Phoenix #12 annotations
PHOENIX #12
Writer: Stephanie Phillips
Artist: Roi Mercado
Colour artist: Java Tartaglia
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Editor: Annalise Bissa
PHOENIX
Jean doesn’t appear much in this issue, which mostly consists of Sara giving her account of how she came to be in Greyhaven. She appears briefly at the end, to look overwhelmed by her sister’s return, and to react to Cable’s entrance.
Jean also appears briefly as a child in Sara’s flashback, when she challenges Sara on deliberately throwing a baseball match. From Jean’s point of view, the significance of the scene probably lies mainly in the fact that she can verify it as a real incident. Well, if she does – it’s minor enough that she might think it’s something she doesn’t remember, and she doesn’t actually tell us that she remembers it.
Exceptional X-Men #10 annotations
EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #10
Writer: Eve L Ewing
Artists: Carmen Carnero & Federica Mancin
Colour artist: Nolan Woodard
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Tom Brevoort
Quite a short one for annotations, to be honest.
THE CORE CAST
Emma Frost. The end of the previous issue apparently involved Emma sacrificing herself to free Axo from Sinister’s machine (not something that was terribly clear from the previous issue), and then Emma’s mind being sucked into Sinister’s mindscape. She believes that she made a heroic sacrifice for Axo, and is rather put out by him coming after her – she claims he’s overshadowing her, but obviously her sacrifice would be in vain if he got killed too. She does make a point of getting him to safety first, before following back to the real world.
She claims that a major event in her personal development was meeting Kitty Pryde as a teenager and being shaken by the level of confidence she had. (Emma’s own back story has her only becoming that assertive later on.) The flashback shows Emma with Kitty in a Hellions costume. This is not actually the first time that Emma met Kitty – which would be X-Men #129 – but rather a scene from New Mutants #16, when Kitty was briefly at the Massachusetts Academy. That’s the first story where they spend an extended amount of time together.
House to Astonish Episode 213
Two weeks in between episodes? What is this, 2014? Whatever it is, it’s me and Paul talking about Peter David, Marvel and DC’s upcoming Deadpool and Batman crossovers, David Marquez’s The UnChosen, Superman: The Kryptonite Spectrum and Punisher: Red Band. We’ve also got reviews of Imperial and Be Not Afraid, and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook hunts alone (in a group of five). All this plus Skrull bin collections, Bruce Banner’s canonically accurate coat and the Space RNLI.
The episode is here, or available via the embedded player below. Let us know what you think in the comments, on Bluesky, or via email, and don’t forget to treat yourself to one of our frankly lush t-shirts, right now, while you remember.
Charts – 6 June 2025
Oh god…
Twelve weeks. The chart company is getting very excitable about how this compares to American artists of the past, but it’s not very meaningful, because they were working in the sales era, and so their runs at number one weren’t measuring continued listening.
At this point we need to get into the tedious details of the downweighting rule. I normally summarise it here as meaning that a record gets downweighted if it’s been out for ten weeks and it’s more than three weeks past its peak. It’s a bit subtler than that: it’s three weeks in which the change in consumption from week-to-week is consistently below the market average. Alex Warren has benefitted from this, because he has had three consecutive weeks where consumption went down, but in some of them the whole market was down, so he was still above average. The result is that he is still not in any imminent danger of being downweighted.
If he makes a thirteenth week – and by all appearances he will because he still has nearly double the consumption of the number 2 single – then that will match the run of “Shape of You” by Ed Sheeran in 2017, which is before the downweighting rule was introduced, and so isn’t directly comparable. God help us all.
6. Tate McRae – “Just Keep Watching”
The X-Axis – w/c 2 June 2025
ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #24. By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ Díaz, Clayton Cowles & Darren Shan. End of the current storyline, and I’m not convinced that this one really drew all its threads together. It looks great, and there are some elements of the Mutant Salvation Front that I really like. The idea of some of the MLF types being so dispirited by the post-Krakoa world that they’d rather try to travel forward in time to a better future than get there the long way is a nice one. Sure, the Krakoan era ended in a way that rather implied that all the mutants left on Earth were either new or had made a conscious decision to stay, but at this stage we’ve probably just got to assume that a lot more people didn’t fancy life in a conceptual realm than that story let on. And there’s an undercurrent to Wildside’s attitude to the post-Krakoa X-Men that makes a degree of sense: what do you mean we reverted to villainy? You’re the ones who turned your backs on mutant supremacism. We’re holding true to the Krakoan dream, mate.
However… quite what any of this has to do with the influencer storyline, I don’t really get. Something about Wildside trying to use them to spread his ideas and coming up against self-interest and cynicism and…? No, it just feels like two storylines that don’t connect up. So there are good ideas in here but it’s less than the sum of its parts.
X-MEN #17. (Annotations here.) This is by far the longest storyline we’ve had from Jed MacKay, despite it being basically a day’s fighting in the vicinity of the Factory. The X-Men themselves – and their 3K counterparts – don’t actually get that much to do in this issue, the real point being to expand a bit on the shadowy members of 3K. For that to work, of course, the art winds up having to gather them around one little bit of their enormous table, which always seemed a hostage to visual fortune. I’m not sure how effectively the new information about 3K is landing as a reveal – there surely can’t be many people out there who are excited to see Astra back, and Wyre is so obscure a character that he might as well be a new creation so far as X-Men readers are concerned. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with using either character here, but building them up as a mystery is an odd choice.
Storm #9 annotations
STORM vol 5 #9
“Sinister Schemes of the Stars and Stripes, part 2”
Writer: Murewa Ayodele
Artist: Lucas Werneck
Colour artist: Alex Guimarães
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Tom Brevoort
STORM
Her relationship with Eternity is sharply deteriorating. She tells Manifold that “something has taken possession of my body” – which was Eternity, in issue #5 – and that she feels she’s been made to watch helplessly as it commits atrocities in her body. More recently, she’s been experiencing blackouts, though she’s not clear whether this is Eternity taking even more control, or just a sign of mental collapse. She doesn’t seem to have done anything about it so far, and while she claims to be unable to resist Eternity when it takes control, she seems able to speak freely about it to Manifold the rest of the time.
She then goes on compare the experience to the time in her childhood when she killed a man who was trying to rape her (in a flashback in Uncanny X-Men #267), and declares that she wants to kill Eternity. The original scene carries a rather stronger implication that she kills the attacker in self-defence before he’s able to rape her; this one is played more as if she killed him in retaliation, given the analogy that she draws between him and Eternity.
Laura Kinney, Wolverine #7 annotations
LAURA KINNEY, WOLVERINE #7
“My So-Called Perfect Life, part 2”
Writer: Erica Schultz
Artist: Giada Belviso
Colour artist: Rachelle Rosenberg
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso
WOLVERINE
Last issue consisted entirely of Laura hallucinating about a world in which she lived a happy family life with Logan as her father and Gabby as her younger sister, with Julian Keller (Hellion) showing up at the end of the issue. As it turns out, all of this is the result of Beautiful Dreamer (see below) being used to sedate Laura while the Badoon try to experiment on her.
Laura’s dream life includes Julian as her boyfriend, which fits with the way their relationship was written in NYX #8. For some reason, Julian’s arrival also seems to destabilise what was previously a fairly ingrained illusion: not only does he lead her to step outside the house (which she didn’t do at all in the previous issue), but he proposes marriage to her.
X-Men #17 annotations
X-MEN vol 7 #17
“Visitor”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Ryan Stegman
Inkers: JP Mayer, Ryan Stegman & Livesay
Colourist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
THE X-MEN
Cyclops, Psylocke, Temper, Magik and Juggernaut are all still fighting the 3K X-Men throughout this issue, and their plot doesn’t advance that much.
Kid Omega. He survived the explosion in issue #14 thanks to a psychic “macro” that created a telekinetic shield around him while he was unconscious, only to be opened on the arrival of an “authorised ally”. We’ve seen him do something broadly similar when he used pre-prepared mental traps to beat the more experienced Professor X in issue #13, though that was reusing a trick he’d picked up from Cassandra Nova.
Charts – 30 May 2025
It never ends.
1. Alex Warren – “Ordinary”
9. Alex Warren featuring Jelly Roll – “Bloodline”
“Ordinary” has now been number one for 11 weeks. And it’s still way ahead of Chappell Roan at number 2, so it’s really a question of when it gets hit by downweighting. Unfortunately, it outperformed the market this week, so it’s several weeks off that happening. An 11 week run matches Ed Sheeran’s “Bad Habits” from 2021. To find a longer number 1 than that, we’re going back to “Shape of You”, which was number 1 for 13 weeks in early 2017.
Meanwhile, the highest new entry this week is from… Alex Warren. It’s Mumford & Sons stuff, with a guest verse by a very obviously autotuned Jelly Roll, making his first appearance in the singles or albums top 40. It’s Perfectly Competent.
The X-Axis – w/c 26 May 2025
ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #23. By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ Diaz & Clayton Cowles. Well, it’s a fight issue, but it’s a fight issue that also has the task of selling us on the revamped “Mutant Salvation Front”. The original Mutant Liberation Front always had some memorable character designs going for them – something that was genuinely one of Rob Liefeld’s strengths. But conceptually they’ve been more generic. This pared-down version of the group aren’t so much anti-human as pathologically pro-mutant, throwing themselves into a utopian vision of a restored mutant society. Using Wildside in the leader role seemed a weird choice at first, but Seeley actually makes a good case for it here: Wildside’s power is to create hallucinations, but there’s a thin line between a hallucination and a spiritual experience, which is how he can resposition himself as a preacher. That actually makes sense, complete with the suggestion that Wildside may not literally believe his visions but does believe in the importance of inspiring hope in his followers. And for the core group, sure, why not these three? Forearm is highly recognisable. Reaper is also highly recognisable, but now claims to have a higher perspective on the world because he’s also been to other universes. Which is true! He was in the Ultraverse Exiles for a while, and nobody remembers that. But as a guy who’s had weird experiences that he thinks make him open-minded… that works. And… well, okay, Strobe’s an odd choice because she was one of the more generic designs. And that design has been reworked here anyway, quite well. But sure, Strobe. Why not. Anyway, I like what Seeley is doing with these characters – they’re underused and this legitimately gives them something to do.
UNCANNY X-MEN #15. (Annotations here.) “Dark Artery” has been the strongest arc of the series so far, though this is something of a middle chapter issue. I assume the flashbacks are heading towards how Henrietta wound up as guardian of the Artery, and since the suggestion is that she’s looking for one of the Outliers to release her from that role, it’s an interesting reversal from her ultra-sympathetic role in the flashbacks. I’m looking forward to seeing how we pull that off next time. As for this issue, I like the way Deathdream is handled, and obviously David Marquez can sell the atmosphere of the Penumbra. I’m not so sure about the goth costumes for everyone, though I guess they help prevent the vibe of the Penumbra being polluted by too many bright colours, so they serve a function there.
