Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men

Welcome to Bayville, Rachel. Hope You Survive the Experience!

Coming soon to R&MXtX-M: X-Men: Evolution!
Coming soon to R&MXtX-M: X-Men: Evolution!

Rachel here! As you may or may not know, Rachel and Miles X-Plain the X-Men–the podcast, the videos, and everything we do here on the site–is entirely listener supported, via our kickass Patreon subscribers. And last night, while we weren’t looking, they unlocked one hell of a milestone goal:

Starting next week, I’ll be recapping and reviewing not one, not a dozen, but every single episode of animated high-school drama X-Men: Evolution.

It’s no secret that I love this show. I love it a lot. I love the awkward teenagers (and even more awkward early animation); the dubious fashion; the high-school angst; the godawful Season One finale. I love the way it starts terrible and then slowly and subtly gets awesome while you’re not paying attention. I love that there’s an episode where it stops being a superhero show and instead spends 22 minutes doing a straight-up homage to old-school girl-gang movies.

And I love seeing characters and premises I love reinvented and refiltered through very different sensibilities: what shifts and evolves, and what core themes persist through the changes. In a lot of ways, Evolution is the most daring adaptation of X-Men; certainly, it’s the one that moves furthest from any other incarnation of the series and team. Sometimes it succeeds brilliantly. Sometimes it fails spectacularly. But it never stops being fun.

If you want to watch along with me, you can find the full series on Marvel’s YouTube channel, starting here. I’ll be kicking off next week with Season 1, Episode 1: “Strategy X.”

As Mentioned in Episode 40 – Give Them Something to Fight (With G. Willow Wilson)

Listen to the episode here!



Links and Further Reading:

  • G. Willow Wilson. Go read everything she’s written. It’s all splendid. GO. NOW.
  • You have until JANUARY 21 to send in your entries for the Corbeau Coloring Contest!
  • If you want to help support the podcast–and see Rachel recap and review all 52 episodes of X-Men Evolution–now might be a good time to click over to our Patreon.

 

Rachel and Miles Review the X-Men, Episode 21

Week of January 14, 2015

In which we continue to be frustrated by Cyclops, but everything else is pretty great.

Reviewed:

  • Wolverines #2 (00:23)
  • X-Force #14 (2:23)
  • *Amazing X-Men #15 (4:59)
  • Cyclops #9 (7:26)
  • Nightcrawler #10 (9:39)

*Pick of the week (11:24)


These 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!

CORBEAU COLORING CONTEST EXTENSION (And Some General Updates)

Our January in a nutshell.
Our January in a nutshell.

Realistically, there’s no way we’ll have time to even look at them until later in the month, so we’re extending the deadline of the Corbeau Coloring Contest by one week, to January 21.

ALSO: Some of you expressed interest in an organized Corbeau Swap, in which you’d make awards for each other–kind of a very specific Secret Santa. If you would be into participating in that, pleas sound off in the comments; if we hit critical mass–let’s say a dozen people or more–we will go ahead and get that up and running! (And if someone else felt like taking point on that, we would be even more excited about it, because, this month, man.)

We’re still catching up on Patreon–a lot of thresholds hit at once this month–and having a blast putting together the first round of comics care packages. WE HOPE YOU LIKE TINY PLASTIC DINOSAURS AND GLITTER PAINT.

Cheers,
Rachel

 

 

As Mentioned in Episode 39 – Forever Alone Together

Listen to the podcast here!



Links and Further Reading:

  • Information and links to donate toward Bill Mantlo’s ongoing care
    (You can also send physical donations–and cards and letters–addressed as follows:
    Mike Mantlo
    26364 East Pintail Road
    Long Neck, DE 19966
    Please make out any checks to “Michael Mantlo” — Bill’s legal guardian.)
  • The Hero Initiative
  • Waiting for the T is absolutely delightful, and if you’re not already reading it, we acutely envy you the experience of going back through the archives for the first time.
    • (Specifically apropos of the Maximoffs: 1, 2)

Jasper and Kestrel X-Plain the X-Men

Best fan video ever?

Best. Fan. Video. Ever.

We’ve written a bit about Jasper and Kestrel (they switched names for the video, for reasons that remain a mystery) over here. They belong to our very good friends Katie and Dave, and they’re pretty much the best kids ever. They’re also super into X-Men: we’re already counting the days until they’re old enough to take over the podcast.

As for the origins of the video, Katie writes:

Jasper and Kestrel have listened to the podcast in bits and pieces (they don’t have the attention span for the whole thing). Every morning this week we’ve put on music, mostly a Tune-Yards album, over breakfast– but today they asked if they could learn about the X-Men instead. Sure! As I went to put it on, I asked them if they thought they could do a show like your show.

“Yes, but at a different age than now,” said Kes.

“How do they even know so much?” asked Jasper. So we talked about how one way to know a lot about a thing is to read it from when you were a little kid, but that you guys also had to study and do research (what’s that?) to make the show. Kestrel said that she was gonna learn all about the X-Men for when she was bigger.

I put on the show, and they listened to the first few minutes of Ep 3. After the cold open & intro, Jasper asked me to stop it, and then we started playing with saying the lines to introduce the show. They asked me to make a video explicitly to send to you & M “because it would make them laugh so so much.” So. That happened.

ETA: It occurs to me that there are enough parents of young X-fans here that it might be worth setting up an open thread or something for discussion/resource pooling. Is that something people would find useful?

Rachel and Miles Review the X-Men, Episode 20

Week of January 7, 2015

In which we hit our 20th round of video reviews, G. Willow Wilson rocks X-Men, and we kind of fixate on a guy with some birds.

Reviewed:

  • *Storm #7 (00:46)
  • Death of Wolverine: The Weapon X Program #5 (3:04)
  • All-New X-Factor #19 (5:10)
  • Wolverines #1 (7:37)
  • X-Men #23 (9:51)

*Pick of the Week (14:22)


These 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!

Welcome, Entertainment Weekly Readers!

Art by Chris Haley
Art by Chris Haley

(There’s a “hope you survive the experience” joke in here somewhere…)

We are honored and slightly intimidated to have found ourselves on Entertainment Weekly‘s list of 20 Podcasts You Need to Hear in 2015!

If you’re new to the podcast: It’s exactly what it says on the tin. We are Rachel and Miles. We explain the X-Men, in very roughly chronological order, sometimes with the help of folks responsible for them.

For a good general introduction to who we are and what we do, we’d recommend listening to the episode Giant-Size Special #1, which covers a stand-alone story (the graphic novel God Loves, Man Kills), along with a lot of bonus material (and significantly more navelgazing than usual).

We also do weekly video reviews of current X-books, which you can find here.

Rachel and Miles X-Plain the X-Men is listener supported and ad-free. If you want to join the ranks of the rad people who make it possible for us to keep making stuff, you can do that over at Patreon!

Other varyingly relevant links:

January 2015 Shirt of the Month: LILA CHENEY!

Art by David Wynne
Art by David Wynne

Did you see David Wynne’s sweet, sweet Lila Cheney gig poster from Episode 36? Was your immediate response–like ours–“Damn, I wish I could wrap that around my torso”?

YOUR WAIT IS OVER!

Screen Shot 2015-01-05 at 11.41.24 AM

As the name implies, this is a LIMITED RUN: T-shirts (including kids’ and infant sizes!) will be up in the shop through February 5, 2015 (after this, switches’ll happen on the first of any given month, but we’re posting this one a little late, so), then DISAPPEAR FROM THE SHOP FOREVER. (Posters and stickers may persist, depending on interest. We’ll see.)

T-shirts of the month 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!

As Mentioned in Episode 38 – Welcome to Murderworld

Listen to the episode here!



Places Where You can Find Chris Sims on the Internets: