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In which Jay returns; babies are bad at pretty much everything; continuity flies straight out the window; Cable should speak English with a Scottish accent; Harry Leland knows how to dress; Tanya Trask makes the same time travel mistake everyone makes; and we love Al Kennedy forever.
X-PLAINED:
- Sentry (but not that one)
- Babies
- Flashback
- Cable #-1
- Excalibur #-1
- Generation X #-1
- Uncanny X-Men #-1
- The preturn of Angus McWhirter, angry hovercraft-rental guy
- Hippie Cable
- Veins of science
- Yet another time travel loop
- What may or may not be how Nightcrawler quit the circus
- Sabu
- “Science”
- A large volume of dubious continuity
- Larry Trask (more) (again)
- Jay’s cosplay aspirations
- Sanctity (Tanya Trask)
- The Twelve (somewhat)
- A possible splinter timeline
- The X-Men of 1602
- Rube Goldberg
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Has there ever been a Bernard The Poet cosplayer?
The 12, BOOOOO!
I know you don’t normally cover the solo books but I really hope you cover the Landron/Robinson/Casey run of Cable which is one of the best x-books of the era
Welcome back, Jay! We missed you. Not that Al didn’t do a good job in your absence but it’s good to have the team back together.
I don’t think James Robinson made a continuity error, I think he read Classic X-Men. Early in that series there is an added scene in one of the issues where Moira and Rahne are riding a horse together. I don’t remember what the context of that scene was except to show how Moira got invited to the mansion.
I would really like to know what Claremont and Simonson’s plans were for The Twelve. Part of me thinks it must have been something that would have been addressed in The Mutant Wars but I can’t find anything. I’m sure it was much better than what it ultimately became.
Which brings up a question I’ve had for a while, do creators have topics that are off limits when they are interviewed? Despite the curiosity surrounding things like The Mutant Wars I have never heard it addressed in any interviews. That seems… odd.
A fairly accessible example of a Rube Goldberg machine on YouTube is the music video to OK Go’s song “This Too Shall Pass.”
I’m just glad we’re finally getting Cable again. I was getting a little tired of all the babies in the X-Men books.
Welcome back Jay! Miles and Al made for a terrific team, but it;s also good to have the OG duo back.
The team Miles was thinking of was “The Defenders of the Earth”; Flash Gordon (and his son Rick), the Phantom (and his daughter Jedda), Mandrake the Magician (and his ward Kshin) and Lothar (formerly Mandrake’s bodyguard in the comics, here acknowledged as a fighter, tactician, mechanic and all round “Most usefully skilled and equipped person in any room” in his own right), (and his son LJ).
Minor factoid – Apparently the writers original plan was for Rick to be the Phantom’s son, and Jedda Flash Gordon’s daughter, but they changed their mind, which doesn’t make a lot of difference, but at least gave us a chance to see what I think is the first female version of the Phantom in the lineage.
Welcome back Jay. Glad to hear you two enjoyed Ladronn’s work. I think I’ve mentioned it at least twice in previous comments which feels like I’ve been nagging you. I don’t think you mentioned Moira having Nathaniel Essex on her bookshelf alongside Charles Darwin. I had a friend from the US who visited the Isle of Lewis in the 1980s. Everyone was really nice until she turned up at church without a hat…
Aside from Cable, I think the work Ladronn did for Marvel with most potential interest for X-Fans is the Fantastic Four ’99 annual. Written by Chris Claremont it has Selene, the Hellfire Club and Margali of the Winding Way. For those with access it’s on MU.
It’s interesting that this comes straight after the Al Kennedy episodes, because Paul O’Brien may have been partly responsible for Flashback Month and specifically Uncanny X-Men -1! Here’s his account, from his old website, still available on archive.org (http://web.archive.org/web/20080307080025/http://www.thexaxis.com/indexes/uncannyxmen/-1.htm):
Scott Lobdell had e-mailed me a few months before this issue. He was thinking of doing something with the Twelve in that year’s summer crossover (which eventually went to be Operation: Zero Tolerance instead). I seemed to be pretty up on my continuity. Did I have any thoughts on the subject? Well, at this point the Twelve plot hinged almost entirely on some cryptic comments of the Master Mold, and I wrote back with some suggestions on how the Master Mold might have come into possession of such a list in the first place. Scott didn’t use any of them, although I did suggest that Larry Trask might have identified the Twelve in his precognitive visions (thus explaining how the Sentinels knew about the Twelve).
However his mind got onto this track, Scott came up with the idea of a two-part story featuring Rachel Summers, Sanctity and the Trasks. It would run through Uncanny X-Men and X-Men and be set in the past. Not unreasonably, he thought the fans might like it. It would be a self-contained story, it would advance the Twelve plot (which fans never seemed to shut up about even though it never went anywhere), and it would have the popular character Rachel Summers in it. And it would take up the X-Men books for a month. Hey, wouldn’t it be great if they made it something across the whole X-Men line?
Well, that’s what it sounded like when I first heard of it, and I thought it was a great idea. It would fulfil the X-books’ requirement for an obligatory major event without being a crossover. It would be an interesting change of pace. And it was supposed to be setting up plots for the future, or at least exploring interesting areas of characters’ histories.
What it most certainly was not, at that stage, was a month-long sprawling concoction of mostly irrelevant and unimportant Silver Age pastiches and novelty stories. Some of them were actually alright, but a whole month was going to test anyone’s patience. It certainly seemed a commercial loser, and given the order figures for that month, retailers seemed to agree.