Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | RSS
In which we actually kind of like a Sabretooth story; we’re not asking for viscera, here; all pants on Earth-616 are tearaway pants; we’d like to see more Wolverine stories about bodily autonomy; Gambit’s hallucinations have hallucinations; and there are probably too many X-books.
X-PLAINED:
- Punch-clock villains
- Hydro-Man’s secret weakness
- 411
- ‘90s fashion
- X-Men Unlimited #17-18
- X-Men Unlimited vs. annuals
- A difficult casting decision
- Forge’s neutralizer gun
- Costume injuries
- Color symbolism? Kinda? I guess?
- Mrs. Hoo
- Saberine & Wolvertooth
- Warren Kenneth Worthington III vs. shirts
- How to dress for Earth-616
- Hot buttered whatever
- Boob foliage
- Clones
- Very tenacious blood stains
- The return of the Angry Claremontean Narrator
- Lots of hallucinations
- Oscar the Fixer
- Hydro-Man
- Redemption, symbolic and otherwise
- The evolution of Magneto’s name
- Our ideal X-line
NEXT EPISODE: Back to the core!
Check out the visual companion to this episode on our blog!
Find us on iTunes or Stitcher!
Jay 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 rad swag at our TeePublic shop!
Is the Worthington family fortunes actually based on the tearaway clothing industry? That would explain so much about the upcoming X-Ranch story arc…
Both your intro and outro made me laugh out loud. Good work!
X-Men Unlimited is a very interesting series in how it changed as the years went on. It started as a quarterly giant size series at $3.95 an issue but, by the end, it was monthly series costing $2.99 an issue and was mostly throwaway short stories. Interestingly, it was never supposed to be a single story per issue. It was originally envisioned as an anthology style book. Or similar to annuals where it would have a main story with a back-up or two. It also cost more than the typical Annual was at the time.
I’ve always been confused by the notion that there too many X Books. As long as they aren’t dependent on each other I’ve always thought Marvel should make as many as they could sell. Whether that was 4 or 16. Since most of them usually stand alone on their own pretty well (minus the occasional crossover like X of Swords) there isn’t any reason to buy them all. It also gives more characters a better chance of showing up since 4-5 titles means that you’d have roughly 25-28 characters appearing at any given time and we already know most of those slots will be filled up with the most popular characters first.
That’s just my opinion, of course, and I don’t ever feel like I’m getting enough X-Men.
I misheard your description setting up the issue and I thought you said that Worthington Industries were trying to reverse Forge’s Neutraliser, rather than “reverse engineer Forge’s Neutraliser” and I spent a long time wondering why that would piss any mutant off.
Also interesting that Angel does make a valid point that there are some mutants who would happily rid themsleves of their powers if they had the option, and years before the comics had Whedon’s “Cure” storyline.
For some reason I was surprised to discover that Travolta is two inches taller than Cage, who always seemed like a lankier type. Live and learn… or immediately forget because I don’t actually care about their heights outside of the context of this paragraph, and have more than enough brain-clogging trivia already.
Angel’s other OTHER nemeses are, of course, his own reflection (he attacks it reflexively) and his tendency to fall asleep when someone drops a sack over his head.
Wouldn’t it have been easier for Shaw to just BUY the Worthington research facility, that tends to be how businesses work, isn’t it? Or possibly make use of his connections as a Government contractor for Operation Wideawake.
Oh yeah, Wolverine and his Clothtonite issues. It’s been a while since I read those issues, but I think it goes…
Purple – Skiing
Orange – Sous-Chef (Apparently there’s one issue with neon orange making him a full Pastry Chef, but that’s possibly non-canonical)
White with equal sized black stripes – Tour Guide
Black with equal sized white stripes – Compulsive arsonist
(Oh, the number of whimsical Silver Age stories that made use of those two!)
Cerise – World class orchestra conductor
Vermillion – He can levitate most breeds of small dog who are within 14 feet of him
Azure – It’s never made clear, but he can do some pretty sick skateboard flips
and last, and definitely least,
Taupe – His eyes change from blue to, ironically enough, taupe.
CANON.
On Angel and guns – he used a gun that fired “gas-filled ping-pong balls” back in his origin story backup strip in the ‘60s.