Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men

315 – Theater Is Dead

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

In which Jay and/or patriarchy ruin everything; Archangel is dubiously aspirational; we need a moratorium on Jack the Ripper stories; there are a lot of Masterminds; and Arcade is a whole bundle of psychosexual weirdness.

X-PLAINED:

  • Tom Malverne (Jack the Ripper)
  • Lunch
  • Wolverine and Gambit: Victims #1-4
  • Loeb & Sale
  • Jack the Ripper in fiction
  • Alexandra Davies
  • Fun on international flights
  • That one time Jay thought the NSA was going to come for him
  • Martinique Wyngarde (Mastermind II)
  • Mastermind, Mastermind, and Lady Mastermind disambiguation
  • Collateral damage
  • Various Dies Hard
  • Several heists
  • Several hallucinations
  • Variations on the death of Miss Locke
  • Problematic third brothers

NEXT EPISODE: Hawk Talk!


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6 comments

  1. Maybe I missed it somewhere but, if not, any chance of you guys talking about The New Mutants movie? I just watched it and I’m curious to hear some views on it.

  2. I confess I’ve never been a Loeb fan, and I find Sale someone whose art I can generally appreciate the technique of, rather than find conducive to a comic reading experience.

    But I might be slightly jaded by The Long Halloween, which decided to take one of Batman’s silghtly loopier, fun, “theme capers” villain and turn them into another murdering psychopath. Calendar Man committed crimes based on the Seasons, or National Holidays now he’s just another killer. Sigh

    And I think they do a bit of that with arcade here. The difference being that Arcade was always a murderous pyschopath, but at least he had STYLE, he dressed ridiculously because he was a showman, he loved watching Phil Silvers, his deathtraps were absurd and, at some level, fun (as Kitty and Courtney Ross both noted, if you survived you’d probably at least had a good time, and his relationship with Miss Locke was wild and fun (Especially her being allowed one day a year to try and kill him because he enjoyed the risk)

    Here he’s basically another sexually frutrated creep, covering up his crime, and he’s disfigured like Two-Face why?

    That being said, I’m with Jay in that I do sort like Sale’s style on Gambit here, where he’s NOT the pretty boy rogue, he’s slightly weird looking.

    Out of morbid curiosity, do they explain how Arcade managed to catch Wolverine when Wolverine was busy scarfing fast food on the X-Mansion grounds?

  3. Checks when comic was published.. Ooh, so close! So very close to the moment at which I could mock this comic without pity for not having taken five minutes to use the Internet to check some basic details.

    But, actually, I think I still can. Because I had already moved to the US by the time this came out, and so I know from personal experience that PBS already had an obsession with British crime shows. So what in the world is Tim Sale drawing on for his bizarre idea of what the uniform of a woman in the Metropolitan Police might look like? It’s particularly silly in the context of a comic that keeps saying “C.I.D.! C.I.D.! Chichester! I’ve done very little research, but not none at all!”

    Still, Loeb spared us his London version of the Claremontian phonetic accent, which I imagine was a wrench for him. Although having read him write his Irish dialogue I am ghoulishly curious to know what he might have come up with.

  4. Another third sibling I can think of who’s not a raging A-hole is Ruby Summers. Though I’m not sure she counts given that the siblings are spread out over three separate timelines…

    I was also thinking Christian Frost, but he’s apparently the fourth sibling revealed (albeit the third oldest).

    1. I think Christian is first or second oldest. He’s Emma’s older brother, and Adrian is her older sister.

      From the way he was drawn in Emma’s own series (and I cannot wait to hear Jay and Miles talk about the massive disconnect between the cheesecake covers and the stories for that series), I keep wanting Emma to mistake Steve Rogers for her brother.

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