Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men

296 – Hard Choices

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

In which Magneto doesn’t really do work/live divide; Amazing X-Men is a bit of a misnomer; Exodus is the lawful evil to Fabian Cortez’s chaotic evil; smoking is bad for you; moisture molecular inversion is fairly definitely not a real thing; Earth-295 Quicksilver and Earth-616 Cyclops would probably get along; OSHA would probably like a word with the Madrii; Gambit had ONE JOB; and there are no superheroes in the Age of Apocalypse.

X-PLAINED:

  • An unlikely team-up
  • Relative amazingness
  • Amazing X-Men #1-5
  • Color separations
  • Comics credits
  • The Brotherhood of Mutants and/or Chaos
  • The Great Human Airlift
  • Exodus (more) (again)
  • Best Quicksilver (Earth-295)
  • Abyss
  • A dubiously aerodynamic cape
  • One last job
  • Several points of semantic distinction
  • Lone Nanny & Cub
  • The most punchable man on Earth-295
  • A difficult choice
  • What it means to be X-Men
  • Dick Valentine
  • Jamie Madrox (Earth-295)
  • A world without superheroes
  • Universe numbering

NEXT EPISODE: X-Man!

CORRECTION: The line about fence-straddling that Jay attributed to Wonder Woman was in fact spoken by Hawkgirl.


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8 comments

  1. I was going to comment on Miles’ Abyss voice being similar to his Mojo! 🙂

    From what I remember, 616 Abyss is so different to his AoA version, thankfully.

    I remember raising an eyebrow at Iceman’s teleporting everyone power. I could seem him doing it himself, since he’s almost like a DCU Elemental (Swamp Thing, Firestorm, Naiad) who can discorporate and reform themselves in another part of the world provided a source of their element is available) He’s basically a psychic entity who can animate water and turn it into a human form (or vice versa), but doing the same to other people is perhaps a step too far.

    You think Destiny might have mentioned something about the fact that yes, they got her back so X-Calibre , but at the cost of pretty much everyone else in Avalon, including her adoptive son. Though I suppose that might seem like it’s trying to one up… or one down everyone else. To paraphrase Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen* “Now WE had it tough)

    * Not to be confused with Monty Python’s Four Horsemen: Fear, Surprise, Ruthless Efficiency and An Almost Fanatical Devotion to the Pope

  2. Also, given how many people beat him up and generally threaten him, it is perhaps surprisng that Warren Kenneth Worthington III hasn’t actually gone over to Apocalyose side as full blown supervillain.

    “I’m going to be a Horsemanm and THEN you’ll see!!”

    “Kid, you got wings… they’re very pretty wings, but I don’t think that’ll get you through the interview process. What are you going to be, the Horseman of fluffy pillows?”

    Oh, and my never ending, and utterly purposeless interest in when the death of Charles Xavier actually happened in terms of timeline, has another curveball thrown at it, (an appropriate turn of phrase in this context), as “It aint’ over til it’s over” apparently goes back to a Yogi Berra comment in 1973… which suggests that Apocalypse kept the baseball leagues going longer than I would have thought a cod-Darwinian despot would.

  3. Regarding the question of whether or not Ghost Rider is in the Age of Apocalypse, at the very least John Blaze makes a cameo appearance in a panel of X-Universe #1 … as a corpse. He’s one of the pilots who was caught in the explosion caused by the Thing. A burning corpse is seen lying on the ground with its face reduced to a skull and a visible name tag on his uniform that reads, “J. BLAZE”. So in this timeline he ended up as an aircraft pilot in the Eurasian forces.

    1. I feel obligated as a pedant and a Rush fan to mention that Neil Peart’s Objectivist phase only lasted about 5 years and that even though “Freewill” was written in that time it’s just as true after he rejected the philosophy.

      1. Okay, great… but what does this have to do with my post? Did you intend to reply to a completely different comment? I’m not seeing the connection.

  4. Remember how 616 Rogue used to have a version of Carol Danvers take control of her body after she absorbed her powers? Do you suppose something similar happens to 295 Rogue too? I’m imagining Magneto waking up and turning over to give his wife a kiss, only to get a disconcerting “Mornin’, Dad!” in reply.

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