As Mentioned in Episode 69 – Weird Science

Obviously, I miss Rachel and Miles, but I love that Elle and Graeme covered the best era of Beast. I own all the Amazing Adventures comics, plus his entire tenure with Avengers and Defenders. I like to think of Beast as the ultimate counterculture intellectual—listening to Stevie Wonder and smoking pot, exploring Eastern mysticism, and discussing Marxism with Vera. The best Beast needs to make a comeback!

Here from X years in the future enjoying replaying all these episodes, and I doubt this comment will be seen, but I would love to hear an opinion update.

The final question for Graeme is very interesting to listen to with how Jonathan Hickman utilized Moira MacTaggert.

“She’s not a terrible person, she’s a perfectly fine person, but she’s so many things I don’t like all wrapped up into one. She is the scientist who has a specialism of whatever the plot demands. She is a female character who exists to service male characters. She is a female character of entirely indeterminate age who will consistently be drawn as hot, no matter what, and will always wear figure-hugging costumes. I mean, the Proteus story has her having an adult son and yet she’s consistently drawn as if she is at oldest thirty?

“She exists to serve at first Professor Xavier–I mean she will drop ANYTHING that is going on to help out Professor Xavier. And then when she hooks up with Banshee, she then becomes Banshee’s girlfriend as opposed to an independent character in her own right. And she should be this independent character; she is, you know, in theory, a leading scientist and one of the leading experts on mutation, and that’s she never given any real strength or energy within herself, despite that.”

I’d be extremely curious what his opinions are now after she did come back and with everything behind her mutation and behind-the-scenes work with Charles and Erik. She’s plot specialist super scientist because she’s lived nine lives and retained so much information and developed such amazing skills. She exists to serve herself and the future of mutantkind and/or humanity (and/or cybersupremacy… I might just be looking for opinions under Hickman’s run), and is as part of background machinations as Sinister. No-prize for adult son Proteus and always looking thirty: she’s turned Magneto into a baby! She continues to keep herself looking young and fresh well into her fifties/sixties/however old she was in relation to Xavier & Magneto. Hell, super scientist Bulma from Dragonball does the same in Dragonball Super Hero.

My brain’s run off on tangents and I’m losing the plot (why did Moira fake her death when she did? Is it because she knew Cassandra Nova would be coming and she needed to stay off the radar completely? Did Genosha have to happen? Did she manage to help catalog the 16,000,000 mutants that died there? Was there any later retcon for the Xavier/Magneto-led Excalibur series where Moira was a part of things?). So two questions that may just float in the empty:

1. What does Graeme McMillan think about Moira ten years later, at least for HoX/PoX?

2. Between this question, episode 70 discussing the earliest instance of the Twelve and inconsistent members, absolute love for Cypher and Warlock… was Jonathan Hickman an avid listener of Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men and curating ideas for Krakoa Era from podcast discussions?