Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men

Tag: Professor Xavier is a Jerk

69 – Weird Science, with Elle Collins and Graeme McMillan

29 comments

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | RSS

Art by David Wynne. Prints and cards available until 8/9/2015 in the shop (once Redbubble’s uploader starts working again, anyway), or contact David for the original.
Art by David Wynne. Prints and cards available until 8/9/2015 in the shop (once Redbubble’s uploader starts working again, anyway), or contact David for the original.

In which Elle and Graeme save the day; Hank McCoy joins the real world (sort of) (briefly); Carl Maddicks may or may not be undead; academic discourse in the Marvel Universe leaves a few things to be desired; Steve Englehart is an unsung hero of X-Men; Mastermind lives up to his name; Warren Worthington has a good attitude about mutation; and Avengers Beast is the best Beast; and Graeme has strong feelings about Moira MacTaggert.

X-PLAINED:

  • The complex romantic life of Patsy Walker
  • The increasingly terrible life choices of Hank McCoy
  • Amazing Adventures #11-17
  • Incredible Hulk #161
  • Captain America #173-175
  • Avengers #137, 144, & 178
  • Marvel Team-Up #124
  • Life after the X-Men
  • The Brand Corporation
  • Carl Maddicks (again)
  • Vampire Secret Agent Linda Donaldson
  • The dubious chemical cause of mutation
  • Beast as proto-Wolverine
  • Steve Englehart
  • The high price of passing
  • Several unusually realistic latex masks
  • Norman Mailer’s Handbook for Unliberated Women
  • Sad clowns
  • Buzz Baxter
  • Hellcat (Patsy Walker)
  • Someone who might be Carole King, Indira Gandhi, or your sister (but isn’t)
  • Questionable corporate practices
  • Quasimodo (but not that one)
  • Semantics of fur color
  • The Griffin
  • The Secret Empire
  • Actual supervillain Richard Nixon
  • Mimic (Cal Rankin)
  • Avengers Auditions
  • Best Beast stories
  • Scotland

Special thanks to guest hosts Elle Collins & Graeme McMillan!

NEXT WEEK: Everything is terrible.

You can find a visual companion to this episode on our blog!

Find us on iTunes or Stitcher!

Rachel 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 prints of this week’s illustration at our shop, or contact David Wynne for the original!

Rachel Recaps X-Men: Evolution
S1E1: Strategy X

43 comments

I was a little too old to catch X-Men: Evolution the first time around. It debuted my freshman year of college, corresponding with the peak of my nerd pretension—that larval-geek phase where you insist on calling all comics graphic novels—and like the arch little fucker I was, I dismissed it sight-unseen as X-Men dumbed down.

A few years ago, I finally sat down and watched my way through X-Men: Evolution and came away with two conclusions: teenage Rachel was kind of a dolt; and X-Men: Evolution is delightful.

Not only is Evolution not X-Men dumbed down, it’s a really clever, appealing reinvention. In fact, Evolution accomplishes what the Ultimate universe never quite could: shaking off years of continuity and attracting an entirely new audience with a distilled version of one of Marvel’s most convoluted lines.

groupshotIf you’re not familiar with X-Men: Evolution, the premise is roughly thus: The Xavier Institute is an extracurricular boarding school of sorts, whose students are mainstreamed into their district school—Bayville High—for academics. Some of the characters—Storm, Wolverine, and Professor Xavier on the side of the angels; Mystique, Magneto, and a few others on the other end of the moral spectrum—stay adults; everyone else is aged down to teenagers. Evolution draws characters and some story hooks from the comics, but for the most part, it occupies its own discrete continuity.

And as continuities go, it’s a good one. It’s clever and fun, it’s got a ton of heart, and it stays true to the core themes and characters of the source material without becoming overly beholden to the letter of the text. By the end, it’ll become a really, really good show; but even when it’s bad, X-Men: Evolution is bad in really entertaining ways.

Which is important, because X-Men: Evolution gets off to a pretty rocky start.

Continue reading

As Mentioned in Episode 9 – Leprechaun Surprise Party

4 comments

Listen to the podcast here!

Cassandra Nova: The worst evil disembodied parasitic sister ever.
Cassidy Keep (X-Men #101)
Nightcrawler is just ridiculously charming. (X-Men #101)
I keep trying to think of a Monster in a Box joke to make about X-Men and vacations, but no matter where it goes, it’s not going to be in good taste. (X-Men #101)
Page 3 of Storm’s origin flashback. Can we talk about Dave Cockrum splash pages and how they are AWESOME? (X-Men #102)
After the “Cyclops Has a Good Day” sketchbook is full, Rachel’s going to move on to “Cyclops tells Professor X to go fuck himself.” (X-Men #102)
And then, Leprechauns. (X-Men #103)
Here, Nightcrawler. Have a new mutation. And also I guess some more Leprechauns, because, why not? (X-Men #103)
Even fake Charles Xavier is kind of a douche. (X-Men #103)
“We also know what you think about when you masturbate.” (X-Men #103)
The rad bromance of Cain Marko and Tom Cassidy. (X-Men #103)
“Whaddayamean, ‘roll diplomacy’? I put all my points into claw weapons!” (X-Men #104)
Secondary mutation: awesome villain speeches. (X-Men #104)
So, that happened. (X-Men #104)
Cockrum is REALLY into this layout. (X-Men #105)
Fun fact: Misty Knight is the only one of these characters alive in the modern Marvel universe. (X-Men #105)
Phoenix wants you heralds of Galactus off her damn lawn. (X-Men #105)
Shi’ar Trek. (X-Men #105)
AND THEN THINGS GOT AWESOME. (X-Men #107)
“While you guys were fighting the functionally omnipotent Superboy clone, I beat a guy up and stole his clothes.” Wolverine: Chaos gamer. (X-Men #107)
I’m not sure what he expects Captain America to do about this. (X-Men #107)
The Phoenix Force. (X-Men #108)
More majestic Phoenix action. (X-Men #108)
“I realized that I’d left some scenery unchewed, and that would NEVER do.” (X-Men #111)
Magneto is COMMITTED to the supervillain schtick. (X-Men #112)
NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE (X-Men #112)
Okay, then. (X-Men #113)
Next week on Rachel and Miles X-Plain the X-Men!

9 – Leprechaun Surprise Party

15 comments

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | RSS

In which Rachel refuses to back down from a challenge, we reject a point of canon, Leprechauns know Wolverine’s secrets, Erik the Red is (still) awful, Professor X is (still) a dick, the X-Men are your D&D party, the Shi’ar do a Star Trek riff, Phoenix is kind of a big deal, the circus comes to town, and Magneto gets creepy.

X-Plained:

  • Cassandra Nova
  • More early Claremont
  • Sound effects
  • Cassidy Keep
  • Seneschals
  • Shillelaghs
  • Image inducers
  • Black Tom Cassidy
  • Supervillain bromance
  • Bronze-age pacing
  • Leprechauns
  • Hovercraft rental
  • Muir Island
  • The Shi’ar Imperial Guard
  • The M’Kraan Cyrstal
  • Phoenix 101
  • Secret volcano lairs
  • Magneto’s mercifully short-lived age-play fixation
  • The (dis)continuity of mutant powers

You can find a visual companion to the episode – and links to recommended reading – on our blog.

Find us on iTunes or Stitcher!

Next week: Wolverine punches a pterosaur, Cyclops grows a mustache, and everyone gets possessed!

 

Summers School: Gabriel 101

5 comments

On Episode 5 – The Retcon that Walks Like a Man, we met Gabriel Summers, and did a very quick drive-by introduction to the Summers family and their really depressing space adventures. Because this shit is complicated, Rachel,* the resident Summers Family Continuity expert, has put together a brief visual guide to Gabriel’s backstory. Click through for the origin of the third and worst Summers Brother:

Meet Scott and Alex Summers! They’re brothers. Their parents have just pushed them out of a burning airplane. Scott and Alex are going to crash in a minute and then have awful childhoods, but all you really need to know for now is that they’re going to become X-Men when they grow up.
Meet Mister Sinister! He’s a creepy, creepy man who knows even more about the Summers family than Rachel does (and that’s a lot). In 1993, Mister Sinister let slip that Scott and Alex might have a third brother, and for over a decade, pretty much every orphan in the Marvel Universe had “probably a Summers brother” stuck on to the end of their official bio.
But in 2005, X-Men: Deadly Genesis came around. Deadly Genesis was a straight-up retcon of 1975’s Giant-Size X-Men #1. It also—finally—resolved the question of the third Summers brother.
Meet Christopher and Katherine Summers! They’re Scott and Alex’s parents. They’ve just thrown Scott and Alex out of a burning airplane, then gotten abducted by aliens. This part of the story has been X-canon since the ’70s—but what Deadly Genesis reveals is that Katherine is pregnant. Christopher gets sent off to the slave pens, and Katherine ends up a Comics Code-compliant-analogue-to-concubine of the evil space emperor. Christopher breaks out and tries to free her, but he’s caught, and Katherine—and apparently her now-nearly-to-term fetus—are killed. (Christopher later becomes a space pirate named Corsair, which is awesome but irrelevant to this particular story.)
Meet Fetus Summers, who turns out to be viable after all! He gets rapid-aged by means of Fancy Space Science, named Gabriel, and sent to be a slave of the Shi’ar’s representative on Earth. Later, his powers manifest and he kills the only person who was ever nice to him, then escapes into the sewers with nothing but his favorite book of Roman myths and a case of dramatically expedient amnesia.
Gabriel gets picked up by Dr. Moira MacTaggert—Professor X’s ex—and becomes one of her group of teen mutants in training, under the code name Kid Vulcan. X consults—and, in the process, pieces together Gabriel’s history but doesn’t tell anyone, in keeping with a long tradition of lying to Scott about the existence of his living relatives. Professor X is a dick.
To confirm his theory, X brings Scott out to train with Gabriel for a day—but still doesn’t tell either of them that they might be brothers. (Gabriel’s powers, incidentally, have to do with energy manipulation and redirection, which his how he can do that with Scott’s eye beams.)
When the X-Men are all captured on Krakoa (the Island That Walks Like a Man!), X convinces Moira’s kids to go rescue them. Immediately before they leave, he tells Gabriel that Scott and Alex are his brothers. The new kids rescue Scott, and Gabriel tells him that they’re brothers. Scott’s super beat up and his powers are broken, so the new kids leave him and go to rescue the rest of the captive X-Men—but instead, they all get killed.
Scott returns to the X-mansion, understandably distraught. X decides the most expedient course of action is to totally wipe Gabriel out of Scott’s memory. Did I mention that Professor X is a dick? Professor X is a dick. When the new X-Men return to Krakoa to rescue the original team, he continues to mess with their perceptions to support this version of events.
What X doesn’t know is that Gabriel and his teammate Darwin are actually still alive, so when the X-Men launch Krakoa into orbit, Gabriel and Darwin go with it. They get stuck in stasis for years, in space. OOPS.
Later, Gabriel wakes up pissed, comes back to earth, kills Banshee, kidnaps Scott and Scott’s alternate-timeline-future-daughter (I know, I know. Just run with it.), and forces Professor X to show them what actually happened. Darwin—still in stasis inside Gabriel—is extracted and revived, Gabriel flies off to fight an evil space empire, and absolutely no one lives happily ever after. X-Men!

*Edidin, not Summers or Grey.

1 – The Strangest Podcast of Them All

28 comments

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | RSS

In which we begin at the beginning: everything clicks with #3, Professor Xavier is a jerk, Magneto is a fearless fashionista, Cyclops gets a name, Jean Grey has a chronic case of the Silver Age, and allegorical diversity is not enough.

X-Plained:

  • Mutant genetics and taxonomy
  • Practical semantics of “X-Men”
  • Charles Xavier’s equally dubious ethics and decorating choices
  • Superhero couture of the Atomic Age
  • Why Cyclops can’t control his powers
  • The miracle of comic-book magnetism
  • A problematic analogy
  • X-books for beginners
  • Snow grenades
  • The word “yaybo”
  • The mystery of the ubiquitous plaid suit

You can find a visual companion to the episode – and links to recommended reading – on our blog.

Find us on iTunes or Stitcher!