Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | RSS
In which Jean Grey crosses several lines; Emma Frost is killed; Bishop and Sage visit from X-Treme X-Men; mutants are weird; the plot thickens; Emma Frost is resurrected; and we learn several secrets of fly reproduction.
X-PLAINED:
- The brothers Xorn
- A question of reading order
- New X-Men #139-141
- Cosmic force problems
- A showdown
- A brief tour through the mind of Emma Frost
- A murder most foul
- Bishop (briefly) (again)
- Sage (briefly) (again)
- Many suspects
- One way to get drugs, I guess?
- A mysterious shack and its mysterious contents
- Perils and advantages of being a living computer
- A murder weapon
- Angel and Beak’s excellent babies
- A resurrection
- A subtly remarkable taxicab
- The advent of mixed-case lettering in Marvel comics
- How Angel and Beak’s reproductive cycle corresponds to actual fly reproduction
NEXT EPISODE: Assault on Weapon Plus
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!
Adding for posterity that the second half of Dmanda’s set was “Text Message Breakup” by Kelly. If anyone wants to see, it’s all on her instagram and it’s as amazing as Miles says. (In general, she’s an amazing queen who does deep cuts like Tangerine and “blue phoenix printing error” Rachel)
The Jean-Emma fight issue is just absolutely fabulous. If Riot is my favorite story, this is probably my favorite issue (followed by the silent one) since it really just is mainlining comic book nonsense soap opera. The rest of the story also is a great underscoring of the Beast-Emma friendship which is one of my favorite oft-forgotten X-friendships.
It does though have a bit of a plot error since Jean was on the plane when she psychically burst in last issue. One could though no-prize it as either:
A. She used the Phoenix force to warp her way back to the mansion…which is pretty crappy to do since that either means that Dust had to go through Customs unaccompanied or Dust was also teleported and now has to deal with that legal issue.
B. She was just there psychically the whole time…but that gets really weird when Scott needs to get into the room to yell at her
C. She landed and went through customs while psychically torturing Emma and then put everyone on pause so she could enter the room.
Hi. Long time listener very few times commenter friendly Argentinean dude here
This feels like the right time to do it, so here’s a (probably incomplete) list of stuff (good, bad and just ok) that came around this run for those who want to New X-pand the New X-Perience (did I really wrote that?) (shame on me) (shame) (shame!) (SHAME!!!)
X-Treme X-Men
#9: before the first open doors days, Jean tells Ororo about Cassandra Nova
#20 to 23: listen this episode
#24: after that thing in Paris (we see the aftermath of that) and around the time of this issues, Cannonball is invited to join the cast of this book
Iceman 1 to 4
By Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning and Karl Kerschl
An adventure with Opal Tanaka. It’s on this list only because the bad guy is loosely connected to John Sublime
X-Factor (four issues mini)
By Jeff Jensen and Arthur Ranson
I love this one. Some kind of Law and Order: Special Mutants Unit, with two flatscans detectives who… Their experience with mutantkind has not been the best. The book shows them working some cases (with a justified X-Men distrust) and trying to be good people even if sometimes they fail to the task. The New X-Men and Nightcrawler have important cameos on this. Please, read it. This and Chamber by Brian K. Vaughan are the best not Morrison X-Books of this era
And talking about Brian K. Vaughan… Look, I love the guy, but let’s keep him very far, far, far away from Latinamerica. That’s why I will never recommend his Cyclops mini (It’s bad and is situated around/maybe before the firsts issues by Morrison) and his work on the Mystique ongoing
Aftermath
New Mutants, the ones by Nunzio Defilippis and Christina Weir, #13
In the aftermath of Planet X, the OG New Mutants and the students have to deal with Donald Pierce and the reavers
Uncanny X-Men 442-443
In the aftermath of Planet X, Xavier goes to Genosha.
Chuck Austen writing is a mess (and finding not-comic people who know him and tells you he’s an amazing human being make it all worse) but this and his work on Exiles is kind of decent and readable
X-Treme X-Men #46
In the aftermath of Planet X, this book is cancelled (because it moves cast and creative team to Uncanny X-Men, not because the stuff Rogue said on twitter)
Exiles 46 to 48
In the aftermath of Pla… of Here Comes Tomorrow, Beak joins the Exiles were Tony Bedard will give him an amazing arc
Haven’t read Weapon X (Frank Tieri) yet, but I know it expand the Weapons Programs and the Sublime mythologies
Did I miss something important/good, maybe from X-Men Unlimited?
Why does Emma’s hair move when she’s in Diamond form?
This is a fun arc, but as a mystery it doesn’t really hold up. There isn’t enough misdirection to keep the reader guessing as to what happens, and the core alibi — Beast and the Cuckoos at the opera — is so flimsy it certainly doesn’t need a telepath to bust apart.
Beast: “It wasn’t me, I was at the L’Orfeo with the girls.”
Bishop: “Oh yes, the bomb threat. That was on the news last night.”
Beast: “ … “
Even if New X-Men exists in a world where bomb threats against major opera houses are so common that they don’t make the evening news, that’s a two-minute routine phone call by the dumbest cop on the force to determine that Beast is lying or has had his memory altered. Do police procedurals not exist in Bishop’s future?
Possibly not, because he also forgets the rule about confronting the killer at the end: You don’t do it alone. You get the confession, then open the door and there are a bunch of cops ready to take the villain away.
This issue also reuses the gimmick from Riot At Xavier’s where experienced heroes are overwhelmed by children with less experience and power. Presumably Esme was on kick, but Bishop had said in this same issue that he absorbs psychic energy; why bring that up at all if it’ll be ignored in the same story? And Sage gets jumped twice? You’d think that experience would’ve convinced her to bring some backup.