Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men

397 – Mürdr at IKEA

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

In which Al Kennedy and Miles enter a somewhat post-OZT world, the art of Frank Teran (whose uncle built a jetpack) elevates an otherwise merely decent story, Puck is played by Bob Hoskins, Wild Child gets a chance to shine, Mystique and Forge are sitting in a tree, and Swamp Thing is amazing.

X-PLAINED:

  • Spider-Man’s head cold
  • Sabretooth: Back to Nature #1
  • Sabretooth (Victor Creed)
  • Wild Child (Kyle Gibney)
  • Horrible violence, expertly implied
  • The ubiquity of sewers
  • Saturday morning cartoons of R-rated movies
  • Serial killers with G.I. Joe names
  • Improbable tracking
  • Bilingual crime
  • Chekhov’s waterfall
  • DRUGS
  • X-Factor #136-137
  • The Hound program
  • Skeumorphism
  • Doctor Valerie Cooper and Major Edmond Atkinson, excellent exes
  • Questionable wound-dressing
  • Holograms
  • Government jobs
  • The sad fate of the Chase family
  • Nimrod disambiguation
  • The Marvel Universe According to Doctor Seuss

NEXT EPISODE: The X-Men return from space!


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8 comments

  1. As a long-time listener of both Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men AND House to Astonish, it’s great to hear these two great tastes come together for the first time since Paul O’Brien X-Plained Kang the Conqueror during the Secret Convergence on Infinite Podcasts (which is still one of my favorite bits I’ve heard from any podcast, ever). I can tell Miles and Al are still working out how to play off each other and getting used to each other’s senses of humor, but I think they’d mostly figured it out. Best of luck, fellas! I think we’re in for a fun several weeks.

    1. Assuming next week goes all the way to #350, y’all are going to be hitting where I came back to the X-bookw after dropping off in high school with X-Factor #100. As mangled as it was and as unhappy as they ended up being toward the end, I have enormous affection for the Kelly/Seagle et al. stories and I never totally left again after that.

    1. She originally required holographic projectors to be nearby but, after the events of the 1996 Uncanny X-Men Annual, she somehow became a self regulating mass of photonic energy, so didn’t need any sort of projectors.

      I confess the only reason I know that is because I wondered too and went and looked it up.

  2. I know I’ve posted it before (and probably will again) but in many of the books with cover date February 1998 there was an insert that promised the revelation of who killed Graydon Creed in X-Factor #150. Which obviously didn’t happen.

    Brian Cronin, in one of his “Legends Revealed” columns talked to Howard Mackie who said there was never a plan for X-Factor #150. Bob Harras had asked Mackie if he (Mackie) thought sales could be brought up on X-Factor about a year before the final issue. Mackie didn’t think it was possible. So they went ahead and implemented the Mutant X stuff.

    What I find really interesting is that in the same insert, there was a promis for a new X-title (labeled as “X-_______ #1”.
    I had assumed that was Mutant X but it sounds like that wasn’t the plan when Macke and Harras had that conversation.

    It sounds like marketing wasn’t communicating with the editors.

    I find these inserts fascinating. Back during the 30th Anniversary issues there was an insert that teased upcoming projects. Of note was a Wolverine by Mike Manley mini-series that never materialized.

  3. The Bucket of Blood shows up in some versions of Stagger Lee as the bar where he kills Billy Lyons. Turns out it wasn’t, the killing was in another bar, but the Bucket of Blood was a real bar/ restaurant/ nightclub/ possibly house of prostitution in fin de siècle St. Louis. And one with a sufficiently evocative name that it is no wonder that songwriters would want to put the most famous murder of the 1890s there.

    So, that is not only the name of a real bar, but also one that would be known to people interested in a particular strand of American folk tradition.

  4. I can imagine a very plausible Marvel version of “If I Ran the Zoo,” with a super-villain pontificating about how great their collection of incarcerated heroes would be.

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