Elimination Chamber 2012
For the second month running, the WWE have made my life easy by not announcing a full card for Sunday’s show. There are four matches officially announced for this show, and only three of them really count. Presumably there will a couple of other random matches to fill out the card, which probably wouldn’t have done anything for viewership anyway – but there is a reason why promoters have traditionally announced the entire card, namely to avoid giving the impression that they’re just making stuff up at the last minute. (Even though, in the WWE’s case, they often are.)
This is Elimination Chamber, the show that fills the gap between Royal Rumble in January and Wrestlemania in the spring. On the January show, Sheamus won the Royal Rumble match, so he gets to challenge for either the Raw or Smackdown title at Wrestlemania. In an ideal world you would now start the build for that match, but for some reason the WWE has decided that it would be a good idea to use the February show to put up both titles in six-man elimination matches, thus throwing the field of potential champions wide open. This must be very convenient if you’re prone to last-minute storyline revisal, but it seems an odd time in the year to run matches that inevitably emphasise the potential randomness of the title-holder.
Charts – 12 February 2012
First things first: no, there aren’t any Whitney Houston songs on this chart. The chart week runs from Sunday to Saturday, so all of the memorial sales will count towards the next chart. In fact, judging from iTunes, it looks like the major impact will be sales of her greatest hits albums; I’m not expecting a deluge on the singles chart, though things could always change during the week.
The midweek chart showed “Titanium” by David Guetta staying at number one, but as it turns out, it didn’t quite hold on. Instead, it slips to number two, and gets replaced by this:
“Somebody I Used to Know” by Gotye featuring Kimbra entered at number 36 four weeks ago and has been climbing steadily since. I already covered it in the 15 January post, so go and read that if you want more on the artists.
The X-Axis – 12 February 2012
This is a podcast weekend, so don’t forget to check out the show (just one post down!) to hear our reviews of the first issues of Winter Soldier, the latest Conan series, and Thief of Thieves. I’m not going to repeat those books here, since we’ve got five X-books to cover, starting with…
Daken: Dark Wolverine #21 – Part one of “Lost Weekend”, which looks to be the wrap-up to Rob Williams run before the series gets cancelled with issue #23. The Los Angeles storyline is now behind us, and Daken has effectively lost. He didn’t get to become the local crimelord; he didn’t get the girl. And thanks to issues of heavy drug use, he burnt out his healing factor, so now he’s dying.
All of which leads the battered Daken back to New York, initially to look for a cure, but eventually to try and go out in a blaze of glory, with one last futile gesture directed at his estranged father Wolverine and the New York superhero establishment. He drops by at the Baxter Building to gratuitously show his true colours to the FF, and tell the Human Torch that his return from the dead “is simply an insult” to real people. He drugs Wolverine with Heat. And generally, he just wants to vent his spleen at superheroes.
House to Astonish Episode 78
It’s been a kind of unpleasant couple of weeks for comics news, and we’ve got lots of discussion of it all for you – we talk about Before Watchmen, Gary Friedrich’s lawsuit against Marvel, Tony Moore’s lawsuit against Robert Kirkman, DC’s creative reshuffles and the results of their readership survey. We’ve also got reviews of Thief of Thieves, Conan the Barbarian and Winter Soldier and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe goes West. All this plus the scripture of the year 2070, ‘roid freaks and the Punisher’s desperate search for manufactured drama.
The podcast is here, or here at Mixcloud, or accessible via the player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments, on Twitter, via email or at our Facebook fan page.
Charts – 5 February 2012
Don’t get too comfortable, this probably won’t take long. It’s a week of almost total inactivity on the singles chart, at least where new entries are concerned.
We do, however, have a new number one, because “Twilight” by Cover Drive has dropped to 6 in its second week. That should have left the way clear for the week’s only major chart-eligible new release, which was indeed at the top of the midweek chart – but as it turns out, sales tailed off in the second half. (Madonna also released a new single last week, but because it’s being offered as an advance download for people pre-ordering her new album, and the chart compilers can’t tell the two types of purchase part, it’s not eligible to chart.)
The somewhat unexpected result is that our new number 1 is “Titanium” by David Guetta ft Sia.
The X-Axis – 5 February 2012
Our main event this weekend, it would seem, is the Before Watchmen piece in the post below. But we also have some X-books out this week, so let’s cover those.
Before we start, fair warning: there’s a common theme with all five of this week’s books, which is that it’s the middle chapter of a storyline, and in most cases my views remain much the same as they were last issue. But here we go anyway…
Avengers: X-Sanction #3 – You may have seen that the early January sales charts are out, and DC took a clean sweep of the top 10. As it turns out, X-Sanction tailed in somewhere around number 15, quite some way off being even Marvel’s top seller for the month. Which, on the one hand, is maybe not a good sign for interest in the upcoming Avengers vs X-Men crossover that this book is supposed to be building to. On the other hand, it could just be that Loeb and McGuinness aren’t the draw they used to be, and everyone knows that preludes are disposable, and so a lot of people decided to skip it. After all, Fear Itself tie-ins didn’t do much business, but people still bought the regular series.
Before Watchmen
Since it’s going to be woefully stale news by the time we reach the next podcast, I’ll throw out a few thoughts on this one now.
If you haven’t seen the official announcement, a brief summary: DC has announced a line of seven interconnected Watchmen prequel miniseries to ship this summer. There are some pretty respectable creators on there – Darwyn Cooke, Brian Azzarello, Adam Hughes, JG Jones. Some would argue that J Michael Straczynski still counts, though I find most of his recent comics work toxically smug.
Needless to say, fandom is incensed.
There are broadly two strands to that reaction. The first is to do with the widely-held view that DC has generally screwed Alan Moore in relation to Watchmen, which is old territory, and not something I’m inclined to go over here. And the other aspect can best be summarised as “For god’s sake, why?”
Charts – 29 January 2012
Time for another new number 1 single – and to judge from the iTunes chart, another one that’s likely to spend a single week at the top. This time, it’s “Twilight” by Cover Drive, a Bajan group who like to style their music as “Cari-pop”.
Hey, guys, you couldn’t work some really incongruous product placement for the Mini into your video, could you?
Thanks.
The X-Axis – 29 January 2012
It’s a busy weekend here on the blog. This week’s podcast is a couple of posts down, and there’s a wrestling preview just below. But now, comics.
Astonishing X-Men #46 – Greg Pak and Mike McKone’s fill-in arc is proving to be very much in the vein of the cancelled Exiles. Cyclops is kidnapped by X-Men from another earth, and finds himself leading a makeshift team composed of other captives from yet further parallel worlds. So we’ve got a civilian schoolboy version of Nightcrawler, a military version of Wolverine, and such like.
This issue, Pak spells out the high concept. It’s a world where the X-Men finally triumphed over the bad guys, only to find that the world was so horribly damaged by the battle that it needed special machines to keep it going. By the magic of plot contrivance, those machines need to be powered by mutants sacrificing their lives. And having run out of willing sacrifices on their own world, they’ve started harvesting.
Royal Rumble 2012
Welcome back, for the first wrestling PPV preview of 2012!
Although this is not the easiest show to preview. The Royal Rumble is traditionally the second biggest show of the year. The winner of the titular 30-man battle royal gets to challenge for the world title (or, these days, one of the world titles) in the main event at Wrestlemania. It is, therefore, the point where storylines kick into gear to start the long build to Wrestlemania in the spring. It’s been in that role for 25 years now. And, aware that the Royal Rumble pretty much sells itself, the WWE has more or less left it to do that. They’ve announced a couple of title matches and something for John Cena; they’ve pushed the Rumble itself in general terms; but they haven’t announced anything else for the undercard, nor have they announced a full list of participants for the Rumble itself. Apparently there is actually a reason for this. We shall see.
1. The 2012 Royal Rumble. The design of the Royal Rumble match – with wrestlers drawing numbers at (ahem) random and entering in sequence over the course of an hour – is a masterstroke, allowing them to tell a range of stories during the hour. A straight 30-man battle royal, with everyone starting in the ring at the same time, is usually just turgid. Until the field is thinned out, there’s no room to do anything. The Royal Rumble solves that problem brilliantly.
Sure, the element of random luck would make it a ludicrous way for any real sport to choose its top title contender. But in wrestling, built-in unfairness is a positive boon.
