Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men

44 – Assembling Legion, with Si Spurrier

Art by David Wynne. Prints, cards, and travel mugs available until 2/22/2015 in the shop, or contact David for the original.
Art by David Wynne. Prints, cards, and travel mugs available until 2/22/2015 in the shop, or contact David for the original.

In which Legion grows from setting to protagonist; Rachel is a master of narrative rationalization; “Claremont” is a verb; Warlock befriends an airplane; Xavier owns a significant mistake; New Mutants does a deep dive into power dynamics; you should go read X-Men: Legacy already; and Si reveals the true secret nature of reality.

X-PLAINED:

  • Blindfold (Ruth Aldine)
  • Luca Aldine
  • Legion (David Haller)
  • Mental illness in fiction
  • New Mutants #26-28
  • Socialized medicine
  • Appropriate gym apparel
  • Rachel’s favorite scene from any X-book, ever
  • Claremonting
  • Jack Wayne
  • Cyndi
  • Jemail Karami
  • Roughly 20 years of condensed continuity
  • The Age of Apocalypse
  • Age of X
  • X-Men: Legacy vol. 2
  • Father issues
  • David Haller’s accent
  • The Origamist
  • Santi Sardina
  • A visual metaphor
  • The true secret nature of reality
  • Professor Y
  • The Franklin Richards Universe Hypothesis

NEXT WEEK: Spotlight on Storm


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18 comments

  1. I’ve been listening to this show for a while and I’ve heard Eric the Red mention and I have no idea who he is. Can some one please tell me?

    1. I don’t remember when we first started talking about him, but he’s not a person, exactly. He was first a cover identity Cyclops used to infiltrate the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, and then another cover identity a Shi’ar jerk used to do bad things on Earth without anyone knowing the Shi’ar were involved. Magneto then jumped on the Erik the Red bandwagon years later. I really enjoy that when it was time to pick a disguise, three separate dudes chose the same implausible and ridiculously-costumed identity.

  2. Hi guys. I just wanted you to know, I’m having a rough time these couple of monthes with my work and daily life, and your weekly podcast is that time in the week when I’m driving home from my evening college and having a smile on my face. Thank you!

    Also, I never read Si’s work in Xmen-Legacy before (was never a Legion fan) but I might just pick it up and give it a try.

    1. I’m really glad we can brighten your week. I hope things get easier soon.

      Legacy is very weird but very good – kinda like Si’s just-finished run of X-Force. Worth it, I say!

  3. Professor Y? Maybe Professor Who? He travels through time and space in a vehicle that’s bigger on the inside and occasionally breaks down for plot-convenience. Also, capable of destroying all of said time and space. Fact.

    1. You are not the only one who has seen this analogy, but that was not intentional.See here http://tmblr.co/ZbIRLt1DpmMYu
      Anyway, the Whovian corner is already occupied in Marvel universe. Before MI:13 there was Weird Happenings Organization, whose founders were Doctor Alistaire Stuart and his sister, Brigadier Alysande Stuart.

  4. Without wanting to jump in to the nineties but in legion quest is it not implied that rather then being Xavier’s son did legion not rape his own mother and become his own father

  5. i really loved si’s xmen legecy and legion, excuse me,
    david (dont call him legion) as a character explored in this run. so great. thanks for choosing to talk about it.

  6. You guys missed the four-issue issue arc David had after Age of X, called “Lost Legions” (it ran in X-Men Legacy #250-253), where he had a handful of his superpowered alternate personalities escape, and he and a handful of X-Men had to travel all over and track them down so he could reabsorb them. It’s the one real major use of the Neural Switchboard Wristband (which he’s not shown using at all in XML Vol. 2).

    That said, this was an awesome episode. David Haller needs more love in general.

    1. Written by Mike Carey. One of my favorite stories from his run on Legacy. I always saw it as a sort of pilot for the Legion-centric V2.

  7. As mentioned by Miles, Jamie Madrox first appeared in Fantastic Four — specifically, in Giant Size FF # 4, written by Chris Claremont. I believe this preceded his start on X-Men. As his co-creator, I guess he felt some affection for the guy, although he didn’t do much with him but have him hang around the background.

    As someone buying these issues off the rack, I never saw Cyndi as an “Ann Nocenti” type. I saw her as a direct riff on Cyndi Lauper. The spelling of the name, wardrobe, hairstyle, manner of speech… yeah, it’s Cyndi Lauper.

  8. So, during the podcast, Si got asked a question of why so many reality warpers in the British Isles, and, having no answer, quite acceptably made up a nonsensical, humorous little story about two old men in the British Isles who talk the world into existence over breakfast each day.

    Cute enough. But this is continuity and comic book explanation, which is SERIOUS BUSINESS. My actual swinging for the No-Prize explanation is The Tower that Crosses Time. It’s established in the Davis/Davis “Excalibur” run that, during an alignment of the multiverse, Merlin, Necrom, and Feron used the Phoenix force to run an anchoring post through the entire multiverse in the form of Excalibur’s lighthouse. This made a temporary alignment permanent. This is NOT how the multiverse is supposed to be. So it begins to chafe, pulling against the Tower that Crosses Time, trying to break loose so everything can move freely again. This is done by the generation of beings capable of reworking reality, to make a go-round around the Tower that Crosses Time. Essentially, the concentration of reality warpers in the British Isles is the body of the multiverse rejecting an implant.

    I have never thought about this until today, but dang if the podcast didn’t get me picking at this question like a loose scab.

  9. When I heard Warlock being afraid that Lockheed was lonely, I was reminded of Brandon Sanderson’s “Stormlight Archive” (a fantasy series) where objects are portrayed as (in their own way) having a certain degree of feelings. It’s cool.

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