Service announcement

Ladies and gentlemen, a moment of your time.

Al and I have decided that it would make a lot more sense if both of us were blogging on Housetoastonish.com. After all, we're both on the show. And besides, the House to Astonish website is prettier. And it runs on WordPress, which has more buttons, so it must be better.

So, I'm packing up and moving over to Housetoastonish.com. Do follow.

This won't make any difference to how much I post, by the way - well, except that only one of us will have to plug the podcast. You'll just have it all on one site.

And yes, this site will stay up as an archive.

See you at the new home, where this week's X-Axis should already await you.

So did I miss anything?

Well, I certainly chose an eventful couple of weeks to go on holiday, didn't I? And we'll be talking about all that on the podcast this weekend. I'll save my views on this whole topic for later, when I'm less jet-lagged and more suited to coherent thought...

For the moment, suffice to say that whatever Marvel and Disney are saying, there are obviously going to be changes. As I understand it, Disney are basically valuing Marvel at almost 40 times its annual earnings. That only makes sense if they think there's value in the company to be unlocked.

Housekeeping

No reviews today, because the ever-reliable postal service hasn't actually delivered the books yet. Which makes it kind of hard to review them.

They'll probably arrive on Monday. Of course, then I have to read them before reviewing them, so don't hold your breath.

Housekeeping

For those of you wondering, here's the plan. From last week's books, I'm going to do full reviews of Astonishing X-Men and the "Messiah War" crossover. Everything else, I'll cover in this weekend's capsules.

We're recording House to Astonish on Sunday, so it should be up Sunday evening.

Oh, and in the meantime... if anyone can tell me what on earth is supposed to be happening in the closing pages of "Messiah War", I'd love to know, because I've read it several times now, and I haven't got a clue.

In case you're wondering...

I'm not going to review X-Men Origins: Wolverine, because I don't plan to go and see it. To be honest, I'm not really that interested in adaptations to other media. Never bothered watching the animated series either.

The review on Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's podcast has some very valid points about the pointlessness of over-exploring back story, though. (Worth subscribing.)

And they flag up the too-close-to-home analysis on the British Board of Film Classification's parental guidance website: justifying the 12A certificate, the Board explains that "it is always obvious that we are looking at a fantastic world that has little in common with reality."

Ow.

Remarkable coincidence alert!

I reviewed Wolverine: The Anniversary yesterday. Here's what I said about the back-up strip:

"There's also a short back-up strip by Jonathan Maberry and Tomm Coker, in which Wolverine fights off a bunch of ninjas and then wonders, for no readily discernible reason, whether they might be ghosts. No, Logan, they're probably just ninjas again. It's Wednesday. Coker's art is lovely, but the story is a confused mess which seems to think it's making some sort of terribly profound point."

And at 10.44am today, somebody called Celia Herrick posted to disagree:

You're usually pretty clever with your assessment of comics, but you really missed the boat with the Jonathan Mayberry story GHOSTS in Wolverine the Annivesary.

There are two whole pages of a dream sequence that set up the blurred line between dream and waking experience. How could you have missed that? Far from the confused mess you say it was, this was one of the most elegant and clearly thought out stories in quite a while. Reminiscent of Garth Ennis or Warren Ellis.

Maybe you should read the story rather than just cruise the art.

Actually, I had noticed the dream sequence, and I still thought it was a mess. But that's another matter, and hey, if you think I'm misreading the story, that's your prerogative.

Anyhow, Celia certainly started the ball rolling, because just one minute later, at 10.45am, one Robert N Norris chipped in with:

I agree with the last post. I think GHOSTS was really great. I wonder who this new writer is. I haven't heard of him before.

A minute apart! If I were a cynic, I might start to get suspicious.

Now, you might not know this, but thanks to the magic of Haloscan, I can see the IP addresses of commenters. And guess what? Both comments came from the same IP address - I won't post it, but I've checked it on IP-adress.com, and it's a Verizon connection in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

Which is a truly remarkable coincidence, because I checked Jonathan Maberry's MySpace page, and wouldn't you just know it, he comes from Doylestown, Pennsylvania too!

It's a small world, isn't it?

Podcast update

Just so you know, we're recording the new House to Astonish on Monday, so it's going to be a couple of days later than usual.

Housekeeping

I'll be doing some reviews in the next couple of days, but there's no time tonight. In the meantime, you could always visit The Beat and read the January Marvel sales column...

Happy New Year

Forgot to say that in the last post.

And here's what's coming up in the next few days:

The new House to Astonish will be up either tonight or tomorrow, with reviews of Incognito #1, War Machine #1 and Justice League of America #28.

For the first time in a while, we've got a couple of X-book story arcs ending this week. So here on the blog, we'll be looking at the "Y-Men" arc from Young X-Men and "Old Ghosts" from X-Force. There's also New Exiles Annual #1, but I'm not sure it really merits a full review. We'll see.

I'm also inclined to take another shot at posting at least a couple of paragraphs about other books and so forth that I've read in 2009. I've tried this before and usually ended up giving up because I didn't have the time to write full reviews, so expect some of these to be little more than capsules... but hey, it's a blog and they might spark some discussion, so why not?