Charts – 26 April 2024
Well, this is not going to surprise anyone.
1. Taylor Swift featuring Post Malone – “Fortnight”
3. Taylor Swift – “The Tortured Poets Department”
4. Taylor Swift – “Down Bad”
That’s the maximum three tracks from “The Tortured Poets Department”, which enters the album chart at number 1. Taylor Swift hasn’t missed number 1 with a studio album since 2010 – and yes, that’s counting the “Taylor’s Version” releases. She doesn’t manage a clean sweep of the top 3, with Hozier hanging in at number 2.
“Fortnight” is both the official single and the opening track, and so gets the most streams. It’s only her fourth number one single – more a sign of bad luck than anything else, since she’s had five number 2s. Her other number 1s are “Look What You Made Me Do” (2017), “Anti-Hero” (2022) and “Is It Over Now? (Taylor’s Version)” (2023). Post Malone gets a featured artist credit, even though he’s more noticeable in the video than on the record – finally giving him a second number 1 to follow “Rockstar” (2017).
The X-Axis – w/c 22 April 2024
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #136. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Phillip Sevy, Yen Nitro & Travis Lanham. I’m sorry, but this is part sixteen and I lost the will to live long ago. Go see previous instalments if you want a fuller explanation of why, because nothing is changing.
RISE OF THE POWERS OF X #4 (annotations here) and X-MEN: FOREVER #2 (annotations here). Over at the main event, the heavily intertwined Rise of the Powers of X #4 and X-Men Forever #2, both written by Kieron Gillen, come out at the same time. I know Marvel like a number #1, but it would probably have made more sense just to bill X-Men Forever as the last four issues of Immortal X-Men, in terms of cueing readers on what to expect from it.
Unavoidably, they cover a lot of the same plot ground. But for the most part Kieron Gillen manages to avoid it feeling repetitive by shifting the emphasis between the two books, or just by letting one book carry a fuller explanation of something that the other one can afford to skip over. Principally, though, Rise is the Professor X story, as Xavier seems to be burning all his bridges in an effort to occupy Orchis and thwart Enigma in what he apparently conceives to be the Krakoa-friendly manner of throwing the humans under the bus. Precisely what he’s trying to achieve remains somewhat mysterious, but it looks like he’s trying to get to Moira one way or another, and get her to redeem herself in some way.
Wolverine #48 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
WOLVERINE vol 7 #48
“Sabretooth War, part 8: Alone Together”
Writers: Benjamin Percy & Victor LaValle
Penciller: Cory Smith
Inker: Oren Junior
Colourist: Alex Sinclair
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER / PAGE 1. A symbolic image of Wolverine being torn apart by two sets of hands – which the caption indicates are “two Creeds”. I haven’t got a clue what this has to do with the issue, or which two Creeds they had in mind. (Victor and Graydon would be the obvious ones in terms of their role in the story, but Graydon doesn’t have anything to do with Wolverine in this issue.) My best guess would be that this is a hangover from an abandoned early version of the story, although the solicitation copy for this issue does match the content well enough.
PAGES 2-6. Wolverine and Sabretooth separately reflect on their lives.
Obviously, these two monologues in first person narration are presented to emphasise the parallels between the two characters. The key theme for Wolverine is that while Sabretooth’s attack on the Greenhouse drove him into a rage, Kid Omega’s psychic attack on him last issue shifted his perspective and made him focus more on the positive reasons to fight – his loner tendencies are about the fear of getting other people hurt, but he does ultimately feel happier around others.
X-Men: Forever #2 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-MEN: FOREVER #2
“Quiet Council”
Writer: Kieron Gillen
Artist: Luca Maresca
Colour artist: Federico Blee
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Design: Tom Muller, Jay Bowen & Kat Gregorowicz
Editor: Jordan D White
COVER / PAGE 1: Rachel, Cannonball, Jubilee, Exodus and Arakko fight a Stark Sentinel.
PAGE 2. Paul Neary obituary.
PAGES 3-5. Mother Righteous’ homunculus dissolves, and Professor X sends a message to the White Hot Room.
This scene takes place roughly alongside page 6 of Rise of the Powers of X #4. The two issues interweave, so you might want to look at the annotations for that issue.
“Sinister’s dead.” Fall of the House of X #3.
“Xavier murdered Rachel.” Rise of the Powers of X #3.
“Xavier freed me to @#$% over Rasputin, who’s also dead.” Rise of the Powers of X #4.
“Bring Rachel back. She’ll be furious, and rightly so.” Professor X makes clear that he killed Rachel in Rise #3, and Rasputin in Rise #4, so that they could be resurrected in the White Hot Room – the only way that they could readily travel there. That begs the question of why he didn’t just tell them that, but of course then Mother Righteous would have known what he was doing.
Rise of the Powers of X #4 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
RISE OF THE POWERS OF X #4
“Sentinel X”
Writer: Kieron Gillen
Artist: R.B. Silva
Colour artist: David Curiel
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Jordan D White
COVER / PAGE 1: A distraught Professor X, in his Cerebro helmet, in a field of flaming skulls. Presumably that’s Krakoa in the background.
PAGE 2. Paul Neary obituary.
PAGES 3-6. Professor X frees Mother Righteous and kills Rasputin.
This picks up directly from the end of issue #3, where Professor X was persuaded to switch tack and try Rachel’s plan of resurrecting the Phoenix as a means of defeating Enigma. As we establish later on, the reason why Professor X is killing Rachel and Rasputin is so that the Five can resurrect them in the White Hot Room – being the only available means of actually getting them there.
“You have the power to stop Rasputin, yes?” Mother Righteous’ magic gives her control over anyone who’s thanked her in the past, until she cashes that favour in. She used up most of her power in the White Hot Room by cashing in the general thanks that she was given by the whole population of Krakoa (in the closing issues of Immortal X-Men), but clearly she hasn’t cashed in her thanks for Rasputin yet. I’m not sure we ever saw Rasputin thank her on panel, but she regarded Mother Righteous as a saviour in Sins of Sinister: Dominion, so she’ll doubtless have thanked her somewhere along the line.
Daredevil Villains #21: Death’s-Head
DAREDEVIL #56-57 (September & October 1969)
“…And Death Came Riding!” / “In the Midst of Life…!”
Writer: Roy Thomas
Penciller: Gene Colan
Inker: Syd Shores
Letterer: Artie Simek
Colourist: not credited
Editor: Stan Lee
With the Starr Saxon storyline that he inherited from Stan Lee out of the way, Roy Thomas moves on to his own stories. Thomas often liked to dust off forgotten characters from earlier issues, but apparently he didn’t find Daredevil’s rogue’s gallery all that inspiring. Instead, he bombards the book with new villains during his run. First up is Death’s-Head, not to be confused with the more popular Transformers-adjacent character.
In our previous instalment, Daredevil faked Matt Murdock’s death in order to thwart Starr Saxon’s blackmail scheme. Karen Page was distraught about that, and Daredevil made matters even worse by stealing his cane back from her. But never mind, because Starr Saxon is now dead, and Daredevil can break the good news to her that Matt is alive. So our story opens with Daredevil swinging merrily across town to see her, showing absolutely no signs of concern about the distress that he’s put her through. The man is a psychopath.
But when Matt arrives at Foggy’s office, Karen isn’t there. She’s decided to go home and see her family. We learn that Karen is the daughter of Dr Paxton Page – “the man who perfected the cobalt bomb.” A cobalt bomb was a type of nuclear bomb designed to make the target area especially uninhabitable, which seems like overkill in the event of World War III, but there you go. It was supposed to be a thought experiment to support the argument that nuclear weapons were too dangerous to exist. Roy Thomas was particularly keen on the threat of cobalt bombs; he had created the Cobalt Man for X-Men in 1967.
Charts – 19 April 2024
So before you ask: the chart week runs from Friday to Thursday, so that means Taylor Swift doesn’t show up until next week’s chart. In the meantime, we’ve got quite a busy week – and mostly decent new entries on the singles chart, too.
Two weeks. I don’t fancy his chances for a third, but you never know.
6. Sabrina Carpenter – “Espresso”
Well, that’s interesting. Sabrina Carpenter has three previous hit singles to her name – “Skin”, the questionable answer record to “Driver’s Licence”, which got to number 28 in 2021; “Nonsense”, which managed a week at number 32 in 2023; and “Feather”, which made it to number 19 at the start of the year. And, to be fair, it stuck around for a few weeks. Still, it’s not exactly a track record to suggest that the first single from her sixth album would be a top ten hit. This is a big step up in her singles chart performance.
The X-Axis – w/c 15 April 2024
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #135. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Phillip Sevy, Yen Nitro & Travis Lanham. Well, apparently we’re going with Sunspot versus Gideon as a huge showdown that everyone’s been waiting for. And… I mean, it’s a storyline from thirty years ago that hardly ever comes up. Even I barely remember anything about it. Seemed like a big deal in early X-Force, never came to anything much? Something like that. At any rate, it’s the sort of continuity reference that’s fine for a bit of background colour but hardly carries the weight of being the hook for an issue. You’re going to have to work a lot harder than this to persuade me to care about Gideon in 2024.
FALL OF THE HOUSE OF X #4. (Annotations here.) Fall of the House of X is feeling a little more coherent than it was when it started, but it’s still not pulling off the epic feel. Apocalypse rounding up mutants to sacrifice themselves to kickstart Krakoa – okay, that kind of works. It’s the sort of thing that you can imagine making sense to Apocalypse and some of the guys from Arakko. But the material with the X-Men and Orchis just feels rather rushed. The art doesn’t give a sense of a grand scale, the plot feels truncated, and the whole thing is just rough around the edges. It’s like reading an outline.
DEAD X-MEN #4. (Annotations here.) Not a great week, this. The final issue of Dead X-Men is okay at best, but doesn’t stand up to much thought. You can see how this miniseries made sense as a pitch. The X-Men who died at the Hellfire Gala get a chance to be a team; we visit some of Moira’s past lives; and it can all feed in to Rise of the Powers of X around the edges. It looks decent enough and it has a reasonable shot of providing closure by looping us back to the first issue. But… aside from Prodigy, literally any bunch of characters could have been in this series, and the book never finds anything much to do with its specific set of characters. Ideally you’d want this book to make a case for its cast as a great lost X-roster, and it doesn’t do that. And the plot mechanics boil down to some arbitrary stuff happening in order to bring about a result which arbitrarily advances the plot of Rise. It’s not like anything very meaningful happened during the visits to Moira’s past lives, and I just don’t buy that anything was actually learned from the exercise.
Dead X-Men #4 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
DEAD X-MEN #4
“Hyperballad”
Writer: Steve Foxe
Artists; David Baldeón, Bernard Chang & Vincenzo Carratù
Colour artist: Frank Martin
Letterer: Cory Petit
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Jordan D White
COVER / PAGE 1. The X-Men fight their alt-Moira.
PAGE 2. Paul Neary obituary.
PAGES 3-4. The X-Men and Moira are dragged back through time.
Issue #3 ended with the cyborg alt-Moira from issue #1 attacking the X-Men and their local counterparts in Moira’s fifth life. This turns out to be a bit of an anticlimax, as Dazzler calls on Rachel to haul them all back through time and bring Moira with them.
The montage on page 4 shows scenes from Moira’s earlier lives.
- Top left: Moira sees Professor X in a bar in her second life. This is page 8 panel 4 of House of X #2.
- To the right of that, a generic-looking campus scene. By elimination, this is probably meant to be her uneventful first life.
- On the second tier, on the left, Destiny threatens Moira before killing her in her third life.
- To the right of that, a Sentinel blasts Professor X and Moira in her fourth life. This is page 17 panel 4 of House of X #2.
- Below that, Moira and Logan in the Preserve in her sixth life.
- In the bottom tier, on the left, Moira and a wheelchair-bound Xavier in a futuristic city. This is Moira’s fifth life, where they built a mutant city.
- To the right of that, Moira with a sniper rifle, about to kill one of the Trask family. This is her seventh life.
- Next, Moira approaches Magneto. This is her eighth life, and specifically page 21 panel 2 of House of X #2.
- To the right of that, Moira with Apocalypse. This is her ninth life.
- And finally, above Frenzy’s head, a generic head shot of Moira, presumably representing her tenth and present life (from the perspective of this divergent Moira).
Fall of the House of X #4 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
FALL OF THE HOUSE OF X #4
“The Turn”
Writer: Gerry Duggan
Artists: Jucas Werneck & Jethro Morales
Colour artist: Bryan Valenza
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Jordan D White
COVER / PAGE 1. Moira and Cyclops fight.
PAGE 2. Paul Neary obituary.
PAGE 3. Data page (!). The opening quote is Magneto’s line “Promise me you’ll watch Charles… Three began Krakoa. Moira betrayed us. I… deserted my post. Now Charles is alone with his dream.” This is from Magneto’s death scene in X-Men Red #7, which has since been positioned as foreshadowing for Professor X caving to Orchis’ demands in X-Men: Hellfire Gala 2023. That in turn ties to Professor X’s role in this issue, of which more later.
PAGES 4-6. Apocalypse leads his forces against Orchis.
Up in the sky are the two crossed space stations from the previous issue.
Apocalypse and his forces have arrived in time to save Krakoa from Orchis. Krakoa has been on the run from them ever since issue #1. As Apocalypse points out, Krakoa feeds off mutant energy, which wasn’t a problem when it had a whole mutant population and could take trivial amounts from each one. Without the mutants around, he’s been starving, so Apocalypse needs to offer up some life force.
