Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men

As Mentioned in Episode 35 – Post-Disco Panic

Listen to the episode here!


 


Links and Further Reading

9 comments

  1. Holy crap. I had no idea that Dazzler: the Movie was so….rapey. I mean, I get that it’s supposed to be slapstick comedy, maybe…in the vein of ‘Three’s Company’ from the early 1980s? But it comes off as so, SO RAPEY. UGH.

    No, seriously. UGH.

    1. I think a lot of the problems can be placed at Jim Shooter’s feet. The man has some really… creepy gender politics that he puts into his comics sometimes. From what I recall, this was done while he was actually the EiC of Marvel… which basically meant he could (and probably did) veto any decisions made by the editor above him (Ralph Macchio, in this case).

      I mean, Jim Shooter wrote the abhorrent Avengers 200, also from the seat of the Editor in Chief.

      Really, it’s almost like Jim Shooter is why we couldn’t have nice things in the 80s. Well, that, and some horrendous business decisions made by Marvel.

      1. i wish I could have found a link to Shooter’s character notes for the Legion of Super-Heroes. The gender politics in it are appalling, it doesn’t sound like he matured at all by the time this graphic novel came around.

      2. I think we have to separate Shooter the writer from Shooter the editor a bit. As editor-in-chief he did give us a lot of nice things, and rescued several titles from longtime irrelevance by giving Daredevil to Frank Miller and Thor to Walt Simonson.

        He also put Louise Jones and then Ann Nocenti as editors on the X-Men books, and later gave them good writing assignments like choosing Nocenti to take over Daredevil after Miller left for the second time.

        What can I say? He’s a complicated guy who made some very good decisions and some very bad ones, and many of the bad ones in the ’80s were as a writer. (Though to be fair, Secret Wars, while not very good, was such a huge seller that Marvel is building its entire 2015 around a remake. So even his bad ideas were sometimes good.)

        1. No, that’s very true. Jim Shooter did make some great decisions in his run as EiC.

          However, many people from the end of his time as EiC also relate tales of him basically meddling with every single book, which gave them the impression that he believed “only Jim Shooter knows Marvel.”
          Whether that’s true or not, I’m not sure. However, every other time I’ve seen an Editor in Chief write a book… it’s not turned out pretty.

          Of course, my main example is pretty much the abysmal Marville from the mid-2000s. While I’m glad that I somehow entirely avoided the book at the time of release, I still wound up reading it eventually.
          I pirated that book, and STILL felt completely ripped off by it.

          Aaaaaagh.

  2. Hey great job again guys. I’ve never been a big Dazzler fan, and have often avoided Dazzler the Movie and Beauty & the Beast. I may look them up to read for myself after listening to the latest episode.

    Lister question: When you go back to discussing Uncanny … since the 2-issue X-Men and Alpha Flight miniseries takes place during the gap of time in the last few pages of Uncanny 192 (the last issue you discussed), will you be discussing that when you get back to Uncanny, or will you be discussing it later, when you get to the New Mutants/X-Men annual Asgardian 2-parter?

    Since the Asgardian stuff interrupts the story arc that’s ongoing in 193-200 (Xavier’s injuries, Magneto’s redemption and trial and Rachel’s evolution) I wasn’t sure if you would shunt the Asgard stuff off to it’s own episode or hit it where it appears in chronology.

    Keep up the great work!

  3. The Heartbreak Hotel reads an awful lot like a mutant version of Anna Madrigal’s 28 Barbary Lane from Armistead Maupin’s “Tales of the City.” I wonder if Anne was a fan of that work?

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