Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men

307 – Ugly Mootants Only

Art by David Wynne. Wanna buy the original? Drop him a line!

In which Cable has clearly inherited his father’s inability to go on a date that doesn’t end disastrously; Husk is a lightweight; we are very taken with a turtle; you really don’t want to run into the other Hemingway in an elevator, either; Jubilee can speak in logos; and Wolverine gives some fatherly advice.

X-PLAINED:

  • One way to get your powers back
  • Cable #15
  • Generation X #5-6
  • X-Men: Marvels Snapshots #1 (Coming September 16)
  • Cable, in general
  • A date
  • “Sheer” fabrics
  • What we’d bring to desert islands
  • Sarah (Marrow)
  • The Ceremony of Light
  • Several generations of mutant teenagers
  • Generation X and its members (more) (again)
  • Chamber’s socks
  • Gateway’s taste in television
  • Husk’s extremely low alcohol tolerance
  • Some cool lettering
  • Banshee is to Chris Bachalo as Nightcrawler is to Alan Davis
  • Fridge wolves
  • NYC celebrity encounters
  • The ongoing legacy of X-kids with gross powers
  • Teenagers
  • Hemingway, but not that Hemingway
  • The return of Artie and Leech
  • Bones
  • How we would incorporate the X-Men into the MCU

NEXT EPISODE: Snapshots!


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!

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HAWK TALK – Playing With Super Power (feat. Matthew Hunter)

This would usually be a skip week, but the world is still being a jerk, so we made you a bonus, entirely unedited, and almost entirely off-topic episode. This time, our producer Matthew Hunter subbed in for Jay and he and Miles talked about the video games they grew up on!


Topics, roughly:

  • Crystalis
  • Power Blade
  • Fighting robots (in general)
  • Super Mario World
  • F-Zero
  • Final Fantasy II (which is to say IV)
  • Street Fighter II
  • Rockin’ Kats
  • Shatter Hand
  • Battletoads
  • Lemmings
  • The Incredible Machine
  • The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
  • Turtles in Time
  • Mario Paint
  • Doom
  • Secret of Mana
  • Mega Man X
  • Disney adaptations
  • Final Fantasy III (which is to say VI)
  • Donkey Kong Country
  • Super Punch Out
  • Illusion of Gaia
  • BioForge
  • DWANGO (Dial-up Wide-Area Network Game Operation)
  • Full Throttle, Quest For Glory, Gabriel Knight…
  • Wild ARMs
  • Wipeout
  • Stun Runner
  • Resident Evil
  • Final Fantasy VII
  • Fallout
  • Parasite Eve
  • Xenogears
  • Baldur’s Gate
  • Tetris DX
  • Pokémon (Blue)
  • LUNAR
  • Silent Hill

You can find Matt on Twitter and his music on Bandcamp!

306 – Between Here and There

Art by David Wynne. Wanna buy the original? Drop him a line!

In which we continue our ongoing tour of the post-Age of Apocalypse X-Universe; Onslaught gets a name; nobody’s sure what Noah Dubois is doing there; Iceman gets to be the practical one, for once; T&A should not generally appear on the same visual plane; someone needs to talk to Cannonball about kink safety; and Emma Frost lets a call go to voicemail.

X-PLAINED:

  • Tarzan fandom
  • X-Man, summarized
  • Uncanny X-Men #322-324
  • Color as a narrative tool
  • The evolution of Storm’s shower etiquette
  • How not to relax with Lucas Bishop
  • Seat-of-the-pants plotting
  • Parenting
  • Noah Dubois, sort of
  • A road trip
  • Sexiness vs. sexualization
  • Emma Frost as Caprica Six
  • How not to walk a supervillain
  • Cannonball’s uniform
  • Sack
  • Vessel
  • Greycrow (more) (again)
  • The worst morgue and/or disco ever
  • Edna and Norton McCoy
  • Times Rogue has absorbed Colossus’s powers
  • X-Men: Marvels Snapshot

NEXT EPISODE: Generation X


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!

305 – The Sleep of the Wicked

Art by David Wynne. Wanna buy the original? Drop him a line!

In which X-Factor gets its own roster shakeup; most bartenders will look at you funny if you order a flight of superheroes; Kaboom is a great name for a nightclub; we lack significant feelings about the clone saga; Yukio probably sends love to everyone’s girlfriends; Forge has terrible coping mechanisms; and Jay’s current life is not conducive to consistent acoustics (sorry!).

X-PLAINED:

  • Mystique’s powers
  • X-Factor’s new roster
  • X-Factor #112-114
  • The word “wreak”
  • The issue that made Miles stop reading X-Men
  • Wild Child (Kyle Gibney)
  • Wolverine as a role
  • Cyburai (more) (again)
  • Unethical management practices
  • One way to be drunk on power(s)
  • Scarlett McKenzie (again)
  • Club Kaboom
  • Yukio (again)
  • Fatale
  • Summers Problems(TM)
  • Marvel’s 1996 reader survey
  • A bondage harness that may or may not be made out of dryer tubing
  • Alex Summers vs. his own powers
  • Sugar Man in the 616
  • Several potential but unexplored story hooks for Scarlett
  • An implausible implant
  • Mystique’s new costume
  • A deeply dysfunctional but narratively plausible ship
  • A Random tangent
  • RPF on Earth-616
  • Forge vs. Tony Stark

NEXT EPISODE: Things get Uncanny!


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!

304 – Explosive Ops

Art by David Wynne. Wanna buy the original? Drop him a line!

In which Jay discovers a continuity loop; phonetic spelling reaches a new level of implausibility; it’s always already Onslaught; X-Force’s roster gets shaken up; Siryn goes undercover; and the Upstarts remain vaguely plot-relevant despite our fervent wishes.

X-PLAINED:

  • Mimic (Calvin Rankin)
  • Wing problems
  • X-Force #45-47
  • One of Adam Pollina’s more remarkable non-Marvel art credits
  • One of many homages to the cover of X-Men #138
  • X-Force, its members, and its recent history
  • Phonetic spelling
  • Warpath’s hair
  • Baffling managerial decisions
  • Whether Reed Richards is machine washable
  • Many pouches
  • An unlikely friendship
  • Sabretooth’s state of mind
  • Rutland, VT
  • The Weisman Institute for the Criminally Insane
  • Dr. Rachel Weisman
  • Jeremy Stevens
  • Part of why we like following X-books over time
  • Character redesigns

CORRECTION: In addition to being the setting of a number of 1970s Marvel and DC stories, Rutland, VT is actually a real place with a famous annual (and largely superhero-themed) Halloween parade!

NEXT EPISODE: What X-Factor’s been up to


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!

HAWK TALK – Video Renaissance

This would usually be a skip week, but the world is still being a jerk, so we made you a bonus, entirely unedited, and almost entirely off-topic episode. This time, we talked about the movies we grew up on!


Topics, roughly:

  • The glories of VHS
  • Flight of Dragons
  • Fantastic Planet
  • Star(s), both Wars and Trek
  • The Princess Bride, which is objectively perfect
  • The Dark Crystal
  • My Dinner With Andre (again)
  • The Crow
  • Barbarella, Queen of the Galaxy
  • Help
  • Yellow Submarine
  • Wayne & Garth & Bill & Ted
  • Defending Your Life
  • Ghostbusters
  • Various musicals

303 – No Simple Answers, feat. Laura Hudson

In which writer and editor Laura Hudson joins us as we take a break from X-Men comics to discuss the complicated ethics of consuming and covering comics by creators we’re not comfortable promoting.


LINKS:


No visual companion to this one, for obvious reasons; see the links listed above.

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!

302 – Space Junk

Art by David Wynne. Wanna buy the original? Drop him a line!

In which you should probably not mess with space junk; Exodus is terrible at many things; Rusty Collins deserved better; X-Men #100 references are dirty (but effective) pool; Magneto goes through a lot of orbital bases; Nate Grey makes things worse; Frenzy is generally the most competent member of any team she’s on; and we sincerely regret not making more Satellite of Love jokes about Avalon.

X-PLAINED:

  • Consequences
  • The foundations of Onslaught
  • X-Men #42-44
  • The Acolytes (more) (again) and several members thereof
  • How not to toast
  • Milan
  • A teleportation incident
  • Juggernaut problems
  • A break-in
  • Several things not to do in space
  • Prioritizing problems
  • A very dramatic confrontation
  • X-Men #100 references
  • An extremely counterintuitive use of Amelia Voght’s powers
  • The return of Cyclops’s castaway uniform
  • A reluctant team-up
  • Cyclops as catalyst vs. focus
  • An unexpected reunion
  • Marrow
  • Determining characters’ ages
  • Dazzler’s powers

NEXT EPISODE: The ethical tangle of creators, creations, consumers, and critics, with guest Laura Hudson


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!

 

301 – Can’t Beat the Real Thing

Art by David Wynne. Wanna buy the original? Drop him a line!

In which we enter our fourth century of podcasting with brand new theme music; we have both Wolverine questions and wolverine questions; it is extremely rough to be Bishop; the creator of Garfield may or may not live in a sewer on Earth-616; Rogue needs better coping mechanisms; bigotry is depressingly timeless; and everything is Onslaught now.

X-PLAINED:

  • Joseph’s Brotherhood of Evil Mutants
  • Our new theme music
  • X-Men Prime #1
  • A genuinely cool cover gimmick
  • What happened after the end of the world
  • Boundaries
  • War crimes vs. fashion crimes
  • Destruction of real landmarks in fiction
  • A mysterious assailant
  • Actual embodied chaos god Jim Davis and his Earth-616 namesake
  • Several memorable Garfield stories
  • Marrow (Sarah Rushman)
  • The secret origin of the Morlocks
  • A friendship we miss
  • Unhealthy coping mechanisms
  • The perennially dubious journalistic ethics of Trish Tilby
  • Dennis
  • The death of Dennis
  • Flaws of the mutant metaphor (more) (again)
  • Several refugees from Earth-295
  • Mr. Summers and Mr. Summers
  • The secret origin of the Genoshan mutates
  • The Acolytes
  • The continuing relevance of the mutant metaphor (more) (again)
  • Cross-universe characterization

NEXT EPISODE: The fall of Avalon!


NOTE: The Garfield strips Jay mentions appeared in newspapers, on purpose, in October 1989.


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!

HAWK TALK – Attack of the Franchise Cartoons

This would usually be a skip week, but the world is still being a jerk, so we made you a bonus, entirely unedited, and almost entirely off-topic episode. This time, we talked about the television shows we grew up on (and a few current ones)!


Topics, roughly:

  • Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood
  • Masters of the Universe
  • She-Ra
  • The Real (vs. non-Real) Ghostbusters
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
  • Little Shop of Horrors
  • Beetlejuice
  • Toxic Crusaders
  • Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
  • The Adventures of Pete & Pete (and the not-so-secret origin of this podcast)
  • Les Schtroumpfs (and the time they maybe fought Satan)
  • Batman: The Animated Series
  • X-Men: The Animated Series
  • X-Men: Evolution
  • Wolverine & the X-Men
  • The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour
  • The X-Files
  • Star Trek: Voyager
  • Earth 2
  • VR5
  • M.A.N.T.I.S.
  • The Simpsons
  • Daria
  • Tuca & Bertie
  • Gravity Falls
  • Over the Garden Wall

You can check out Waiting for October, our zine based on The Adventures of Pete & Pete, on Gumroad!