Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men

As Mentioned in Episode 144 – Giant-Size Special #5 (feat. Kid Apocalypse)

Listen to the episode here.



THE 2016 SUPER DOCTOR ASTRONAUT PETER CORBEAU AWARDS FOR EXCELLENCE IN X-CELLENCE

  • Best X-Writer: Dennis Hopeless
  • Best X-Artist: Alti Firmansyah
  • Best X-Colorist: David Curiel
  • Best Ongoing Series: All-New Wolverine
  • Best Miniseries: Worst X-Man Ever
  • Good Sport Award: Scott Koblish
  • Best Book Miles Wishes He Hadn’t Put Off Reading For This Long: Marjorie Liu’s X-23
  • Fun-Matters-More-Than-Good Award: X-Men: Apocalypse
  • Best Actual Wolverine Award: Jonathan the Actual Wolverine
  • Irene Adler Memorial Award for Most Anticipated Upcoming Book Or Series: Generation X
  • Cyclops Has A Good Day award: Cyclops had no good days.
  • Best Stealth X-Series: New Avengers
  • Kristafer Anka Award For Best Withering Sneer In An X-Book: Emma Frost in Inhumans vs. X-Men #1
  • Wet Noodle Award: The Noodle Incident
  • Making Lemonade Award: Inhumans vs. X-Men
  • Best Non-X Marvel Book: The Vision

CLASSIC CORBEAUS (for older X-material covered in the podcast during 2016)

  • Best Cover Ever Forever: Excalibur #4
  • Buried TreasureHavok & Wolverine: Meltdown
  • Why-Isn’t-This-Collected Award: X-Factor: Judgment War
  • Still Crying Award: New Mutants #64
  • The Unhand That Elf Award: “Unhand that elf!”
  • Better To Reign In Hell Award: Madelyne Pryor
  • You Tried Award: Illyana Rasputin
  • ABD Award: Havok, for still not finishing his dissertation

AND

  • Still the Best Listeners of Any Podcast, Ever – You!

LINKS AND FURTHER READING:

  • Find Kid Apocalypse on Twitter and Bandcamp!
  • Listen to Dennis Hopeless’s original, super-secret, censored version of the Noodle Incident in the cold open of Episode 104!
  • You can hear Scott Koblish’s rap battle with Jay in the cold open to Episode 105
  • …and his performance of Jay’s song about Summers continuity in the cold open to Episode 134!

144 – Giant-Size Special #5 (feat. Kid Apocalypse)

Art by David Wynne. Buy prints at Redbubble, or contact David to purchase the original!

In which we get a visit from Kid Apocalypse and debut a track from his upcoming album; Jay No-Prizes Community; Rahne of Terra is pretty damn delightful; Cable is an armchair editor; we finally release the unexpurgated version of Dennis Hopeless’s version of the Noodle Incident; and you remain–to nobody’s surprise–the best listeners of any podcast, ever.

X-PLAINED:

  • Kid Apocalypse (Quinn Allan)
  • Portland Snowpocalypse 2017
  • “Return of the King”
  • Rapping in character
  • Beats in the gutters
  • A vehement defense of Nate Grey
  • Wolverine: Rahne of Terra
  • Earth-1991
  • Geshem
  • Many puns of varying quality
  • EiC Cable
  • A definitely 100% true and accurate explanation of the Noodle Incident
  • The Third Annual Super Doctor Astronaut Peter Corbeau Awards for Excellence at X-Cellence

NEXT EPISODE: The debut of Gambit!


In retrospect, we should totally have made reference to the song “Beards Going Nowhere” during our discussion of surfing the timestream on glam hair. We regret the omission.


You can find a visual companion to this episode on our blog!

Find us on iTunes or Stitcher!

Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men is 100% ad-free and listener supported. If you want to help support the podcast–and unlock more cool stuff–you can do that right here!

We’re in the process of migrating our official shop to TeePublic! Click over to check it out! (You can still find the designs we haven’t moved yet at Redbubble.)

 

ANNOUNCING: The Noodle Incident Contest Winners!

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In Episode 104, we challenged you to submit your versions of the Noodle Incident: whatever Big, Terrible Thing Cyclops did to earn the enmity of most of the post-Secret Wars Marvel Universe.

We got a lot of awesome entries, but in the end, the standouts were clear. It is therefore out great pleasure to announce the official winner of the 2016 Noodle Incident Contest:

We also decided to go ahead and expand the winners’ circle to include a runner-up, because any shaggy-dog joke that makes us laugh as hard as Zachary SP’s deserves a prize of its own:


Following SECRET WARS, Cyclops ended up more-or-less where he was before, leading the outlaw X-Men. But incubating in his head was a surviving ember of the Phoenix Force from when he merged with it during the incursion from Earth-1616. As a primal force of rebirth, the power of the Phoenix didn’t stay dormant for long. When it flared back to life, it brought with it memories of Battleworld up until Cyclops’ death at the hands of Doom. 

Realizing the artificial nature of this new reality, Cyclops became resentful. Someone rebuilt the entire world and didn’t bother to try and make things any better for mutants? And – even worse – they rebuilt Cyclops-the-terrorist without necessarily replicating the decisions he made that got him to that point. Someone else was responsible for him being where he was.

Cyclops being Cyclops, he could not accept this as easy absolution for his mistakes. He wouldn’t even undo those mistakes, given the opportunity. He wanted to take full responsibility for his actions. He wanted to be sure that he was in control of – if nothing else – himself. To that end, he started building a device.

The press was calling him “terrorist” and “supervillain” anyway. Why not live up to it?

Time travel wasn’t the answer. Hank tried to give Scott the kind of perspective he needed when he brought forward the original five X-Men, but, for once, Hank didn’t go far enough. Cyclops felt the need to extend his perception to all points on his personal timeline at once. If he succeeded at his goal, maybe he could make different decisions along that timeline. Maybe not. It didn’t matter. Scott had seen enough time travel to know that “going back and fixing things” never makes anything better. He just had to know that all the Cyclopses that make up the Cyclops of today were Cyclops. He had to relive all those moments, all at the same time, to be sure.

He had the means to do this at his disposal all along. After all, what he was searching for was unimpeded vision. He needed to take off the visor for the last time.

One set of scavenged Hank McCoy marginalia, one jury-rigged Cerebro, one hijacked particle accelerator, and four truckloads of ruby quartz later, the Psioptic Gene-Force Accumulator was ready. Having learned supervillainy from the best, he took the time to broadcast his manifesto to the world before he activated his machine. After finishing his speech, he took off his visor and stared down eternity.

The tidal effects of Cyclops’ amplified, contained, and compounded optic blasts registered on seismographs worldwide. No one noticed, though, because the psychic effects hit first. Cyclops’ machine didn’t only affect him; its ripples spread to everyone on Earth. In an instant, everyone’s perceptions stretched forward and backward to encompass every conscious moment of their lives. The effect of suddenly being aware of every decision one has ever made was too much to bear for the vast majority of the world’s population. The world’s population was paralyzed with existential fear and guilt. And yet, Cyclops poured more and more power into the machine.

The superheroes stopped him, of course. It turns out the superhero community has a disproportionate number of people who are accustomed to agonizing over past tragedies 24/7. Spider-Man rallied the troops. Kitty Pryde got them inside. Magneto put Cyclops down. Squirrel Girl was also there, and also she was totally fine because Squirrel Girl has no regrets.

Once the world’s perceptions de-stretched back to their usual 4-D capabilities, they associated Cyclops with the near-lethal dose of guilt they all just suffered. Everyone had unpleasant memories they’d rather have forgotten dredged up by Cyclops’s machine. Mentioning the event tended to dredge those memories back up, so no one discussed any specifics about the incident ever again.

How did Cyclops know his machine would work? There is a principle in physics where objects falling into massive gravity wells stretch out, becoming longer and thinner as they are pulled in. He simply replicated this principle with the combination of force and vision inherent to his optic blasts instead of mass.

This principle is called Spaghettification.


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Spaghettification.

Well done, Evan and Zachary. Please drop us a line and let us know where to send your Official Noodle Incident Medals:

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At this point, we are pretty comfortable owning the fact that our awards aesthetic is basically “kindergarten craft hour.”

As Mentioned in Episode 104 – The Noodle Incident

Listen to the episode here.



LINKS & FURTHER READING:

104 – The Noodle Incident (feat. Brett White and Dennis Hopeless)

Art by David Wynne. Prints and cards available at the shop, or contact David to purchase the original.
Art by David Wynne. Prints and cards available at the shop, or contact David to purchase the original.

In which Brett White joins us for a look at the current state of the X-line; Dennis Hopeless helps shed some light on a persistent mystery; Brett has a lot of feelings about the Dark Riders; All-New Wolverine is our everything; All-New X-Men is the new New Mutants; X-Men ’92 is the prize at the bottom of the continuity cereal box; we speculate on potential fatalities in the upcoming Death of X; and everything is probably going to be more or less okay.

X-PLAINED:

  • Why everyone is mad at Cyclops
  • The Noodle Incident
  • How we variously define X-titles
  • The current state of the X-line
  • The 8-Month Gap
  • Secret Wars
  • Earth 616.1
  • Extraordinary X-Men (Current series)
  • Uncanny X-Men (Current series)
  • All-New Wolverine
  • Old Man Logan (Current series)
  • All-New X-Men (Current series)
  • X-Men: Worst X-Man Ever
  • X-Men ’92 (Current series)
  • The Dark Riders
  • Being personally invested in characters you don’t own
  • Favorite formats
  • The mystic end of the X-Men cinematic universe
  • Mysteries and mysteries

NEXT WEEK: Continuity Has Its Eyes on You: Live from ECCC with Kris Anka, Al Ewing, Scott Koblish, and G. Willow Wilson!

EDITED: NOODLE INCIDENT SUBMISSIONS ARE NOW CLOSED. We’ll be announcing the winners sometime between 4/18 and 4/22. Thank you to everyone who participated!!!


You can find a visual companion to this episode on our blog!

Find us on iTunes or Stitcher!

Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men is 100% ad-free and listener supported. If you want to help support the podcast–and unlock more cool stuff–you can do that right here!

Buy prints of this week’s illustration at our shop, or contact David Wynne for the original!