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In which Jay sits down with cartoonist Ed Piskor to talk about the upcoming X-Men: Grand Design!
NEXT EPISODE: X-Men: Gal Pals!
The visual companion to this episode can be found in X-Men: Grand Design #1, available from your local comics shop this December!
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I suggest we share the cold open which we each came up with. Here was mine.
Miles: Wow, Jay, you’re going to interview Ed Piskor this episode!
Jay: I know, right! He made Wizzywig!
Miles: WISIYG? The text-editor acronym?
Jay: No, Wizzywig was Ed’s project covering the history of hackers.
Miles: There was a comic about Hackers? I need to read this right now! But how could he draw people skateboarding through the Internet?
Jay: I appreciate the confusion here, but Wizzywig was about only one fictional hacker, not Crash Override and Acid Burn. The main character was interacting throughout the story with actual hackers.
Miles: Oh. Well, who was in it?
Jay: Well, as a Mac user, I’m sure you’ll appreciate that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak are in it…
Miles: O.K.
Jay: …from about the time they were prank calling the Pope.
Miles: What?!
This is a pretty great cold open IMO.
Thanks, though I now noticed I misspelled WYSIWYG, so now it’s ruined forever. Anyway, I guess my mind went to the cold open before interviewing Kid Apocalypse, which was more about the guest and confusion than Marvel. It probably would have been perfect if A) I wrote WYSIWYG properly and B) I had also worked in a Dark City reference.
hahaha Nice work 😀 U really captured their voices (how they talk) well
Really really enjoyed this episode…def going to check this comic out. What and epic\ambitious project Ed took on.
ASK THE X-PERTS: Where do you post the questions for this? I dont see it anywhere on the site.
So glad ur guys X-POD came along, really filled the void, that the Uncanny X-Cast left when they called it quits after 10 yrs. This is my new fav X-POD 😀 ! Do you u guys listen to any of the other ones? Uncanny X-Cast, X-Aspirations, ThePodcastThatGoesSnikt, DangerRoom.
I say that (I’m looking forward to it), but then again those retelling of the silver-age type series usualllly blow, so hmm, will see. Though this one WAS going to get to Giant size and go even further past that, so that’s cool. And it DID sound intriguing with him saying how this series is going to fix & tidy up all the little (but numerous) logic/plot holes etc, from the silver age, ex, Professor X faking his death, EricTheRed / Cyclops, etc, so I’m interested to see how he handles those.
The only way I can even BEGIN to headcanon Xavier’s comment about Jean is that I’m never sure how old Xavier was meant to BE in the Silver Age. His parents were involved in atomic testing in 40’s, so he would have been in his 20’s in 1963, and the fact he was bald would make his age hard to guess but probably make people read him as older than he was.
That might make it a _little_ less creepy that he HAS those emotions, without lessening his responsibilikty to never do a single solitary thing about them.
(Once you add in him being older of course, serving in WWII. AND being Jean’s therapist when she was younger, then it’s a big fat utter NOPE!)
He fought in the Korean War at what seemed to be college age, so by X-Men #1 he’d have to be around early-to-mid 30s (at least as intended by Stan and Jack, though they probably didn’t have that backstory in mind when the line about Jean was dropped). Not nearly as old as people think.
I was a bit confused at first by all the talk of 4+ issues, when Marvel only solicited two (and a trade collecting them). This is a really weird publishing schedule (three sets of two issues, separated by nearly year-long hiatuses), and probably something that should have been made clearer (of course by the publisher, but maybe also at the start of the podcast instead of at the very end ?).
Wow. That was really interesting. I’m surely going to check this when it’s come out.
It must have been a very special moment for you when Ed said you and Miles were in his mind when he worked on the project… This podcast started with two people influenced by a franchise they liked and want to give back – and now you got creators of the same franchise that are influenced by you.
The publishing breaks are not something I can see a way around. The six volumes (40 pages each?) will be done when they are done. Consider how long this podcast has taken to cover roughly the same material without relying upon a publisher.
Intended to reply to JD.
I remember loving how Uncanny X-Men 138 took you through the history of the X-Men up until that point. Being a new reader when that story was printed in Classic X-Men, it really helped me out. I always wished they would do a story like that every few years or so, to help people keep up with an increasingly convoluted continuity. There was a Dave Cockrum inventory issue that didn’t see print in the nineties, but was printed later in X-Men: Odd Man Out. In an interview, he recalled that his second run on the book was glossed over entirely in that issue. Anyway, I hope this book serves a similar purpose, and stokes interest in the source material as well. I’ll be looking forward to it.
I think that issue had a particular charge for a Marvel reader at the time. It was pre-Internet, obviously, but it’s more than that.
It was still a time when most readers were young, and were therefore picking up on books and characters that had been in existence for some time before they were reading them. On the other hand, the Marvel universe still had a small enough history that it hadn’t reached the point that it now has, where it’s obvious that most “continuity” is “sort of not in continuity except for maybe the broad strokes, maybe.” One could still entertain the illusion that it all “mattered.”
There was this intense appeal for the young reader (well, this young reader) of starting a story in the middle, where there was *all this other stuff* (I had very little clear idea of how much story one could fit in in the period before I started reading) that had happened before that one found out about piecemeal — from references in current comics, from finding old issues. More extreme if you were largely dependent on Marvel UK and the odd American original that somehow found its way across the Atlantic, as I was, but I suspect that the experience I’m describing was true of Americans, too.
This is obviously like being a child in general, one comes into the world and discovers that there’s all this stuff that affects and constrains your life that you don’t know about until people tell you. I suppose that is why children are so tolerant of starting a story in the middle when adults often insist prefer something with that classic three-act beginning, middle, and end. Children are more tolerant of media that resembles chaotic, unstructured, predetermined reality than adults are.
(I remember that a friend hooked me on 2000 AD by giving me his huge pile of issues in no particular order, and it did not occur to me to arrange them chronologically and start with the oldest one — I just started with the one that happened to be on top of the pile.)
So something like UXM #138, that gave you the sweep of the whole thing (instead of scattered individual issues here and there) was really special in that context, I think.
In Grant Morrison’s run on “New” X-MEN #123 during Jean Grey’s press conference, she states that thirty years ago Xavier’s telepathy manifested and that he was eleven years old. This would make him 41 at the time that issue takes place, which always seemed a touch too young based on his previous deceptions, especially considering the “sliding scale timeline rule” of Marvel that only about 10 to 15 years have passed since the Fantastic Four took their fateful space flight. As such, Xavier would only have been in his 20s at the time the X-MEN were founded. If nothing else, this makes his past with Magneto alone very… askew.
like (if this was facebook)
( I made this 😛 )
https://www.youtube.com/edit?o=U&video_id=DqFyCztpkw8
It’s: X-MEN 7 (1964) – Homemade comedic video-edit of the issue