Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men

10 – Not All Mandroids

In which Phoenix has nothing on Jamie Madrox when it comes to retcons, Pterosaurs have super punchable faces, Colossus gets laid, we are uninterested in the Savage Land, Wolverine and Storm are both pretty interesting, smiling costs extra if you’re Doctor Doom, Banshee saves the day, Alpha Flight tries, Angry Hovercraft Guy comes back, and Proteus is fairly upsetting.

X-Plained:

  • X-Men #109, 114-16, 118-122, and 125-128
  • Multiple Man
  • Metacontinuity
  • The Savage Land
  • Pterosaurs
  • Shi’ar mustache technology
  • Karl Lykos
  • Misty Knight
  • Colleen Wing
  • Wolverine in Japan
  • Mandroids
  • Moses Magnum
  • A Heist
  • Angus McWhirter, disgruntled hovercraft rental guy
  • Alpha Flight
  • Team Dynamics
  • Why you always leave a note
  • Proteus

You can find a visual companion to the episode – and links to recommended reading – on our blog.

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Next week: Secret origins, shipper wars, the Siege Perilous, and which of us would win in a fight.

14 comments

  1. hey guys another amazing episode!

    one note:

    Proteus DID come back during the Necrosha cross-over. He takes over Destiny’s corpse, Blindfold, Husk, and a host of other X-Men before Magneto “reached into Preoteus’s energy matrix and CHANGED it” which made him of course, dissipate into electrons and leave his death open to a future Proteus story.

    you guys are effing rad! keep up the good work

    – jesse

  2. While this is certainly a niche subject matter (though one with a surprisingly large audience) the quality of your production and performance truly transcends narrow categories. The podcast is both as exhaustive and as facile as an introduction to a highly convoluted subject matter can get, The format of each show is is intelligent and tightly organized yet still leaving space for riffing and improvisation. You two are just awesome and highly entertaining. Your podcasts are the perfect meld of graduate level dissertation and stand up act. I love what you are doing, would like to see you revisit and discuss the Steranko and Neal Adams issues eventually, but otherwise I am so happy to be along for the ride.
    Totally tangential, but I would love to see you tackle the the new Star Wars movies!

  3. Um…in our world Inverness is not the fourth largest city in Scotland, that would be Dundee. It’s not the fifth either, that might be Stirling, it’s certainly bigger than Inverness.
    No offence to Inverness, a place I have some amazingly happy memories of, but in our world it’s not even a close thing. In the 1970s Inverness had a population of about 35,000, while Dundee was about 185,000.
    Cyke should have maybe asked the Scot in the party.

  4. Why would you say Mike Mignola did the covers for Classic X-Men? Why would you do that to me? It was Arthur Adams. It was SO Art Adams. You broke my nerdbrain. Damn your eyes.

  5. Proteus also came back in that Harness/Piecemeal mess and in the Star Trek/X-Men crossover, which seemed a much better fit–as Proteus kinda smacks of old ST:TOS omnipotent-yet-confused antagonists–and which gave us that wonderful double Dr. McCoys panel. Weird cross-company crossovers! Maybe review that Teen Titans/X-Men one?

  6. Also, super weird that Moira kept her married name. Why not go back to Moira Kinross? There are plenty of reasons a woman *might* choose to keep her married name after a divorce, but none seem relevant to Moira. Die again, Joe MacTaggart!

  7. And while I’m replying to a 4-month-old post (y’know, as one does), can we resolve to be fearless in the face of Claremont fetishes? Let’s talk about Piotr’s three-way. Let’s talk about weird Victorian-era naked human hunting. Let’s talk about CC’s fascination with an innocent ideal of free love a la Heinlein’s ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’. Is it open-minded or just ewgross? Reading it at a young age, I found it fearless, as any challenge to current societal norms of sexuality tend to be met with outright scorn–orientation, sure, but also exploration, flexible boundaries, non-traditional relationships, etc. Piotr’s puritanical views are directly challenged with, “Where’s the harm? This is how we choose to express ourselves.” I feel like Chris did some solid work in putting these ideas into the ether, not saying too much, letting them evolve or not based on reader interest, and maybe being absorbed into the collective consciousness. Maybe.

    1. Agreed.

      I’ve mentioned this before but want to clarify again, since this seems like a context in which the line is likely to blur: we are 100% down with discussing motifs, but we draw a really serious line between discussing motifs in a writer’s work and speculating–outside of primary-source, publicly-available material–on that writer’s personal investment in those motifs; and that line applies to comment moderation as well.

      (You’re fine, Justin – this is just a train of thought spinning out from your post.)

  8. Proteus also came back during the Exiles issues of the House of M, which is kinda cheat because that’s kinda 616 universe but also not, and he actually became the Exiles’s major villain.

  9. (Disclaimer: I know this is way too late to be useful in any way, but I just listened to this episode!)

    Wasn’t there also some kind of Proteus involvement with Harness and Piecemeal (now THOSE are some messed-up characters, which somehow seems appropriate in connection with Proteus…) in X-Factor, sometime during the 90s? I can’t recall specifics, but it might’ve been some kind of clone, which might disqualify this as, strictly speaking, a ‘Proteus’ (re-)appearance.

    Also, just to say, I really enjoy the podcast!

  10. I think that one aspect of the Proteus saga that you guys overlooked is the amazing art. I’m a Silvestry guy because 229 was my first exposure to this whole beautiful mess, but this arc has some of my favorite art in all of comics. It almost looks like Byrne may have been experimenting with certain substances around this time.

    I also think this arc was a HUGE turning point in the Cyclops/Wolvie dynamic. Wolvie gave Cyclops a lot less shit after this.

    Also a quick note on your discomfort with the implication that Proteus was evil due to the nature of his conception. I hear you. It’s not a good message. But, it was a message that only came from the characters and was shaped by their perceptions. It was never implicitly stated that Kevin was evil because of his conception.

    And yes, the Cyclops/Corsair mustache bit was an 11 on the ridiculous scale. Perfection!

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