Charts – 22 July 2012
This week: very little is released, and none of it is very interesting.
1. Florence + The Machine – “Spectrum”
The X-Axis – 23 July 2012
It’s the heaviest week for X-books in quite some time – so since I didn’t get the books until today, this is going to be something of a rush job…
Avengers Academy #33 – The only Avengers vs X-Men tie-in from the Avengers’ half of the franchise qualifies for that title by virtue of having the Phoenix-powered Emma Frost show up at the Academy to destroy Juston Seyfert’s Sentinel. But it’s not fundamentally her story, and besides, it would remain basically the same plot even if all the Phoenix elements were removed.
Emma wants to destroy the Sentinel as part of the X-Men’s overall demolition of anti-mutant munitions. She doesn’t get why it’s a big deal, since it’s just another Sentinel. We’re presumably meant to be fairly early on in the Phoenix Five part of the crossover, as Emma’s personality is pretty much normal here. She thinks she’s being mercifully indulgent by just dismantling the thing and wiping its personality. And all that makes sense.
Housekeeping
Reviews on Monday, people, since I won’t get the books till then. But there’s a podcast just waiting for you, two posts down.
Charts – 15 July 2012
Don’t forget there’s a new podcast up, and it’s just one post down!
Meanwhile, let’s catch up on last week’s chart. In fact, it’s another relatively quiet week, so this probably won’t take us all that long.
1. Florence + The Machine – “Spectrum”
House to Astonish Episode 88
It’s our last podcast before Paul gets wed and heads off on his honeymoon, so we’ve made it an extra-long one, with nearly 90 minutes of discussion on news out of San Diego, including Marvel’s current teaser images, the Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man movies, the new Sandman mini, Minimum Carnage, Red She-Hulk, all the titles announced at the Image panel and Daniel Way leaving Deadpool. We’ve also got a run through the October solicitations, there are reviews of Captain Marvel, Bandette and Punk Rock Jesus and the esrevinU levraM eht fo koobdnaH laiciffO eht fo koobdnaH laiciffO gets confusing. All this plus the invention of time, Marvel WHEN? and the latest in our series of regionally accented comic book creator impressions.
The podcast is here, or on Mixcloud here, available via iTunes or through Stitcher.com‘s site or free iOS or Android apps. It’s also accessible via the player below.
Let us know what you think, in the comments, on Twitter, via email or on our Facebook fan page.
The X-Axis – 15 July 2012
Yes, it’s a day late. Mind you, if I’m being perfectly honest, it’s not the most exciting week of stories anyway…
AvX: Versus #4 – You can just about see why somebody might have thought an “all fight scene” spin-off book would be a good idea. In theory, if you’re creative enough, it gives artists an opportunity to go nuts and have fun for a few pages. Frankly, very few of the stories in this book – if “story” is even the right word – have come close to delivering on that. This issue has one of the better attempts, with Kaare Andrews showing up for ten pages of Thor versus a Phoenix-powered Emma Frost. (She wins, as if you need told.) It’s pretty much content-free, but it’s nicely over the top, and hell, it’s Kaare Andrews, who could probably make ten visually interesting pages out of paint drying.
The lead story is another matter. It’s Rick Remender and Brandon Peterson doing Daredevil versus Psylocke. And what you get there is an adequate trudge through the remit. Remender is clearly hunting for ways to make this interesting, but struggling to find many. He tries to play up the idea that both characters have a connection with the Hand, but he can’t really do anything much with it. There’s a theoretically nice idea about Psylocke using flocks of birds to obscure Daredevil’s radar sense, but visually, these things are being done much better in Daredevil’s own book, which actually has a plot. And of course the pay-off is the umpteenth “one of the X-Men realises that gee, maybe they’re the bad guys in this” – which just flags up the problem that the crossover as a whole has never given them any adequate reason for failing to spot the point anyway.
Housekeeping
Reviews won’t be till Monday, due to my perverse insistence on reading the books first, something which I have not yet done.
Money in the Bank 2012
Once again, the WWE has chosen to make this easy for me by only announcing five matches – one of which is going to be the pre-show match, streaming on YouTube. So in practice, that’s only four matches announced for a three-hour show.
Now, granted, in practice, all four matches can be expected to be lengthy – but that’s still about an hour of mystery content for the PPV buyer. There’s a school of thought that says this doesn’t matter. In one sense that’s correct. Nobody (or nobody who understands how these shows work, at any rate) ever bought a three-hour show because of the sixth match on the card, which was unlikely to run more than ten minutes.
But I still think it’s a mistake, for two reasons.
Charts – 8 July 2012
Don’t get too comfortable, this won’t take long. The week ending 8 July 2012 was utterly dead for new releases, resulting in a chart with only two new entries, both miles down the chart, and with only one major climber (“Pound the Alarm” by Nicki Minaj, jumping 34-16).
1. Maroon 5 (feat Wiz Khalifa) – “Payphone”
Haven’t we been here before? “Payphone” was number 1 two weeks ago, it got knocked off by will.i.am’s “This Is Love” (which drops to 3 this week), and now it’s back. It’s probably not going to manage a third week, though you never know. Judging from the video, the quality of aim among American gun-users has improved little since the days of the A-Team. Also, it’s remarkably easy to just run out of a bank besieged by the cops.
Housekeeping
Just for anyone who’s wondering:-
The next podcast will be next weekend. (If we did it today, there’d be an enormous gap before the next one. Trust me, it’s neater this way.)
Chart post and wrestling preview to follow later this weekend, and (probably) reviews on Sunday night – depending mainly on whether I manage to find the time to actually read the comics before then.
