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In which the Shockwave Riders are exceptionally silly; we are deeply impressed by brain sharks; and chrome plating and gun arms are among the lesser explored recurring Claremont motifs.
X-PLAINED:
- The fate of Sara Grey
- Revolution Claremont X-book disambiguation
- Uncanny X-Men #381-383
- The Neo (again)
- An unmarked anniversary
- A secret treasure trove
- Vagaries of telekinesis and telepathy
- The Shockwave Riders
- Brain sharks that eat memories
- The stuff of legend
- The Lost Souls
- Dirges and non-dirges
- One way to start a conversation
- Simyon Kurasov
- Colonel Alexi Vazhin (again)
- The Slash
- How to dress to go clubbing
- Blinkers, somewhat
- Ransom Sole
- Big Casino
- Sketch
- Revenant
- Major Debra Levin
- Bludgeon, Cudgel, and Manacle
- Houndification
- The best 21st century X-characters
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So your talk about the door in Venice, how no one else goes through it. There’s a business near me that does in some way integrated logistics. Sounds legit, but what do they *actually* do? No one’s going to wander in off the street and ask for anything. My dad and I joke that it’s a front for something else. Could be something like that!
I think there’s a slight error in the episode description: I believe issues 381 through 383 are covered, not “Uncanny X-Men #301-383” as listed. I’m not sure if the same typo is on other platforms as well.
Good catch, thanks! Fixed now.
If Jean and the Professor were going to Venice investigating weird stuff before she even started at the school, that’s… .
I can’t believe you didn’t make the OTHER connection from a club named “The Slash” given the amount of fanfic you guys must have at least seen over the years!
Yeah, Cable bigging up the Shockwave Riders has to be sarcasm.
There’s a definite “coating” fetish (I’m sure there’s a catchier word for it in certain select communities) somewhere in the Claremont-ian bag of tricks, when you remember he also created Worm of the Savage Land Mutates, whose power invovled smearing his skin secreted slime over people so he could control them, and Bodybag from the Technet who coats his victims in anaesthetic goop before swallowing them in the sacs on his back.
There might be something interesting and existential about The Lost Souls… that they’re maybe not real any more and can only exist in the mindscape of other people. That has a certain creepily intriguing feel to it.
Whilst disappointed that Sketch didn’t show up again, sort of glad she didn’t become a member. Reality warpers are the same sort of “Get out of Jail” power that annoy me as much as the 90’s preponderance of “They can do… stuff. But we don’t want to define what that means it in case we need to change it by issue #3 because we changed creators and they had their own ideas”
I think Big Casino might be called that because of irony, like a tall guy nicknamed “Tiny”
Interestingly… well, potentially interestingly, I was just watching an episode of the Batman 1966 TV series and the narrator actually says, whilst waxing dramatically about the peril which the Caped Crusaders are in, for the cliffhanger (in this case, as it’s a Shame episode, they’ve been tied down in front of an oncoming cattle stampede);
“Is this the big casino?”
Which made me wonder if it’s been used as a slang term. The most recent I could find was “The Sopranos” using it as a slang term for cancer (Though that’s after this comic, so not an inspiration), but Stephen King made a reference to it in 1979’s “The Dead Zone” when talking about killing someone.
So I guess it has to do with the inevitability of death. The notion that you can play any game you want, but the house always wins, not the player.
Okay, lots of gun-arms as mentioned here, but Claremont also wrote the story where Jean Grey got tentacle arms, AND that story was also the first appearance of Maj. Debra Levin. I’m starting to think maybe he just has a thing for women with non-traditionally-functional arms?