Listen to the episode here!
Art by David Wynne. Prints and travel mugs available until 1/11/2015 in the shop, or contact David for the original.
Hope you survive the… oh, wait. (Uncanny X-Men #123)
Next Issue: Spider-Man quotes Atlas Shrugged until the Fantastic Four politely ask him to leave. (Uncanny X-Men #123)
Cyclops: the worst at dates, or definitely the worst at dates? (Uncanny X-Men #123)
Pause for a moment to take in the glory of this perfect murder truck and its perfect sound effects. (Uncanny X-Men #123)
Just for the record, we would TOTALLY read a comic about Cracklin’ Rosa. (Uncanny X-Men #123)
Well. That happened. (Uncanny X-Men #123)
Arcade: Really good at his job, until he’s not. (Uncanny X-Men #123)
It’s a “Hope you survive the experience!” riff! Take a drink! (Uncanny X-Men #123)
Cyclops, look, we know you were kind of raised by a supervillain, but pro tip: people who kidnap you and drop you into funhouse death traps ARE GENERALLY NOT TO BE TRUSTED. (Uncanny X-Men #123)
The sound effect in the blast, tho. (Uncanny X-Men #123)
COSPLAY THIS MAN COSPLAY HIM RIGHT NOW (Uncanny X-Men #123)
If Arcade ever makes it to the big screen, he damn well better be played by Jim Rash. Just sayin’. (Uncanny X-Men #123)
Who gift-wraps the hostages? Do they just have those boxes sitting around? WE MAY NEVER KNOW. (Uncanny X-Men #124)
Cyclops solves problems with optic blasts and geometry! Take a drink! (Uncanny X-Men #124)
‘Kay, then. (Uncanny X-Men #124)
Starring the Most Reluctant X-Men Ever (after that one team Jean Grey put together when Magneto had Professor X hostage in the Savage Land, or I guess probably any other version of the team involving Sunfire). (Uncanny X-Men #146)
Let’s take a moment of silence for how much more awesome this panel would be if Arcade were toying idly with a HeroQuest set. (Uncanny X-Men #146)
GOD, Arcade! Don’t you know ANYTHING? (Uncanny X-Men #146)
NOPENOPENOPENOPENOPENOPENOPENOPENOPENOPENOPENOPENOPE (Uncanny X-Men #146)
More festive pudding-cup hostages! Why? Why not? (Uncanny X-Men #146)
No, but, seriously. (Uncanny X-Men #146)
Phil and Tobe are the Harvey and Janet of Doom Minions. (Uncanny X-Men #147)
Aw, Tobe. You’re a stand-up minion. (Uncanny X-Men #147)
The hell whaaaaat? (Uncanny X-Men #197)
This is kind of like when you go to someone’s house and you’re looking for the bathroom and you open a door that you’re pretty sure is the door to the bathroom and it’s actually a room full of robots dressed up like all your mutual friends. I mean, that happens to other people, right? (Uncanny X-Men #197)
‘Kay. (Uncanny X-Men #197)
THIS TRAIN MONSTER IS SO GOOD. (Uncanny X-Men #197)
You know she’s been saving that one up for like a year. (Uncanny X-Men #197)
I kind of love Arcade and Miss Locke’s original dynamic, before it got super screwed up and sex-murdery. (Uncanny X-Men #197)
NEXT WEEK: Miles returns, and Cloak and Dagger meet the New Mutants!
Places Where You can Find Chris Sims on the Internets:
- LOOK AT ALL THESE PODCASTS
- He’s also the senior writer at Comics Alliance!
- Oh, hey, here’s that one article about Arcade that we mentioned in this episode
Wait, tax money doesn’t pay for phone booths. The telephone company does. In the case of Spider-smashing, probably actually the telephone company’s superhuman damage insurance policy.
“Ooopsie, Victor von Doom fall down, go boom!”
Laughed so hard when this first came out, and I got to do it again today. Thanks for bringing back that memory 🙂
Is it possible Tobe is named after Tobe Hooper, director of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre?
Tope Hooper was my first thought too, though I’m not sure who that would make Phil.
I desperately want to cosplay the Proletarian. I’ve never done cosplay in my life, but that? That, I can get behind.
DOOOOOOO ITTTTTTTT
I’m not sure I can pull off the red overalls look. Of course, I’m not sure anyone can pull off the red overalls look. Which I suppose is kind of the point.
… and now I’m imagining some weird, Chinese equivalent of the Proletarian. This is like when some geeky colleagues and I spent an hour discussing what Captain China would be like, if he existed, and how he would interact with Captains America, Japan, Korea, et al. I think it mostly involved his two-dollar, mass-produced shield malfunctioning, poor guy.
Heh: I just watched Dirty Dancing for the first time this Tuesday, thus making the Wynne image 200% more hilarious.
The picture of Lenin must be there to make it harder to confuse The Proletarain with Super Mario.
I remember a few alternate universes where Colossus had a glorious Mario-esque mustache. Makes me long for seeing him as Mario now.
Hey Rachel, at one point in this week’s show, you seemed briefly perplexed as to part of the reason for the two different X-Men teams/Murderworlds in Uncanny 145-147. I hate to come off as “that guy” but I have to throw in a clarification that I don’t believe was addressed during the show: Doom wasn’t working WITH Arcade, Doom had actually KIDNAPPED Arcade.
It was Miss Locke and Mister Chambers who kidnapped the X-Men’s family members as collateral so the X-Men would rescue Arcade from Doom. The X-Men didn’t trust Miss Locke not to kill them, so they called in the “B-squad” and sent them to Murderworld, while they headed to Toadworld to liberate Arcade.
Side note that I find to be a DELIGHT: Byrne got so pissed that Claremont used Doom in what he thought was a “poor fashion” that in a later issue of Fantastic Four, it’s revealed that THIS Doom is actually a Doombot. If you love over-the-top Doom, I highly recommend hunting down the FF issue where Doom punishes this Doombot for letting Arcade strike a match on him by ‘splodin’ him real good.
I’m so glad you guys came back around to cover this story in more detail as it’s one of my favorites. And it was a delight to hear Chris again, although I will be glad to hear Miles again this week.
Actually, we covered exactly that pretty extensively in Episode 14; I glossed over it here because we were focusing mostly on Murderworld. Sorry for any confusion that caused.
No god please don’t be sorry, you guys are doing great work! There’s just so much info to digest, especially in the Claremont years.
Re-reading this arc always brings me back to a weird theory I have that Chris Claremont does not like Iceman. I have no basis for this other than the fact that Claremont constantly brought Beast Angel and Cyclops back into the title but in his 200 issues only ever used Iceman three times: Here, Inferno, and X-tinction Agenda — and in the case of the latter two, he really had no choice. And I’ve noticed when Claremont does write Iceman, he occasionally comes off as more jerky than normal.
Again I have no basis for this but it’s sort of become my “head canon.”
I’ve always thought this too.
I thought everyone knew that Tobe is a common Latverian name!
But they’re in New York!
Yeah, but I hear all the really big super villain enterprises import most of their rank and file from overseas these days. It’s a good thing Elsie Carson got on board when she did- I hear Hydra’s been doing a lot of cutting back lately, and their medical and dental coverage has really gone down the tubes. I hope for her sake she got her benefits grandfathered in!
I’m also inclined to think that if Latveria’s primary export is angry peasants, they can probably leverage that to break into the henchmen export business. All you really need is a change of clothes and fewer torches.
I’m so glad that Chis mentioned the first Marvel Ultimate Alliance game but I’m surprised that he didn’t mention the fact that Arcade managed to stick Jean Grey in an arcade game of Pitfall, meaning that you essentially had to play an 8bit game inside the massive budget video game in order to proceed. It also was EASILY the most challenging part of the game as me & my siblings found out that we all sucked at Pitfall.
The sliding timeline makes me enjoy the Prolatarian even more, since it now takes place sometime around 2000. In a few years it will move it up to the brief boom in communist-kitsch revival, so that Colossus will have been brainwashed into being a hipster.