You are delightful. Did you know that? It is true.
David Wynne sent us this family picture of Wolverine and his many, many off-brand knockoffs! (Reminder: If you like David’s X-Plain art and want to take it home with you, you can do that!)
Tim Siltala imagines Rachel and Miles X-Plain the X-Men as it might exist within the Marvel Universe:
Logan Bonner has dreamed up the best crossover-event villain EVER: Prydeslaught: the dark impulses of Charles Xavier merged with the SPECTACULAR fashion sense of 13-year-old Kitty Pryde!
Logan also sent us two boxes of blue raspberry Twinkies of Future Past; click through below for a brief chronicle of our (fairly tame) adventures with the Official Snack Food of the Sentinel Apocalypse:
Along with Prydeslaught, Logan sent us two boxes of Twinkies of Future Past.
This is what happens when the Sentinels win!
Like their regular-continuity counterparts, the Twinkies of Future Past are pretty vile, so we brought some to a friend’s 4th of July cookout to see if they’d be any better grilled. (Also, someone there recognized Miles based on his voice, which was both weird and awesome!)
Post-grill, the Twinkies looked way worse, but tasted way better.
Also, they turned our tongues hella blue. The end!
“Oh, y’know, idyllic ancestral memories about an 18th-Century Jean Grey who hunted humans for sport.” (X-Men #126)
You know that thing where you visit your parents and they still try to ground you after you stay out late, even though you’re 30? (X-Men #129)
“Professor, this is the Claremont era, not the Silver Age. We evolve dynamically now.” (X-Men #129)
Someday, we’re going to do an entire episode about Emma Frost and the subtle but important difference between weaponized femininity and pandering to the male gaze, and it will be so rad. (X-Men #129)
“Oh, y’know, idyllic ancestral memories about getting married in a cemetery, in fetishwear.” (X-Men #130)
AWKWARD. (X-Men #130)
Ladies and gentlemen, Alison Blaire. (X-Men #130)
People tend to forget that Emma Frost, however briefly, actually managed to holder her own against the Phoenix Force. Daaaamn, Frost. (X-Men #131)
Warren Worthington and his shorts. (X-Men #132)
This scene will be referenced over and over and over until the end of time. (X-Men #132)
“About fucking time you caught on,” says the audience. (X-Men #132)
Aw, Wolverine. We remember when you were cool. (X-Men #132)
In X-men #33, we hit Peak Awesome Wolverine. It’s all downhill from here, kids.
Mostly here for the hat detail, which is pretty clever; and the tiger line, which is not. (X-Men #133)
Beast is a good bro. (X-Men #133)
Sebastian Shaw is legit fairly awesome. (X-Men #134)
Yo, Mastermind, let’s talk about manipulating omnipotent cosmic forces and natural consequences. (X-Men #134)
Oh, shit. (X-Men #134)
Next week: Epic Showdown on the Moon, and what might be the best issue of X-Men ever.
Links and further reading:
The Dark Phoenix Saga has been collected roughly a million times. Here is one such collection. Seriously. You need to just straight-up read these comics. They are very good.
Cameron Harris on Sebastian Shaw (the quote Rachel referenced in the episode but didn’t have on hand):
“So, I was all set up to haaaaaaaaate the HFC and yaaaaaaaaaay Jean and the X-Men. But I didn’t, and it was pretty much because of Shaw. His entrance, his presentation, his presence was all big, bold confidence. He wore those eighteenth-century-dandy duds with complete aplomb, and I could tell almost immediately that he was in charge of everything he wanted to be in charge of. Okay, so a good villain type. This X-fight will be great!
“But he had something I hadn’t expected. I had thought we’d get another (bigger, better, eviller) Mastermind, or a Magneto: grandiloquent (Miles’s word!) and charismatic, would-be king of all he surveys, but not a mano a mano fighter, you know? I’d been reading so many villains whose attacks came from a distance or through non-physical means–and then Shaw is taking a punch from Colossus and laughing about it and taking off his fancy coat to duke it out with the X-Men, and I thought, Holy shit. This guy is the real deal. He’s going to fight them on their terms, not hide behind robots or tele-powers. In fact, the more you beat him up, the stronger he gets! How do you even stop that? (Besides pulling a Hercules-with-Antaeus move, I thought, and was kinda hoping to see that.)
“So. I was into Shaw for that combination: immediate confidence and social control + physical prowess and willingness to fight his own fights. The capper was that when everything at the HFC goes to hell, he hops into a car and leaves. I love a canny opponent who not only isn’t afraid to retreat but doesn’t care how it looks. I commend such priorities.”
In which we wade into the first arc of the Dark Phoenix Saga, Rachel does not like Sage, the Hellfire Club are the mean girls of the Marvel Universe, Cyclops and Phoenix have a Moment, Mastermind ruins everything, Emma Frost is a force to be reckoned with, Wolverine gets awesome, and we meet the Dark Phoenix.
X-Plained:
Sage
The Hellfire Club
The Inner Circle
Jason Wyngarde (again)
Sebastian Shaw
Harry Leland
Emma Frost
Donald Pierce
Hegemony and social politics of the Hellfire Club
18th Century bondage cosplay
Kitty Pryde
The worst disco ever
Alison Blaire
Tiny shorts
How to make Wolverine work
Sexual politics of the Dark Phoenix
Why Magneto’s powers are broken post-AvX
The P.E.N.I.S. five
You can find a visual companion to the episode – and links to recommended reading – on our blog.
Rachel and Miles of 2003, testing out early “Who Would Win in a Fight” hypotheses. Rachel hasn’t had long hair in years, but she still fights dirty.
Cycloptometry, from X-Factor #39.
Some of our favorite X-spinoffs.
That’s Rachel Summers, sending Kitty Pryde’s consciousness back in time in the original “Days of Future Past” comic. (X-Men #141)
Fun fact: the title of this podcast is roughly 90% Michael C. Maronna’s fault. (Photo courtesy of Will McRobb.)
Mystique and Destiny: CANONICAL AS FUCK. (Astonishing X-Men #51)
The Siege Perilous will body-swap you with a Japanese assassin, or send you to Australia, or whatever. Unless you’re Quentin Quire, anyway. (Uncanny X-Men #229)
Lee Forrester takes shit from nobody. (X-Men #143)
You can, in fact, judge this book by its cover. (Nightcrawler #1)
Would you buy logical causality from this man? YES. Yes, you would.
From That One Time Rachel Discovered Blingee and Spent Two Days Doing Nothing but Animating Starbursts on Longshot and Dazzler Covers.
Miles’s favorite superhero.
Just in case you were wondering what it looked like.
In which we answer 45 straight minutes of your questions and alienate everyone with our answer to Jean vs. Emma, Miles is probably too nice to win in a fight, we are really into The Adventures of Pete & Pete, Rachel is the Vega to Miles’s Shepard, Excalibur is awesome, you should stop punching the DNA, Wolverine is Rogue, Longshot is the prettiest man, and Professor X is a pufferfish.
X-Plained:
Who would win in a fight
The Rachel & Miles Fastball Special
Cycloptometry
Backissues, collections, and where to find them
Podcaster ‘shipping
Spinoffs
Rachel Summers (more) (again)
Five tattoos
Non-X stuff we’re into
X-Force versus the Comics Code Authority
Ultimate X-Men
How to keep track of crossovers
Textual queerness
The Siege Perilous
Jean vs. Emma
Some good Nightcrawler and Iceman stories
Dream teams
The Glammest Timeline
Best and worst code names
Bendis’s X-books
X-animals
You can find a visual companion to the episode – and links to recommended reading – on our blog.
In which we more or less prepare you for the upcoming feature film; Rachel Summers is a black hole of continuity; Kitty Pryde breaks the Danger Room; Earth 200500 is clearly the best earth; even the X-Men have no idea what’s going on; First Class Emma Frost is so boring that we forget she exists; wolverines are definitely not wolves; and you can have Rachel’s Community references when you pry them from her cold, dead hands.
X-Plained:
Rachel Summers
“Days of Future Past”
Gravestone engraving standards of 2013
The Mostly-New, Mostly-Different Brotherhood of Evil Mutants
Another unfortunate hat
Causality in the Marvel Multiverse
Earths 811, 1191, 295, 311, and 200500
Hall monitors with laser rifles
How to fix a broken timeline
The X-Men cinematic universe, and points of divergence from the comics
The one thing X-Men: The Last Stand does right
The Xavier Index of Cinematic Continuity
The difference between Canis lupus and Gulo gulo
A Days of Future Past cinematic cram course
Fix-it fic
Blink, Bishop, and dark-future mash-ups
The enduring appeal of Earth-811
The significantly less enduring appeal of Earth-242
The Nazi Excalibur of Earth-597
You can find a visual companion to the episode – and links to recommended reading – on our blog.