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In which we celebrate a birthday; nuclear war is never a good Plan A; every Logan is Old Man Logan; we are underwhelmed by the Pretty Boys of Earth-295; Jean Grey is one hell of a pilot; there are so many reasons not to like Donald Pierce; teleporters are the narrative nuclei of the Age of Apocalypse; and Gateway of Earth-295 deserves significantly more in-depth exploration than we can provide.
X-PLAINED:
- Weapon X (Logan)
- Weapon X #1-4
- Irony
- Coordinating costumes to tattoos (and vice versa)
- How to ride a sentinel
- Apocalypse’s sea wall
- Mutant power classifications
- The mass human evacuation
- Nuclear war
- Magma
- A load of malarkey
- Interactions of telepathy and PTSD
- The Pretty Boys of Earth-295
- How not to jump out of a zeppelin
- What Carol Danvers smells like
- Gateway (Earth-295)
- An exceptionally high-tech guilt trip
- Unconventional navigation
- Character transformations between universes
- The complex conundrum of Jean Grey
- When humans became aware about mutants
- Logan’s D&D alignment
- Our own D&D character histories
NEXT EPISODE: Factor X!
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Congratulations on your podiversary! However, I’m waiting until ep 300. One of you will be bagged and slabbed, the other will be wrapped in chromium.
In other news, I once read that it was Toad who turned humans against mutants. Early on, he won some local sporting event. Humans realised they were outranked even by the bottom end of mutantdom, even in everyday life, and relations only worsened from there.
I’d forgotten about that early issue, yeah! If I recall, the Trask issue doesn’t specifically reference that Toad story, but it slots nicely in continuity-wise.
Very confused by your cold open. You talk about Wolverine in Age of Apocalypse and I’m sure she doesn’t get created until a decade later.
There remain some interesting questions to be asked as to WHEN the split happened again, which the sliding timescale ensures will never be asked.
If Monty Python is known, especially a quote from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” which didn’t come out until 1975, it’s a heck of a lot later than I’d have expected.
Though I imagine it’s not how it ended up, the “fusing with the giant hand thing” just makes me think of a truly weird character from Milestone’s Xombi series (a seriously underrated series IMHO), where the hero is a sort of zombie since an accident left him with nanobots determined to make sure he stays aive at all costs, cannibalising any nearby organic matter to do so (He was not a team player). He soon meets up with all sorts of oddities with gloriously wince-inducing pun names like The Nun of the Above. The one I’m thinking of was “Manuel Dexterity”, a guy who is human from the waist up and a giant hand from the waist down, aka the Manotaur!
Teleporters being key in many of these stories makes sense in a world far more focussed on combat and military strategy since the ability to deliver your weapon to their target without them being able to track the route would be invaluable. It especially doesn’t surprise me that it’s Larry Hama who makes use of it like this.
I’m intrigued, I had no idea that the mutant overlord costume originated in Marvels, I think I’d assumed it was harking back to something actually from the Silver Age, that Marvels had referenced.
Did the MU population know that Namor was a mutant back in WWII. He did good work with the Invaders, but one has to wonder how many invasions of the surface dwellers one can take before the mutant threat becomes more pronounced in the media.
And a Happy Podcast Anniversary to you both!!
Thank you, Icon!
Since we may have been unclear in the episode – the mutant overlord costume *first* appeared in 1965’s X-Men #14, but it became much better known (and became enough of a symbol for Morrison to reference it years later) in Marvels. So – credit to Lee & Kirby (and Werner Roth, who co-penciled) first and Busiek & Ross second!
Site question: are folks still getting duplicate comment errors after 10:00 AM Pacific Time on April 14th?
If so, what’s the exact error message you’re getting, and what web browser are you using?
This is the first time I’ve posted that I haven’t gotten the message, which used to read “Oops! It looks like you’ve already posted that!”
Didn’t get the “You’ve already made this posted” message when I made the post above, so that’s a good sign I think!
Here’s my test comment.
And since I have to have some content to it I suppose, I will say that this episode is made substantially weirder for me by the fact that the world “malarkey” never fails to conjure up Joe Biden in my mind.
No “Duplicate comment detected – it appears that you already said that” Evil Warning.
Hung for a bit, and then took a little while to appear, but not the couple or so hours it was taking previously.
Follow-up: after I posted my second comment, both comments vanished and did not reappear for a long time.
I hope this diagnostic information is helpful.
Two steps forward, one step back…
The timestamps I’m seeing show your initial two replies at 2:28 PM and 2:31 PM (Pacific Time, so GMT -07:00). From what you remember, does that line up with when you initially posted them or with when they came back?
[Translates to Eastern Time.] I’m pretty sure that the timestamps are accurate to when I posted, not when they appeared.
Loving the Donald Pierce voice, hope you do it again! Despite him being…blown up pretty thoroughly in this universe…I think he comes back as a guy named Goonight though?
I’m slightly torn as to whether I want to read that a “Goodnight”, which sounds like he wants to be a Bond Girl (It’s Britt Eklands name in “The Mad with the Golden Gun”) or “Goo Knight” with the implication they just schlepped whatever organic bits were left of him into a suit of armour and let him loose.
Both seem like something Pierce would do.
So many of the characters in the AoA ongoing series seem to act like the original AoA didn’t happen. Donald/Goodnight is a prime example, but Emma Frost’s heel-turn is in some ways more egregious – it acknowledges original AoA continuity, but gives the character completely contradictory motivations with only the barest justification. And then there’s Bruce Banner’s rewrite, which is just… weird.
That said, Pierce going from exaggerated, sadistic, cackling, thoroughly exploded maniac in Weapon X to a quiet, regretful warrior in later AoA is… a definite stretch.
I’m absolutely excited that you guys are at Age of Apocalypse during it’s 25th Anniversary.
It’s amusing to think that the Marvel of 25 years ago would be hyping up that fact with a sequel event, complete with gimmick covers.
I wasn’t as big a fan of 295 Logan as I was the 616 version. I just didn’t like him as a character.
I also wish that Jean Grey’s look here would have carried over to the 616.
Well I am going to have to catch up with this podcast and many others some time in the future when I am driving to and from work again; I gradually filled up those 5 hours a week with a variety of podcasts that are now just accumulating on my hard drive. (Being at home has its own set of time obligations.)
Appropriate, though, to put things on pause at the beginning of a massive in-comic reality shift due to a massive in-reality reality shift. See you all hopefully soon!
: It wasn’t soon.
You still beat me!
AoA Gateway whole saving a record of human culture while it’s still reminding thing is interesting to think about in context of how much Australian Indigenous culture was destroyed by colonization and is now lost, preservation of the remaining languages is a big focus for a lot of organizations here. It feels like an instinct that comes from the loss of culture already experienced.