Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men

248 – Destructo Woman

Art by David Wynne. Wanna buy the original? Drop him a line!

In which Tom Cassidy and Cain Marko may be the most stable couple in the Marvel Universe; Rory Campbell is no Super Doctor Astronaut Peter Corbeau; Siena Blaze remains a big jerk; the Cassidy family has some issues; and we are dismayed by an inexplicable dearth of leprechauns.

X-PLAINED:

  • Birthday presents
  • What Excalibur has been up to
  • Excalibur #72-74
  • X-Force #31
  • How to be mysterious
  • The Proteus Room
  • The continually terrible choices of Moira MacTaggert
  • Porridge ghosts
  • An unnatural disaster
  • Chekhov’s solid rock
  • Rory Campbell
  • Destructo Woman
  • Limitations of CD-ROMs
  • Siryn (Theresa Cassidy)
  • The Cassidy family
  • How not to treat a gunshot wound
  • Kelvin Donaghann and his fancy hair
  • An intervention
  • The future of the New Mutants feature film
  • Underwear

NEXT EPISODE: Family Reunion!


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247 – The Butt-Kick Scale

Art by David Wynne. Wanna buy the original? Drop him a line!

In which the Hand probably doesn’t even offer dental; literally everyone is less creepy than the Joker and Harley Quinn; toxic masculinity is Sabretooth’s adamantium; Mark Trail is a wild ride; Wolverine trashes the dress code and gets funky; Larry Hama is your god now; and Sabretooth: Death Hunt scores a solid six on the butt-kick scale.

X-PLAINED:

  • Mark Trail vs. X-Men
  • Sabretooth (Victor Creed)
  • Clones of Sabretooth
  • Birthday traditions
  • Sabretooth: Death Hunt #1-4
  • Ps[i don’t remember; that one guy]
  • Low-context ninjas
  • A somewhat tasteful omission, I guess
  • The glow (and its counterintuitive sound effect)
  • Turbo Sabretooth
  • Tribune (Graydon Creed)
  • Mark Trail
  • Affirmations with Sabretooth
  • “Leni Zauber”
  • Dress codes
  • The butt-kick scale
  • A tearaway tuxedo
  • Dubious grenade handling
  • Parenting with Mystique
  • One thing Wolverine knows
  • The CHK-LIT gun
  • Comics bankers
  • A very qualified recommendation
  • Our preferred versions of Sabretooth’s origin
  • Relative redeemability

NEXT EPISODE: Siena Blaze and the Mystery of the Missing Leprechauns!


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246 – Foreshadow Puppets

Art by David Wynne. Wanna buy the original? Drop him a line!

In which Danielle Moonstar is not a master of disguise; the MLF are bad enough dudes to kidnap a guy who works near the president; Tempo wasn’t even supposed to be here today; Reignfire is no Magneto; we now desperately want X-Force matryoshka dolls; Feral quits the team; Henry Peter Gyrich fails to learn from experience (or anything else); small children are bad at everything; Shatterstar gets a tagline; Sam Guthrie REALLY needs a vacation; and it’s surprisingly difficult to choose a favorite resurrection.

X-PLAINED:

  • Cortex
  • The kinder, gentler Cable
  • Several matters related to Nicholas Cage
  • X-Force #27-30
  • Broome jaws
  • The Area jar
  • The Mutant Liberation Front
  • Reignfire (again)
  • Hardaway
  • A cyborg asshole
  • Locus
  • Moonstar
  • “Of Faith and Fable”
  • Foreshadow puppets
  • Bobby da Costa’s greatest fear
  • Dad jokes with Cable
  • X-Force’s day off
  • Shatterstar vs. Adam X the X-Treme
  • Windsong
  • An inevitable team-up
  • A Very Special Episode moment
  • The return of Wine Mom Domino
  • The return of Jean Grey’s telepathy
  • Our favorite resurrections

NEXT EPISODE: Sabretooth


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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!

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245 – Natural Causes

Art by David Wynne. Wanna buy the original? Drop him a line!

In which Rogue flouts air traffic regulations; Jay is very sorry for how badly he butchers Gambit’s accent; stealth is directly proportionate to how loudly you dress; Rogue and Gambit win the gold in Pairs Punchin’; Candra is a big jerk; you should ABSOLUTELY NOT remove an impaled object; Rogue busts through some tropes; and we have complicated feelings about the Ultimate universe.

X-PLAINED:

  • Rogue’s biological parents
  • Marvel New Orleans
  • Brood Trouble in the Big Easy
  • Rogue/rogue disambiguation
  • Rogue #1-4
  • Bella Donna Boudreaux
  • What may or may not happen if Rogue kisses a Transformer
  • Cody Robbins (again)
  • Natural causes
  • Supervillain funeral crashers (again)
  • Inverse Ninja Law (Law of Conservation of Ninjutsu)
  • The Bill the Pony incident
  • Relative culpability
  • Nature vs. nurture
  • Tante Mattie (Mattie Baptiste)
  • Candra’s new threads
  • How long it takes to drive from Westchester, NY, to Caledcott, MI
  • How Jay learned to love Gambit (but not to stop worrying)
  • Gris-Gris
  • Lapin
  • Fifolet
  • Punching hallucinations
  • Questa
  • Knives as superpowers
  • Inversions of several gendered superhero tropes
  • Closure
  • The limits of intent
  • Magnetos’ (sometimes) kids’ hair
  • Whether we’ll cover Ultimate X-Men

NEXT EPISODE: Spiky boys, yelling!


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244 – Terminal Nudity

Art by David Wynne. Wanna buy the original? Drop him a line!

In which X-Men don’t get to take vacations; Jay makes a somewhat belated announcement; sometimes Gambit is legitimately pretty cool; the assassins get a day-glo-up; The Crow holds up surprisingly well; Gambit gets exiled again; and Artie and Leech damn well better get to live happily ever after.

X-PLAINED:

  • Rogue and Gambit’s honeymoon
  • A thing that Jay is working on
  • Brood Trouble in the Big Easy
  • Bella Donna Boudreaux
  • Gambit #1-4
  • The New Orleans trilogy
  • “X-Ternally Yours”
  • The tithe collector
  • Things about which your mama may or may not have warned you
  • Dramatic captions
  • Candra
  • The Thieves’ and Assassins’ Guilds
  • The pact
  • Julian Boudreaux (again)
  • Henri LeBeau and his mustache
  • Critical nudity
  • Terminal nudity
  • Marius Boudreaux
  • Accent inconsistencies
  • Draping
  • Jean Luc LeBeau
  • Treachery most foul
  • (Select elements of) Gamit’s origin story
  • How thieves get kids
  • Gambit as a romantic hero
  • Ungrateful children of the Marvel Universe
  • Petite Chou
  • Clubbing with Gambit
  • Subtlety (for some value of the term)
  • Lifestyles of the rich and immortal
  • The Church of Lost Thieves
  • The Elixir of Life
  • An undersold side effect
  • A very lucky break
  • Artie and Leech’s probable adult lives
  • Villains we’d like to see on the X-Men

NEXT EPISODE: Rogue!


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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!

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243 – And Now We Are Five

Art by David Wynne.

In which we celebrate a red-letter birthday with a look back at five years of milestones, favorite moments, dubious headwear, and our own convoluted continuity!

NEXT EPISODE: It Gambit time!


You can find a full list of the episodes we mentioned here over on our blog!

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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!

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242 – Spider-Mansfield Park

Art by David Wynne. Wanna buy the original? Drop him a line!

In which we encounter one of comics’ greatest rarities; Spider-Man cannot actually do whatever a spider can; Flash Thompson subscribes to the X-Factor school of child endangerment; alliteration is the source of a very specific sort of powers; Spider-Man is not Phil; guilt is Spider-Man’s greatest motivator; we root for the antagonists; Guido Carosella would be an epic Twitter monster; a lot of people have hung out with the X-Men; and Glob Herman is a lovable, gross mystery.

X-PLAINED:

  • Spider-Man / X-Men Crossovers
  • Other media we have consumed recently
  • Spider-Man and X-Factor: Shadow Games
  • What a spider can do
  • What Spider-Man can do
  • Shadow Force
  • Hard Time
  • Airborne
  • Oversize
  • Firefight
  • Ambush
  • Mirrorshade
  • JELLO Jigglers(TM)
  • Journalistic alliteration
  • The government
  • A comfortable fictional jacket
  • How to find Flash Thompson
  • Many sound effects
  • The untimely death of Mirrorshade
  • Why we’re not covering the Captain Marvel movie
  • Glob Herman’s powers

NEXT EPISODE: Somehow we been doing this for FIVE WHOLE YEARS?!


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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!

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241 – Conducive to Moral Subversion

UPDATE: Jay initially linked to the wrong episode here. Link now leads to the actual Episode 241. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Dave is moving this week. We miss you, Dave!

In which Quicksilver wants you to know that he’s not cool; X-Factor gets a new government liaison; a danger room on a jet is a terrible idea; this team is bad at feelings; Forge is a pretty okay boss; and it remains exceptionally difficult to be Rahne Sinclair.

X-PLAINED:

  • Several deaths of Scott Summers
  • X-Factor #93-96
  • X-Factor (more) (again)
  • A somewhat tragic meeting
  • A costume and the response thereto
  • A very brief adventure
  • A political reference
  • Feelings
  • Art therapy with Quicksilver
  • Random (more) (again)
  • Mr. Dibbles
  • Havok’s hair
  • The new boss (as literally and idiomatically distinct from the old boss)
  • Some history
  • Haven (kind of)
  • Navigating mental health triggers in comics
  • The difference between isolation and quarantine

NEXT EPISODE: A Threat and/or Menace!


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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!

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240 – Live at ECCC 2019, feat. Vita Ayala, Seanan McGuire, & Leah Williams

Art by David Wynne. Wanna buy the original? Drop him a line!

In which we sit down live at Emerald City Comic Con with writers Vita Ayala, Seanan McGuire, and Leah Williams to talk Age of X-Man, the intergenerational legacy of X-Men, and telling stories in the pauses.


Check back later this week for our ECCC cosplay and sketch galleries!

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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!

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239 – Rap and Rumble (feat. Max Carleton)

Art by David Wynne. Wanna buy the original? Drop him a line!

In which we enter the era of bomber jackets; the covers are the cards; Genosha remains neither green nor pleasant; the A is for “Avengers,” not “A-list”; Henry Peter Gyrich is the straightest of men; Cyclops sets an important precedent; Exodus is a huge jerk; we speculate about movies we have definitely not seen; Stephen Strange is not a qualified OBGYN; the Avengers are really weird even by our standards; and Max manages to connect two of Marvel’s most complicated family trees.

X-PLAINED:

  • One way to name babies
  • Blood Ties
  • Infinite bomber jackets
  • Avengers #368-369
  • X-Men #26
  • Avengers West Coast #101
  • Uncanny X-Men #307
  • Several very fancy covers
  • A shadow government, but not that kind of shadow government
  • Genosha (more) (again)
  • The Avengers, as of 1993
  • A special delegation
  • The Genoshan resistance
  • U.S. Agent
  • A time Cyclops told someone other than Dracula to follow their heart
  • The many belts of Nicholas Fury
  • Several members of the Maximoff family (more) (again)
  • Black Knight (Dane Whitman)
  • Sersi
  • A very drawn-out fight
  • Roy Thomas dialogue
  • The racist icing on the racist cake
  • Exodus (Bennet du Paris)
  • Diplomacy, kind of
  • Apolitical avenging
  • Magneto’s dream
  • A green and pleasant beverage
  • Yet another energy-dome-enclosed crisis
  • The giant, angry disembodied head of Charles Xavier
  • What is definitely the actual plot of the Purge movies
  • The surprisingly torrid private lives of the Maximoffs
  • Scarlet Witch and Vision’s kids
  • Master Pandemonium and his weird baby hands
  • Damian Hellstrom
  • How we’d handle Magneto’s family in modern Marvel
  • Robopaternity
  • A possible link between the Summers and Maximoff families

NEXT EPISODE: Live at Emerald City Comic Con, with Vita Ayala, Seanan McGuire, and Leah Williams!


Check out the visual companion to this episode on our blog!

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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 TeePublic shop!