Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men

375 – One Thousand Kicks to the Face

In which there is definitely a wrong way to enjoy your comics; Storm could probably use a more secure storage system; the Externals need more camp; and Joseph makes some valid points.

X-PLAINED

  • What Storm’s up to
  • X-Men Unlimited #7 (again) (briefly)
  • X-Men #60-61
  • X-Men Unlimited #14
  • Karima
  • Jamil
  • Candra (again)
  • A surprising absence of Howard Mackie
  • Candra’s heart
  • Some excessively complex psychic powers
  • Phylacteries
  • The origin of Storm’s romance with T’Challa
  • Kicks to the face as a unit of pain
  • Undercloaks
  • The alternate universe where the McCoys live in Indiana
  • The moppet squad (again)
  • Dunfee, IN
  • Yet another angry mob
  • Multiverse-variable powers
  • Favorite X-relationships

Correction: The Brandalorian let us know that “Phylacteries (tefillin) are not Chasidic; they’re a ritual object mentioned by the Torah, used by Jews of all sorts.” Apologies for our error, and we appreciate the correction!

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13 comments

  1. Because my brain works like that I jump straight to the questions at the end!

    I think AoA had several variations of existing powers outside the 616 norm.

    We met Elizabeth Guthrie who had growing powers, and called herself Amazon. I’m not even sure 616 HAS an Elizabeth Guthrie, and we’ve not seen a Guthrie with her powers that I can recall.

    M’s analogue had none of her 616 powers, but became Know-it-All, though that was probably slightly confused by who was actually BEING Monet at the time.

    Doug Ramsey’s power was a telepathic translation field he could spread across an area so other people could speak each other’s languages directly, something 616 Doug has never been able to do.

    Again, such things might well depend on whether the person was born before or after the trigger event of AoA. If Doug and Elziabeth were conceived after Legion killed Xavier, then the change to history might well have been different enough to explain different powers developing.

    I’m pretty sure there’s some other variation on a major character I’m overlooking and that’s going to bug me.

    Oh and as for power couples/throuples, etc. Doug now has a technorganic selfsoulfriend in Warlock, a geographic significant other in Krakoa, and a large wife in Bei the Blood Moon. The exact dynamics are unclear, but Cypher’s Polycule of Power covers a LOT of bases! 🙂

    1. There were a couple of variants over the course of the first Exiles series. The one that springs immediately to mind is the Atlantean Gambit. I would have to physically go through my issues to remember any others, though I am sure they exist.

  2. The best alternate-powers-in-an-alternate-timeline is one you two haven’t talked about in a long time: the John Proudstar that turns into a bear in Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends!

    1. Congratulations!

      Though sadly now you have to join the rest of us in dealing with the linear passage of time between episodes.

      1. That’s mostly fine, because I’ve prioritized this over a few others that I can now go back and catch up on.

        Someone needs to remake Time Enough At Last but for Podcasts…

  3. I’m not sure which is more surprising; that someone besides Howard Mackie wrote Candra or that Howard Mackie himself doesn’t include her in his X-Factor run.

    You’re at a point in your coverage that I’ve only read through once, too many years ago to admit. Like Mils, I kind of dropped X-Men shortly after AoA for many of the same reasons but, unlike him, I came back into it right after these issues. Well, except for Excalibur and X-Factor. I never went back to them so I haven’t read any pf the stuff between now and when their runs end so I am looking forward to reading along with you and seeing if I missed anything. Fingers crossed!

  4. Reminds me of my first exposure to the Externals.
    When Sam used Crule (who was stuck in a cast) to find out where Gideon had taken Tabitha and the others, and then just dumped him in the ocean.

    Crule gets no respect.

  5. Tying in to your professed love of all things Sam Guthrie, I think his powers being given to a precog (Negasonic Teenage Warhead) is another example of powers being different across universes. I half expect her to shout “I’m nigh invulnerable while I’m blastin’!” every time she uses her powers in those movies.

  6. Scattered thoughts:-–

    – As an adoptive Midwesterner, I *have* to “Umm, actually…” our hosts really hard for repeatedly calling Illinois “Indiana.” Then again, Scott Lobdell manages to make the mistake at the beginning of #61 of locating the action in MoMA. Which you’d think he or the editor would have caught, unless they have a very odd idea of what constitutes “modern art.”

    — Speaking of Illinois, I notice that Jim Cheung couldn’t bring himself to depict accurately just how flat downstate Illinois is. I sympathize, Mr. Cheung. Before I saw it, I wouldn’t have quite grasped it, either.

    — Shouldn’t Storm having “mutagenic abilities” mean that Storm causes mutation?

    — I missed something. I get the thematic reasons for an Egyptian backdrop and all, but is there an in-story reason why Candra wants to meet at the Temple of Dendur? I mean, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is hardly the most unguarded place, seeing as it contains many of the most valuable artifacts in the world. It would seem peculiarly badly-suited to hand over anything like a gem that might form part of the collection.

    (Also a bit shocking that no-one in the story seems to spare a thought for how the temple gets damaged, presumably with other serious damage to the items in the Egyptian gallery.)

    — Was anything ever done with Storm’s feelings about the geopolitical conflicts that led to her parents dying in a bombing raid on Cairo? (Originally, Storm’s parents died due to a French bombing raid during the Suez crisis; this comic speaks vaguely of an “Arab-Israeli” war, which at the time it was published could certainly have been the Yom Kippur War.)

    Obviously, any such exploration is now foreclosed by the passage of time since 1973— I don’t know how, if it’s ever been addressed, the Munroes are supposed to have died in current continuity, but one has to suppose that it was something else that orphaned the young Ororo.

  7. If I had a nickel for every time Ororo had a palm sized mystical ruby… I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.

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