Listen to the episode here!

We passed your stealth and plainclothes cosplay contest entries along to X-Pert Judge Kris Anka, and he sent us back two winners: Congratulaions to lilpeepeedanceofdoom as plainclothes Gold Balls (you can read more about his costume here), and Elle as stealth Excalibur-era Shadowcat! (We’ll be getting in touch with you shortly with prize details!) Thanks again to contest sponsor TV Store Online, and judge Kris Anka–and be sure to swing by the blog early next week to see a roundup of all the amazing finalists!
Links and Further Reading:
I think the key difference between the New Mutants’ uniforms and the Hellions’ uniforms is that the New Mutants uniforms’ are more or less timeless (they’re only slightly tweaked from a Kirby design, after all) while the Hellions’ uniforms are 1980’s as can be.
So the blackface thing…That totally flew over my head when I was 14 and pulled New Mutants off the comics rack. I won’t go into the fact that the Roman culture really didn’t have the black/white race thing, and certainly didn’t have minstrel shows because it is really more about the reader’s cultural lens, not the subjects. I confess, when re-reading it right before listening to the podcast, it didn’t occur to me that it could be construed that way. Maybe because it was a disguise, not a comedy bit or a cruel mocking. Maybe because it was South American not Africa. The moment that struck me as questionably racist was when Dani (a Cheyenne) called the natives “Indians.” And the issue before with Axe, who was just a Clubber Lang knock-off and there are a lot of racist undertones with him in Rocky III.