Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men

As Mentioned in Episode 166 – Proteus Has Two Mommies

Listen to the episode here.



LINKS & FURTHER READING

 

7 comments

  1. Marvel Boy! MARVEL BOY! One of my very favorite characters! Here’s the real short-form Reader’s Digest Condensed Version of Marvel Boy. It will still not be short.

    So back in the day a team was introduced called the Guardians of the Galaxy. Not the ones you know from the movies! These Guardians were all from the future, and all of them were the last survivors of their individual human colonies after the solar system had been conquered by the Badoon (except Yondu, who was the last survivor of an alien from Alpha Centauri because sure). One of these characters was a guy named “Vance Astro.” Vance was actually an astronaut from the 20th century who had been placed into suspended animation and sent on a millennium-long star journey, but now that he was awake he could not remove his special space suit or he’d die. And also he was telekinetic.

    Go with it, okay?

    So the Guardians came back to the present day and showed up in some Avengers and Defenders stories, and in one of those stories Vance Astro encounters a beloved time travel cliche by encountering… his younger self! Said younger self was a teenager and had not yet changed his name to “Astro” from “Astrovik.” As a result of the temporal paradox, young Vance Astrovik’s mutant powers of telekinesis erupted early!

    So now young Vance Astrovik is a telekinetic, and does just what any of us would do in this situation – he puts on a costume, calls himself Marvel Boy, and becomes a professional wrestler.

    Yup.

    See, in the 80s the Marvel Universe had this thing called the UCWF, or “Unlimited Class Wrestling Federation.” Because the kids like pro wrestling! The Thing was in it. No, seriously, Ben Grimm was a professional wrestler. He met Marvel Boy! They had adventures together! Then everyone forgot Marvel Boy until the New Warriors happened.

    Later on Marvel Boy would actually accidentally kill his abusive father with his mutant powers (in a surprisingly well-done and sympathetic story that I am not doing justice to, you should read it), get convicted of manslaughter (Foggy Nelson is his attorney and beats the murder rap but I guess the jury was allowed to consider lesser charges) and go to prison, where he at one point aids and abets a prisoner riot in The Vault (the supervillain prison) because the prisoners’ demands were actually quite reasonable, and when he gets out not long after, he takes the name Justice. He is my favorite New Warrior. Also eventually he joins the Avengers and becomes staff of the Avengers Academy.

    Guardian of the Galaxy Vance Astro, by the way, goes back to the future with the rest of the Guardians, and eventually he finds Captain America’s shield and finds a way to get rid of his protective bodysuit and takes the name Major Victory.

    Comics!

    Anyways, New Warriors Marvel Boy is cool. He has no connection whatsoever to any other Marvel Boys or Marvel Girls. But he’s awesome, and you should love him.

  2. Mentioned this on twitter, but this Marvel Boy is Vance Astrovik, the future Justice/splinter off of Major Victory, the leader of the original Guardians of the Galaxy.
    Also, since this article dives into Fabian Nicieza, His New Warriors run is really really good. it manages to do some good stuff with the rightly derided Night Thrasher concept (he strongly de emphasized skateboarding, though at one point the Punisher does complement the skateboard as functional, since Thrash uses it as shield with a pop out blade).
    Also, the origin of New Warriors is sorta interesting- Tom DeFalco, who I think was Marvel EIC, picked out the team and wrote a short story for them, but Nicieza was basically given carte blanche from a very simple starting point, I think.
    “here, I chose the team the leader is skateboard guy do what you want I’m gonna keep writing thor now bye.”

    ALSO, REBOOT- Reboot took place hypothetically inside a computer, with anthropomorphised concepts of what goes on in a computer, with the entire computer acting as a city. so you had a “guardian” as a sort of antivirus, an administrator who ran the place, antagonists who were viruses who could corrupt other sprites.
    The show had a wonderfully absurd 90sified 3rd season, where things went dark, the plucky kid sidekick became Cable Esque, the protagonist was gone for half the season then became a … Norrin Radd like shiny character with vaguely messianic imagery, the bad guys basically won…. it was a whole thing and really absurdly fun! worth a check out, even if the CGI looks really dated now.

  3. One other thing that might make Vance interesting to our hosts is that he’s that rarity – a mutant character that has never been drawn into the ambit of the X-books.

    He has very strong connections to other parts of the Marvel universe, but not the X-Men, except romantically at one remove via Firestar in a “Six Degrees of Charles Xavier” sort of way. It’s not that anti-mutant prejudice is suppressed as part of the character and his history – it’s just that this isn’t taken to make him somehow automatically an X-character.

  4. TEARS of support. Miles made me cry-y with his response the question about str8 yt privilege. So beautifully articulated; its been really intense to listen in on the journeys of these two, I am appreciative of the clarity and frankness with which these intrepid x-fans address their listeners.

  5. RANDOM METAL GEAR SOLID QUESTION FOR MILES: What did you think of the latest MGS5 PhantomPain Miles? Though it WAS pretty amazingly done, ahh, still it didn’t quite do it for me. I didn’t even totally finish it, which is a first for me ever in an MGS game. That series PEAKED with MGS4 id say. That or RedDeadRedemption are probably my fav games of all time. Don’t even get me started on MetalGearRising, think I played a few hrs of that one and had enough 😛

    1. You’re the first person I’ve run into who thinks the series peaked with 4- I almost always hear 3. interesting!

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