Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | RSS
In which John Sublime sucks; Angel Salvatore rules; trauma does not justify evil; and you should never, ever, ever mess with Jean Grey.
X-PLAINED:
- A horrifying revelation
- The universe where Jay and Miles work for Cassandra Nova
- New X-Men #118-120
- John Sublime (more) (again)
- The U-Men
- Psychic energy, gender-reveal party-style
- The Stepford Cuckoos
- One way to disperse a mob
- An uncivil conversation
- The death and/or discomfort of many U-Men
- An awakening of sorts
- Squaring the phoenix
- Hank McCoy’s “coming out”
NEXT EPISODE: The Shi’ar invade!
The visual companion to this episode will be up later this week.
Find us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify!
Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men is 100% ad-free and listener supported. If you want to help support the podcast–and unlock more cool stuff–you can do that right here!
Buy rad swag at our Dashery shop!
Really enjoying this sequence of episodes, this run got me back into X-Men comics. John Sublime is a gloriously evil and bonkers villain.
I remember Igor Kordey copping a fair amount of stick for his art back in the day, the book was running very late (neither Quitely nor the other artist are quick) and he was able to turn issues around astonishingly quickly but it seemed to harm his rep. His later work on X-Treme is very, very good.
Miles’ point about artistic consistency in trades – I bought the Poptopia trade from the sister Uncanny title at this time. It looks absolutely ridiculous, going from Ian Churchill to Sean Phillips to Ashley Wood. Fun times in the Jemas era!
Is it worse to get shot by scalpels, or by flechettes?
“Scalpels” would seem to imply they at least have been stored in a sterile packaging prior to being opened.
I don’t think flechettes have the same stringent packaging conditions, alas.
You’d get ripped to shreds by both, but I think the chances of blood poisoning or tetanus are higher with flechettes.
Is it patronising to mention the origin of the name “Stepford Cuckoos” for those who might not know? (Well, that’s never quite stopped me before, has it?)
A combination of “The Stepford Wives”, from Ira Levin’s feminist horror novel from 1972, about the extent to which the men of the town of Stepford will go to make their wives docile and obedient, and “The Midwich Cuckoos”, John Wyndham’s 1957 sci-fi novel about the English village of Midwich, where the entire population mysteriously blacks out for 24 hours (likely due to alien infulence), and wakes to find that every single woman resident who could become pregnant now is, without having had sex. The resulting children have golden eyes and silvery-skin and look like each other, but nothing like their mothers. They also share a hive mind (Well two, one for boys, one for girls) and have poweful telepathic/mind control abilities, which are handy (for them, if no one else) when everyone in the town is afraid AND creeped out by you.
Jean’s little “chat” with the U-Men is one of the most memorable of the run IMHO. The bit about her moving the junk food they’d been eating inside their body with telekinesis is astoundingly (yet subtly) gross in description, and the implication of how far she could take it .
I was never sure if Sublime had removed Martha’s brain on purpose, or if her brain was “simply” able to survive without her body and the syringes just kept her docile, rather than being responsible for keeping her alive.
I have a constant buzzing in my brain about Quentin (five/fifth) Quire (book signature, i.e. collection of multiple pages into a single unit; also, homophone for “choir”) being so conceptually close to the sobriquet Five-in-One.
Re: Quentin
It’s possible Morrison just likes the “Q” sound. After the New X-Men run comes All-Star Superman, where Professor Quintum is introduced almost immediately.
On John Sublime: He’s a terrific villain and it’s a shame he had to be killed off so quickly. (I’m not counting Sublime itself, which isn’t anywhere near as interesting.) The take on the gleefully evil CEO is eventually reprised with Roxxon’s Darrio Agger, I suppose.
On Cyclops/Jean: The “she kept me up all night” line seems deliberately hurtful; it’s too old a joke to be funny and Scott isn’t socially inept enough to see how barbed it is. At this point it’s unclear WHY he’s being hurtful, though since he didn’t actually do anything with Emma in Hong Kong it’s likely because he’s hurt as well by Jean’s lack of trust, and is lashing back. It’s a good scene; the Scott/Jean/Emma storyline may be the best genuine soap opera stuff X-Men has ever had.
Re: Beast’s “coming out”
There’s a conversation between him and Emma at some point, where she’s confronting him about it and he says something ala “Why *couldn’t* one of the X-Men be gay? Is that so unrealistic?” which to me always read as the author going “Guys, trust me, I get it. I wanted to do a legit gay character, but that wasn’t allowed, so this is what we’re doing instead.”
I also later read something about Morrison having originally wanted to hook Emma up with *Jean* instead of Scott, which fits that read, but I’ve never looked into how legit that rumor was.
In general, it’s already been really fun to reread New X-Men alongside the podcast. It was one of the first X-Men comics I read when I first started reading them seriously and while I could tell it was good, it took me *months* to get through and then I swallowed the next handful of series in maybe just weeks. I was also lacking the full X-Men context to fully appreciate what was going on, but this time I’m ready!