X-Men #19 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-MEN vol 5 #19
“Out of the Vault”
by Jonathan Hickman, Mahmud Asrar & Sunny Gho
COVER / PAGE 1. The Children of the Vault, being dramatic.
PAGE 2. Data page.
It’s been a while since we’ve had an issue which is quite so keen on the graphics. It’s perhaps not immediately obvious on this page, but the timeline runs from the top of the page to the bottom, so Synch is kind-of being presented as the central rock in this group.
PAGES 3-4. Wolverine, Synch and Darwin survive the explosion.
This is the aftermath of the explosion from the previous issue (this being a rare two-parter in Hickman’s X-Men). The narrator is Synch, as clarified later. The reasons for that become apparent at the end of the issue, as he’s presumably the only one of the trio to retain memories of this after the event.
Charts – 26 March 2021
In which Justin Bieber has a new album out, and so everyone just stands back and lets shim get on with it.
1. Nathan Evans, 220 Kid & Billen Ted – “Wellerman”
Two weeks at number one, with a comfortable lead. It’s been out for nine weeks already, though, so if it’s already peaked then it might find itself being hit with the downweighting rule next week. We’ll see.
3. Justin Bieber featuring Daniel Caesar & Giveon – “Peaches”
24. Justin Bieber featuring Khalid – “As I Am”
Bieber’s album “Justice” enters at number 2, which is his sixth top five album (admittedly, two of them are the regular and acoustic versions of “Believe”). Two of them reached number 1 – the main version of “Believe” in 2012, and last year’s “Changes”. It gets the maximum permitted three tracks into the chart – the two tracks above, and “Hold On”, which rebounds from 31 to a new peak of 10.
The Incomplete Wolverine – 1985
Part 1: Origin to Origin II | Part 2: 1907 to 1914
Part 3: 1914 to 1939 | Part 4: World War II
Part 5: The postwar era | Part 6: Team X
Part 7: Post Team X | Part 8: Weapon X
Part 9: Department H | Part 10: The Silver Age
1974-1975 | 1976 | 1977 | 1978 | 1979
1980 | 1981 | 1982 | 1983 | 1984
When we left off, Wolverine had disappeared from the pages of Uncanny X-Men for a few months to be in another miniseries. And here it is…
KITTY PRYDE & WOLVERINE #1-6
6-issue miniseries
by Chris Claremont, Al Milgrom & Glynis Oliver
November 1984 to April 1985
There’s a lot of plot here, so deep breath…
The Pryde family’s bank is in trouble because it’s just too generous in lending to local businesses. Kitty’s father Carmen sells out to new Japanese owner Heiji Shigematsu, actually a Yakuza obayun who intends to use the business as a money-laundering front. Kitty tails her father to Japan to learn all this, and gets captured by Shigematsu’s supposed “intermediary”, Ogun. Ogun brainwashes her and trains her as a ninja. But before she was captured, Kitty phoned Logan, and he duly shows up in Japan looking for her. Logan and Yukio fight a masked ninja who, you guessed it, turns out to be Kitty. Yukio drugs Kitty and the heroes regroup at a Clan Yashida stronghold, where Kitty seems to return to normal.
Wolverine explains that Ogun was his sensei, that he may or may not be a legendary samurai, and that he has imprinted his psyche onto hers, either through magic or psi-powers. Eventually this Ogun personality will overwhelm her entirely. The suggestion is that Ogun is basically a psychic parasite / ghost that moves from host to host. Conveniently for the plot, Logan believes that Kitty can only defeat Ogun’s influence by beating it herself. Logan mentors and trains her, and puts her through the same drills as Ogun, but gives her more choice, so that she has to make the decision to press on.
House to Astonish Presents: The Lightning Round Episode 2
Come with us back to 1997, as Paul and I take our second dive into the history of Marvel’s foremost felonious faculty, the Thunderbolts!
This time round, we’re covering Spider-Man Team-Up #7, Thunderbolts #3 and 4, and Thunderbolts: Distant Rumblings (aka Thunderbolts #-1). You will note that we have not yet managed to get an episode of this down to the planned 40-45 minutes. We’re working on it!
It should go without saying, but this episode contains spoilers for the issues under discussion (though we’ve tried to avoid flagging things that will be important in later issues).
The podcast is here, or here on Mixcloud, or available via the embedded player below. let us know what you think, in the comments below, on Twitter, via email or through our Facebook fan page. And, of course, our lush shirts are available over at our Redbubble store for the discerning consumer.
Excalibur #19 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
EXCALIBUR vol 4 #19
“Wild Violets”
by Tini Howard, Marcus To & Erick Arciniega
COVER / PAGE 1. A confrontation between Captain Britain and Psylocke.
PAGES 2-3. Captain Britain of Earth-13054 locates our Captain Britain.
Elspeth Braddock was among the horde of Captains Britain we saw in X of Swords: Destruction, but this is her first full appearance. She’s a sorcerer version of the character; we’re told that her “focused totality turned inward”, which refers to the late 80s tagline about Psylocke’s psionic knife being the “focused totality of her psionic powers”. Earth-13054 is home to a fantasy-genre version of the X-Men, and was seen in X-Treme X-Men vol 2 #2.
Cable #9 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
CABLE vol 4 #9
“Bargaining”
by Gerry Duggan & Phil Noto
COVER / PAGE 1. Cable and Esme share a drink in the Green Lagoon, while a woman with a logo for a head stands over them. Okay, it’s Emma and her head is actually off the top of the page… but it does look a little odd.
PAGE 2. Epigraph from an anonymous customer at the Green Lagoon, basically making the point that nobody really treats Kid Cable seriously. Partly that’s because he doesn’t have the gravitas and experience of the familiar version, but we’ve also seen before that Cable himself has serious doubts about whether he’s really up to the role that he’s taken on.
PAGES 3-5. Cable and Esme deal with an A.I.M. submarine.
As any longtime Marvel reader will know, these guys are from A.I.M. (Advanced Idea Mechanics), which is basically a group of scientists who want the world to be ruled by a scientific meritocracy (i.e., them). They’re serving here as generic walk-on villains.
Cable started this series dating all five of the Stepford Cuckoos – or perhaps just four of them, given that Phoebe is dating Quentin Quire – but we seem to have quietly settled down to just him and Esme. Back in issue #2, Esme is the one that Emma Frost singled out in her conversation with Cyclops. (“Do not let him [Cable] break their hearts, except Esme. She needs it, Scott.”) Emma’s reaction to Esme’s behaviour here should be seen in that light.
Charts – 19 March 2021
Ah, so it’s that week. “Drivers License” by Olivia Rodrigo has now been out for 11 weeks and so – since it passed its peak several weeks ago – it shifts to the lower streaming points for older records. This rule, designed to stop the top end of the chart being logjammed with older singles, goes unnoticed most of the time, because it normally affects records that were on their way down anyway. With number 1s, its more of a problem, since it has the absurd consequence of a song dropping direct from 1 to (in this week’s example) 18. Which is to say, you can see the strings a bit too obviously.
Anyway, that leaves the door open for…
1. Nathan Evans, 220 Kid & Billen Ted – “Wellerman”
X-Force #18 annotations
X-FORCE vol 6 #18
“Shadows of the Mind”
by Benjamin Percy, Garry Brown & Guru-eFX
COVER / PAGE 1. Kid Omega… um, crying psychic energy, I suppose. Explosively.
PAGES 2-4. Black Tom is attacked.
Obviously, this is the psychic creature that XENO created using Kid Omega’s body. It’s not really clear to me how we’re meant to read this scene – whether Black Tom is cut off from part of Krakoa, or whether he’s connected to Krakoa but Krakoa can’t sense the psychic entity, or whether being unable to sense something on Krakoa has become something nightmarishly wrong for him.
The opening line, with Tom talking in his sleep, refers to his long-running partnership with Cain Marko, the Juggernaut. There are some stories that portray them as extremely close friends.
We’re told later on that the psychic entity’s attacks are tied to “the unguarded mind”, which usually means a strong emotional state. In Tom’s case, however, it seems to be just sleep.
S.W.O.R.D. #4 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
S.W.O.R.D. #4
“The Krakoan Sun”
by Al Ewing, Valerio Schiti & Marte Gracia
COVER / PAGE 1: Knull corrupting Cable. Yes, it’s still a King in Black tie-in.
PAGE 2. Cargill’s monologue.
Cargill is stuck inside Knull’s black symbiote goop stuff, following the previous issue. She experiences this as a sensory-deprivation void, which she’s trying to find a hook for. We can see on the next page that she’s not actually surrounded, so this must be some sort of mental effect that the symbiotes have.
When she says that “something stole Cable’s face”, she basically means that one of Knull’s symbiotes has taken him over.
PAGES 3-4. Symbiote Cable rants at Manifold.
Manifold addresses this character as Knull later in the issue, so we should presumably take it that Knull is speaking through the symbiote.
Wolverine: Black, White & Blood
WOLVERINE: BLACK, WHITE & BLOOD #1-4
November 2020 to March 2021
An anthology title! We haven’t had one of those in a while.
Marvel’s track record with anthology titles is patchy to say the least. X-Men Unlimited used to serve as the X-books’ anthology, and to put it politely, it was a mixed bag. But, different times. And in an age when the ongoing titles are tied into a big picture, perhaps there’s a gap for stories that are more freestanding.
Even so, Black, White & Blood seems uncertain about what it’s aiming for. The gimmick here is to tell Wolverine stories, drawn from any point in his history, but with the art in black and white with only red as colouring. So black, white and blood, you see.
And… is that a good idea? For a series?
