House to Astonish Episode 221
It’s our birthday! Or it was yesterday when we recorded this, anyway! Join us for House to Astonish’s 18th anniversary, as we run through the comics landscapes of 1993 and 1998 (the years when we turned 18, do you see, it’s thematic) and talk about all sorts of things that happened in those years, from Marvel Knights to Vertigo, DC One Million to Slingers, via a man made of air, the gentle hillock of Marvel UK, a fruity tench, St Trinians vs Umbrella Academy and the Punisher War Journal of Barbies.
The podcast is here, or available via the embedded player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments, on Bluesky or via email.
And if you’re at Thought Bubble in Harrogate this weekend, come and see me, Gary Lactus and The Beast Must Die as we do more silly things with and to comics creators, with John Allison, Sarah Graley, Christian Ward and Becky Cloonan on SILENCE! To Astonish!
The X-Axis – 4 November 2026
DNX #4. (Annotations here.) We’re running very late this week, but let’s run through the books quickly anyway. I’ve said before that the mistake with “Age of Revelation” was to try to turn it into a line-wide event when it was better suited to being a storyline in X-Men. DNX hasn’t fallen into that trap, since the event is only running in X-Men itself, DNX (which is just five extra issues of X-Men) and two good but skippable issues of Fantastic Four for… reasons. But even so, I can’t help wondering whether this would have worked better if it had just been an X-Men storyline, maybe paying off in an anniversary issue. The attack on Philadelphia gets averted; the new X-virus doesn’t work and the X-Men already know how they’re going to stop it. (Or think they do, at least, but that’s the plot.) And while Juniper does get annihilated, the core of the story seems to be a final confrontation between Scott and Chairman Hank – all of which is perfectly good in its own way, but it feels like it would play better if it had been presented as a character-driven storyline in X-Men than as an attempted epic in DNX.
UNCANNY X-MEN #38. (Annotations here.) There’s an awful lot going on in this issue. I’m mostly on board with Sarah Gaunt setting up a rival school with the Scavenged, as a dodgy imitation of the X-Men and incoherent attempt to get back at Professor X; taking him off the board has been something of a problem for this character, given her obsession with him, but I can get behind the idea of her repositioning in a wonky attempt to usurp his legacy. It’s harder to know quite what to make of the Scavenged themselves at this stage, since it looks like they’re under some degree of mind control, but there’s enough there to hint at them being promising. Luciano Vecchio’s designs for them are looking good at this point, and Mutina’s slow-burn face turn (or at least her toying with the possibility) has been handled well enough that we can get behind her now.
Wolverine #29 annotations
WOLVERINE vol 8 #29
“Aftershocks on the Riviera”
Writer: Saladin Ahmed
Artist: Julius Ohta
Colour artist: Jesus Aburtov
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER: A straightforward Wolverine pin-up.
PAGE 1. A family of hotel guests get gassed.
We’ll find out in the next scene that this is Solem taking hostages. On the next page, Wolverine talks about this as a hotel for the “ultra-wealthy”, but Ahmed is going out of his way here to present this family sympathetically (“years of saving”).
PAGES 2-7. Wolverine arrives at the hotel and meets Solem.
This is the first time we’ve seen Solem in this series since the end of the Krakoan era. He did make a couple of appearances in Deadpool #9 and #13 last year, where he was still doing his smug hedonist routine. In those stories, he had given away his version of the Muramasa Blade, and the sword he’s carrying here seems to be a new one. Solem’s mutant power (aside from his evident longevity) is meant to be his adamantium skin, which was always a bit of a stretch given that it’s a man-made alloy, but we’ve seen stranger powers than that. This scene spells out that it’s more accurately described as an “adamantium mesh covering your skin”, essentially a sort of chainmail – this has certainly been offered before as an answer to “so how does he move”, though I’m not sure it’s been spelled out quite so directly in a story.
Uncanny X-Men #38 annotations
UNCANNY X-MEN vol 6 #38
“Soul Deep, part 2: In the Hands of a Wounded Child”
Writer: Gail Simone
Artist: Luciano Vecchio
Colour artist: Matthew Wilson
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: Wolverine and Nightcrawler in a swamp, apparently ready to fight an alligator or something. Nothing like this happens in the issue, but maybe it was always intended as a generic pin-up. For what it’s worth, the solicitations for this month listed Uncanny X-Men #37-38 as parts 1 and 2 of “The Scavenged”, but the actual story content in the solicitation seems to match with what we have here.
PAGES 1-4. Sarah Gaunt acquires a house.
Let’s start with the house. Sarah Gaunt’s back story, as related in the early issues of this series, involves her meeting Charles Xavier at Oxford University, entering a relationship with him, declaring after a month or so that she wants them to have children, and becoming vindictive when he rejects her. The broad strokes of that seem to be confirmed by Xavier himself.
DNX #4 annotations
DNX #4
Writer: Jed MacKay
Artist: Federico Vicentini
Colour artist: David Curiel
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: The Fantastic Four and the X-Men surrounded by newly transformed, zombie-like mutants. Nothing like this happens in the issue.
PAGES 1-3. Flashback: The Age of Revelation Beast sends his message back to the present.
This is a continuation of a scene from X-Men: Age of Revelation Finale. In the original scene, the Age of Revelation Beast swapped back into his body, and quickly figured out from speaking to Animalia that he had swapped minds with the Chairman instead of with the X-Men’s version of the Beast. Then he asked Schwarzchild to help him send “an information burst” to the past. We don’t see any of these characters again, before the world ends a few pages later.
In this version, the Beast continues by helpfully recapping the plot of “Age of Revelation” for the benefit of any newcomers. Interestingly, he suggests that the Age of Revelation X-Men weren’t aware that the Chairman was alive at all, and apparently still thought he had died at the end of Benjamin Percy’s X-Force run. Since 3K were framed for the release of the X-virus in the “AoR” timeline, presumably it did have a version of the Chairman, who got killed by Revelation before the X-Men found out his identity.
Housekeeping
Annotations will be up at the weekend, for anyone checking in.
Daredevil Villains #91: The Surgeon General
DAREDEVIL #305-306 (June & July 1992)
“Under the Knife” / “Emergency Procedure”
Writer: D.G. Chichester
Artist: Scott McDaniel
Inkers: Chris Ivy (#305) and Bud LaRosa (#306)
Colourist: Max Scheele (#305) and Nel Yomtov (#306)
Letterer: Bill Oakley
Editor: Ralph Macchio
We’ve jumped forward about a year. Issues #297-300 are “Last Rites”, which is a Kingpin story. It removes him and Typhoid Mary from the picture for a while, and resets the book to a classic status quo, with Matt and Foggy as lawyers again. It’s also the final story drawn by Lee Weeks. Issues #301-303 are an Owl story, with guest artist MC Wyman. And issue #304 is a format-breaking issue which consists of Daredevil saving assorted lives across New York over the course of 24 hours.
So it’s not until issues #305-306 that we get the first DG Chichester story to focus on a new villain. With hindsight, the most notable thing about this two-parter is that it’s the start of Scott McDaniel’s run as penciller, which continues through to issue #336. He had done some scattered work for Marvel before this on fill-ins, annuals and Marvel Comics Presents, but this was his first regular assignment. It’s a signature run for him, and his art style will evolve dramatically over its course. By issue #320 or so, he’ll be working in the abstract and stylised mode that people associate with him, but at the start of his run, he’s doing Marvel house style.
Charts – 30 October 2026
Well, back to a more typical level of turnover on the singles chart…
Two weeks. It’s still growing, and quite rapidly – if nothing else, we do have a number 1 that’s outperforming “Rein Me In” by a mile, even before ACR downweighting. The song still does nothing for me, though.
13. Jade – “Angel Of My Dreams”
Apparently this has gone viral after being used as soundtrack for Kylie Jenner at the 2026 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. It reached number 7 on release two years ago as Jade’s solo debut single, but she struggled to follow it up, and it took another four singles before she got something into the top 40 again. I still think “Angel Of My Dreams” was fantastic – and the video remains completely insane – so it’s nice to see it get another shot.
The X-Axis – 29 October 2026
X-MEN #40. (Annotations here.) Another DNX tie-in, another solo spotlight issue. This time it’s Psylocke, notionally trying to deal with the defeated 3K X-Men (she doesn’t find them), but actually reflecting on her journey from being a weapon to making her own decisions. This feels like the least successful of the DNX spotlight issues, perhaps because Psylocke’s history is quite well trodden territory, and came up a lot in her solo series as well. Drawing parallels with Myriad doesn’t really work either, since Myriad’s locked-in history is very different. It may work best when you consider it alongside the previous issue, focussing on her partner Greycrow; he thinks he’s dealing with the morally dodgy work so that she has the space to be a better person, while she’s still rather more keen on killing the bad guys than he seems to be allowing for. And Werneck does a rather nice shapeshifting monster for Myriad. It’s fine – it’s the best of the Marvel Universe X-books this week quite comfortably – but we’ve had better.
FANTASTIC FOUR #18. By Ryan North, Vincenzo Carratù, Edgar Delgado & Joe Caramagna. It’s a DNX tie-in, so let’s get it out of the way. The FF’s two-part contribution to the crossover is basically to do “Fantastic Voyage” in Magneto’s body. It certainly qualifies as a DNX crossover because the mission incidentally fixes his powers, but really it’s a story about the FF losing their memories and having to figure out who they are as they complete the mission. The fact that it happens to be Magneto is pretty much incidental. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing – these are two issues of Fantastic Four, and they’re quite rightly more interested in doing a Fantastic Four story. Ryan North excels at doing this sort of high concept idea, and the art is appealing, even if Magneto’s body seems remarkably light on fluids. Still, from the X-books’ standpoint, there’s something really quite odd about Magneto’s cure, in a storyline that’s been running for forty issues, happening by a side wind in a story about something else in a different book entirely.
X-Men #40 annotations
X-MEN vol 7 #40
“A Blade”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Artist: Lucas Werneck
Colour artist: Arthur Hesli
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: Psylocke in action. Specifically, she’s fighting a monster whose tentacles are on the edges of the frame, and we’ll find out later that this is Myriad.
PAGES 1-3. Psylocke sets off after the 3K X-Men.
Ben Liu. In DNX #3, he used his powers to summon up the UFO thingies that are now keeping 3K’s airship in the air. To provoke him into using his powers, Scott basically trapped him on the airship and left him to get on with it. Understandably, Ben isn’t very happy about this, and Scott’s rather cursory congratulations probably aren’t helping. To be fair, Scott does acknowledge that Ben has a point and shifts tack to saying that it’ll have to wait until the crisis has passed.
