Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men

197 – Wolverine and the Honker of Doom

Art by David Wynne. Wanna buy the original? Drop him a line!

In which Wolverine is an eternal teenager; most of what Jay knows about Hawaii comes from Lilo and Stitch; Shiv is a complicated fellow; Nightcrawler represents an unattainable beauty standard; the Easter Bunny flies at dawn; Wolverine: The Jungle Adventure is delightful; Logan inadvertently starts a cult; Gahk does as she pleases; Jay and Miles are going to FlameCon; and we are all now Honkers forever.

X-PLAINED:

  • What Bloodscream and Roughouse have been up to
  • Albert and Elsie Dee
  • An unorthodox vocal warm-up
  • Wolverine: Bloody Choices
  • Wolverine: The Jungle Adventure
  • The Wolverine formula
  • Kamehameha Day (which Jay mispronounced; sorry!)
  • Mr. Bullfinch
  • Mr. Kapeland
  • Shiv
  • Doc Corbel
  • Nick Fury’s penmanship
  • How retail works
  • Secret agents, maybe
  • A stimulating combination
  • Karate pants
  • A darker, grittier version of the Easter bunny
  • Wolverine’s apocryphal childhood
  • Characters who can pull off the Wolverine hairstyle
  • Don Adams as Wolverine
  • Win/win murder scenarios
  • Two adult men discussing their feelings
  • Honkers
  • Cargo cults
  • The Tribe of Fire
  • Gahck
  • Some romance
  • A Spiny Honker
  • The Honker of Doom
  • Pit traps, with and without shallow holes
  • A dastardly but ineffectual plot
  • Apocalypse, kind of
  • One of Wolverine’s many kids (who may or may not be Erista)
  • Jay & Miles at FlameCon 2018
  • How to get us at your local convention
  • Reading comics with Miles’s dad
  • Seriously, though: honkers

NEXT EPISODE: Even more Excaliburs


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38 comments

      1. If you ever did one of those Fictional Character acknowledgement things as a honker, you could just use one of those old fashioned bicycle horns. honk honk honk (name) honk honk

  1. I had just finished reading “Original Sin” before listening to this episode, which made me realize Nick Fury beats Wolverine in terms of characters with a mathematical improbability of working hours.

  2. Oh yeah, Danzig as Wolverine was enormous before X-Men actually came out, despite him having no known acting skills or interest in the role. I remember on some comic forum someone demanding that he should be in the role, not some unknown Australian. I pointed out that Hugh Jackman wasn’t totally unknown, as he had just been in a movie where he’s an author of romance novels. I think this news may have actually killed the poor guy.

    ps, the intro music was out of time, if you aren’t already aware. I fear I might be the 80th person to say this.

  3. I think I now want to read the 1930’s Stratemeyer Syndicate adventures of plucky, clean-cut and always polite, teenage Logan and Sabretooth ; The Howlett Boys… Tagline: Like the Hardy’s, but stabbier.

  4. As for Shiv and Logan being related because of their interchangeable tonsorial teasing traits, “Hairstyle as familial genetic indicator” is actually a thing in the MU!

    John Byrne, back in “Spider-Man Chapter Zero”, decided that because of their near identical hairstyles, Norman “Green Goblin” Osborn and Flint “Sandman” Marko HAD to be related and so gave them a discussion where they discuss having the same great grandmother, making them.. I think, second cousins? (The whole second/third/etc and “once removed” thing always confuses me so I probably have that wrong), and I don’t think that’s ever actually been de-ret-conned, or det-conned or whatever the term is.

    1. Ah, bless you John Byrne.

      There was a parody comic, “What The” I think, where Thor or someone was getting a haircut, but the barber only knew one style, as seen on Prof X, Vulture, Kingpin etc. Angrily he goes to another barber, and you see Wolverine, Beast and Owl in the background…

  5. Perhaps because of my conversation with Icon_UK, I find myself unable to stop imagining Wolverine: Bloody Choices as if it’s pre-watershed dialogue from a British sitcom in the 1970, with “bloody” as an expletive.

    “Wolverine. Bloody choices.”

      1. Good Lord, that’s…

        …rather handsome, really. I’ve always thought of Hoskins as a brilliant, charismatic actor. But I’ve never thought him as so good-looking.

  6. So . . . a Honker of Doombot, is it? And then you tie it with a robot doppelganger of a villain who’s not aware he’s a bot? Conceivably, it could be a coincidence, but I refuse to believe it so.

  7. HONKER OF DOOM!

    Is there any other comment that really needs to be said?

    Anways Wolverine: Jungle Adventure is the first graphic novel I had ever bought and I love it so much. I feel like a lot of these graphic novels were always trying way to hard to be “about” something or have some sort of deep meaning or theme but not Jungle Adventure. Its just Wolverine going to the savage land, hooking up with an awesome lady, killing honkers and then a surprise robot Apocalypse. It was perfect for my 13 year old brain then and nearly 30 years later I still get a kick out of it

  8. Bug or Feature?

    Is the intro music playing over Jay in the cold open (right before Miles’ “What!?”) intentional or not?

    I guess it could have been a joke but the silence right after makes me think it was an editing hiccup.

  9. This episode was delightful, guys. I was cracking up muttering the word ‘honker’ on the drive to work and it really brightened my entire morning. 😀

    1. I proclaimed “Spiny Honker!” in the car as instructed and it really did improve my day by a good deal more than 1%.

  10. Destiny driven? She’d never qualify for a driver’s license. Is this how she initially got involved with villain types, in the pokey for driving without a license?

    Couldn’t help myself. Great episode especially the second half.

  11. Dimetrodons may be honkers (spiny or otherwise), but they are not dinosaurs. They didn’t even live in the Mesozoic and are more closely related to mammals than dinosaurs. I think a ‘spiny honker’ is a spinosaurus, anyway.

    Look, my inner 5-year-old never got over her love of space and the ocean and dinosaurs (among other things), she just had to narrow it down to one for a career, and keep the others as hobbies.

    1. If anything, the spiny honker is a juvenile Spinosaurus- it has the build of a typical carnosaur with a spine added to its back, but is only slightly bigger than the humans. It doesn’t have the Spinosaurus’s elongated, crocodilian snout, but I chalk that up to a possible lack of decent reference. I was a dinosaur-obsessed kid, and I was only vaguely aware of the Spinosaurus’s existence.

      If anyone out there wants to read awesome dinosaur comics, check out Age of Reptiles by Ricardo Delgado. They’re silent, gorgeously-illustrated dramas set in the Mesozoic Era. The first three stories are collected in a Dark Horse Omnibus. A more recent story, Ancient Egyptians, stars a Spinosaurus and is collected in trade.

      Great episode, as always!

  12. Geese are genuine honkers, which plays into the birds are dinosaurs thing. By the way have you heard about my new END project? It’s called Dances with Honkers!

  13. Can some kindly North American enlighten me as to the use of “johnny” as a slang term in the US and Canada in 1990?

    Because in the sense of “person” “johnny” seems Victorian to me. (There is a quite different slang sense in later British English.)

    But our hosts displayed no surprise at it, so presumably Americans and Canadians were saying it all the time when this comic came out?

  14. I think my first exposure to cargo cults as a concept was Larry Niven’s Dream Park, where it forms the basis for an adventure scenario that the Westworld/Holodeck amusement park runs. I found the idea fascinating.

    I know that Sir David Attenborough did a piece on a cargo cult back in 1960 but that predates even me.

  15. I too remember the Wizard breakfast mentioning Danzig, only because I was excited to see all that hair replicate Logan’s Meltdown look.

    So where do we find the blurbs & excerpts to submit to our local cons to prove to them that you’re awesome and deserve an invite?

  16. Despite coming to this several months late due to archive-binging, (Oh no, there’s not much left!) I believe this subject to be of great enough importance to comment anyway: In the interest of SCIENCE, I have tested the feasibility of operating a standard BIC lighter with your feet.

    Conclusion: Entirely doable! The only complicating factor being that keeping the gas switch depressed with one foot, whilst holding it to your bonds with the other, is prohibitively difficult. (This would, incidentally, be much easier were Nick Fury not such a cheap bastard and bought Logan an actual Zippo)

  17. In a moment of aberrant nostalgia, I find myself reading some ’90s Magnus comics. They end up in some kind of savage land with Turok where they also refer to the dinosaurs as honkers. I immediately remembered this episode from 3 years ago.
    Apparently calling them honkers goes back at least to the old Turok comics from the ’50s and ’60s. If you do an image search for Turok and honkers (with safe search on) you’ll get some delightfully pulpy covers emblazoned with honkers.

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