Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | RSS
In which you, too, can use Cerebro; Jubilee is here, for some reason; the Xavier School should absolutely not be accredited; Hulk Hands would solve many of Rogue’s problems; Sauron gets a gun; Psylocke pulls a Lois Lane maneuver; you really shouldn’t spring a Phoenix costume on anybody; Joseph has (another) identity crisis; and Canada has problems.
X-PLAINED:
- Miles at SDCC
- Uncanny X-Men #353-355
- X-Men #73
- A running motif
- Wolverine’s sons
- Margaret Stone
- “fun”
- The location of the original X-jet
- A red herring
- Sauron (more) (again)
- Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy… in space!
- How to ship a pterodactyl
- Mighty appendages
- The Agee Institute
- Boundaries
- Wallpaper
- Joseph (more) (again)
- New Year’s Resolutions
- Sebastian Shaw and his wraith buddy (again)
- The X-Men’s answering machine
- What Wolverine does
- Alpha Flight
- Canada problems
- A crossover
- Phoenix problems
- Jean Grey’s ‘90s costume
- Found families
- What makes the Dark Phoenix Saga an X-Men story
NEXT EPISODE: Reignfire, resolved!
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!
Funny Sauron pics
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1hHfUN-3m6soBqzYwxiCyfMezRfWeYbhH?usp=sharing
Sauron has actually packed a gun for a while. Looks like Byrne was the one who added the gun to Sauron’s look, way back in X-Men 115.
Related question: why does Dr. Doom also wear a side arm? Is the armor not enough?
Was a side arm the twirling mustache of comics’ Bronze Age?
Miles is right on — Jean died on the moon in her Phoenix costume (not Marvel Girl). She turned into Phoenix then into Dark Phoenix by the time she blasts herself with the Kree cannon thingie.
That is some very, very VERY comic book type monologuing from Sauron there!
I wonder if the “Logan has a son” thing was supposed to link to the implication in the concurrent Alpha Flight series that new member Flex might be Logan’s son.
Radius and Flex were half brothers Jared and Adrian Corbo, same mother, different fathers. Jared’s dad was eventually revealed to be Unus the Untouchable (Who started as a wrestler rather than a boxer, but his memories of his father were hazy at best, so that wasn’t a big deal) which ties in with his own force field powers.
But Adrian’s wasn’t revealed… I don’t think, though I’m pretty sure it was hinted it might be Logan. Can anyone with a better memory of the rest of the series recall?
Man, has Jean ever looked better than when Bachalo drew her in this look? I have long wondered if the reason Jean’s costume was that off orange and blue look was because Lee had a more Green-ix(love this new term)-style take for his design and then had to change it late in the game for whatever reason:
http://unpublishedxmen.blogspot.com/2013/07/jim-lee-and-scott-williams.html
Likewise, maybe they considered keeping her X-Factor look per this Portacio image that circulates. Seems like they were playing around a lot with looks and line-ups for the relaunch, and maybe poor Jean just got stuck with an ill-considered look for her big cartoon debut (with an animation cheat pony tail for bad measure): https://i.redd.it/vwjm4t8qygq91.jpg
Speaking of Canada being evil… the leading researchers into biological weapons among the Allies during WW2 were… yes… the Canadians.
As Icon_UK mentioned, Seagle was building up to a reveal that Logan had a son he didn’t know about, and that was new Alpha Flight member Flex, with the power to turn his hands into thin metal blades, over at Alpha Flight v2 which he was writing at the same time. The foreshadowing over in that other book was NOT subtle. In the end he was not allowed to do that reveal, so it remains unofficial. Flex would have been a very interesting addition to the Wolverine family, he’s very thin and reserved / mousy, he looks a lot like what a young James Howlett would end up looking like in the later Origin series.
The Alpha Flight v2 series is an amazing read, btw, it’s worth covering at some point, it’s one of the best Marvel books of the 90s and a huge departure from what the book was, like a Vertigo series set in the Marvel U. Its second year will be drawn by podcast fave Duncan Rouleau. The book has a very interesting crossover with Seagle’s UXM, where each title’s issue covers THE EXACT SAME FULL STORY, but from that team’s perspective, it’s easy to miss that the actual titles crossover, as it looks like the teams crossover in each others books instead.
Rogue went to a scientist to try to remove her powers in the ‘92 animated series. Scientist turned out to be Mystique working for Apocalypse. That’s what this story beat was reminding me of.
Yes! Also called, like the Whedon storyline, “The Cure.” I remember the Apocalypse being a little off there.
Really enjoyed the conversation about Jean’s costume change, slow reemergence as Phoenix and Scott’s reaction to it.
To me, this – somewhat aborted – little arc is essential to understanding Scott’s later distancing of Jean and his cheating during the Morrison run.
Essentially, Scott can’t handle Jean becoming more powerful. But to dismiss this as “Scott can’t handle a woman being more powerful than him” would be ungenerous.
We know that when Scott first believes Jean dead – back in the Claremont days after the X-Men escape from Magneto in Antarctica – he doesn’t mourn her loss. He later acknowledges that he shut himself off from his feelings because losing Jean was too much etc.
He is obviously then traumatised by “her” death on the moon, which he associates with a chain of events that began with Jean becoming more powerful.
In this arc, Jean basically admits that she has held herself back from her powers because Scott can’t handle it. If we accept the reading that Scott associates Jean becoming more powerful with her eventually leaving him (through death) than this makes sense.
So later, during the Morrison run, where Jean again embraces the extent of her powers and the Phoenix force, it makes sense that Scott would shut himself off from her. He demonstrated early on that he is capable of distancing himself from his feelings. And if, on some level, he expected Jean’s transformation to again lead to her death, his coldness and eventual cheating, are easier to understand as a defence mechanism.
I know it wasn’t the intention, but this little arc makes sense of that. A bit.