Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men

295 – The Nuclear Naked

Art by David Wynne. Wanna buy the original? Drop him a line!

In which this episode may or may not be a temporal aberration; Gambit is bad at marketing; Jubilee’s sixth birthday was probably worse than yours; Earth-295’s chronology doesn’t make that much more sense than 616’s; Super Doctor Astronaut Peter Corbeau wears this timeline well; Rictor makes a terrible Javert; Jubilee has no time for your makeouts; superheroes are basically preschoolers; there is only one Jahf; babies are bad at stealing; and Apocalypse is not a tactician.

X-PLAINED:

  • How Magneto got his own country
  • A numerical convergence
  • Earth-295
  • Gambit and the X-Ternals #1-4
  • X-Ternals
  • The human resistance
  • The Temple of Human Redress
  • A terrible way to celebrate your birthday
  • Lila Cheney of Earth-295
  • The Nuclear Naked
  • Super Doctor Astronaut (mermaid) Peter Corbeau of Earth-295
  • Julio Richter (Earth-295)
  • Mudir
  • Homage
  • Cross-timeline vocabulary
  • Cosmic peril
  • The state of the Shi’ar Empire in Earth-295
  • The Starjammers of Earth-295
  • Varyingly versatile energy absorption
  • Jahf
  • An exchange
  • Some fancy sewers
  • Guido Carosella’s devil’s bargains
  • Earth-295… IN SPACE
  • The nominal justification for Apocalypse’s society
  • Which Apocalypse is currently running around Earth-616

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18 comments

  1. Regarding Kendra, given that the AoA Horsemen of Apocalypse seem to have a higher turnover rate than Spinal Tap drummers, I’m not entirely sure that they are THAT big a step up from the Externals… or even a step “up” at all

    (And because my mind works in odd ways on a Monday, I know want to see a group made up of failed Horsemen who we will call; “The Neigh-Sayers!”)

    Gambit naming his team “The X-Ternals” seems like exactly sort of petty, namecalling, wanting-to-be-a-zinger-but-just-missing, he’d do.

    Warren Kenneth Worthington III wearing a leather hood and obeying a woman’s every order… that’s the most Hellfire Club thing I’ve ever heard of that wasn’t written by Chris Claremont.

    I think movie Poccy and his approach might have impressed me more with his Four Horsemen, his “perfect weapons” weren’t pretty much just the first four mutants he actually met after waking up… and I’m now imagining what he’d have been like if the first four he’d met had been characters like Artie, Leech, Forget-Me-Not and pretty much anyone from the Heartbreak Hotel.

      1. I can see it now;

        “You, Lucy of the Heartbreak Hotel, shall be War, as you change the colour of opponents uniform to look like their own enemy.”

        “You, Leech shall be Famine, as you starve mutants of their powers”

        “You REALLY know how to labour a metaphor, don’t you big guy?”

        “Who said that?”

        “Sigh… I did… ForgetMeNot”

        “You, Arthur Maddicks shall be… Pestilence! No these are NOT ponies… you can’t have a pony. These are Horses worthy of…. Yes, Rarity is my favourite too”

        “You know My Little Pony?”

        “Apocalypse has a lot of free time and a cable package. Wait, who am I talking to?”

        “Sigh… it’s me, ForgetMeNot… oh forget it”

        “You, Forgetme…Ummm whatever your name is shall be… wait, who am I talking to? Hang on, weren’t there four of you a moment ago?”

  2. I mentioned this on twitter, too, but it can just be pronounced Jeff! “Modt & Jahf” is a reference to comic strip “Mutt & Jeff” — just another in a long string of comic strip references from Claremont.

  3. If you’d just taken that Raising Arizona joke one step further, you could’ve said, “Remy! We’re stealing a baby!”

  4. The discussion of the cosmic parts of the storyline got me thinking about the 295 Universe versions of Thanos and Galactus.

    The two are… significant enough factors that I could see them having an impact in some manner or another (Galactus going to nosh on Earth with no Reed Richards and Ultimate Nullifier to stop him, Thanos and the Infinity Stones with no Avengers to fight) – and here’s what I found out.

    There was an issue of “What If…” which tweaks the conclusion of the AoA storyline, with Galactus showing up at the very end, so everyone has to team up to fight Galactus to save the Earth one more time – but apparently this is technically not the actual Age of Apocalypse universe so I dunno. I can’t find a synopsis of that issue, so I don’t know how well it actually plays out.

    However, I can’t find *anything* about the state of the Infinity Gems and Thanos in the Age of Apocalypse universe. Maybe Thanos pulls off The Snap in this universe, maybe he never gets the opportunity to try. I can’t find any information one way or the other.

    1. I have to assume that Apocalypse also dealt with the Z’Nox invasion in his own way, which is the other “big, global, historical event dependent entirely on Charles Xavier’s intervention” that always come to mind for me.

  5. I really hope no one from the Trump administration listens to this podcast or else the Nuclear Naked(tm) may join the super duper missile as the first projects designed by Space Force.

  6. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this felt like Fabian Nicieza was working his notice, but a lot of this did drag for me.

    And then it got better at the end – that final issue is pretty compelling (although for God’s sake, Mr. Nicieza, you can get away with the “soul” line once, but you can’t get away with having two characters say it.). I think that’s because, for me, the only really interesting character element in this is Guido’s heel turn, and that’s all in the last issue.

    In principle, Gambit choosing to rescue Lila *should* complement that, but it suffers from the fact that, as our hosts noted, Lila’s characterization is very flat – she’s a little too overtly just in this story to provide a reason for Gambit to have to make that choice. (And when you get down to it, I just can’t bring myself to give a [expletive deleted] about Gambit in any story. Sorry.) But in any case, to the extent that adds anything, it’s in the last issue as well.

    So what’s the problem with the rest? Well, the first issue is very slow set-up, and then we get two issues of Shi’ar space opera. And, to the extent that AoA has anything to offer, it’s in the alternate Earth, which is where the story is speaking to larger issues. An alternate version of the Shi’ar empire in which D’Ken kept on ruling — that doesn’t really do anything except revisit an old Claremont story in nostalgic mode. But that was a story that derived its interest from the fact that an injection of space opera made for something different. AoA is already something different, which is the point.

    Fabian Nicieza said in his interview with our hosts that what he found frustrating about working on X-Men was that he couldn’t do the stories that were more in the Claremont tradition that he wanted to do. I hate to say it, but this really isn’t the best advertisement for what he might have done. Oh well. He did all that brilliant stuff elsewhere. And the last issue is pretty good.

  7. 616 Strong Guy Also has eyewear, I don’t think the silly Cyclops-esque visor is much further of a leap than the weird pince-nez goggles he wears in X-Factor.
    It is established in X-Factor issue X-Aminations that he wears them to try not to let people see that he’s in pain. AoA Guido might well have similar reasoning.

  8. So, I take that I’m the only person persistently distracted by the notion that AoA Gambit looks EXACTLY like Billy Kaplan would in the same art style?

  9. Very interesting discussion about M’Kraan and what it is and does.

    So how did the AOA world switch back to the 616?

  10. Great ep / thank you for it! Really digging following along with the AOA coverage guys.
    1st X-Pod to GET to AOA. Ive been waitin!

  11. I had a friend called Robert, who I used to play and read comics with when I visited my granny and grandpa in Jordanstown. We had a fairly complicated mythology involving the nation of Alligatoraggifly. There was a large group within it called The Garbians. They were frequently troubled by ‘The Cloth Magnet’ which frequently left them wearing only gloves, boots and (by curious coincidence) Magneto helmets. There were drawings, but as far as I know, none survive

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