In which we return to our favorite convention; writer Vita Ayala remains an absolute legend; everything was always already queer; and nobody should ever have to wait 37 years for a kiss.
NEXT EPISODE: Rise of the Phalanx!
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In which we explore the aftermath of Multiple Man’s death; X-Factor has a lot of feelings; it probably sucks to grieve with Charles Xavier; neither power nor responsibility is particularly fun; we finally find out who was trying to kill Polaris; Professor Power makes it to the big leagues; and the ‘90s were one long leg day.
X-PLAINED:
Vectors of Malice transmission
X-Factor #101-102
X-Factor Annual #9
The aftermath of Jamie Madrox’s death
Several ways to grieve
Captain Capitalism and Plucky the Girl Wonder
A foiled robbery
Several guest stars
Multiple Man’s Muir Island years
Several assassination attempts
Some shady government shenanigans
Beatrice Conners (sort of)
A surprisingly muscular astral projection
Haven’s deeply dubious origin story
Professor Power
A surprisingly muscular android
One way to clean a room
Creative uses of mutant powers
Top-ten lists
NEXT EPISODE: Live at FlameCon with Vita Ayala!
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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!
In which fix-it fic goes canon (or vice versa); Psylocke is a complicated individual and/or individuals; assassins have complicated personal lives; it is probably ethical to tell your teammates about your camera eyes; Beast takes over Blue Team; we get our first tease of Generation X; Sabretooth is a surprisingly fun narrator; that Hickman fellow seems to know what he’s doing; and you should totally come see us at FlameCon!
X-PLAINED:
X-Men #31-33
What Forge does in his downtime
Several retcons, including a metaretcon
Psylocke (Betsy Braddock)
Revanche (Kwannon)
What we are not wearing
Hawks
Digital Chameleon
Assassin romance
What actually (probably) (mostly) happened to Betsy and Kwannon
The Eye Fairy
The death of Kwannon
The future of the Xavier School
The last will and testament of Emma Grace Frost
Rogue and Gambit’s breakfast-cereal habits
All the eyes you’ve been given
Nyorin’s “diary”
A murder cliché
Genevieve Darceneaux
BabyGoth Gambit
Henri LeBeau and his majestic mustache
Our (very early) thoughts on HoX/PoX
NEXT EPISODE: Havok once again fails to complete his dissertation.
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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!
In which Lisa Winters pinch-hits for Jay, we take a trip to the newspaper funnies and back, Spider-Man and Beast are natural BFFs, nothing good ever happens at the Brand Corporation, and “mutant” can be a pretty fuzzy concept.
X-PLAINED:
Bessie the Hellcow
Spider-Man: Mutant Agenda (the newspaper strip storyline)
Spider-Man: Mutant Agenda (the comic book miniseries)
Spider-Man: Mutant Agenda (the cartoon episodes)
Four-color hoards
Three-panel newspaper comic structure
Sunday strips (and their Mark Trail deceptions)
Hero Jaws – a breakfast-based theory
Spider-Man (Peter Parker)
The Brand Corporation
The Beast (Henry McCoy)
Narratively convenient Spider Sense
Hobgoblin (Jason Macendale Jr.)
Goblin gliders
Picket signs (*air horn sound*)
Finger blasters (heh)
Laser cages
Arcade’s superpower flowcharts
Mutants: newspaper versus comic continuity
Coming home to the 90s
Lisa’s favorite X-Man
Beast’s versatile character design
Spider-to-X ratios
Dark, tortured heroes
Herbert Landon’s selective memory
Confirmation bias
Anti-mutant cancer goo
Ironic reversals
Wolverine, the most marketable mutant
Evil British accents
The most adaptable Spider-Man / X-Men crossovers
The X-Men and the newspaper funnies
NEXT EPISODE: X-Factor mourns and moves on.
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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!
In which Rachel Summers’ continuity somehow becomes even more complicated; X-Men: Phoenix is pretty much a Star Wars (minus the stars); cultural appropriation remains a problem in the distant future; we are surprisingly into the origins of the Askani; and you should totally come see us at FlameCon!
X-PLAINED:
Several Rachels Summers who may or may not actually be the same Rachel Summers
Time, somewhat
Gaunt
Jay & Miles at FlameCon 2019
X-Men: Phoenix #1-3
Bird stuff
What happened after Rachel got sucked into the timestream
High Councilor Diamanda Nero
An extremely poor choice of ornamentation
Luminesca
Ch’vayre
The origins of Blaquesmith
A questionable alias
Diogenes Chang
The Order of Witnesses
A rad team
Malachai Hark
Qua
Lexii
Ozana
The word “Askani”
The Hellhole
A resurrection
Penguins of Apocalypse
Sanctity (Tonya Trask)
A butt-on
The Phoenix Force and its hosts
Characters we’d like to see imported into comics from other X-media
NEXT WEEK: Jay & Miles take a week off.
NEXT EPISODE: Adventures in the funnypages!
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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!
In which you raised a lot of money for Trans Lifeline; we continue to miss Alan Davis; Rory Campbell should not be narrating a climactic event; Daytripper needs to dial up her eldritch patter; the universe is dubiously self-correcting; Britannic is not nearly weird enough; and we have ongoing concerns about the anatomy of incarnate concepts.
X-PLAINED:
The X-Men of Earth-77995
Excalibur #75-77
Daytripper
A somewhat pointless sacrifice
Rough times in the timestream
Britannic
X-theology
D’Spayre’s butt
The rest of D’Spayre
Margali Szardos
The blood-brain barrier
Acrobatic flirtation
The Winding Way
Stark emptiness
A shocking possible resurrection
Major X
Essential characters
NEXT EPISODE: The Adventures of Rachel Summers in the 37th Century!
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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!
In which the Upstarts are the worst at Calvinball; Moonstar remains a non-mystery; Speedball gets a new costume; Shinobi Shaw never gets to finish a bath; Gamesmaster comes perilously close to getting context; Cable gets a new superpower; and Rahne Sinclair is too good for your crossover.
X-PLAINED:
The time Husk went evil
An anniversary
A guest appearance
X-Force #32-33
New Warriors #45-46
A crossover
A game
Younghunt
The semi-debut of Paige Guthrie
Deeply uncomfortable bathing-suit choices
A toy that never actually existed
The New Warriors
Justice (Vance Astrovik)
Night Thrasher (Dwayne Taylor)
Nova (Rich Rider)
Silhouette (Sil Chord)
Kymaera
Speedball (Robbie Baldwin)
Rage (Elvin Haliday)
Firestar (Angelica Jones) (more) (again)
A plan
Bantam
A lot of mind control
A very ambiguous game and its potential implications
Favorite ads
The narrative economy of resurrection
NEXT EPISODE: Mullets of time & space!
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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!
In which Nicole Miller is fashion designer to Earth-1218 and Earth-616, Jay rejects the word “bestest”, we kind of want to just read every word of X-Men #30 aloud, One is a perfect wedding song for Scott and Jean, and you save the last dance for who brought you.
X-PLAINED:
The perils of animated weddings
X-Men: The Wedding Album
Nonstandard trim sizes
Misattributed Oscar Wilde quotes
Shatterstar’s favorite Olympic event
Jean Grey’s short-lived modeling career
Computo, Commander of the Robot Hive
A most excellent wedding dress
Cursive fonts in comics
Jean Grey and Jubilation Lee, ambiguously excellent chosen family
X-Men #30
An event decades in the making
Wolverine, Master of Penmanship
Charles Xavier, reader stand-in
The largely forgotten Madelyne Pryor
The understandably tentative Rachel Summers
The bow-tie scene
A phenomenal two-page spread
A set of perfect vows
A bittersweet song for a bittersweet couple
Victor Creed, vengeful kitty-cat
Rogue and Gambit, best worst wedding guests
Video albums vs. Instagram
Beast and Banshee, jazz combo
Scott and Jean as a couple vs. individuals
The necessity of Scott and Jean’s relationship context
NEXT EPISODE: Goodbye, Phoenix. Hello, Britanic.
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In which an engagement begins; Jean Grey’s Walden Puddle counterpart is definitely Nicole; Cyclops is the telepathic equivalent of a pit trap with spikes at the bottom; Charles Xavier’s subconscious is very dialogue-heavy; nobody ever has appropriate professional boundaries; Cable dabbles in passive aggression; and the best is yet to come.
X-PLAINED:
Some of Blaquesmith’s recent activities
Uncanny X-Men #308-310
A very sweet retcon
Thanksgiving “traditions”
How to scare crows
Emplates
Feelings and telepathy
A proposal
A misprint
Thanksgiving at the Xavier School
A somewhat alarming manifestation of a conscience
The lies Charles Xavier tells himself
Xavier’s depression beard
The evolution of Amelia Voght
Angry Claremontean Narrator: The Movie
The anticlimactic return of Carl “X-Cutioner” Denti
An unexpected resolution
Foreshadowing
Trans voices in the larger comics conversation
NEXT EPISODE: The wedding!
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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!
In which Miles invokes Freddie Mercury; Polaris is more competent than the rest of X-Factor put together; Armageddon theology does not intersect well with superpowers (or politics, or anything else); Val joins a cult (kind of); Random joins the team (kind of); Haven is a surprisingly nonviolent mass-murderer; Havok is confused by women; and good guys don’t have orbital lasers.
X-PLAINED:
Hope across the multiverse
X-Factor #97-100
Haven (Radha Dastoor)
Man, Mutant, and the New Humanity
A very fashionable outfit
One of the greatest Marvel art submissions of all time
Trinket the cat
Catalogs
A dramatic entrance
Mahapralaya (kind of)
Jamie Madrox vs. Jamie Madrox vs. the Legacy Virus
The Trolley Problem
Possession
Orbital lasers as a metric of morality
Monsoon (Aloba Dastoor)
The apparent death of Jamie Madrox
Our favorite takes on the Phoenix
Who our X-Universe counterparts should be
NEXT EPISODE: A very short engagement!
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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!