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In which we begin our coverage of The Twelve; Scott and Jean get sucked back in AGAIN; Apocalypse probably doesn’t tip; and we have become awfully fond of Cable.
X-PLAINED:
- A codename that deviates from common patterns
- The story so far
- Uncanny X-Men #376
- Cable #75
- X-Men #96
- Fiz the Skrull (again)
- The Twelve
- Foreshadowing, both accurate and otherwise
- The Living Monolith (more) (again)
- That one font
- Time-travel logic
- Cable vs. eyes
- Fabian Cortez (more) (again)
- A trap
- Why the Twelve are the Twelve
- The evolution of Cable
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Miles enjoyed that Shonobi Shaw bit waaay too much 🙂
(And so did I!)
So, while I get that overall The Twelve may not be the best story, it’s still really cool to hear you guys talk about it in depth. The Twelve was the first X-Men story I read when I started reading the comics as a kid, so I have been looking forward to hearing this covered.
Can someone help me figure out the chronology? Jay and Miles say (several times) that The Twelve is the culmination of “22 years of comics,” but then the first reference they cite is an issue of X-Factor from 1987–only 13 years before the issues covered in this podcast.
What am I missing?
Thanks!
Ha, whoops – you’re missing what we missed, which is an embarrassing math error! Since The Twelve starts in 1999 (as far as release date, not cover date), it should have been 12 years, but… I guess my brain wanted to increment that first digit. Curses.
…although come to think of it, I guess it’s kind of cool that it took twelve years to finally reveal the true nature of The Twelve!
Glad to see The Twelve finally tackled. It was one of the unresolved plot threads in X-Men when I stopped reading comics in the mid-90s, and when I returned years later and sought out what the final resolution was, none of the summations made any sense.
I don’t expect the story to make much sense now, either, but it’ll help seeing the building blocks being assembled even if they don’t add up to anything in the end.
One thing that struck me as odd was picking Wolverine as Death rather than War — and, for that matter, why Death always gets to be the bandleader and Big Reveal whenever the Horsemen are trotted out. (Remender’s Horsemen is an exception to this, maybe?)
I was very disappointed at the sheer lack of imagination in the selection of “The Twelve”.
It was a lot more interesting (to me) as a group who would be pivotal as the mutant leaders of the present and future, so Sam, Dani and Franklin made a lot sense, and be people a future Sentinel like Nimrod would likely wish to remove from the playing field as soon as possible.
Instead we get Apocalypse using (and Destiny conveniently seeing) a team of very specific powers who, co-incidentally, happen to be “most of the OG X-Men and some others”… It’s the single dullest and least exciting combination it’s possible to imagine.
As for wanting to learn Krakoan, I do like the fact that the “base Krakoan” font which Doug and Krakoa speak between themselves is also a substitution alphabet, and one which was previously used for a demonic language spoken in Limbo in the 2009 New Mutants series, and that the primary word used when Krakoa is speaking to Doug is literally “gibberish”.
Adds a whole new dynamic to the Quiet Council! 🙂