Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men

Author: Jay

As Mentioned in Episode 22 – Through Death and Through Life

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Listen to the episode here!

At some point, someone pointed out that this is technically Anniversary X, and it was a pretty slippery slope from there.
We are aware that our favorite romance has its share of detractors. We don’t care. (Art by David Wynne.)
Actual photograph of Rachel and Miles at their 8th-grade graduation dance. (X-Men #32)
This is literally as explicit a conversation they have about it for… pretty much the entire Silver Age. (X-Men #32)
Proposal #1. Unfortunately, Jean is a) actually the Phoenix Force, and b) about to die on the moon. (Uncanny X-Men #136)
Not directly pertinent, but it’s one of our favorite moments. (Uncanny X-Men #137)
Scott saying goodbye to Jean immediately before marrying Madelyne Pryor. That really, really didn’t work out, but we like the sentiment–that “true love” doesn’t always have to mean “one true love.” (Uncanny X-Men #175)
Scott doesn’t actually work out that Madelyne and Jean are identical until X-Factor #14. Headcanon: Hella prosopagnosia.
Scott and Jean are reunited in a panel that appears to have fled from Apartment 3-G to X-Factor #1.
Jean gets Madelyne and Phoenix’s memories–and her own telepathy–back. (X-Factor #38)
Proposal #2. (X-Factor #53)
Jean’s response. (X-Factor #53)
“Fatal Attractions” was a rough time for everyone, but probably worst for Wolverine. (X-Men vol. 2 #75)
Proposal #3, guest-starring John Romita, Jr.’s profoundly alarming faces. (Uncanny X-Men #308)
Fate can go fuck itself. Damn, we love these two. (Uncanny X-Men #308)
There is probably no other panel from the entire 50 years of X-Men that we’ve sent back and forth more than this one. (Uncanny X-Men #308)
He’s actually fighting some dude who broke into the X-mansion and bonding with his time-displaced kid, but the basic principle of failing-at-bachelor-party still stands. (Uncanny X-Men #310)
And now, the main event. (X-Men vol. 2 #30)
Andy Kubert x body language. (X-Men vol. 2 #30)
Charles Xavier of X-Men vol. 2 #30 is the best Charles Xavier.
He also has the best timing. (X-Men vol. 2 #30)
Look at all those X-Men. (X-Men vol. 2 #30)
Can we have a moment of silent appreciation for the fact that Storm managed to find a dress that perfectly encapsulates the 1990s? (X-Men vol. 2 #30)
Best vows? Best vows. (X-Men vol. 2 #30)
Scott, Jean, we’re gonna let you finish… (X-Men vol. 2 #30)
…but Rogue and Gambit’s kiss in X-Men vol. 2 #41 is the best kiss in X-Men.
September 4, 2014.

Links:

NEXT WEEK: Rachel and Miles are going on vacation. Read a book. WEEK AFTER NEXT: The New Mutants!

22 – Through Death and Through Life

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scottandjeanv3_cropped
Art by David Wynne

In which Rachel and Miles celebrate an anniversary with a retrospective of one of the great romances of the Marvel universe; the Summers/Grey family tree is more of a transdimensional strawberry patch; the X-Men play some football; Professor Xavier is not a jerk; and Scott Summers and Jean Grey are the power couple of existentialism.

X-Plained

  • Summers kids
  • Scott and Jean
  • Feelings
  • X-Men #32
  • The worst date ever
  • Madelyne Pryor
  • Plot-relevant prosopagnosia
  • Three proposals
  • X-Factor #53
  • Uncanny X-Men #308
  • “Fatal Attractions”
  • That one panel that gets us every time
  • X-Men vol. 2 #30
  • Some really excellent wedding vows
  • The best kiss in X-Men
  • Cats Laughing
  • Why “One” is actually a pretty decent first dance
  • Existential ramifications of fictional romance

Next week: Rachel and Miles take a much-needed vacation.

Week after next: The New Mutants!

You can find a visual companion to the episode – and links to recommended reading – on our blog.

Find us on iTunes or Stitcher!

Support us on Patreon!

Video Review Redux – Rachel’s Favorite Panel

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Hi. Rachel here.

I talked some about our panel of the week in this week’s video reviews, but I think it’s a panel whose effectiveness is much better illustrated via static images, so I’m posting this here as a supplement.

This is a panel that grabbed me immediately. It’s the kind of beat I look for in comics–the stillness where you often find the most powerful and subtly significant moments in a story.

Here’s the panel, in isolation. It doesn’t look like much on its own, right?

Screen Shot 2014-09-05 at 12.07.28 PM

 

Here’s the full spread it’s part of. Pay attention to how people are standing: this moment is all about body language.

Screen Shot 2014-09-04 at 3.54.43 PM

Can you see it yet? If you’re still having trouble, here’s a hint: Follow the hands–Cyclops’s, in particular.

See what I mean? Is your heart breaking a little right now? It should be.

I would love to see the script for this spread–whether that moment was written, or if Bachalo improvised it; and how it was described relative to how it was drawn. As is, it’s one of the most powerful emotional beats of the story–if you know what to look for.

The fallacy that comics are easy and simple to read is dependent, I think, on the idea that reading is a skill specific to written language. In fact, the language of comics–that integration of visual and verbal, the ways static images can convey and evoke movement and passage of time and a thousand other minute nuances–is incredibly, exquisitely complex and rich. They’re not just illustrated stories. They’re their own discrete medium.

And it’s when creators–and readers–understand those things that comics can really, really get good.

 

Rachel and Miles Review the X-Men – Episode 5

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Week of September 3, 2014

In which we actually feel pretty okay about a foil cover.

Reviewed:

  • Death of Wolverine #1*
  • X-Men #19
  • All-New X-Factor #13
  • Uncanny X-Men #25
  • A cat

*Pick of the week (Yes, really.)

Video reviews are made possible by the support of our Patreon subscribers. If you want to help support the podcast–and unlock more cool stuff–you can do that right here!

Edited to add: Rachel wrote a bit more about the panel of the week over here.

Today. Tomorrow. And Every Day for the Rest of My Life.

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X-Men #30 cover art by Andy Kubert
X-Men #30 cover art by Andy Kubert

Rachel here.

I don’t usually talk about personal stuff here. But today is special.

In this week’s episode–the one that goes up at Comics Alliance today, and here on Sunday the 7th, Miles and I talk about Scott and Jean and how they are kind of our couple, and I want to write a little bit more about that.

We talk on the podcast about having known each other since forever. For context, that’s well over half our lives: we’re in our early 30s now, and we met when we were 11 or 12, and became friends when we were 13.

I’m not–look, how much I identify with Cyclops should be a pretty good indicator of how socially inclined I’m not. I didn’t have a lot of friends in middle school. I was the kid who sat in the back of a class, hiding a book under my desk and hoping that no one would notice me–because if they did, it never, ever went well.

In eighth grade English, I sat in my usual far back corner. Miles was in the row in front of me, and at some point, he decided–out of nowhere–that we should probably be friends. He initially expressed this mostly by whipping around dramatically when no one was looking and whispering bad puns at me during vocab review. It was slightly terrifying and absolutely delightful.

At some point, Miles started asking me about books. We’d both grown up on the Dark Is Rising sequence and the Chronicles of Prydain; he lent me Bored of the Rings and the big collected Hitchhiker’s Guide that had the then-nearly-impossible-to-find “Young Zaphod Plays It Safe”; I lent him More Than Human and The Hero and the Crown. There was an end-of-the-year eighth-grade graduation dance and we danced together once, awkwardly, at arms’ length; and each of us was pretty sure the other was just doing it to be polite.

We dated briefly and awkwardly our freshman year of high school, and then we didn’t really talk for a while, and then we were friends again, and then we were friends who slept together and were looking at colleges together and still staunchly refused to put a label on what we were doing because we did not buy in to that nonsense, even after we moved in together two months into our first semester of college. We spent years aggressively reinventing the wheel, because even if we didn’t entirely know what we were or where we were taking it, we knew it was ours.

So, when we talk about how Scott and Jean are kind of our couple, we’re not just talking about the awkward teenage romance thing. Editorial mandates aside, every step of their relationship was a “fuck you” to fate, a conscious choice to not even find but make their own meaning. They’re not together in most of the Multiverse, and when they are, it’s usually something they have to fight for.

Even without supervillains and cosmic forces, being and staying with someone you’ve known since you were a teenager isn’t always easy. Everyone has hard-wired buttons; when you’re with someone you’ve known for that long, there’s a pretty good chance that they–or at least who they were when you were kids–wired some of them. It’s difficult and painful to grow and figure out who you are and who you’re becoming when you’re with someone who still responds to–and probably always will respond to, to some extent–who you were at sixteen.

And Scott and Jean are our couple for that reason, too: because it’s not always easy, but it never stops being worth it–every day, but especially today, because ten years ago* today, I married the best person I’ve ever met: my partner in crime, my best and truest friend; who still finds me when I’m lost, and coaxes me out when I get stuck in my own head, and holds me so that I can let go.

I love you, Miles Stokes.

Today.

Tomorrow.

And every day for the rest of my life.

 

*According to Miss Manners, the tenth anniversary is–for obvious reasons–the X-Men anniversary.

The Famous Five

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Art by David Wynne
Art by David Wynne

Last week, our kickass Patreon subscribers unlocked weekly illustrations as a milestone goal, and we are tremendously pleased to present the second of those, in which David Wynne references Episode 21 to bring us a mash-up shamefully absent from pop culture thus far: the original X-Men as Enid Blyton’s YA-adventure classic Famous Five!

Patreon subscribers get a high-res desktop background version of the image. If you want a larger version you can hold, frame, lick, &c., David will have the original for sale here (alongside a lot of other very rad X-Plain the X-Men-related originals).

Nominally, this is a weekly thing, but we love this one enough that we’re going to keep prints available for the rest of September in our Redbubble shop.

(And if you want the desktop, you can subscribe to the Patreon here!)

As Mentioned in Episode 21 – Kurt Busiek at the Coffee-a-Go-Go

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Listen to the episode here!

METOXO the lava man, as teased in X-Men #48–but never revealed!
Beast and Iceman teach METOXO the true meaning of Christmas in the 1994 Marvel Holiday Special.
Angel X-Plains the Phoenix retcon. (X-Factor #1)
In X-Men #37, five reasonably normal-looking teenagers dive out of a plane…
…and then this happens. (X-Men #37)
In which Jean Grey, given the choice between the Silver Age’s two stock career options for female protagonists, opts for option A. (X-Men #48)
Scott Summers’ radio career lasted five whole panels. Here are four of them. We remain annoyed that none of them actually show him recording, because that would be really useful as a podcast graphic. (X-Men #48)
The Coffee-a-Go-Go made its debut in X-Men #7, along with regular Bernard the Poet and acerbic waitress Zelda.
There are a lot of Coffee-a-Go-Go stories, but Bobby’s 18th birthday, from X-Men #32, is probably the best.
Bernard the poet sells out in the name of birthday cheer. (X-Men #32)
Zelda’s original line, from X-Men #7 (she was originally a redhead)…
…and Busiek’s homage in the 1994 Marvel Holiday Special.
Iceman vs. ice skating. (X-Men #29)
We’ll be giving it its own post on Monday, but David Wynne’s art of the original X-Men as Enid Blyton’s Famous Five goes way too well with this episode.
Next Episode: Fast-forwarding to 1994 for the wedding of Scott Summers and Jean Grey.

Links & Further Reading:

21 – Kurt Busiek at the Coffee-a-Go-Go

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Famous Five
Art by David Wynne

In which special guest Kurt Busiek is the J. Robert Oppenheimer of X-Men, Rachel and Miles learn to love the Silver Age, Cyclops gets a job, Bernard the Poet falls from grace, we really wish X-Men: The Secret Years was a real book, everyone recites poetry, and we still don’t get around to Marvels.

X-Plained:

  • METOXO, the Lava Man
  • The true, secret purpose of Rachel and Miles X-Plain the X-Men
  • The Phoenix retcon
  • Archival pocket dimensions
  • Enid Blyton’s X-Men
  • Early-to-mid-20th Century American Jewish Socialism
  • Why the X-Men are terrible mutant P.R.
  • Band names of the Silver Age
  • An X-Men series that might have been.
  • Why Cyclops should be the Rachel Maddow of Marvel
  • Quicksilver’s childhood dreams
  • The Coffee-a-Go-Go
  • Bernard the Poet
  • Zelda Kurtzberg
  • The Barefoot Beats

Next week: The wedding of Scott Summers and Jean Grey!

You can find a visual companion to the episode – and links to recommended reading – on our blog.

Find us on iTunes or Stitcher!

Support us on Patreon!

Rachel and Miles Review the X-Men – Episode 4

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Week of 8/27/2014

In which we engage in reckless substitution, and apparently the blinds make more difference to the lighting than we expected.

Reviewed:

  • All-New X-Men #31
  • Uncanny Avengers #23
  • Cyclops #4
  • Wolverine and the X-Men #8*
  • Wolverine #12 Ms. Marvel #7

*Pick of the week

Video reviews are made possible by the support of our Patreon subscribers. If you want to help support the podcast–and unlock more cool stuff–you can do that right here!

FAQ, Part Three: Questions and Comments

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W - Whedon; A - Cassady
W – Whedon; A – Cassady

We get questions.

We get a lot of questions.

But there are some questions we get more than others.

This is the third of a multi-part series. As we post questions and answers on the blog, we’ll also add them to the FAQ page!

 

I have a question for the X-Perts! Where should I put it?

You can send your question via any of the following means:

  • Post it in the comments anywhere on this website.
  • Use the website contact form.
  • E-mail it to us at xplainthexmen (at) gmail (dot) com.
  • Drop it in our Tumblr askbox.
  • Tweet it at @xplainthexmen, or hashtag it #xplainthexmen on Twitter.

 

Why haven’t you answered my question yet?

When we get a question–an X-Plaining question, we mean, not, say, an immediate logistical question–we drop it into a massive spreadsheet, from which we then pull questions for the podcast. As of this FAQ, that spreadsheet contains over 300 questions, of which we have so far explicitly answered around 70 (and covered about that many others within the bodies of episodes).

We usually answer 2-3 questions every episode. Here are some of the factors that go into why we do or don’t pick any given questions for any given episode:

  • Relevance: We try to pick questions that connect–at least tangentially–to what we’re covering in that episode.
  • Novelty: If we’ve covered a question already–either explicitly, or in the body of an episode–we probably won’t revisit it. We’re working on an index of questions we’ve answered in previous episodes; when it’s up, we’ll update this FAQ to reflect that.
  • Tone: Are you being a dick? Are you trying to bait us into bad-mouthing creators or other members of our community, or asking something super personal? We are not into that. Is your question a statement of fact or opinion–or a long diatribe–followed by the word “right”? We are also not into that.
  • Utility: If your question can be answered with a simple Google search, we will probably not answer it on the podcast.
  • Scope: We are good at doing research and entertainingly justifying our opinions. We prefer not to speculate on other people’s private lives and personal motivations, and we don’t have a secret channel to creators’ intentions or the “real” truth about things that have been written inconsistently in canon. If your question is about one of those things, we will probably not answer it.
  • Channels: Did you send the question to the podcast contact form, e-mail it to the podcast address put it in our blog comments, ask through the rachelandmiles Tumblr askbox, or tweet to @XplaintheXMen? If not, your question has fallen down the Memory Hole, to be feasted upon by the Memory Eels who dwell therein.

THAT SAID:
There is one and only one way to make absolutely sure we answer your question: a few of our Patreon subscriber levels include a certain number of bespoke answers, which we will hand write, seal with wax, and mail to you in the dead of night. You can find out more about those here.

Why didn’t you publish / why did you delete my comment?

We are super lucky: most of our listeners–at least the ones who comment here–are rad as hell and make the job of moderating the comments incredibly easy. However, sometimes we come across a comment that we would rather not have on our site. Here are some examples of comments we have removed:

  • Accidental double-posts. These account for the overwhelming majority of the deletion we have done thus far.
  • Posts that contain no content or obviously posted mid-typing.
  • Promotional links that have no bearing on the post you’re commenting on or the conversation you’re entering. Our comments section is not free ad space.
  • Speculation about creators’ personal lives.
  • Speculation about our personal lives.
  • Comments about Rachel’s appearance and/or requests that she smile more, take off her sunglasses, &c. (The same would apply to comments about Miles; we just haven’t gotten any).
  • Rape jokes or things that are so close to being rape jokes that the line is essentially academic.

 

What else might get a comment deleted?

Off the top of our heads?

  • Threats or incitement to violence of any sort directed at real people.
  • Blatantly sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, or otherwise bigoted language.
  • Blatant derailing.
  • Outing anyone else’s personal information, including real names.
  • Use of sock puppets.
  • NSFW content, or links to NSFW content without warnings.
  • Blatant spoilers for current or very recent media.
  • Gratuitous meanness.

Note, however, that these aren’t hard guidelines, nor a comprehensive list. We reserve the right to remove or edit comments according to our judgment (Incidentally: if we alter the text of a comment, we’ll *always* make a note of that within the comment).

I found an e-mail address for Rachel on her professional website / via an article she wrote. Can I send my podcast question there?

You can, but it’ll go straight to the Memory Eels. Seriously, there are like six ways to send a question to the podcast. Use one of those.

Why haven’t you answered my e-mail yet?

We get a lot of e-mail. If it’s something super time-sensitive, please nudge us.