Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men

399 – The Cybertronic Spree

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

In which the X-Force road trip era begins; Team X takes on a new dimension; Dani Moonstar gets her subtext back; pointing out a stereotype doesn’t excuse using it; Tabitha Smith generally deserves better; platypuses are underrepresented in the superhero genre; Hell becomes Stryfe; and Domino gets back in the game.

X-PLAINED

  • A dastardly plot
  • X-Men 2099
  • Road trips
  • X-Force #71-74
  • Team X
  • Love & Rockets reference
  • Stan and Ollie
  • The Triplets of Belleville
  • How not to fund your film
  • Michael Whitecloud
  • Project Stepladder
  • Colossal Man
  • Several references to X-Force -1
  • Platypuses
  • Edwin Martynec
  • Weaponized humming
  • The death of Warpath
  • Hell
  • Blackheart
  • Friendship
  • A mysterious villain

NOTE: Whoa, The Cybertronic Spree is actually a real band!

NEXT WEEK: The return of Erik the Red!


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8 comments

  1. My tuning in has less to do with how good the run/issue was, and more to do with if one of my faves is in it! My faves are nearly all lower-level/lesser known villains (Shinobi, Haven, etc.) soooo…

  2. I have to jump in and fundamentally disagree on X-Men 2099. I love it, but there’s so much copy/paste from the X-Men books it’s ridiculous.

    There’s a big honourable dude who turns into metal like Colossus.
    There’s a guy with emotional problems who lets out virtually uncontrollable energy blasts that can kill people like Cyclops
    There’s a fighty stabby lady who creates weapons from her hands like Betsy.
    There’s an angsty guy with evil looking wings whose skin is a non-standard colour like Archangel.
    Ok, stretchy girl I will give you but (spoilers for issue like 3 of X-Men 2099 a 25 year old comic book) she dies very early on.
    Quicksilver may not be on the team, but Meanstreak is impatient and arrogant and is almost a carbon copy.
    To top it all off the team’s founder, a small pacifist, is the brother of the giant, brown, metal, physically powerful almost indestructible bad guy, which is exactly Charles and Juggernaut.

    The big villain’s name was Brimstone Love so it had that going for it.

    It isn’t a “good” comic, for sure, but I still agree that it was great, and the art was cool. Going back I wish it had been more “cyberpunk”, like the setting implies, but I guess that’s there for the next time a writer tries to bring them back for an issue or two.

  3. I mean to say I appreciate Al speaking up on the difficulties in trying to have a road trip in the UK, where 2 days driving is pretty much all you can do before driving off the edge of a coastline, though it’s possible to get stuck in a motorway traffic jam for about 12 hours at a time, which might, if timed properly, perhaps give you another day of “road”, if not actually “trip”.

    I’m delighted that Miles has now been introduced to the actual Cybertronic Spree, a real one of a kind!

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