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In which the rest of the X-Men return from space; Maggott is the new cool; Gambit’s past catches up with him; Chris Bachalo takes over as regular artist on Uncanny X-Men; Deathbird flirts singularly aggressively; Eany and Meany eat a truck; dating a telepathic ninja is going to take some getting used to; and Havok predictably remains ABD.
X-PLAINED
- Motormouth (Harley Davis)
- Motormouth and Killpower
- Uncanny X-Men #347-349
- Grovel and Spat
- A horse guy who is actually a cat-frog-lizard guy
- An extraordinarily half-assed action figure
- Load-bearing backstory
- Landscape
- The other Nanny
- Elegant foreshadowing
- Beast’s appearance as a mutant power
- Gambit’s chest hair
- The end of playtime
- CCA-compliant foliage
- Deathbird and Bishop
- A vanity plate
- Eany and Meany
- One-off psychometry
- Psylocke vs. Maggott
- Decompression
- Havok’s enduring lack of a Ph.D.
NEXT EPISODE: X-Force hits the road!
NOTE: In this episode, Miles theorized Grovel’s voice as sounding halfway between Cable and Kermit the Frog without realizing that he was in fact just describing Sweetums. -Jay
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Uncanny #348 was my last issue of Marvel Comics, mostly due to the guy at the comic shop being a jerk. I came back at the tail end of Grant Morrison’s run, mostly thanks to finding Paul O’Brien’s X-Axis website, and seeing all the cool new stuff the X-Men were up to. But I DID re-read this run of the Joseph and X-Men in space a few times during the intervening years, and the instant I saw Spat & Grovel figures at Toys “R” Us, I picked them up, along with the rest of their line-mates, Nate Grey and Blink.
It’s so funny that Maggott and Cecilia Reyes got all the hype, but Spat & Grovel got toys literally decades before Maggott. Poor Dr. Reyes STILL hasn’t ever received an action figure.
Re: “Other Nanny”
I like Magneto’s Nanny much more than the one who hangs out with Orphan Maker. The character design (even before Bachalo) is much stronger than Simonson’s weird egg armor, which I’ve never been able to take seriously.
Magneto Nanny actually would’ve been a pretty good substitute for Egg Nanny all along; the kill-the-parents-to-protect-the-children schtick is really something that a robot would’ve come up with moreso than a traumatized scientist.
King Kong climbs the World Trade Center rather than the ESB in the 1976 remake, which I assume would be the version of King Kong that people of the age to be writing/drawing X-Men in the 90s would be likely to remember having seen in the theaters as kids/teenagers.
I hate this ending so damn much. It’s why I finally stopped reading X-Men because this was the final nail in the coffin of bullshit plot they kept coming up with. I didn’t care about giving Gambit a bad secret in his past (and I say that as a Gambit fan), but using the Massacre was in shitty taste, it made for bad retcons, and they twist Rogue’s actual powers around so torturously to make it work that is ridiculous. Not to mention the fact they wrote her into also being the biggest hypocrite on the planet when she leaves him to die.
Honestly, this story is also why I never liked the constant Rogue/Gambit pairing for decades. It took until the miniseries and someone writing them both well and not as a shrill hypocrite and an idiot for me to see they might actually be a good couple.
Joseph was actually one of the Lobdell plots that had a VERY specific twist planned, just like his M, and if you know it you can see the crumbs left as hints. Joseph was planned to be an amnesiac Proteus having taken on Magneto’s form. Joseph is a nudge to Proteus’ dad, Joe McTaggart and there is also a panel where he reacts to a photo of Moira!