industry took last week off, but even with the X-books’ overabundance of output, this week is also quiet, with only All-New X-Men #5 coming out. As it happens, that’s also where the first collection is due to end (it ships in February), so let’s take this as our cue to look back at the first arc.
All-New X-Men is the product of one of Marvel’s now-familiar marketing strategies: cancel a book, launch what appears to be a replacement, and then relaunch the actual book a couple of months later. The idea, presumably, is that this creates two books that inherit the sales of the original title. In reality, All-New X-Men is taking the place on the schedule of the unwanted, unloved, unadjectived X-Men, which stumbled on for a couple of fill-in issues for no apparent purpose other than to distract from that fact. And it ought to work; they’ve taken a book that even the most avid completist would regard as supernumerary, and replaced it with a book that will be seen as a flagship setting the direction that Brian Bendis will take as the X-Men’s new lead writer.
Charts – 30 December 2012
Welcome to 2013! This is the dead week of the charts, when nothing came out and virtually nothing happened. There’s one re-entry at the bottom end, but that’s just existing material filling the space left by the sales of Christmas songs coming to their habitually abrupt halt. And with the big push for the Christmas number one out of the way, the Justice Collective single also drops to 5, leaving James Arthur to return to number one with “Impossible”, thus also making himself the first number one artist of 2013.
So, since I can hardly fill a whole post with that, let’s take this opportunity to look back over the number one singles of 2012, some of which you have quite probably already forgotten about, due in no small part to a resurgence of the phenomenon of well-timed new releases with weeks of advance promotion taking turns to have a single week at number one. Most of these records, it should be said, proceeded to hang around the chart for a good long while afterwards. But records with a dominant run at the top have been rare, and the year has seen a total of 36 number one singles. Here they all are.
House to Astonish Episode 97
It’s the most wonderful time of the year – the time when comics pundits online post their picks of what stuff they thought was great and/or rubbish!
Paul and I are no exceptions to this tendency, and this year we’re attending the glittering night of the stars that is the Homies awards. Live from the green room of a very unusual venue, we’re rounding up our choices in a variety of categories, and going live to the main award ceremony where a dazzling cast of comics creators and personalities will be awarding the prizes to the comics, publishers and creators that won the listener vote, as chosen by YOU here, on CSBG and via email.
No news, reviews or Official Handbook this time round, just 95 minutes of the best and worst of 2012. 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.
Have a happy new year, and we’ll see you in 2013.
Charts – 23 December 2012
Merry Christmas! Yes, this is the Christmas chart, and you know what that means – everybody in their right mind runs a mile, leaving us with a two horse race between a charity record and a bloke who won X Factor but told everyone they should buy the charity record. (Despite which, he was still ahead on iTunes for some of the week – so it wasn’t a complete thumping.)
But further down the chart, it’s a bit of a wasteland, truth be told. Quite simply, releasing a record in the week before Christmas is almost entirely the province of charity records, novelty acts, and lunatics, giving us one of the stranger charts of the year. All part of the glorious tapestry, though.
36. Chris Rea – “Driving Home for Christmas”
35. Wham! – “Last Christmas”
Two belated re-entries from the Christmas back catalogue. “Driving Home for Christmas” was the lead track from an EP that Chris Rea released in 1988, but didn’t make the top 40 until the download era, when it achieved the dizzy heights of 33. Even so, it keeps coming back (perhaps because a lot of people genuinely don’t own it). “Last Christmas” spent five frustrating weeks at number 2 in Christmas 1984, stuck behind Band Aid.
The X-Axis – 23 December 2012
It’s the week before Christmas, and the scheduling bunnies are on acid. Perhaps it’s a rush to get all this month’s remaining books out before the holiday season hits, but the result is a full-on deluge of X-books if ever there was one – ten books in a single week, surely more than anyone could actually want.
A+X #3 – The stories in this anthology title have generally been pretty decent so far, but I still struggle to believe that it’s a format that will sustain sales once readers and retailers figure out what it actually contains. If it does, so much the better – that would imply that it’s selling on entertainment value (of which it has some) rather than significance to continuity (of which it has virtually zero), and that would be no bad thing.
The Homies 2012
As we’re about to hit the end of the year, we’re thinking about our next episode, which will be our end-of-year wrap-up. As part of this, we’re going to be inaugurating House to Astonish’s own awards – the Homies – where we’re going to hand out gongs in eight categories. The best part is, we want YOU to help – Paul and I are each going to select our winners in the following categories, but we’re also going to read out what our listeners think on the next episode. So check out the categories below, and let us know who or what you’d award each glittering prize to if you were us!
BEST NEW SERIES
This one’s pretty self-explanatory – any comic whose first issue was published between 1 January 2012 and the date of broadcast (likely to be the 29th or 30th of December) is eligible. What new series got your attention the most this year?
BEST ACTUALLY NEW SERIES
This one’s a little less self-explanatory – what series, again first published between 1 January and date of broadcast, did you think was best, with the proviso that it has to be something where the property wasn’t in existence prior to the start of 2012. We’re counting re-use of titles as well as concepts, so Prophet, X-Men Legacy or Dial H wouldn’t be eligible, but (for example) Saga would.
MOST WANTED
This is for the comic, series or graphic novel that saw print this year which you’d want to see more of, whether that be a book that was cancelled before its time, a one-shot or mini that just begs for a follow-up, or an OGN that you’d love to see a sequel to.
MOST PLEASANT SURPRISE
It may have seemed unappealing when you read about it online, and those preview pages may have looked unremarkable, but when you finally got the winner of this category in your hands you were ready to eat your words. What comic, series or graphic novel did you find yourself enjoying much more than you thought you would?
STIFF DRINK AWARD
This award will go to the comic or graphic novel that most made us gasp with surprise – an unexpected plot twist, a daring cliffhanger or a shocking denouement will stand a book in good stead here.
THE JOE CHILL AWARD FOR SERVICES TO REFRIGERATORS
Here we’re looking for the most egregious example of bad gender relations in the comics world, whether that’s a disservice done to female characters or to a female creator(s) or participant(s) in comics fandom.
THE NEW COKE AWARD FOR MOST ILL-JUDGED MARKETING
What move did a comics company or creator make this calendar year that had the effect of most making you want not to read a particular book or buy a particular company’s comics? We’re looking for abrasive interviews, ridiculous variants and counterproductive advertising here.
OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT
This is exactly what it says – which creator, creative team or publisher really knocked it out of the park this year?
Let us have your picks in the comments thread below, along with your thinking on each one – we’ll read out a range of the responses on our big end-of-year show. Happy nominating!
Charts – 16 December 2012
It’s the release week of the X Factor winner’s single! Will it make number one? Yes. Of course it will. Ooh, the tension.
This peaked at number 10 a few weeks back before plummetting out of the chart in the band’s traditional fashion, but it rebounds now thanks to an ITV special.
36. Ellie Goulding – “Anything Could Happen”
Rebounding after it dropped out of the top 40 last week.
35. Emeli Sande – “Clown”
This is Emeli Sande’s next single, which technically doesn’t come out until 23 December, but since it’s already available as an album track, it doesn’t matter. She performed it on the X Factor final, which is why the pre-release promotion has now gone far enough to get her into the top 40 – though it was much higher up in the midweeks, so this is very much a post-TV surge.
The X-Axis – 16 December 2012
And so on to this week’s reviews, plus some hanging around from the week before. You’ll forgive me if I take some of these quickly, it’s been a busy day…
Age of Apocalypse #10 – Age of Apocalypse sells abysmally, so even though it’s heading towards a crossover with the similarly audience-bereft X-Treme X-Men and the somewhat healthier Astonishing, it comes as no real surprise to see the book suddenly racing towards the conclusion. It doesn’t take a genius to read between the lines when Prophet takes the opportunity to explain that he really wanted to train Jean Grey as his successor but “We’ve run out of time.” No kidding you have.
