New Mutants #9 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
COVER / PAGE 1. A fever-dream version of the New Mutants.
PAGES 2-3. A mutant cowers in a tunnel in a facility in Carnelia.
The mutant is named later in the issue as Tashi Repina, and she’s 13. She seems to have made a hole in the fence somehow, and taken refuge in… some sort of outflow pipe? She’s leaving a trail of something behind her, but it’s hard to tell what it’s meant to be – some sort of goop caused by her transformation of the world around her, I suppose.
Carnelia. Another of Marvel’s many, many fictional microstates from the back catalogue. This one comes from Iron Man stories in the late 1970s, when it was a generic Russian satellite state. It’s popped up a few times since then.
Pershyy Misto is its established capital city – though this doesn’t really look like it’s in the city.
(more…)X-Men #8 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
COVER / PAGE 1. Cyclops and the New Mutants (specifically, Magma, Mirage, Wolfsbane and Magik) versus the Brood.
PAGE 1. Magma asks Mirage about Rahne’s egg.
The Akademos Habitat / The Sextant. The area of Krakoa where the members of the former teen teams live, including the New Mutants, as seen in their book.
Magma was a member of the classic New Mutants, but didn’t go on their recent trip to space, which was depicted in the Hickman-written New Mutants #1-2, #5 and #7. Mirage did.
The King Egg. This is the King Egg that the Starjammers were trying to steal in New Mutants. We’ll find out later that it’s a Brood King Egg. The Brood are insectoid aliens who go around planting eggs in people in order to turn them into more Brood; they’ve been major X-Men villains since the 1980s.
(more…)Charts – 6 March 2020
1. The Weeknd – “Blinding Lights”
That’s four weeks (non-consecutive). He might be settling in for a while. Number 2 is “Roses” by Saint Jhn, which climbs 4-2, and now has a lyric video for the Imanbek remix that’s doing most of the business.
5. Lady Gaga – “Stupid Love”
(more…)House to Astonish Episode 182
Hello! We’re back! And we’re talking about Dan DiDio’s exit from DC, the postponement of Emerald City Comic-Con, Comixology’s European price hikes, The Quotable Giant Days and John Layman and Dan Boultwood’s Chu. We’ve also got reviews of Join The Future and Strange Academy, and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe is half the man it used to be. All this plus Deathstroke the Coal, Roy Harper’s Syringe Academy and the Marvel Universe’s premier hand model.
The episode is here, or here on Mixcloud, or available through the player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments below, on Twitter, via email or on our Facebook fan page. And, as always, you can pick up some of our sweet tees over at our Redbubble store!
If you enjoyed my appearance on the first issue of the Shelfdust Presents podcast, then good news, because I was also on last week’s episode talking about 1989’s Damage Control #1. If you didn’t enjoy it then we’re too late to do anything about that now, unfortunately.
Excalibur #8 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
COVER / PAGE 1. Cullen Bloodstone in hunting gear, with the heads of Excalibur as trophies on the wall behind him. Don’t worry, this does not happen in the story.
PAGES 2-3. Cullen calms down and invites Excalibur to talk over a meal.
Cullen behaves as if he thinks he’s acting perfectly reasonably; even though he’s in monster mode, his threat is basically to call the police.
PAGES 4-5. Credits and recap. The story is “Verse VIII: The Unspeakable and the Uneatable II” by Tini Howard, Wilton Santos, Marcus To, and various others. (Four inkers – the deadlines must have been pressing…)
(more…)Marauders #9 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
PAGE 1 / COVER. Bishop shoots at Yellowjacket.
PAGES 2-4. Pyro arrives on Krakoa and is immediately besieged by adoring fans.
As we’ll see later, this is a dream created by Emma Frost to keep Pyro’s mind busy and Yellowjacket confused. For what it’s worth, though, note that the other Marauders are entirely absent from Pyro’s dream, even though he’s supposed to be just off the boat. The endless beach party of Krakoa is something we’ve seen in plenty of stories, but here it’s used as a trope of ludicrous fantasy, which is… interesting.
Jean Grey appears as the one-dimensional love interest – presumably this is Emma’s reading of Pyro’s fantasy, since when we see her later, she doesn’t exactly seem in the mood to be making private jokes. Pyro seems remarkably gullible in all this, but presumably that’s Emma’s influence too.
(more…)Charts – 28 February 2020
Billie Eilish got a week at number one with her Bond theme, but slips straight to number 2. So we’re back with…
1. The Weeknd – “Blinding Lights”
Three weeks total. Bear in mind that this has been out since before Christmas, and it’s been in the top ten for a total of 8 weeks now. Its staying power is impressive.
There’s not much else going on in the upper reaches. “Roses” by Saint Jhn is now up to 4. “Lonely” by Joel Corry climbs 14-8 to give him a second top 10 hit (he needs to reach 6 to match his previous peak). “Intentions” by Justin Bieber featuring Quavo climbs 10-9. And after that, there’s a bit of milling around in the teens before we reach…
20. The Weeknd – “After Hours”
…which doesn’t have a video because it’s a promotional single. It’s the title track of the upcoming album and, at six minutes long with an extended intro, considerably less radio friendly than the number one – though it’ll edit down nicely enough.
(more…)New Mutants #8 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition. By the way, the original version of the digital edition omitted the data pages – a corrected version was issued literally minutes before I was about to post this. X-Force, which has the same issue, still hasn’t been corrected at time of writing.
PAGE 1 / COVER: Magma fights the weird Brazilian monsters.
PAGES 2-3: Recap and credits. We’re continuing here from the Ed Brisson issues. The story is “A-Hunting We Will Go”, by Ed Brisson, Marco Failla and Carlos Lopez. The small print has changed to “Nova Roma – mutant hunting quadripeds”. I assume that’s a misprint for “quadruped”, not their name.
PAGE 4. Maxime and Manon tell Sebastian Shaw about the Bohem Cartel.
Blackstone is Shaw’s home on Krakoa, most often seen in Marauders.
(more…)X-Force #8 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition. This isn’t an issue in need of much annotation, but hey, it’s a vehicle for an open thread.
This post has been edited to add the data pages, now that they’ve been included in the digital edition.
COVER / PAGE 1. Domino and Colossus, facing opposite directions, with blood and bodies everywhere.
PAGES 2-5. Domino stops the anti-Domino from killing a politician.
Apparently the minister was intending to support pro-mutant legislation. Well, they are offering very quick trade deals.
The anti-Domino seems to be removing her own ear to use as a weapon. We saw something similar in the autopsy of the Xeno soldiers who attacked Krakoa in issue #1, and the next scene confirms the link.
(more…)X-Men/Fantastic Four #2 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
PAGE 1 / COVER. Well, it’s some of the X-Men and some characters from the Fantastic Four, isn’t it?
PAGE 2. Recap.
PAGES 3-4. Cyclops tries to reassure the FF that the X-Men aren’t responsible for Franklin and Valeria’s disappearance.
Straightforward. Scott is trying to be as emollient as possible, short of departing from his mutant-nationalist line. His comment that Valeria doesn’t belong on Krakoa is meant to demonstrate that the X-Men wouldn’t have taken them both (and it’s a fair point in that context), but goes down predictably badly. This is the basic conflict set up in issue #1: the X-Men see their mutant separatism as a positive identity, the FF (Sue in particular) see it as divisive and supremacist. For her, the X-Men only care about what Franklin is, not who he is (and she has a point).
As in issue #1, Magneto doesn’t seem particularly disappointed by this. (Note that in his data page about mutants later on, Reed is actually much more sympathetic to the mutants’ desire for a homeland.)
(more…)