Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | RSS
In which Nightcrawler does Weird Tales; Iceman does Back to the Future; we want a vacation home in Dave Cockrum’s brain; Bamfs are terrible; the 1983 Iceman miniseries is straight-up bananas; parents just don’t understand; and Rachel will take literally any excuse to talk smack about John Ruskin.
X-PLAINED:
- Vanisher
- Nightcrawler #1-4
- Bizarre Adventures #27
- Iceman #1-4
- The Well at the Center of Time
- The downside to hanging out with pirates
- A shark wizard in a tiny loincloth
- Better living through sound-effect awareness
- Boggies
- The key to a classic Nightcrawler story
- Earth-5311
- Bamfs
- The full extent of Rachel’s Smurfs knowledge
- Cretaceous Sam
- Sehv
- Illyana Rasputin’s porn collection
- The Drake family
- An exceptionally unlikely girl next door
- The definitive Miles’s Mom anecdote
- Marge Smith / Mirage
- White Light
- Idiot
- Kali (but not that one)
- Two generations of Officers Ratchit
- Pornography no one wants to see
- Death by time travel
- Oblivion
- Night Man (kinda)
- Our ideal cross-media adaptations
NEXT WEEK: X-Men ’92, with Chris Sims and Chad Bowers!
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!
I’m just glad the Vanisher quit dressing in an outfit made entirely of bathmats.
The Nightcrawler series will be reprinted in the next X-men Epic Collection, later this year.
Oh, nice! Do you have a link to what’s going to be in that one?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvel_Ultimate_Collection,_Complete_Epic_and_Epic_Collection_lines
The Iceman mini-series has also been reprinted, albeit in black and white, in Essential Defenders #7. Bizarre Adventures #27 can be found in the Uncanny X-Men Omnibus Vol. 2.
Oh! Essential Defenders #7 also collects the Beauty & the Beast mini in case nobody brought it up back in the Dazzler episode.
The Iceman series (in colour) and his Bizarre Adventures story were collected in those hardcover collections a few years ago. I think they did most of the limited series (Magik and Fallen Angels for sure)
Isn’t John Ruskin the guy who divorced his wife because he didn’t like her body?
Explicitly because she was post-pubescent, yes. John Ruskin was the goddamn worst.
I actually bought these minis off the racks back in the day. This was the time when I first got into comics in middle school, inspired in part by the “Spiderman and His Amazing Friends” series. I picked up the X-Men almost entirely because I thought they looked cool based on their cartoon appearances (and got confused very, very quickly, as this was right after Storm lost her powers and went punk, and then there were dire wraiths and Kulan Gath and Rogue was just really hard to understand for a newcomer, and well … all that).
I also picked up The New Defenders because Iceman was in it, and the surreal tone of the miniseries very much reflects the tone of the comic he was in at the time, which I think you guys talked about a little in the X-Factor podcast. I’m not sure if DeMatteis was still writing the comic at the time, but he definitely set the tone.
I thought it was all remarkably crazy, but since I was new to comics, I had no context to think there was anything unusual about it. It is funny to look back on the kinds of comics that got me into collecting and realize how strange they were.
I know its not an X-men title, but I’m surprised neither of you mentioned Moonshadow, J.M. DeMatteis and Jon J. Muth’s graphic novel. I would consider that to be the work most associated with DeMatteis,and there are some interesting parallels between that story and the Iceman miniseries.
My very first issue of Dragon Magazine (official D&D fan magazine put out by TSR) had the game stats for all the characters from Kitty’s Fairy Tale / Nightcrawler’s miniseries for the old Marvel blue-box RPG. (Or maybe the yellow box precursor?)
I forever after felt that all other Wolverines are inferior to the version from those stats, because no other Wolverines could chew up & spit beer cans as genuinely effective ranged weaponry.
If you can find or make a scan of that, we’d be forever grateful!
I SECOND THIS SENTIMENT SO HARD.
It looks like a compilationo of the Marvel-Phile column from Dragon Magazine can be found at:
http://www.classicmarvelforever.com/cms/assets/images/other_stuff/downloads/Netbook.Compiled.Marvel.Phile.gif
It has the characters from Kitt’s Fairy Tale on pages 36-38 of the PDF.
Sorry, the correct link for the PDF is as follows:
http://www.classicmarvelforever.com/cms/assets/files/other_stuff/downloads/downloads_hidden/Netbook.Compiled.Marvel.Phile.pdf
“BEER: Mean always appears with a sixpack
of beer under one arm He does not
part with it until it is consumed, which he
does by tossing the cans in his mouth and
crushing them. His Fighting is only Excellent
if hampered by carrying his beer, but
he may spit out the crushed empty cans as
missile weapons with a range of three
areas, firing up to three of them per
round and inflicting Good slugfest damage
with each.”
A pdf of them is available here in the “Compiled Marvel Phile”.
http://www.classicmarvelforever.com/cms/netbooks-and-enhancements.html
Pages 37-39 have the characters from the Nightcrawler limited series.
Thanks, all! This is awesome.
Clearly, I have been beaten to the punch! I am glad that such stuff is available online. Dragon didn’t have a whole lot of Marvel stuff (to my memory), so this always stood out in my memory.
Nice One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest reference in officer Ratchit’s name.
Nightcrawler and She-Hulk starring in a bonkers meta-aware team-up book? Yes, please.
Is there anything that is comparable to this Cockrum nightcrawler run, writing-wise and ridiculousness-wise?
Speaking of offbeat solo X-Men adventures, can I suggest the “X-Men Rarities” TPB? It collects Bizarre Adventures #27, RECOLOURED in splendiferous fashion, along with Marvel
s first unoddicial mutant story, a Gen-X volleyball game (yay!) story and Marvel Fanfare #40 with the prelude to the Storm losing her powers story (and they gayest Mustique story ever)