Charts – 8 April 2012
It’s another exceptionally quiet week, with a bare handful of new releases, and some older records making a resurgence further down the chart. Mercifully, Chris Brown’s sales flare out after a single week, and he drops to number five. He is replaced by a much better pop single.
1. Carly Rae Jepsen – “Call Me Maybe”
No less than two “tribute” cover versions of this song were floating around outside the top 40 last week, which should have been a tip-off that it was going to sell rather well. It takes thirty seconds or so to get going, but then it launches into the chorus and pretty much stays there for the rest of the track. Well, okay, there’s a second verse. But it’s not very long. It’s a very good pop single, and it looks like it’s got a decent shot of staying on top for a second week.
The X-Axis – 8 April 2012
Well, after all the hype, we’ve finally reached Marvel’s big event of the year. Also available in exciting “augmented reality!” Yeah…
But first!
Age of Apocalypse #2 – I’m still not really sold on this book, but it does have something. In theory, there’s some potential in doing an inverted Marvel Universe where the mutants are all lunatics and in control, while the human villains become the plucky underdogs whose anti-mutant agenda becomes utterly reasonable. And I like the use of the depowered Jean Grey and Sabretooth, who end up stuck with the human resistance – though it’s perhaps surprising that they don’t get more to do, given that they’re among the book’s most recognisable established characters.
Charts – 1 April 2012
I never did get around to doing last week’s chart. So I’ll catch up now. We’ll run through this week’s new entries, and the tracks from last week that are still around. Last week’s number 1 was a one-week-wonder new entry, which we’ll come to in a bit. But first…
1. Chris Brown, “Turn Up The Music”
Oh, Britain. Oh, really.
Chris Brown has been around since 2006, but this is his first UK number one. His previous best was debut single “Run It!” back in 2006. His success in the UK is decidedly patchy – his last single, “She Ain’t You”, failed to make the top 50 last year. But this is the start of the campaign for his new album, so inevitably it’s doing better.
The X-Axis – 1 April 2012
Tonight’s Wrestlemania preview? One post down.
This weekend’s podcast? Two posts down.
Alright, now to run through this week’s X-books! And it’s quite the eventful week, with one cancellation, one new creative team, and the lead-in issue for the big summer crossover.
Astonishing X-Men #48 – The first issue by Marjorie Liu and Mike Perkins. We talked about this on the podcast, and for my money it’s a mixed affair. There’s an obvious difficulty for any of the secondary X-books in trying to find a separate identity for their title, and to some extent Liu succeeds in setting a different tone for her book – even if it’s one that bears little resemblance to the sort of stories that have appeared in this book before. The title is now aligned with Wolverine’s side of the split, but steers clear of the school in favour of doing stories about some of the staff hanging out in New York over their weekends along with Manhattan residents Northstar and Cecilia Reyes.
Wrestlemania 2012
It’s spring again, and time for the biggest wrestling show of the year. This time, Wrestlemania is coming from Miami, where the weather has apparently been pretty dreadful of late. And it’s an open-air arena. But there’s a bloody great tent suspended over the ring, so unless the weather turns really atrocious, they should be okay. Could be a long night for the live crowd, though.
As we’ve come to expect, the show is built around the headlining matches, with the idea being that the casual audience will be attracted by the big names, but that decent matches on the undercard should bring them back for more. This is well and good in theory. It’s notable, though, that this year’s two biggest matches actually feature wrestlers who aren’t on the regular roster at all, and are essentially semi-retired – with the Raw and Smackdown champions down at the third and fourth slots on the card. It’s undoubtedly the case that the two top matches are bigger draws than anything the regular roster has to offer right now, but that in itself should be a cause of concern for the company. There’s a risk in bringing back the likes of the Rock, which is that you draw attention to the company’s failure to create stars of similar magnitude in the years since.
House to Astonish Episode 81
We’re back, with more comics chat goodness – this time round, we’re talking about the new Scott Pilgrim colour editions, the shake-ups on Avenging Spider-Man, 2000AD‘s digital expansion, the Mars Attacks! musical and Katsuhiro Otomo’s new series and taking a quick look at the new solicitations. We’ve also got reviews of B.P.R.D. Hell On Earth: The Pickens County Horror, Astonishing X-Men and New Deadwardians, and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe is free to be you and me. All this plus PunisherMAX as a Country & Western ballad, an international firm of surveyors and the Gothiest of all child detectives.
EDIT: And yes, I did say we were looking at news out of Wondercon, when actually I meant ECCC. I would like to enter a plea of It Was Early And I Was Sleepy.
The episode is here, or on Mixcloud here, on iTunes or available via the embedded player below. Why not check out the show that comicsbulletin.com described as “the best comic book podcast out there“? Let us know what you think, in the comments, via email, on Twitter or at our Facebook fan page.
The X-Axis – 25 March 2012
All right, then! We’ve got two weeks worth of X-books to cover – which, in this day and age – is a lot – so let’s run through them. I’ll try and take some of these quickly but, well, I said that last time and it didn’t seem to work out that way. Let’s see how we go.
Avengers: X-Sanction #4 – This is the final issue of the miniseries that’s being billed as a lead-in to Avengers vs X-Men (and, incidentally, Marvel are displaying remarkable confidence in product awareness by shipping it with a cover that completely obscures the “X-Sanction” bit of the logo). A while back, I predicted that the pay-off would be that Cable’s mission ended up tipping off the Avengers to the threat posed by Hope, thus ironically bringing about the very thing he was trying to stop. Well, that doesn’t happen.
Thing is, nor does much of anything else. Cable is finally subdued and carted off to the X-Men’s prison; Hope somehow or other cures him of the techno-organic virus; and Cable and Cyclops have a brief conversation in which they acknowledge openly that she’s Phoenix. Which, from the look of it, is supposed to be the big pay-off. Except any remotely attentive reader must have figured it out during “Messiah Complex”, which was years ago. That aside, it’s a load of running around and fighting, with some leaden attempts at emotional melodrama. Oh, and it has one of the stupidest scenes I’ve read in years, in which we’re asked to believe that Hope understands Cable so well that she can guess correctly which wire to cut to defuse a bomb that he’s set. It’s the sort of thing that would be charmingly goofy in a Silver Age comic, to be fair, but even if you’re willing to be charitable and take it that way, it still seems absurdly out of place here.
If you decided to skip the prequel and go straight to the regular series – smart choice. You missed nothing.
Charts – 18 March 2012
Goodness, we really are behind here, aren’t we?
So – let’s cover last week’s chart, and then we’ll do two weeks of comics tomorrow. Then all will be right with the world.
1. Gotye ft Kimbra – “Somebody That I Used To Know”
Yes, it’s still there. That’s a total of five weeks, but with several major releases this week, it seems pretty much certain that this will be the end of the line – the midweeks have a trio of new entries shouldering it down to 4. Five weeks is a very good run, mind you.
House to Astonish Episode 80
We’re back after a one-week hiatus, with discussion of the sad passing of Moebius, Marvel’s Infinite Comics and AR app, the announcements coming out of Wondercon and Amy Reeder leaving Batwoman, as well as reviews of Saga, Avengers Assemble and Saucer Country and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe has little man syndrome. All this plus X-Treme F-Men, exploding sanitary towels and significant quantities of alveolar trill.
For some reason, Garageband didn’t detect the mic this time round, so it all sounds a bit echoey, but we’ll survive.
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 Mixcloud, by email or on our Facebook fan page.
Charts – 11 March 2012
I know, I know. I’m running very late.
Last week’s delayed podcast will be up tomorrow (with the rest of this week’s reviews most likely following early in the week), but in the meantime…
1. Gotye ft Kimbra – “Somebody That I Used To Know”
That’s four weeks total at number one, and the midweeks show him staying for a fifth. Gotye is now closing on the six week combined run of Rihanna’s “We Found Love” last October/November.
