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Jan 26

Charts – 24 January 2025

Posted on Sunday, January 26, 2025 by Paul in Music

At last, we have the first new number one of the year.

1. Lola Young – “Messy”

This has had a long road to number 1. The track was released last May. It didn’t make the top 100 until November and didn’t reach the top 40 until just before Christmas. It spent the last three weeks stuck at number 3. Lola Young herself has been around for years and seems to be a rare case of a major label sticking by someone until the hits came.

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Jan 25

The X-Axis – w/c 20 January 2025

Posted on Saturday, January 25, 2025 by Paul in x-axis

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #7. By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ Diaz & Clayton Cowles. Looks like we’re alternating creative teams on this book now, but Seeley and Audino are perfectly good, so I’ve no read complaints there. This is the first part of a Black Tom Cassidy arc, as he not only tries to return to the regular world, but also has to adjust to being separated from Krakoa. Given his role in X-Force, and his link with Juggernaut, he’s a sensible character to check in with, and this is a solid first chapter. It’s a little jarring at first to see Captain America show up, shrug his shoulders and think “yup, C-list supervillain”, but that’s probably how the non-mutant heroes should see the likes of Black Tom. It’s not like his Krakoan face turn was high profile – he was in the Krakoan secret service. So it makes a certain sense to play him as a character who’s even more directionless than most of the others – except for the obvious question of “So why isn’t he with the Juggernaut, then?” But the story is obviously gearing up to answer that question directly, and so far so good.

UNCANNY X-MEN #9. (Annotations here.) And I guess we’re doing alternating artists on this book, since David Marquez hasn’t drawn a whole issue since #5, and isn’t solicited to do so again until #13 as far as I can see. Mind you, at 18 issues a year, he was never going to draw them all. This issue was solicited with art by Javier Garrón, but winds up drawn by Andrei Bressan, which might explain why it looks a bit rough. Still, it tells the story well enough, and the conversation sequences are pretty good. As for the story, Uncanny X-Men is very much “The Outliers featuring the X-Men” at this point, but I like the Outliers, so I have no complaints about that. I’m not so sure about tying Ransom to Sunspot, though – yes, he’s a character in the mould of early Sunspot, but does it actually help him to draw attention to that fact? The Wolfpack Sentinels work as villains for the newbies, but it does make it a weird decision to use them in an ineffective background role in the “Raid on Graymalkin” crossover. But as another spotlight issue for the Outliers, this does its job quite well.

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Jan 24

Hellverine #2 annotations

Posted on Friday, January 24, 2025 by Paul in Annotations

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.

HELLVERINE vol 2 #2
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Raffaele Ienco
Colour artist: Bryan Valenza
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Mark Basso

HELLVERINE:

Akihiro talks about Hellverine as if he was a different character, in much the way that Johnny Blaze talks about the Ghost Rider. He generally uses “Hellverine” to refer to himself in Ghost Rider form, and “Bagra-Ghul” to refer to the demon inside him which enables the transformation, but he’s not entirely consistent about it.

Akihiro considers “Hellverine” to be an “uninvited guest” whom he can usually keep under control, but the demon can force his way to the surface if he really wants. The demon allows him to sense evil. When attacked by Evan, who’s simply scared and trying to defend himself, Akihiro recognises him as non-evil and remains in human form to subdue him. Despite the signs of demonic possession in the area and his own inability to control Bagra-Ghul 100% of the time, Akihiro assures Evan that “You can trust me” – it’s a white lie to try and calm the kid down, but it’s certainly not entirely true. (Akihiro repeats several times that Evan can trust him, and it’s clearly not just a throwaway line.) It’s possible that Akihiro is using his regular old mutant pheromone powers to Evan too, since Evan belatedly realises that he’s being rather trusting for no sufficient reason towards the end of the story.

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Jan 23

Phoenix #7 annotations

Posted on Thursday, January 23, 2025 by Paul in Annotations

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.

PHOENIX #7
Writer: Stephanie Phillips
Artist: Marco Renna
Colour artist: David Curiel
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Annalise Bissa

PHOENIX:

She tries to earn Adani’s trust by showing her the edited highlights of her origin story (see Footnotes for the specifics). This was foreshadowed back in issue #1, where the older Adani’s narration talked about Jean sharing her story.

Even though Jean is the Phoenix, she can also separate herself from its power and transfer it to someone with whom she has a psychic link. She’s also able to take that power back again, though it’s not like Adani has any relevant psychic training with which to resist. Whether the Phoenix has a mind of its own in this regard isn’t clear. For some reason, this leads to a flash of energy and Jean being transported to the Blue Area of the Moon.

She sees parallels between herself and Adani as a child suffering “corruptive pain”, which makes her want to trust Adani. As a psychic she should arguably know better, but apparently she convinces herself that Adani will make the right choices.

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Jan 22

Uncanny X-Men #9 annotations

Posted on Wednesday, January 22, 2025 by Paul in Annotations

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.

UNCANNY X-MEN vol 6 #9
“Off the Leash”
Writer: Gail Simone
Artist: Andrei Bressan
Colour artist: Matthew Wilson
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort

THE X-MEN:

Rogue. She’s willing to lead the team but wants “everybody” to have a say in decisions – which in practice seems to mean just the established team and not the Outliers. She assigns each of the veterans to mentor one of the kids. Wolverine endorses this decision and calls her a “pretty fine leader”, though she seems genuinely unsure whether he’s being backhanded by comparing her to Professor X and Cyclops. (This seems like paranoia on her part, since there’s no obvious reason for him to be sarcastic.)

Gambit. He’s annoyed that Nightcrawler didn’t buy the beer he asked for in issue #6. Other than that, he doesn’t have much to do in this issue.

Wolverine. He’s sure that each of the Outliers is hiding something – that’s fairly obvious in the case of Ransom and Calico but less so with Jitter and Deathdream. As in issue #2, he doesn’t trust them, but he now thinks the bigger problem is that they don’t “trust themselves”. He approves of Rogue’s mentoring scheme and volunteers to take responsiblity for Ransom. Logan seems to identify to some extent with Ransom as a triggerhappy loner. He apologises for being less than welcoming to the newcomers, and gives Ransom some praise as a lyncphpin of his group. His instinct is to keep an eye on the Outliers when they’re sent to the mall, but Jubilee talks him out of it, with the predictable disastrous consequences.

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Jan 21

House to Astonish Episode 211

Posted on Tuesday, January 21, 2025 by Al in Podcast

And so this is January, and what have you done? Another year over, a new one begun about three weeks ago. It’s not the most topical of year in review shows, but we have once more brought you our pick of 2024 in the world of comics, as we name the books that turned our heads over the past 12 months, with bonus contributions from you, the good people of the comments section, in what we could only call… The Homies (largely because that’s what we’ve been calling it for the past decade and a bit)

The episode is here, or available via the embedded player below. Let us know what you think, either in the comments, on Bluesky, via email or on our Facebook fan page. And why not buy one of our lovely t-shirts? No but, like, why not? Be more constructive with your feedback, please.

 

Jan 19

Daredevil Villains #44: El Jaguar

Posted on Sunday, January 19, 2025 by Paul in Daredevil

DAREDEVIL #120 (April 1975)
“…And a HYDRA New Year!”
Writer: Tony Isabella
Artist: Bob Brown
Inker: Vince Colletta
Colourist: Petra Goldberg
Leterer: Ray Holloway
Editor: Len Wein

Aside from the Crusher issue that we covered last time, Tony Isabella’s short run on Daredevil consists of a HYDRA storyline. These few issues are certainly not enough to make HYDRA into Daredevil villains. But if Isabella had stuck around longer, they might well have wound up as a true import to his rogue’s gallery. Isabella’s big project here is to retool HYDRA for the seventies, and Daredevil happens to be the book he’s writing so here they are.

HYDRA had debuted a decade earlier in “Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD” (at that point, a feature in Strange Tales). They were a terrorist organisation led by Fury’s arch enemy Baron Wolfgang von Strucker, who had started life as a Nazi villain in Sgt Fury #5. In other words, as originally conceived, they were continuity Nazis. If not outright neo-Nazis, they were at least an example of the “escaped Nazi leader resurfaces in South America with a private army” trope.

But Strucker had been killed in Strange Tales #158, back in 1967. HYDRA had continued to appear, but my impression is that without their frontman, they’d drifted into mere generic super-terrorists.

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Jan 18

Charts – 17 January 2025

Posted on Saturday, January 18, 2025 by Paul in Music

There were some new releases this week, but nobody’s very interested in those. Instead, let’s see what’s going viral from the back catalogue!

1. Gracie Abrams – “That’s So True”

But first: eight non-consecutive weeks for this. It’s clinging on by its fingertips, with a lead of less than 2% over Rosé and Bruno Mars at 2. The top 4 is all non-movers and to be honest there’s very little movement in the top 10 period.

25. Alex Warren – “Carry You Home”

First of all, a resurgence of interest in a minor hit from last autumn. This had a four week run in the chart, peaking at number 32. It’s been hanging around in the lower reaches for ages but has had enough of a surge to get a reset on its downweighting, which helps it back into the top 40.

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Jan 18

The X-Axis – w/c 13 January 2025

Posted on Saturday, January 18, 2025 by Paul in x-axis

EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #5. (Annotations here.) No Infinity Comic this week, with no explanation that I’m aware of. But apparently it hasn’t been cancelled, so I guess it’s just running late. That still leaves three ongoings and a new miniseries, though.

Exceptional X-Men has been a consistently good book for the most part, but it’s also an almost entirely character driven one – five issues in, the closest thing it’s had to any bad guys is a random monster on loan from X-Force for two pages, and a few low-level bigots. Obviously the Verate plotline is setting up to be the first real villains of the series, but it’s still taking its time getting there. That’s all for the best in terms of the quality of the series, and hopefully the audience is fine with it getting that time. It’s not an X-Men book – it has more in common with very early New Mutants – but the new characters are all strong creations and Eve Ewing’s efforts to extricate Kate Pryde from the ill-advised Shadowkat storyline is largely successful. There’s two rather baffling pages with specific Orchis characters she never interacted with, I grant you, and I don’t know what they were thinking there. But the character material works. Carmen Carnero is doing a great job with the personality of the new mutants, and the closing panel with Ellie trying the Verate app is beautifully done.

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Jan 17

Laura Kinney: Wolverine #2 annotations

Posted on Friday, January 17, 2025 by Paul in Annotations

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.

LAURA KINNEY: WOLVERINE #2
“The Devil in Me, part 1”
Writer: Erica Schultz
Artist: Giada Belviso
Colour artist: Rachelle Rosenberg
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso

WOLVERINE.

It’s a “they clash then they team up” story. Laura isn’t surprised that Elektra doesn’t want her help, and tries to talk to her at first. But she loses her temper when Elektra says something about not wanting to work with mutants – see below. (The art seems to have Elektra throwing the first punch, but if so, it’s not clear why – and besides, the whole story revolves around Laura being the impulsive one.) Laura clearly finds Elektra condescending, and not without reason.

As usual, she feels strongly about any sign of children being used as weapons, and all the more so when anti-mutant forces are involved. Charitably, this might explain why her self-control and planning skills seem to be at rock bottom in this story, giving Elektra plenty of opportunity to play the older and wiser role. Laura also yells at Luke Cage for not banning an anti-superhero march (see below). Elektra regards Laura as impulsive.

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