Charts – 22 April 2022
Yet again, the singles chart is almost aggressively uneventful, and this week the album chart has chosen to join it. There really is a dearth of new material breaking through this spring.
Three weeks. It’s peaked, but it’s still comfortably ahead of the competition. “First Class” by Jack Harlow is stuck at number 2 (and to be fair, that is a new hit), and the rest of the top 10 consists entirely of tracks shuffling a place up or down. The only significant activity in the top 20 is the highest new entry…
18. Lauren Spencer-Smith – “Flowers”
This is the follow-up to her self-released single “Fingers Crossed”, which reached number 4 in January. Unsurprisingly, she is now signed (to Island). It’s a slightly repetitive ballad, and unrelated to any of the various earlier hits of the same name, but it might have a chance by standing out as something different.
Wolverine #20 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
WOLVERINE vol 7 #20
“Trigger Warning”
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Adam Kubert
Colourists: Frank Martin & Dijjo Lima
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mask Basso
COVER / PAGE 1: Wolverine stands over a bunch of destroyed robots, while Deadpool takes a selfie in the background.
PAGES 2-5. Wolverine stops a runaway truck full of explosives.
This opening action scene is here as much as anything to get Wolverine into the book, while Deadpool sets about his narration. I love the ornate page layouts, which are remarkably clear.
Note that the first of Wolverine’s teams that Deadpool mentions is X-Force, which wouldn’t be most people’s choice. But it’s the one Deadpool is preoccupied with since they were teammates on a version of X-Force before. We’ll come back to that.
Deadpool is sort of correct that Wolverine never really seems to want to be on a team – at the very least he regularly affects not to, and feels ambivalent about his position on a superhero type group. Of course, with the X-Men and Alpha Flight that was balanced out by his sense that they were his family. X-Force raise slightly different issues because they were a black ops group. In the earliest stories about Wolverine’s version of X-Force, from 2008, Wolverine very definitely doesn’t want to be in the team – the idea is that he’s always seen himself as the one who does the nasty things so that his more heroic teammates don’t have to, and so bringing other characters into that orbit is something he’s quite unhappy about.
X Lives of Wolverine
X LIVES OF WOLVERINE #1-5
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Joshua Cassara
Colourist: Frank Martin
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso
X Lives of Wolverine seems to be a book that Marvel had a lot of faith in. Together with its sister book X Deaths of Wolverine, it was billed as a ten-week event that would replace most of the X-books during the season break. The format harks back to House of X and Powers of X, the two linked Jonathan Hickman books that kicked off the Krakoan era, and in that sense perhaps the most important X-books in years. Marvel gave X Lives a same-day release on Marvel Unlimited, and they’ve just posted both miniseries there, without waiting the normal three months. It’s all promoted in such a way as to say it’s a big deal.
This may not have been to the book’s advantage. We’ll come to X Deaths of Wolverine separately, but it follows up directly on Moira’s story from Inferno, and advances some of the Krakoan themes about posthumanity. That book feels like it has implications for the line.
House to Astonish Episode 198
We’re back, with more news and reviews and the usual nonsense. We’ve got chat about Archie Comics’ NFT shenanigans, IDW’s Originals line, DC’s Pride special’s lineup, the new Batman and Detective Comics creative teams, Superman: The Space Age, X-Terminators, All-Out Avengers, the relaunch of Shang-Chi and Grant Morrison’s debut novel Luda. We’ve also got reviews of The Wrong Earth: Fame and Fortune and Sandman Universe: Nightmare Country and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe doesn’t have a leg to stand on. All this plus a fictional Scottish king, an unexplained vendetta against Sussex and Fleem Blomfom, the character find of 2022.
The podcast is here, or here on Mixcloud, or available via the embedded player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments, on Twitter, via email or on our Facebook fan page.
And as always, if you want to show off your appreciation of Scotland’s longest-running comics podcast, you can do so with a fab shirt from our Redbubble store.
Charts – 15 April 2022
We’ve had some dull singles charts lately, but gosh, this is a really boring one.
Second week – which is more than he managed with his only other solo number one, “Sign of the Times”, back in 2017. It was closer than expected; at the start of the week his lead over the single below was equivalent to a few hundred sales, but it wound up being in the thousands.
2. Jack Harlow – “First Class”
This is… a surprise, to be honest. Jack Harlow has had two previous top 40 hits in the UK – “Whats Poppin”, which reached number 25 in 2020, and his guest shot on Lil Nas X’s “Industry Baby”, which got to number 3 last year. His previous single “Nail Tech” missed the top 40, so he’s certainly not here on the strength of fanbase. I wouldn’t have thought this was an obvious candidate for a breakthrough hit – the chorus is lifted from “Glamorous” by Fergie, which is one of her better singles, but hardly a lost classic. (It reached number 6 in 2007.) Harlow’s version is better, mind you.
X-Men #10 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-MEN vol 6 #10
“Sisterhood of the Metal Bones”
Writer: Gerry Duggan
Artist: Javier Pina
Colourist: Marte Gracia
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Jordan White
COVER / PAGE 1: Wolverine (Laura) faces off against someone clawed. Anyone who’s been reading the X-books for a while will recognise her as Lady Deathstrike without too much trouble.
PAGE 2. Flashback: Wolverine is resurrected.
This page is plugging what seems likely to be a continuity error in issue #5, where Laura was shown as having a complete metal skeleton (as opposed to just metal claws). In issue #8, she said that this changed “after returning from the Vault”, so this is apparently an expanded version of the resurrection that we saw at the end of X-Men vol 5 #19. If so, Synch and Cyclops should both be here too, but let’s assume they’re out of shot.
The dialogue seems to confirm that Proteus is the member of the Five responsible for resurrecting people complete with their biological implants – which makes sense, since he’s the only one of the group who could logically do that.
X-Men Unlimited Infinity Comic #26
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #26
Writer: Declan Shalvey
Artist: Nick Roche
Colourist: Chris O’Halloran
Letterer: Joe Sabino
Editor: Lauren Amaro
It’s a Banshee story for St Patrick’s Day! Marvel have done quite a few holiday tie-ins with the Infinity Comics, and I wonder if this started out as one of those.
We’ve not just got an actual Irish character here, we’ve got an actual Irish creative team. Declan Shalvey’s already done two arcs on this book; Nick Roche is probably best known for his work on IDW’s Transformers books, but he’s a really good artist who brings a nicely sturdy, cartoony quality to Banshee.
The New York St Patrick’s Day celebrations inspire Banshee to actually return home to Cassidy Keep, that wonderful bastion of Oirishness where actual leprechauns live. He finds Black Tom there, and the usual fight breaks out, with Sean accusing Tom of always trying to take things from him. Of course, that’s ultimately about Tom raising Sean’s daughter Theresa.
Charts – 8 April 2022
It’s another week with very few new entries, but at least this time it’s because nobody wants to go up against…
1. Harry Styles – “As It Was”
I see you’re the Weeknd now, Harry. Fair enough. This is the lead single from his third album, and his second solo number one. The first was his solo debut “Sign of the Times”, which was number one in its first week of release in 2017 – it dropped to 4 the following week, but to be fair, it hung around the top 10 for seven weeks total.
X-Force Annual #1 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-FORCE ANNUAL vol 3 #1
“Lab Work”
Writer: Nadia Shammas
Artist: Rafael Pimentel
Colourist: Carlos Lopez
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Editor: Mark Basso
X-FORCE ANNUAL. This is the third X-Force Annual #1. The others were in 1992 and 2010. There was also an unnumbered annual in 1999.
This issue seems to take place between X-Force #26-27.
COVER / PAGE 1. Wolverine, Domino and Kid Omega versus Orchis’s Sentinels.
PAGE 2. Sage has doubts about the Beast, and calls Emma Frost.
As we’ll find out later, the Beast has sent the X-Force field team (Wolverine, Domino and Kid Omega) on a mission to retrieve a shipment stolen by Orchis from Hellfire Trading. For reasons which will become apparent as the story goes on, Sage is rightly sceptical about this whole thing, and suspects a trap, but the Beast is insistent. This story doubtless contributes to the breakdown in Sage and Beast’s relationship seen in X-Force #27.
Erta Ale is a volcano in Ethiopia. It’s a rare example of a volcano which actually has a lake of lava; not only that, it’s had one since 1906.
X-Force #27 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-FORCE vol 6 #26
“From Cradle to Grave”
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Robert Gill
Colourist: Guru-eFX
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER / PAGE 1: X-Force battle the possessed Forge.
PAGES 2-3. Wolverine reflects on recent events.
As the footnote says, Wolverine is referring to the X Lives of Wolverine miniseries, in which Professor X and Jean Grey used Cerebro to transport Wolverine’s consciousness back in time so that he could battle Omega Red at various points in history, and prevent him from altering history by either murdering Professor X or preventing him from being born.
Wolverine claims that “I risked everything for Krakoa. Not just my life, but the timeline.” That’s a bit of a stretch, since Wolverine’s life is at risk in almost every story (to the extent that he’s killable at all), and the whole plot was that if he didn’t go back, the timeline was going to be irreparably altered anyway. Perhaps what he means is that the events of X Lives risked his life in the sense of destabilising his own history, but if so, that’s not something that really came across on the page as being at stake.
