Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men

Late-Night Q&A with Jay and Chris

Jay here! X-Men ’92 co-writer and all-around rad dude Chris Sims was in town last week, and after a few days of weird theme parks, pizza, Powell’s, and blowing a LOT of quarters on the X-Men arcade game, we decided to sit down for a spur-of-the-moment late-night Q&A session, featuring fancy tea, a whooooooole lot of sunglasses, and PROBABLY not Chad Bowers hiding in nearby foliage:

Thanks to everyone who sent in questions!


Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men is 100% ad-free and listener supported. These video reviews–and everything else here–are made possible by the support of our Patreon subscribers. If you want to help support the podcast–and unlock more cool stuff–you can do that right here!

Come join us on Imzy!

Jay & Miles Review the X-Men, Episode 82

Week of April 27, 2016:

In which it’s an All-Wolverine week, with bonus Squirrel Girl!

REVIEWED:

  • *All-New Wolverine #7 (00:25)
  • Old Man Logan #5 (05:57)

*Pick of the week (12:34)


CRITICAL UPDATE: THERE IS NOW ALSO A SONG:


Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men is 100% ad-free and listener supported. These video reviews–and everything else here–are made possible by the support of our Patreon subscribers. If you want to help support the podcast–and unlock more cool stuff–you can do that right here!

Come join us on Imzy!

ANNOUNCING: The Noodle Incident Contest Winners!

broken_everything

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.


C110
Spaghettification.

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

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

As Mentioned in Episode 106 – The X-Terminators

Listen to the podcast here.



LINKS & FURTHER LISTENING:

106 – The X-Terminators

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 Nextwave is both canon and not-canon; Inferno officially begins; X-Terminators is basically a cartoon; Bill Gaines cannot catch a break; Artie and Leach are superbabies; Takeshi Matsuya is fantastic; you should probably never take our advice about anything; Boom Boom is pretty good at superhero costume design; Walter Peck was right; Miles still won’t stop saying that one line about stealing a baby; N’astirh is no pigeon; and “No Mutant Is an Island” is a patently inaccurate statement.

X-PLAINED:

  • The Beyond Corporation
  • The Defilers
  • X-Terminators #1-4
  • The first 35 issues of X-Factor, briefly
  • Two teams with the same name
  • Fredric Wertham
  • Bill Gaines
  • Crotus
  • Babies
  • A boarding school that may or may not be Phillips Exeter Academy
  • Muffy
  • Saint Simon’s Academy
  • Wiz Kid (Takeshi Matsuya)
  • Nuprin
  • Medical advice from goblins
  • The Goblin Buster
  • Metareferential snack food
  • RadSport Sport Fashion Outfitters
  • An exceptionally specific Ghostbusters reference
  • Helen and Tim
  • Dubious spell semantics
  • How not to incorporate a crossover into a miniseries, and vice versa
  • “No Mutant Is an Island”
  • A brief history of Magneto’s helmet
  • Definitive Magnetos

NEXT WEEK: The fall of Magik.


Special thanks to multiversal metacontinuity wizard Al Ewing for the last-minute assist on the cold open!


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

Find us on iTunes, Google Play, 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!

Jay & Miles Review the X-Men, Episode 81

Week of April 20, 2016:

In which Extraordinary X-Men finally lives up to its name; Jay and Miles accidentally wear matching shirts (but don’t bother to change); and Jay fails to come up with something exciting to put in the video-description copy.

Reviewed:

  • Extraordinary X-Men #9 (Pick of the week, obviously)

Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men is 100% ad-free and listener supported. These video reviews–and everything else here–are made possible by the support of our Patreon subscribers. If you want to help support the podcast–and unlock more cool stuff–you can do that right here!

Come join us on Imzy!

ECCC 2016 Round-Up!

Listen to the live episode here.


Miles, Scott, and Jay performing the Hamilton cold open live at Phoenix Comics (video courtesy of Annie Bulloch):

ECCC Show Diaries:

ETA: If you absolutely can’t get enough of Hamilton and X-Men cross-references, here’s the time someone asked Jay to associate songs from the show with specific X-characters and they couldn’t stop.

105 – Live from ECCC with Kris Anka, Al Ewing, Scott Koblish, and G. Willow Wilson

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 continuity has its eyes on you; the multiverse is so complex that we have to drag Al Ewing out of the audience to X-plain it; the X-Men mean a lot of different (but mostly compatible) things to all of us; we will accept any retcons necessary to maintain Magneto’s history as a Holocaust survivor; and ECCC rocks our world.

X-PLAINED:

  • Secret Wars
  • Alternate universes vs. alternate timelines
  • Multiversal problem-solving
  • New Arcadia
  • Definitive alternate-timeline X-Men
  • The weird joy of reading comics out of order
  • That one alternate timeline where Storm has a leather jacket and is hooking up with Wolverine
  • The only happy Cyclops in the multiverse
  • What makes the X-Men the X-Men
  • Intersections we’d like to see explored in canon
  • The appeal of universe-hopping
  • Relative ratios of metaphors to punching
  • Proof of concept in comics publishing
  • Battleworld characters we’d like to import into the 616.1
  • Which X-Men should get solo series

NEXT WEEK: X-Terminators!


CORRECTION: During the panel, Jay claimed that Spider-Man had been married for their entire life. Jay was in fact five years old when Spider-Man got married. We regret the error, but maintain our stance that Spider-Man is totally married.


You can find links to all our ECCC coverage–as well as a live video of the Hamilton cold open, from the Phoenix Comics party–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!

 

The Whole Cyclops Has a Good Day Sketchbook, as of April 2016

Jay here! Because a handful of people have asked for them all in one place, here are the full current contents of the Cyclops Has a Good Day sketchbook, in chronological order.

(In the name of being precise about these kinds of things, I should note that these are not all of the Cyclops Has a Good Day drawings that I have–there are a good 6-10ish that are free-floating or digital–just the ones in the official sketchbook. I may add the others later, but they’re somewhat more scattered at the moment.)

 

Jay & Miles Review the X-Men, Episode 80

Weeks of April 6 and April 13, 2016:

In which Uncanny X-Men gets a new artist; Old Man Logan takes our breath away; All-New X-Men gives us the team-up we didn’t know we needed; and X-Men ’92 gets the villain we’ve been waiting for.

REVIEWED:

  • Uncanny X-Men #6 (00:59)
  • *Old Man Logan #4 (05:43)
  • All-New X-Men #8 (09:15)
  • X-Men ’92 #2 (12:49)

*Pick of the Week (18:26)


Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men is 100% ad-free and listener supported. These video reviews–and everything else here–are made possible by the support of our Patreon subscribers. If you want to help support the podcast–and unlock more cool stuff–you can do that right here!

Come join us on Imzy!