The X-Axis – 20 February 2011
Another heavy week for X-books – six of them this time round, even without any of the regular X-Men titles coming out. There’s some decent stuff in there, though. Couple of new launches as well. And since I’m starting this rather later in the evening than I’d normally like to, I’ll get straight to it…
Astonishing X-Men: Xenogenesis #5 – My god, it’s finished! It’s actually finished! The first issue of this series came out last May, if you’re wondering. I’ll do a separate post looking back on the whole series, and I’m pretty confident that it’ll read a lot better in one go. The bottom line is that this was a pretty simple, straightforward, direct story, and one that’s far, far too slight to survive being stretched out over nine months. Frankly I expect it’ll still feel overextended as a graphic novel – in terms purely of story content, it could fit into an annual perfectly happily – but at least it’ll be intact. Of course, and Emma Frost gets a couple of nice moments, but the story is utterly unsuited for the serial format in which Marvel have shipped it and in which the majority of people will probably read it.
Elimination Chamber 2011
The WWE’s final pay-per-view before Wrestlemania used to be something of an awkward schedule filler, but in the last few years it’s been somewhat strengthened. Having two versions of the world title helps here, even if it’s counterproductive more generally. The Royal Rumble show in January determines one of the challengers for Wrestlemania; that leaves the February show with the job of deciding on the other challenger. Throw in the two obligatory title defences, and when this show ends, the company should have identified both champions and both challengers for the biggest show of the year.
The problem this year is that the viable candidates are few in number, so unless they throw in a major curveball, it’s really quite easy to predict who wins. Fortunately for me, this show is not a PPV in the UK, so I don’t have to worry too much about that. (Incidentally, I’m going to be out of the country for Wrestlemania itself, so you won’t be getting a preview for that.)
The Elimination Chamber is a glorified cage match. Six participants. Two men start, and every five minutes, another wrestler enters (or, more accurately, is released from their pod inside the cage so that they can join the match). Elimination occurs by pinfall or submission. Last guy left is the winner.
Charts – 13 February 2011
It seems that Lady Gaga enjoys making life unnecessarily difficult for herself. The chart week ends at midnight on Saturday, giving the compilers time to verify everything before the charts are announced on Sunday afternoon. (Sunday sales count towards the next week.) So when does Lady Gaga release her new single? Friday afternoon at two o’clock.
“Born This Way” dutifully shot to the top of the iTunes chart, which as we all know is based on a complicated formula involving very recent sales and water divination. Would it make number one on less than a day and a half’s sales?
Well, no, of course not. It may be the biggest new release of the week, but not by such a margin as to overturn a five day head start. Granted, “Candle in the Wine ’97” managed it, but that was a special case. “Born This Way” enters at number 3, but chances are it’ll climb to number 1 on Sunday. So we’ll come back to it then.
The X-Axis – 13 February 2011
Last week I reviewed a couple of completed storylines instead of doing the capsules, so we’ve got a couple of weeks’ worth of X-books to cover here – I’ll leave the miscellany of other books for another post. This fortnight’s theme: Wolverine. Loads of him.
Daken: Dark Wolverine #5 – The title may say this is “Empire Act 2, part 2 of 3”, but it actually seems to be the start of a new story. Last issue, Daken dropped by to visit the Fantastic Four, tie up a dangling subplot and pick up a new weapon; this time, he’s off to Madripoor to say hi to Tyger Tiger, a character we haven’t seen in years. It’s a strange book, this, and I honestly can’t make up my mind whether it’s being subtle, or whether it’s just a bit of a mess. Sometimes Daken seems to be written as a one dimensional psycho. At other points, as in this issue, we’re being invited to speculate on what he’s really up to and how much of his stated motivations are true. (The book has wisely disposed with his first person narration.) It’s obvious enough why the writers would want Daken to be in Madripoor; it’s a location strongly associated with Wolverine, so it keeps Daken in his father’s shadow without them actually having to interact. But why is Daken there? He says he’s there to start a new life with a new identity, but he’s also the one who’s chosen to go Madripoor, who dresses in a modified Wolverine costume, and who keeps bringing up Wolverine.
Charts – 6 February 2011
Welcome to a new chart era. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that some of the major labels were introducing a new system for promoting singles. Instead of hyping them for weeks before putting them on sale, they’re going to release new singles for download at the same time that they’re released to radio. So, in effect, no pre-release publicity at all. They call it “on air, on sale.” And this is the first chart to feature singles released under the new system.
You’d have thought that would mean singles entering low and working their way up. But, as it turns out, no. The first major release with an “on air, on sale” schedule goes straight in at number one – which, of course, you could read as evidence that the record industry has been completely wasting its time with the pre-release hype on singles for years now.
X-Force: The Apocalypse Solution
By this point, I have actually got last week’s comics. But I haven’t read them yet. And to be honest, I feel like breaking from format anyway and looking at some completed storylines. So, as promised, let’s look at another recently relaunched book, and the first arc of Uncanny X-Force. Again, beware spoilers – I’m assuming you’ve either read it or you don’t plan to.
The Apocalypse Solution
Uncanny X-Force #1-4
Writer: Rick Remender
Artist: Jerome Opena
Colourist: Dean White
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Axel Alonso
In their endless quest for short-term sales spikes, Marvel will relaunch a title these days for the most tenuous of reasons – or indeed for no reason at all, if needs must. But, at least relatively speaking, X-Force is a legitimate relaunch. They’ve changed most of the cast. They’ve changed the creative team. They’ve changed the style and tone beyond recognition. And it’s a clean slate for new storylines.
What remains is the very basic premise that X-Force are the black ops unit which the other X-Men don’t know about. True, the previous X-Force were exposed during the “Second Coming” crossover, to general disquiet among the ranks (and boy, there’s a storyline that seems to have petered out). But Scott disbanded that squad, and Wolverine’s re-formed it without telling anyone. So the idea of a secret team within a team has been restored.
Wolverine Goes To Hell
As I already mentioned on Twitter, I haven’t got this week’s comics yet, and so, in a fit of critical integrity, I’m not going to review them. For once, however, this coincides with a weekend when I do have time to write some reviews, and so I’m going to take the opportunity to look at length at the first arcs of two recently relaunched titles. Heavy spoilers ahead, by the way – I’m assuming that either you’ve read these arcs, or you’re not planning to.
Coming up in the next day or two, the first arc of Uncanny X-Force. But first…
Wolverine Goes to Hell
Wolverine #1-5
Writer: Jason Aaron
Main story penciller: Renato Guedes
Main story inkers: Jose Wilson Magalhaes and Oclair Albert
Main story colourist: Matt Wilson
Back-up story artists: Jason Latour and Rico Renzi (#1 and #5), Steven Sanders and Ronda Pattison (#2), Michael Gaydos (#3), Jamie McKelvie and John Rauch (#4)
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Jeanine Schaefer
The recent relaunch of Wolverine has been driven more by commercial than creative factors. The last big relaunch, a little over a year earlier, misfired spectacularly – more through overly tricksy marketing than due to any fault of the creative team. The idea was to soft-launch a new spin-off title featuring Wolverine’s son Daken. But rather than just launch Dark Wolverine #1, some bright spark thought it would be a terribly good idea to turn the existing Wolverine series into a Daken title, and shunt Wolverine himself off into a new title, Wolverine: Weapon X. Unfortunately, the way everything was timed meant that Weapon X, which was meant to be the lead Wolverine book, was universally perceived as his C-title, and sales duly crashed into oblivion.
While it may be heartening in some respects to see a needlessly complicated promotional stunt blow up in Marvel’s face, the result was rather unfair to Jason Aaron, who was writing rather good stories over on Weapon X. He’s got a good handle not just on the character, but also on the style that makes his stories work – shamelessly over the top, but still sane enough to shift gears and carry some dramatic weight when it’s needed. If nothing else, this latest relaunch gives him a well deserved second chance to find an audience.
Charts – 30 January 2011
The midweek charts suggested a fairly quiet week. As it turns out, there are ten new entries this week – but six of them are between 31 and 40, so the midweeks weren’t entirely wrong.
One of those new entries is at number one – “We R Who We R” by Ke$ha. This is the lead single from “Cannibal”, a companion EP promoting a re-release of her album “Animal”. Basically, it’s the old “special edition” schtick, except they’re going to sell the same album packaged alongside the new EP. Since the new EP is available separately, it’s actually a fairer way of treating the people who bought the album the first time round. Although as a rule, these days, they can just download the extra tracks if they’re that bothered.
The X-Axis – 30 January 2011
This week: X-books, X-books, X-books. It’s not that I didn’t buy anything else – it’s that Marvel shipped ten X-books this week, in one of their periodic bursts of demented scheduling insanity. Those would be: Age of X Alpha, Chaos War: X-Men #2, Howard Chaykin’s Magneto one-shot, New Mutants #21, Uncanny X-Force #4, Uncanny X-Men #532, X-23 #5, X-Men #7, X-Men Forever 2 #16, and X-Men: To Serve And Protect #3.
This is the definition of saturating the market. If you’re going to produce this many X-Men titles, it’s completely ludicrous to put them all out in the same week. But so it goes. Some of these books are the concluding parts of storylines, and I’ll try to come back to them later in the week once I’ve re-read the whole arc. For the moment…
Age of X Alpha – This is the first part of Mike Carey’s alternate reality storyline, which is running over the next three months in X-Men: Legacy and New Mutants (a book which is between regular creative teams and thus able to join in without interrupting anyone’s story). As Carey explains in his afterword, the approach here is to just to throw us in with the story in progress, and fill in the back story with hints as he goes along. Even the question of why we’re doing an alternate reality story isn’t addressed here, though since this is Carey, and I trust him, I figure all will become clear in due course.
Royal Rumble 2011
Yes, after the usual Christmas break in the PPV calendar, the wrestling posts are back. The majority of you may move on with your lives now.
Still here? Okay, then. Tonight’s show is the 2011 Royal Rumble, traditionally the second-biggest event in the WWE’s pay-per-view schedule. For those of you who don’t follow wrestling (and yet are still inexplicably reading this), a brief recap. The biggest show of the year is Wrestlemania, which is on April 3. The Royal Rumble in January is headlined by a battle royal, and the winner goes on to challenge for the title at Wrestlemania. Now, battle royals tend to be rather dull events because if you’ve got thirty guys in the ring at once, they can’t really do much of anything. The great idea of the Royal Rumble is that the wrestlers draw numbers and enter in sequence every two minutes or so (and boy, there’s a lot of latitude in that “or so” – there’s a good reason why they don’t leave the clock on screen throughout). This is, of course, a ridiculous way to choose a top contender for the biggest show of the year because, if it were real, the element of random luck would be enormous. But it makes for a much better match, because the number of wrestlers in the ring can be kept under control, and because the regular entrances give the match structure and the fans plenty of opportunities to wonder who’s coming next.
