Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men

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.


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26 comments

  1. I love Rahne of Terra so much. It’s a weird story, but so good.

    Grammar Nazi Cable is kinda delightful and I think that’s something that should be a recurring character trait.

    Oh hey! Piers Anthony reference! I love Anthony. I’m a Xanth fan. Though I’ve gotten pretty bored with the recent books, and he has some really weird sexual stuff in those books.

    Knight of Terra was pretty good, too. You’d expect it to be bad, being a shameless sequel to a fun story. But it actually is really fun in its own right, and is an enjoyable sequel.

    Gen X is the upcoming title I’m most excited for, as well. And yeah, absolutely no doubt that Vision was the best Marvel comic of the year. One of the best things Marvel has ever put out.

    Side note: When I opened the episode, the timeline bar showed a length of almost 5 hours. For a couple seconds, I was like, “Holy crap, how much did they talk about?” Then I remembered that this has happened before and it’s just a weird error. But still.

    1. Heyyy, so, I’m saying this without my Moderator Hand of God, but: I recognize that it’s a popular idiom, but right now it feels really important to be really mindful of where and how we use the word “Nazi” casually; and I’d appreciate it if you could find another way to phrase that bit. Thanks! =)

  2. So, I was only half listening during the Noodle Incident section because I’m on the last hours of a 16 hour shift, but then I heard the part about greasing up the king of the Inhumans and was scratching my head. The Gnomemobile, huh? I haven’t seen that in years. All I remember is that it used the same kids from Mary Poppins… and that “courtship” scene.

    1. I was trying to remember the movie that it came from but kept remembering parts of the Li’l Abner movie with their “Sadie Hawkins Day” chase without context.

  3. I must dig out my Clan Destine ashcan with Alan Davis’s self caricature and tweet it at you. Basically Alan Davis hair is wish-fulfilment not mirroring.

  4. I’m not quite finished the episode, but I wanted to flag that Wolverine: Rahne of Terra was collected in “Wolverine by Larry Hama and Marc Silvestri, Volume 2”, which also collected Wolverine 38-46. So it can still be acquired and read with minimal hunting.

    1. Also: the Knight of Terra one is in the recent Wolverine Epic Collection Volume 8.

      But I loved these one-shots! I kind of want to hunt down some of the other Wolverine annuals you mentioned. They sound weird in a way that might be fun (?)

  5. …AND GESHEM MEANS RAIN IN HE-

    Oh…

    This was an awesome year (I mean for the podcast of course).

    Thank you guys so much!

    Continue being you forever, and may the next year be well for you like it should be.

  6. Loved Rahne of Terra, flaws and all (I had either never noticed, or completely blocked the “Can’t you see clearly now that Rahne is gone”.)

    Ummm, Jay, I might have to call you as a witness at some point, if I ever have to explain to anyone watching the CCTV system exactly WHT I doubled over giggling in the middle of the frozen food section for no apparent reason when your “Doug the Peasant” voice debuted! Awesome work!

  7. Obligatory mention that thanks to the weird return of Model, Inc. Tim Gunn officially exists in the Marvel Universe and he was Iron Man briefly. So this head cannon could totally happen

  8. Was the film version not Wolverine: Les Miserables. As surely “Hugh James Logan Howlett Jackman” is always Wolverin in what ever he does.

    1. I was about to ask “Even Curly in ‘Oklahoma!’? Then realised, of course, the only possible answer was “ESPECIALLY Curly in ‘Oklahoma!'”

    1. Yet, the podcast stated in an earlier episode there was an Ultimate version. Just as there was an Ultimate Wolverine. I still need to look up what Miles meant by Ultimate Wolverine and Cable being the same person.

      1. Ultimate Wolverine and Ultimate Cable were literally the same person. Cable came back in time with a grudge and a metal arm and then popped claws from his biological arm. I forget how it all went down (and Ultimate X-Men had gotten REALLY bad by then) but yeah, instead of being Cyclops’ son, Ultimate Cable is Ultimate Wolverine. From the future.

    2. “Unique in the multiverse” type characters come in two flavors:

      1) Cosmic being so high up there is only one of them as far we can tell (this would be the Phoenix Force if it was unique, but the Living Tribunal, the One Above All etc.) – Who these characters are is subject to frequent retcons.

      2) Characters originating from sub-dimensions that are unique in the multiverse (Mojoverse (Mojo, Longshot), Utopian parallel (America Chavez) etc.) – For example Ultimate Mojo and Longshot got around this by not being from the Mojoverse (both were technically human too), but there can also be AU versions created by timeline split after the character left their unique dimension… also retcons and continuity snarls.

  9. Oooh, I have an “um actually”.

    Setting fire to liquor did in fact use to be common practice! Have you ever wondered why the unit of alcohol in liquor is called “proof” and why it’s 1/2 the percentage of alcohol in the beverage? (That is, 100 proof gin has 50% alcohol.) If liquor is more than 50% alcohol, it will ignite. Less than 50%, no dice. When old timey people were paid in liquor for their work, or given a ration of liquor, or something, they’d set it on fire to test if it was sufficiently strong or had been watered down. If it caught fire, that was “proof” that they weren’t being cheated. Thus, the term proof came to be a unit of alcohol concentration and hard liquor was actually regularly set on fire.

    (Of course, by modern standards, 100 proof is ridiculously strong and basically unpalatable. So maybe that’s an urban legend. Or maybe our ancestors drank a lot.)

    1. Can I ‘um actually’ your ‘um actually’?

      This is basically correct, except it wasn’t about booze-wages. It was colonial-era England, and it was about taxes. Caribbean rum got taxed differently depending on alcohol content, and proofing was an easy way to determine that. Importers would use the same test as basic quality control, to make sure their Caribbean holdings weren’t cutting corners and sending sub-standard rum. Since they wouldn’t invent the specific gravity test (which lets you directly measure ABV) until the early 1800s, for about 200 years proofing was a quick pass-fail test to make sure the stuff they were bottling and selling had a minimum alcohol content.

      The proofing test involved soaking a standard weight of gunpowder in the alcohol and seeing if it would still burn. If the ABV was below about 57% (not 50%), it wouldn’t burn, and was not ‘proved’.

      More complicated testing could determine higher or lower ‘proof’ numbers; if I recall, they defined the standard proof test as 100 Proof and then every additional grain of gunpowder needed to make the mixture flammable knocked off one point of Proof, and every grain you could short the amount and still have a flammable mix added a point of Proof.

      But like I said, originally 100 proof did mean 57% ABV, and the ‘add or subtract grains’ method was pretty imprecise. Once the specific gravity test became common, 100 proof was kinda-sorta close to 50%, and they just standardized it at an easy value of 1 proof = 1/2% ABV.

  10. I’m really happy you’re covering Peter David. Volume 3 of X-Factor (Investigatons) is one of my very favorites.

    Also, Jay’s Doug voice is even funnier than their Punisher voice.

  11. The lack of a Cyclops Has a Good Day Award recipient, stuck out to me. While I did notice this was qualified with canonicity and “X-Book,” I would still like to submit his appearances in Champions for the 2017 award. Champions #2, #3 and #4 are all the same “day” but they fly East beyond the terminator. If you count the night scenes and subsequent day scenes as separate days, in Champions #2 he got to join the team, despite Nova’s word balloons on the cover. In Champions #3 and #4, he has great interactions with Ms. Marvel, particularly on page 7 of #4. Although, in #4 they are after he had to pilot their vehicle to make an emergency water landing.

  12. I noticed the 5 hour time thing on this episode too. In my PC player (I still use Winamp) it quickly corrected itself to the proper time. But on Poweramp on my phone, it got confused about where it was supposed to be every time I paused it, and started back up at an earlier point… So I’ve ended up hearing parts of the Kid Apocalypse segment over and over.

    Any idea why this happens?

    1. I wish we knew – sometimes our producer re-exporting the file fixes it, sometimes it doesn’t. In this case, it fixed it for most people – I guess you’re an exception? Sorry about that.

      If anyone has any ideas, we’re all ears!

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