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In which Marvel goes wordless; Cassandra Nova breaks space; none of the X-Men have media training; and Gus was the best dog ever.
X-PLAINED:
- Erik the Red (more) (again)
- Kin Crimson
- A big messy bag of mutant glory
- New X-Men #121-123
- ‘Nuff Said
- A journey into Charles Xavier’s mind
- What Emma is drinking
- A fetus fight
- The criminal culpability of a fetus
- Space problems
- A cosplay challenge
- Space
- Charles Xavier’s weird last wish
- A press conference
- Teen romance
- The Stepford Cuckoos
- Gus
- Charles Xavier’s age
- Nanosentinels
- Stuf
- Pre-ride safety announcements from the X-Men
- Whether Cassandra Nova should’ve been a component of Onslaught
NEXT EPISODE: Cassandra Nova vs. the X-Men (Round 2)!
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Which X-Men character do I want to see giving pre-ride safety instructions? One named leapt immediately to mind: Blindfold.
I’d always assumed that Cassandra was Punching Fetus, not Eyeblast Fetus, because my rule of thumb when two identical fetuses are fighting is: If one of them is manifesting psychic powers, that one is probably Xavier.
But I agree it’s not really what the text suggests, either in this issue or later on, when Professor X is giving his version of events. So I’m thinking it’s an example of the art and writing not really matching up. (Also, whoever Punching Fetus is, I’m impressed by their delts.)
As for Jean’s Cassandra Nova explanation — it’s terrifically cool, but I’m not sure I buy it. Why does an entity that doesn’t believe that anything in the universe exists trick a dentist into building a fleet of genocidal robots to destroy a city, then trek to the other side of the galaxy (the galaxy that doesn’t exist), collapse an empire almost entirely off-panel, and then return with some space aliens?
It also doesn’t fit with her already-established cruelty — I’m not sure it’s possible to be cruel to something that you don’t believe exists, because to be cruel you must believe you are causing pain to another being. (i.e., it is impossible to be cruel to a Bob-omb while playing Mario.) Morrison should’ve saved that concept for another day.
And why does Cassandra Nova go to the Shi’ar empire anyway? Her opening move wiped out half the world’s mutants; her nano-Sentinels are about to finish off the rest. Wrecking the imperium does nothing toward her goal of eliminating mutants, and the Imperial Guard prove far less effective than a single Master Mold. She should’ve stuck with what works.
Not that I’m complaining; I love the Imperial Guard and will take any excuse to get them into a story.
On Xavier’s age: Morrison is consistently 10 years off on ages in this run. There is no way the head of a prestigious private school is “only 27, you ungrateful wretches.” (And that line doesn’t even make sense in the context of Emma’s unreliable narrative; I don’t believe she’d even WANT to be 27.) She’s an easy 38-41, adjusting her looks with good genes, plastic surgery and mental tricks.
Cassandra’s goal isn’t to eliminate mutants, it’s to hurt/kill Charles. Charles cares about mutants, so mutants must die. Charles cares about Lilandra and the Shi’ar, so they gotta go too. If Moira were still alive, she’d be just as much of a target.
I think the explanation makes a little bit more sense if you think of Cassandra Nova as playing the Sims, rather than Mario. Because you can DEFINITELY be cruel to your Sims….
Miles got this one right – Cassandra awakens first (note the evil smile on the bottom panel just before the fight starts), tries to strangle Charles, he retaliates with a psychic blast and “kills” her. It’ll be more clearly stated in #126
Is this the first time we get an explanation of how Smasher’s powers work? I know that, as an analogue for Ultra Boy, he’s always had basically the same power set as Gladiator with the weakness that he could only use one at a time, but I can’t recall them ever being attributed to an external source. (Of course Hickman comes back to this in his Avengers run when he reveals that there’s a whole legion of Smashers, they tend to die and get replaced pretty frequently, and Cannonball met his wife because she found a dead Smasher’s gear.)
I don’t know a whole lot about Proty, the inspiration for Stuf; I guess it won’t really matter because Stuf is less a character than a plot point.
Yes, I think is the first apparance of the Exo-Specs for Smasher.
I wonder, is there a connection between this specific Smasher, who landed in American farmland, and Izzy Kane, Cannonball’s wife, who grew up in Iowa?
Proty was an odd addition to the Legion in the Silver Age, technically the telepathic, amorphous, shapeshifting pet of Chameleon Boy (Likewise a shapeshifter) but he seemed to be given human level intelligence and self awareness, and just… never objected to being treated like a pet until he was just… never mentioned again. (Was probably in therapy for years over that one)
He made a cameo in the 1980’s Legion where he showed up as a professional photographer, making a slightly sarcastic comment about how he doesn’t attend meetings of groups called “The Legion of Super Pets” any more.
Another version of the story had him secretly replace the deceased Lightnnig Lad for about forty years worth of stories, including his marriage and two kids… but that’s another story.
On Izzy: Yes, there’s an explicit connection. During Hickman’s Avengers run, she finds pieces of New X-Men Smasher’s Exospex in the cornfield where he crashed. (You see flashbacks to Smasher’s escape from Cassandra Nova.)
The goggles have fixed themselves and, when she puts them on, transform her into a new Smasher.
Quite a missed opportunity for the cows, really.
Thank you, the mental image of a cow in Exospex and resulting Smasher costume just made me laugh out loud in the office! 😀
Lydia B Kollins’s “Nailed It” runway on Season 17 of Drag Race begins to approach what could be that Prof X cosplay.
Oh Magneto as safety instructor makes total sense, though will lead to a lot of dead teens who JUST DIDN’T LISTEN TO HIM.
I will be honest, I’m team Jay in the “which fetus did what.” Prof X in Jean’s body in 126 sounds like he’s justifying a preemptive attack (I felt her crawling monstrous thoughts. I sensed a raging hunger vast enough to consume me and the whole world and I lashed out in our mother’s womb. My very first act as a conscious being” sounds more “here’s why I strangled her” whereas “she tried to strangle me so I mind blasted her” would make more sense and be less roundabout of a way to explain the other version.
Also, periodic reminder that Prof X is canonically mid-to-late 20s in the Silver Age due to the timeline of atomic research.
“I felt her crawling, monstrous thoughts” – in other words, she awoke to consciousness/awareness first.
If Xavier wasn’t conscious, he wouldn’t have felt it.
At this point, I’m half thinking the art and writing are intentionally mismatched to keep the audience guessing as to which fetus is the bad one.
Oh, and Ride Safety Instructor: Arcade. Though he’s liable to miss something important, it will likely be a fun ride and I’m pretty much guaranteed not to die as long as I’m important to the plot. (I’m VERY important to the plot.)
What an absolutely amazing shout out you gave me from Cassandra Nova. Couldn’t have loved it more, felt spot on between my last name being most associated with a critic and my being an attorney…thanks so much and glad I’m now a recorded supporter.
I had never considered the fetus fight having two readings. Of course Xavier could have made a preemptive strike…very Morrison to leave open to interpretation.
The episode title reminds me of one of Jack Kirby’s weirder creations (and this is “The King” Kirby we’re talking here, so, y’know… weird for him is what Morrison aspires to) from his “Captain Victory and the Galactic Rangers” series, which included “Paranex, the Fighting Fetus”!
The GI Joe comic had two sort of successors during Byrne’s Alpha Flight run: #6 inverts the trope (which came out during “Assistant Editors Month”, when Marvel published sillier/whackier-than-average stories and blamed them on the Editors being on holiday, so their Assistants were in charge) and gave us “Snowblind” during which there was a five and a half page sequence where Snowbird fights Kolomaq, the god-beast of snow and blizzards, which means that everything is whited out, with absolutely no visible artwork, and only the speech bubbles and sound effects to tell you what was going on. (IIRC it was not considered to be a successful experiment by fans, who felt cheated having bought the title largely for Byrne’s artwork)
And then the funeral for James Hudson in #13 started with a ten page wordless sequence (which turns out to be a nightmare).
I felt that Jean’s “We should talk” was Morrison gently chiding the concept of being made to write a wordless story, so not “We should talk“, but “We should talk”.
I could see someone managing to make the “Nova/Xavier psi-shell monster” cosplay out of a lot of inflated surgical gloves.
Also impressed you managed to not mention the cover of #122, which I recall being interpreted at the time of publications, as being rather unsubtle, with the fold of Lilandra’s loose sleeve being carefuly positioned over her crotch in such a way that it resembles… a rather intimate organ.
I can see Emma being unimpressed with the Xavier School kids. Her first Hellions were hand picked out of all possible candidates and she, for wont of a better term, groomed them to serve the Hellfire Club in the upper echelons of wealthy and powerful society.
Generation X were a rather more ragtag group, but there were only a few of them, and she coped as she healed from the loss of her first choices.
Now she has several hundred of what she would likely think of as “Mutants, but the great unwashed type of mutants” all crowding around her ALL the time. Emma likes to be in control of any situation, and unruly kids are notoriously difficult to control.
I’ll probably regret this in morning (when I listen to the rest of the podcast) but fear I shan’t sleep until I get this out of my system. Perhaps your discussion of previous silent comics was only intended to be about US comics, but there are notable precedents. Arzach by Moebius (1976) and the entertaining pantomime strips of HM Bateman (uh, maybe the 1930s?) come quickly to mind. Anyway, rich history and all that.