Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men

313 – Iguanafall

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

In which sky pirates are the best pirates; Wolverine eats chicken in the woods; Xavier’s area loses its status as our least favorite panel; Cable is suspiciously credulous; we search in vain for a consistent metaphor; Storm has a thing or two to learn about restorative justice; and this entire miniseries should probably just have been an annual.

X-PLAINED:

  • Storm’s pirate adventures
  • Storm #1-4
  • Mark Trail
  • The Morlocks (more) (again)
  • Unacceptable gradients
  • Butt murder
  • Fashion
  • Several memes of yesteryear
  • Product placement
  • The new Worst Panel
  • Several variations on the Ceremony of Light
  • How not to identify a body
  • The Hill (Limbo)
  • “Daddy”
  • The inconsistent portrayals of Mikhail Rasputin
  • Still more members of Gene Nation
  • A new costume
  • The most obscure stories we’ve covered
  • That time Wolverine at his own arm

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12 comments

  1. Um.

    You asked, “You know who doesn’t feel too good about life?”

    And I was 100% expecting you to proclaim “Our listeners!”

    1. From the background with Dazzler fighting someone with, at a guess, Darkforce powers, I’m going to assume that that’s Ursa Major of the Soviet Super Soldiers, and not just some poor innovent random bear that happened by?

      (I always wondered why they didn’t take the opportunity to use a military rank for at least ONE of the Soldiers and call them “Major Ursa”)

  2. “This is a $7000 dollar suit, Zero, COME ON!”

    And now I’m picturing Shinobi Shaw’s attempts at sexual sex things as Tobias.

    Also, now I finally know where Storm got this outfit and hair! I don’t know how long it lasts, but I thought it was the coolest costume. This, orange and tan Wolverine, the late X-Factor/Pryde of the X-Men Cyclops outfit, and two upcoming outfits fot Gambit and Rogue were just the best.

    1. A random thought occurred to me when seeing Shinobi’s name come up again. Some time ago, our hosts talked about Shinobi not knowing what sex was. They also joked about Apocalypse teaching sex-ed and it made me imagine Apocalypse badly explain sex to Shinobi who clearly wasn’t grasping it. Random, I know.

  3. I think the thread in our hosts’ discussion about whether or not one can nail down the Hill as being a metaphor for something is important – and important, I’m afraid, in a way that really bothered me about this miniseries.

    Because up to now the X-books have consistently presented Gene Nation as an analogue for real-world terrorist organizations. And admittedly, giving them this exact origin story does do something about my problem with the post-AoA X-line, that it had this dreary sense of returning to the same political metaphors as the books were doing pre-AoA, without advancing them in any way or doing anything very new with them.

    Because I’ll admit it, “People become terrorists because they were formed by a surreal dystopian environment in which their entire lives consisted of fighting and killing each other to climb a hill to become one of the select few who get to be terrorists” — it’s not a take I was expecting.

    But it’s not a great take on something that has such close links to a difficult and sensitive subject in the real world. Bluntly, it appears to be saying that the only way that someone could be a terrorist is if they were warped in a very extreme way from birth, if they were, literally, raised to be a supervillain. This is not the same as “They hate us for our freedoms,” but it’s just as vacuous, and it’s in the same general territory — people who become terrorists are just twisted, and there’s no point in engaging with the complexities of history. Give‘em a dose of good honest hard work, that’ll straighten‘em out!

    And in 1996, this was not at all theoretical, at least not for a British writer! This is a profoundly awful thing to be putting out there in the year of the Good Friday Agreement – exactly the opposite of the way in which one needed to be encouraged to think about this particular topic.

    It’s a shame, because the Hill is a good idea. It just becomes a terrible idea when you attach that idea to Gene Nation instead of using it for something else. None of this makes me at all optimistic about what I’m going to think about Marrow as I encounter her in her period as a major character, going forward.

  4. Metal Gear Solid reference!!
    .
    HEALING POWER vs NEED TO EAT: i think they do need to eat. u cant have the energy/bodily resources to heal, if you have no fuel. it takes fuel to heal.

  5. I just got to this episode. As you were going through miniseries, I realized that the title of each episode is a Cocteau Twins song and I thought that was pretty cool.

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