After a lot of thought, we’ve made the difficult decision to pull out of Emerald City Comic Con 2020. As other creators have written, this isn’t a choice we’ve made lightly–we don’t do a lot of conventions, and ECCC is in many ways our home show, with a lot of love and traditions attached; as well as significant investments of time, money, and planning.
It’s worth pointing out that we’re very lucky: for us, those losses, while difficult, won’t be devastating. We’re also really, really angry, as we watch friends forced to choose between public health and their own livelihoods because the institutions responsible have so completely dropped that ball.
To the friends and fans who were planning to attend the show specifically to see us: we are so sorry to be missing you, and we’ll try to come up with something special over that weekend. To our listeners in the Pacific Northwest, we’re already well into planning an event in Portland at the end of April; while it’s obviously a far cry from ECCC, hopefully we’ll be able to see many of you in person there.
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!
We’re in the process of migrating our official shop to TeePublic! Click over to check it out! (You can still find the designs we haven’t moved yet at Redbubble.)
Click through for the full article, including a lot of mutant metaphor talk and some incredibly blush-inducing quotes from some Very Important People in the X-universe.
Art by David Wynne. Prints and cards available at the shop, or contact David to purchase the original.
In which Rusty is an honorary Bluth; we bid a sad farewell to Bret Blevins; Hogan the Grim is probably the best at bedtime stories; Asgard has really tight hat game; Hela is a remarkably competent supervillain; there are some sound effects you have to earn; Rusty and Skids fight the Vulture; and Miles has so many feelings about Thor.
X-PLAINED:
Cortex
Damian Tryp
Our weird 2016 recording schedule
Jay & Miles at Vegas Valley Comic Book Fest 2016
Recent ResurrXion announcements
The second half of the Asgard Adventure
The end of Bret Blevins’ New Mutants run
New Mutants #82-85
The Odinsleep
A fairly upsetting board game
Volstagg’s awesome kids
Tiwaz of the Wastes
Many excellent hats
Ula and the Savage Swarm
Garm
Miles’s favorite Fenrir story
A remarkably clever villainous plan
A signature sound effect
Karnilla the Norn Queen
Cable’s relationship to Longshot
Recommendations for a comics newcomer
NEXT EPISODE: X-Factor vs. Celestials, as Judgment War concludes!
You can find a visual companion to this episode on our blog!
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!
Jay here, with a brief break from our regularly-scheduled programming! Along with a handful of other podcasts and communities, we’re part of a very small closed beta for a new community-oriented social platform, Imzy; and we’re very pleased to finally be able to invite you to join us!
If you’ve been around long, you may have noticed that we keep a pretty tight lock on the social media we use. We don’t have a Facebook page. We use Tumblr very casually, and largely to boost and crosspost material from our website. Our YouTube comments are permanently disabled; and we do everything we can to direct discussion to the comments here.
There’s a reason for that: it’s incredibly important to us to have our community spaces be fun, civil, and safe; and for those qualities to be supported at an infrastructural level. The community that has come together–largely independently–around this podcast is freaking amazing. You are some of the most engaged, enthusiastic, and all-around nice people we’ve ever met, on or off the Internet. And we want to keep it that way.
Which is part of why we’re excited about Imzy. It’s explicitly oriented around communities–think the rough structure reddit with actual oversight, infrastructure, and active anti-harassment tools. If it works the way we’re hoping it will, it’ll mean a community that you can post directly to–not just comment on our stuff–and a lot of new ways to engage.
Not only is this so far shaping up to be a pretty cool platform, but you also get a totally sweet bribe for joining us there, because Imzy commissioned an X-clusive giveaway t-shirt from the always-amazing Dylan Todd:
I KNOW, RIGHT?!
Here’s how it works: Click over here, and enter your info; and we’ll get back to you with an official beta invite ASAP! We’ll also have physical cards with invite codes with us at ECCC.
As I wrote above, we’re pretty excited about this community, but mostly? We’re really looking forward to seeing you there. <3
On April 13, 2014, we posted the first episode of this ridiculous little podcast: two nerds, at a table, explaining the convoluted continuity of one of our favorite comics.
Almost two years later, it’s like looking back from a different universe. Our weird hobby has become a part-time job. We’ve interviewed some of our favorite creators; traveled across the country; thrown parties and panels; shown up in an actual X-Men comic; been part of an enormous crossover; and explained a quarter of a century of comics continuity. We’ve gone from an audience of friends and family to around 15,000 regular listeners–who, together, have become one of the coolest and tightest-knit communities we’ve had the privilege to be part of.
And you’ve been with us through a lot. In addition to all the stuff above, you turned out for two (soon to be three!) live episodes. You’ve been there through our tenth wedding anniversary; a gender transition and name change; and–as of this week–100 episodes of Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men.
Thanks are in order:
To you, listeners, for sticking with us through 100 episodes of time travel, crossovers, and clones.
To our Patreon subscribers, who let us keep doing what we do ad-free and answerable only to our listeners.
To Kyle Yount, our current producer, who makes us sound way better on the air than we do in the studio.
To Bobby Roberts, our first producer and podcasting mentor, who set one hell of a high bar, and without whom it’s fair to say that none of this would exist in the first place.
To our illustrator and friend David Wynne, who’s bridged what we do back from the audio to the visual.
To AdminstratriX Tina, mistress of the spreadsheets and question files.
To the creators, guest X-Perts, and co-hosts who’ve brought their voices and ideas to our show: Elisabeth Allie, Kris Anka, Marguerite Bennett, Chad Bowers, Elle Collins, Russell Dauterman, Kieron Gillen, Dennis Hopeless, Graeme McMillan, Peter V. Nguyen, Annie Nocenti, Paul O’Brien, Jeff Parker, Greg Rucka, Kieran Shiach, Chris Sims, Si Spurrier, G. Willow Wilson–and last, but far from least, today’s guest: Chris Claremont.
To our off-air partners in crime, Katie Moody and Anna Sheffey, who are just the absolute damn best.
And to the many, many other friends and collaborators who’ve helped make Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men what it is.
We woke up this morning to this amazingness in our Twitter stream:
This is not a photo of us. This is a photo of listeners @StudentofWhim and @Biscainer, who decided to celebrate the new title and URL by cosplaying as the versions of us from our cover art, which is unquestionably the most awesomely Borgesian thing that has ever happened to us in nearly two years of X-Plaining the X-Men.
Speaking of the new stuff, if you’re reading this, it means that we are now at our fancy new URL, xplainthexmen.com! (We almost went with JayandMiles.com, but someone pointed out that we’d have to change it again in a dozen or so years when the Littlest X-Perts come of age and take over, so that just redirects here.) In theory, all of the old links will keep working, but here’s a quick-reference list of where to find what:
iTunes should be showing the correct title now or within the next few days; and your feeds should update automatically.
We’re still working on getting Patreon and Redbubble updated; we’ll let you know as soon as those are moved over (for now, they’re right where they’ve always been).
Obviously, this is a big shift, and it’s involved a lot of coordination, so please pardon any hiccoughs in the days ahead; and let us know if anything’s running wrong, or if you notice the wrong name anywhere!
We were going to wait to announce this until November proper, but we were so excited waiting for the beginning of Secret Convergence that we decided to jump the gun and launch a couple days early.
November’s shirt of the month is… ALL OF THEM. Every shirt of the month ever, back in our store. Check out the designs below–and then read on for a big announcement about the future of the Shirts of the Month!
X-GAMERS – Who needs a Danger Room when you’ve got a Monster Manual? Design by David Wynne
I SURVIVED SECRET WARS – Crossover events come and go, but poop jokes are forever. Design by Dylan Todd
616 OR BUST – The multiverse is waiting! Design by Katie Moody and J. Rachel Edidin
SO, HERE’S THE BIG NEWS:
When we started doing shirts of the month, we were really excited; and over the last ten months, we’ve had a lot of fun and put out some rad shirts. But we’ve noticed two problems:
FIRST: The nature of the Shirt of the Month program means that either we have to pull some of our favorite designs after just a month; or we swamp the store.
SECOND: Because of the first problem, there are designs–ones we really want to do and suspect you’ll really want to wear–that we’ve been sitting on for ages, both because we don’t want them to disappear and because we’re swamped with the monthly stuff.
Fortunately, one of the nice things about being our own bosses is that we get to make the big calls. To that end, here’s what’s going to happen:
Beginning in JANUARY, we’ll be adding some of those shirts to our permanent selection and phasing others out. We’re not yet sure which; so if there’s one you’ve got your heart set on, NOW IS THE TIME TO GET IT.
From January on, there will be no more shirts of the month. Instead, we’ll be adding new designs–and sometimes phasing out old ones–as we come up with ideas we want to do.
THAT DOESN’T MEAN THE END OF LIMITED-EDITION SHIRTS.
One of the things we want to start doing in 2016 is collaborating with local printers to do limited-edition shirts, probably on a pre-order system. They won’t be monthly–but they also won’t be constrained by Redbubble options, which means things like full-bleed designs and a larger size range on limited editions.
EDITED TO ADD: Yes, all our other shirts are still up, too! You can find the whole kit ‘n’ kaboodle at the shop home, or just the shirts of the month over here.
