Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | RSS
In which Warren Kenneth Worthington III is a terrible teacher; we are all Magneto’s children; Sooraya Qadir deserves a better origin story; teenagers have a lot of feelings; and we meet one of the modern age’s most controversial mutants.
X-PLAINED:
- The destiny of Quentin Quire
- New X-Men #131-134
- An underattended funeral
- How to fly? Kinda? I guess?
- A kiss
- A friendship
- Another bit of ruby quartz marginalia that will never be mentioned again
- A somewhat ill-founded psychic metaphor
- Emma Frost’s Dark Phoenix costume
- Some kind of weird affair
- Echoes of 9/11/2001
- Genosha, a year later
- Ghosts
- Polaris’s paternity
- Shocker (the mutant one)
- The last words of Genosha
- Islamophobia post 9/11
- Sooraya Qadir (Dust)
- An attempted hijacking and the aftermath thereof
- Some Shi’ar nonsense
- X-Corporation Mumbai
- Jumbo Carnation
- Telepathy class
- An artist’s interpretation of the fate of mankind if mutants are not driven out, as predicted by Bolivar Trask
- Accountability
- Professor X’s weird little paintings
- X-adjectives
- Best and worst X-Men with whom to share a psychic rapport
NEXT EPISODE: Quentin Quire’s teen angst bullshit gets a body count!
Check out the visual companion to this episode on our blog.
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!
Maybe this is a bit uncharitable, but I always assumed the Polaris thing was purely Austen’s screw-up, if only because he made similar mistakes with other aspects of Morrison’s run (Ernst, the fifth Cuckoo, etc.) There’s no real reason to think Lorna’s being literal in this issue, given her circumstances. Instead we got a clumsy retcon that – in the grand scheme of things – really didn’t do much of anything for Polaris as a character.
So, what’s impressive here is that Morrison is, very likely, somehow doubling down on “Professor X is 25 in X-Men 1.” This date works if you look at the fact that Prof X mentions his dad was doing nuclear fission research before he was conceived, which would mean he could be conceived earliest in 1938. (OKAY, granted, this means he has to lie about his age to go to Korea). If Quentin is 15 or 16, and that image came out the day he was born, and that’s in the early days of X-Men, and Prof X is 41….
Granted, I do like that Morrison breaks the “Silver Age to Present is always 10 years.” I maintain that X-Men makes a lot more sense if you divide the years by 2, roughly (maybe skipping a few in the early 70s). So if we were to say Sentinels was year 2 and QQ is 16, 17 years since #1 basically works (a lot of the Silver Age characters read like they’re having ‘early 30s’ crises). Then we just pretend that Emma is lying about her age to the Cuckoos.
Yeah, this was the first time since… I want to say X-Men #53 that ANYONE had suggested Lorna was Magneto’s daughter. So it might have come and gone SINCE then, but this was the first time it had Come after it’s original Going…. I’m not sure that was grammatical, but I think it gets the idea across.
I would absolutely NOT want WWIII (Oh what an apt abbreviation) teaching me how to fly, especially if, y’know, I couldn’t actually fly.
If he’d even suggested that he knew Beak couldn’t fly, but the test had been to see if you could reach the platform, not necessarily fly to the platform yourself, and so asking someone to give you a lift was a perfectly valid outcome and demonstrated both humility and teamwork then I’d have respected it, but I suspect he did not.
Dust I always loved as a character, a very cool, straightforward power (Well, okay, it’s “Sandman-but-not”), a different worldview and it’s a shame she gets sidelined so often. I also recall the many examples of a “sexy niqab” and really do NOT understand how some artists could miss the point so utterly.
I recall a discussion at the time, which suggested that the various books had been instructed to introduce a new character with a new point of view, and that whilst Morrison had chose to create Sooraya Quadir, a Muslim woman from Afghanistan, Joe Kelly had chosen to create Stacy X, a sex worker from a Nevada brothel, who used her powers to make money from sexual activity (I have a feeling we eventually discover that she ALWAYS used her pheromones with clients rather than anything involving physical sex, but can’t recall) and was also, for some reason, a hand to hand combatant who could rival Wolverine, and was always defined by her attitude towards sex. The comparisons between the two were… not kind and rather demeaning, truth be told, but it has to be said that one seemed a character who could be developed, and the other seemed like an excuse for certain writing tendencies.
I notice that X-Corporation’s Mumbai office has a staff of one Native American, two New Yorkers and one Japanese guy, and absolutely no one from India. Given that it’s the most populous country on Earth it seems a tad improbable that there were NO Indian mutants around (other than Thunderthird) who could be added to the roster, even as new characters.
A wasted opportunity there I feel though again, the Paris office didn’t have any French members either, so it’s more a disappointing trend than a specific disappointment.
I was a little surprised you didn’t mention Darkstar’s memorial service, as the idea of mourners taking part in a shared telepathic experience of everyone’s memories of the departed is perhaps one of the more profound “mutant culture” concepts that Morrison gave us.
Wild that Morrison can build an entire character out of a single panel published three decades prior, but can’t recall Sunfire’s defining character trait or be bothered to check on whether Polaris is related to Magneto or not.
“Ambient Magnetic Fields” is one of my favorite issues of this run; the ghost-voices saved by Magneto evoke the voice mails, texts and other beyond-death messages that at time of publication were all that were left of 9/11 victims.
I don’t have as much of a problem as the hosts with the Afghanistan or Kashmir stuff; Marvel has done more jingoistic stories before and since. I’m more put off by the “sexy niqab” designs Icon_UK mentioned that come later. (It would also have been nice to get the language right, but you can’t blame Fantomex, he’s been in the real world for what, a couple of weeks? Everything he says has to be considered a potential hallucination from his time in Weapon Plus, it’s one of the things that’s so irritating about the character.)
But that story could have been just skipped altogether; Wolverine cuts up some guys, seen that a thousand times. We get a neat new character that Morrison barely uses after this, though I guess she comes up again if the sexy niqabs become a thing.
It reads as filler — and I wonder if it was: Ambient Magnetic Fields can’t have been part of the initial story plan; maybe these issues were initially a two-parter that got preempted by the 9/11 stuff, and Morrison needed another issue or two to keep the Emma/Scott subplot on track.