Charts – 17 April 2026
Apparently Coachella is a thing now, then.
1. Sam Fender & Olivia Dean – “Rein Me In”
Eight weeks, non-consecutive. It’s peaked in terms of sales, but that’s pretty much academic. Because it was still outperforming the market over the last couple of weeks, it has weeks to go before it might be hit by the downweighting rule. Meanwhile, Bella Kay’s “iloveitiloveitiloveit” does go to ACR this week, and that leaves “Rein Me In” with a massive lead over the new number 2 single – which, remarkably, is “Dracula” by Tame Impala in its 18th week on the top 40. The remix with Jenni from Blackpink is the most streamed version, but that’s hardly a simple explanation for why it’s doing so well – it’s not like Blackpink songs typically have this sort of staying power.
11. Justin Bieber featuring Nicki Minaj – “Beauty and a Beat”
15. Justin Bieber – “Daisies”
26. Justin Bieber – “Yukon”
The maximum three tracks for Justin Bieber, essentially because of his performance headlining Coachella. Coachella hasn’t made much of an impact on the UK singles chart in the past, as far as I can recall. But Bieber very rarely performs live, which probably adds to the interest in this.
The X-Axis – 15 April 2026
X-MEN UNITED #2. (Annotations here.) Erm. Right. Well. So… this is certainly a thing, isn’t it?
I liked Exceptional X-Men, but this is a mess. Exceptional‘s strength was always in the character work; a slow pace, a down-to-earth tone and a small cast suited it. X-Men United, with a sprawling cast, a high concept setting and some sort of X-Men Team-up remit, takes all the wrong things from that book. I described the first issue as a misfire which at least had some moments with the Exceptional cast. The closest this issue comes to that is a scene with Kitty and Magneto. The art is okay, to be fair, and does a reasonable job on talky scenes.
Beyond that, it’s pretty much a train wreck. Why can’t it explain the concept of Graymatter Lane? If people are travelling there physically then what’s all this stuff about how if you die in Graymatter Lane then you die in real life? Wouldn’t that be obvious? But if they’re only travelling there psychically, how do they exit to different locations? This is rudimentary and two issues in, the book still hasn’t explained its basic premise intelligibly. It gets worse, though: the resolution of last issue’s cliffhanger is “false peril”, Cyclops feels wildly out of character compared to his home book, and then that plot just goes away. Instead, we move on to a story about Captain America and a supporting player from Truth: Red, White and Black. It’s not exactly obvious why that’s an X-Men story in the first place, though there are some throwaway lines about hoping that Captain America learns something about mutants in the process. But it’s an utterly bizarre choice of story for issue #2, when the book has such a sprawling cast and hasn’t done a proper story with its own setting yet. If the idea is to sell the concept of a team-up book, it certainly doesn’t do that by picking X-23, Melée and Jitter out of a hat and getting them to stand interchangeably next to Captain America. This is going very badly.
Storm: Earth’s Mightiest Mutant #3 annotations
STORM: EARTH’S MIGHTIEST MUTANT #3
“War of the Realms”
Writer: Murewa Ayodele
Artist: Federica Mancin
Colour artist: Java Tartaglia
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: Storm steps out of a comic book panel. Nothing quite so explicitly meta actually happens in the book itself but… well, you’ll see.
STORM:
A flashback reveals that during the break between Storm vol 5 #12 and issue #1 of this series, Storm visited assorted afterlife realms in search of the missing Dr Voodoo. (He was captured by Death at the end of Storm #12, and turned into her servant, for reasons we’ll come back to below.) Her alliance with Sugaar seems to have started around this time, with him providing her with access to these realms.
Storm lists the following realms that she’s visited as part of this exercise:
Inglorious X-Force #4 annotations
INGLORIOUS X-FORCE #4
“Death War, part 1”
Writer: Tim Seeley
Artist: Philip Tan
Colour artist: Romulo Fajardo Jr
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER: The caption reads “Cable – felled by the Angel of Death, or his mysterious pursuer?” The “mysterious pursuer” is the person obscured behind Archangel’s left wing. Their costume doesn’t really resemble anything in the issue, but the monochrome clothing and the gun suggest it’s probably meant to be Domino. The fight is taking place in a scrapyard and doesn’t have much to do with anything that happens in the issue.
X-FORCE:
Cable. Last issue, X-Force fought the Beyond Corporation and Cable eliminated Boom-Boom as a suspect for murdering Kamala Khan in a future timeline. At the end of the issue, Boom-Boom found Cable slumped unconscious in his chair with some sort of mark on his chest, and Domino standing over him; the story ended with Boom-Boom attacking while Domino attempted to explain herself. (Akihiro helpfully explains that the art was supposed to show Cable “bleeding from a wound in his chest”, which it didn’t really convey.)
X-Men United #2 annotations
X-MEN UNITED #2
“Open Wounds”
Writer: Eve L Ewing
Artist: Tiago Palma
Colour artist: Brian Reber
Letterer: Joe Sabino
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: Captain America, Melée, Wolverine (Laura), Beast and Kitty Pryde in a World War II setting. Not a scene from the issue.
THE X-MEN:
This issue is no clearer about the nature of Graymatter Lane than the previous one was. Once again, it’s reiterated that Graymatter Lane is on the psychic plane and that if you die there then you die “in real life”, which makes it sound like it’s a projection; and once again, people seem to be able to travel from there directly to places in the real world. There’s a dining pavilion – does it serve real food or just illusions? On balance Graymatter Lane seems to be a pocket of the psychic plane that people physically travel to, even though most of the environment being a psychic projection… but I’m honestly unsure what the intention is.
Cyclops. His plan was apparently to get Kid Omega to fake an attack on the school in the expectation that it wouldn’t be able to cope, thus proving his point that it was a bad idea. This plan fails spectacularly, but Scott refuses to concede that this has gone badly, or that he ought to have warned Ben, and simply acts as if things had gone to plan. Iceman seems to regard this refusal to apologise as entirely in character.
Charts – 10 April 2026
A virtually dead week, but let’s run through it anyway.
1. Sam Fender & Olivia Dean – “Rein Me In”
Seven weeks non consecutive. While it’s 43 weeks old and past its peak, it continues to evade the ACR downweighting rule. To go to ACR, the test isn’t simply that a track has received fewer chart points several weeks running; it has to be underperforming the market average. “Rein Me In” outperformed a weak market this week, and so it’s not going to ACR for another few weeks at least. And it has no obvious challengers – it’s 10,000 ahead of Bella Kay at number 2, and she’ll go to ACR next week.
28. Harry Styles – “Sign of the Times”
There are only three entries to the top 40 this week, and only one of them is a current release. This isn’t one of them.
The X-Axis – 8 April 2026
UNCANNY X-MEN ANNUAL #1. (Annotations here.) We effectively have two issues of Uncanny X-Men this week, as a result of this Annual slipping from its scheduled release date. Although there’s a present day segment with Wolverine and Jubilee, the main point of this story is to show us more of the group who were guarding Haven House in the 1920s (in the flashbacks to Henrietta’s arrival, in issues #15-16). The focus is Slaughter Freedman, the four-armed gunman who was pretty much a background figure in that story – though he seems to have been redesigned somewhat since then, as he’s now rather more heavily built and looks about 20 years older. Even if it doesn’t really fit with traditional continuity, I rather like the idea that there’s always been an underground community of mutants, and Slaughter himself is an engaging fellow. To the extent the design has been tweaked by Francesco Mortarino, I think it’s for the better; it does make the Regulators into a rather middle aged group, but I don’t particularly want them to feel lke proto-superheroes. Working Wolverine into the story feels like a gesture towards commercial reality more than something the story really needed, though – particularly when the story has to explain why we didn’t see him in issues #15-16 – but overall, I quite like this as an addition to the mythos. And hey, now we’ve got things in New Orleans to play with that aren’t the Guilds.
UNCANNY X-MEN #26. (Annotations here.) This is the first part of “Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed”, which takes us back to the Mutina storyline and also puts the focus back on the Outliers. Uncanny often feels like an Outliers title that happens to have some X-Men in the supporting cast, and this is one of those arcs – though that’s not something I have a problem with, as there’s far more territory to explore with the kids. We do have a subplot with Gambit talking about starting a family – and of course the whole premise of the two X-Men titles is that this one inherited the family aspect while Scott gets the militarism – and some progress with Kurt and Mackenzie’s romance, but the main point of this episode is to establish that the Outliers are trapped in some sort of dream where they’ve been cast as the New Mutants. Luciano Vecchio does a pretty solid job of echoing some of the scenes from Marvel Graphic Novel #4 but it does feel like Gail Simone is making some quite ambitious assumptions about how familiar people are with the original story. With Giant-Size X-Men #1 you can probably assume that a large chunk of the audience know that Peter saves Illyana from a runaway tractor and so forth. But Marvel Graphic Novel #4 never had the same iconic status, and I do wonder how many readers over 40 years down the line actually recognise references to Moira rescuing Wolfsbane, or Sunspot playing soccer. (It’s not even easy to find on Marvel Unlimited – for some reason it seems to be unavailable on the app, though you can find it on the desktop version filed under The New Mutants Graphic Novel.) Maybe it still works as long as you get the general idea that they’re being plugged into the New Mutants’ role, and it’ll probably become clearer as it goes on, but I can see a lot of readers being kind of baffled by this one.
Wolverine #18 annotations
WOLVERINE vol 7 #18
“Clash of the Champions”
Writer: Saladin Ahmed
Artist: Martín Cóccolo
Colour artist: Jesus Aburtov
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER: That’ll be a picture of Wolverine.
WOLVERINE.
He’s been protecting the New Morlocks’ encampment for “the past few weeks” by this point (though if you’re that bothered about fitting this into continuity, he doesn’t actually say he’s been there the whole time).
He still describes his relationship with Silver Sable as casual, but when she gets hurt in battle he flies into a rage which is uncharacteristic for him these days.
He spends most of the issue simply fighting a possessed Hercules.
Uncanny X-Men #26 annotations
UNCANNY X-MEN vol 6 #26
“Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed, part 1: Careful What You Wish For”
Writer: Gail Simone
Artist: Luciano Vecchio
Colour artist: Matthew Wilson
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: The X-Men and Outliers react to someone in a classic X-Men uniform. From the interior, it’s specifically a New Mutants uniform and the character wearing it is Mutina.
THE X-MEN:
Rogue. She’s reluctant to see herself as a mother to the Outliers, claiming that “bad parents are worse than no parents at all”. She could be referring there either to her birth parents or to Mystique and Destiny, but either way it’s a surprising lack of confidence in her own parenting abilities. She’s obviously more comfortable seeing herself as a teacher or mentor.
Gambit. He seems to want to adopt the Outliers as a family, and has started referring to them as “our kids”.
Uncanny X-Men Annual #1 annotations
UNCANNY X-MEN ANNUAL vol 6 #1
“The Rise of the Regulators”
Writers: Gail Simone & Mikki Kendall
Artists: Francesco Mortarino with Elisabetta D’Amico (inks)
Colour artist: Mattia Iacono
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER. It’s a homage to the cover of issue #1 of the current series, with the hands of the Regulators instead of the X-Men.
THE X-MEN:
Wolverine. In the present day section of the story, he shows up at a club to protect one of the bar staff, Mala, from her stalking Emery. For some reason he shows up in a full tuxedo to a nightclub (he surely can’t be this out of touch with modern nightlife, and it’s not like a tuxedo would be his first choice of clothes outside Madripoor). Mala is apparently the great-great-granddaughter of Slaughter Freedman, hence Logan’s interest.
In the 1920s portion of the story, he’s been poisoned by someone and then ambushed and buried alive by the robbers who go on to attack Slaughter Freedman. The poisoners are never identified and for the purposes of this story their main function is to explain how he managed to lose a fight to these robbers in the first place – as well as giving him a mission to justify leaving Haven House at the end.
