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13 - X-Men #63-66 - The X-Men Are Cancelled!
68 Plays15 days ago
It’s the end of an era. The X-Men go out like a… well, you’ll hear the metaphor. Neal Adams and Roy Thomas both say goodbye, but not together as the X-Men get cancelled! And Matt and Pat are, unexpectedly, super bummed about it.
Other Topics:
Has Pat been punched in the face? Magneto is back, bitch! Warren gets beat up. The X-Men fight wolves. Savage Land Mutates. Buster Crabbe/Tarzan Inception. Ben Casey: Revizzzited. SUNFIRE! Angel loses a fight with a plane. Matt’s embarrassing mistake. ANTS! Havok’s very bad no good speech. The original international X-Men. Neal Adams leaves ☹ Guess who’s still alive? What happened to Changeling? Godzilla with Humphrey Bogart’s face. The Hulk shows up…. “What a Rebe.” NOBODY LOVES THE HULK.
Write in to Pat's Email Corner: mutantmenacepod@gmail.com
Instagram: @mutantmenacepod
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Transcript
Introduction and Mutant Menace Report
00:00:01
Speaker
I'm Trish Tobey with W.A.R.C. reporting to you live from Westchester, New York, where there appears to be some sort of mutant menace on the loose.
00:00:35
Speaker
Hey everybody, I'm Matt Aucamp. And I'm Pat Reber. And this is Mutant Menace. Pete. Pete.
00:00:47
Speaker
How are you doing? We still have only gotten a name from Pete. So if you guys don't want to keep hearing us address Pete every episode. ah Speaking of, Pat.
00:00:59
Speaker
Yes.
Listener Mail and Comic Recommendations
00:01:00
Speaker
You got anything for Pat's email corner? Oh my goodness, we're jumping right into Pat's email corner.
00:01:10
Speaker
We'll figure it out. so yes, we do have some fresh emails through. This is from listener Jules. Hey, Pat, tell Matt that his joke from episode 10 that he specifically requested for listeners to email in and validate was indeed funny.
00:01:25
Speaker
I'd specify which joke that was, but I'm confident he'll definitely remember by the time you read this email. Jesus. These people have got our fucking number, man. have no idea what Jules is talking about. They are straight up ah mocking you here, man.
00:01:44
Speaker
Joking aside, Pat's comment from the same episode. i was I'm going to pause there, Jules. I appreciate you writing in. You do not have to refer to me in the third person. You're writing an email to me. No, they're writing an email to me through you.
00:01:57
Speaker
You're telling me that they said Pat's comment. Sentence structure here should be, joking aside, your comment, Pat, from the same episode. Like, it's still, it's my email corner.
00:02:08
Speaker
all right All right, just, all right, read it how you think it should be written. Joking aside, Pat, your comment from the same episode about one to a mini-series- My comment? My comment? No, Pat, just said your comment, meaning me. My comment.
00:02:20
Speaker
Oh, okay. So you should have said that. So, okay. You want me to read it to you the way that I would read it to her? I would pass the news along to you. Joking aside, Matt, my comment from this game episode about wanting a miniseries where Hank and Bobby hitchhike across the country reminded them that something like that does exist.
00:02:41
Speaker
Road Trip from X-Men First Class Volume 2, number four, is a single issue story where a young Hank and Bobby borrow one of Warren's expensive cars for a cross-country road trip. It's a quick, painless read that I would recommend to you and your listeners, especially if they like stories about what the X-Men do on their off time.
00:02:59
Speaker
Love that.
Favorite X-Men Activities and Personal Stories
00:03:00
Speaker
That sounds like a great recommendation. And yeah, thats that's all I want to see. That's fun because what that says to me is that somebody read those early issues and had the same sorts of observations as us.
00:03:12
Speaker
Like the Hank and Bobby stuff is great. It sucks that Warren always has cars. i One more chunk here from Jules. Bonus question for the pod.
00:03:23
Speaker
What are some of your favorite X-Men downtime activities? I mean... The obvious is basketball, right? The basketball scenes always rule. Later, way later, way later.
00:03:35
Speaker
Is that how you interpreted this question? I wasn't sure if it was, what are your favorite things that the X-Men do in their downtime? What are your favorite things that you do relating to the X-Men in your downtime? You're the only person on Earth who thinks about that question.
00:03:51
Speaker
Who thinks about the question, what X-Men related thing did you do?
00:03:58
Speaker
Matt, did you do anything X-Men related I also like when they all go like swim in the mansion's pool.
00:04:12
Speaker
The pool and basketball scenes I like. Those are all 90s trends. Okay, what did I do X-Men related? Absolutely nothing. i have been in the... I've been in the drunken stage of, like, new relationships lately.
00:04:28
Speaker
A new relationship. And that way that it, like, sort of parasitically grabs onto your mind. So I've just been a fucking idiot doing nothing. But... I did do something comic book related.
00:04:41
Speaker
What'd you do? I read, um... Do you know James Tinian? Yeah, of course. He wrote... A bunch of Batman? There you go. um I've been catching up on his series, or his like expanded universe.
00:04:56
Speaker
Something is Killing the Children. Do you know that series? No. It's sort of like a a somewhat horror series and ah like a monster hunting action series.
00:05:09
Speaker
Oh, okay. It is about the Order of St. George, still alive and extant in a small chapter in the United States. And they raise
X-Men vs. Magneto and Savage Land Adventures
00:05:20
Speaker
monster hunters who go out and they um find monsters that have sort of been generated by the imaginations of children and have been killing things.
00:05:30
Speaker
and kill those monsters. That sounds sick. It rules. It rules. And it's, so there's eight trade paperbacks so far. I just read the last three. Cause I'd been reading this some time ago, but since then, James Tinian has expanded it into a book called the house of slaughter. And it is about this house of the order of St. George and all the other characters that in,
00:05:56
Speaker
but Something is killing the children, you're following Erica Slaughter, one character, but in this other thing, you're following other characters from the Order. Okay. um it's like guess It's got its own spinoff series that he's also writing.
00:06:07
Speaker
Yes. And it's it rules. It's not X-Men, but it's good comics. Are we saying that this episode, the X-Men are good comics?
00:06:20
Speaker
Have you been doing anything X-Men related this week? I'll tell you, Matt, sort of. Oh, shit. A lot of content. and so I shouldn't say content. A lot of people talking to me that.
00:06:34
Speaker
i Hold on. Are you saying do you sometimes in your life think of in-person face-to-face interactions as content? I was hoping we would blow right by.
00:06:46
Speaker
i You're hoping you you would be able to edit that out, but there's no way we could pass by this. So it was mostly group chats. Ashley Stoneman.
00:06:57
Speaker
Have you heard this name? yeah Ash Stoneman from the very worst podcast that ah was our frequent collaborator. No, I don't. It doesn't ring a bell.
00:07:09
Speaker
Anyway, she asked in three separate group chats ah if I've ever been punched in the face.
00:07:18
Speaker
I'm only in one group chat. No, I think I'm in two group chats with her. The answer is yes, Matt. I think your answer was yes as well. No, not not since I was a little kid. Not since you were a child. I got in so many fights in early elementary school before they put me on Ritalin.
00:07:38
Speaker
So you have been punched in the face, you said. I have been punched, yeah. as As an adult man, not in a long, long time, but as a young adult, I have definitely been punched in the face.
00:07:50
Speaker
I think it's good for you. Will you tell one your punched in the face stories? i Sure. i was i spent a very brief time at college. I spent one year at college.
00:08:08
Speaker
And so this might still qualify as a child, but technically I'm an adult at this point. And I have a friend who was selling weed and he got ripped off. His name was Joey. We called him Jojo.
00:08:21
Speaker
He got he got like a stack of ones. It was like a quick shady exchange. So we didn't count the money. He walked away and found out that he'd been given like five dollars for fifty dollars worth of weed or whatever. sure. sure ah Jojo confronted the scammer and the scammer went and hid.
00:08:37
Speaker
And so we all went out to party that night and he shows up at that party with a whole bunch of people. i They gang up on Jojo and ah hold us back from participating. There's a brief fight. We all go back to the dorms and then there's a huge fight in the yard. Yeah.
00:08:57
Speaker
at the dorms that i was involved with just like 20 people swinging blind punches um not a fighter but and was this like was this like this was like young dumb kids fighting like nobody walked away hospitalized or right my roommate was super super drunk and he was leading the charge he was just like ah he hated this guy that ripped off jojo so i hate him too and Listeners, write in a Pat's email corner if you hate the guy who ripped off JoJo. Yeah, yeah.
00:09:31
Speaker
Or if you just hate being ripped off when you're trying to sell people weed. ah If you have a ripped off while selling people weed story.
Introduction and Development of Sunfire
00:09:41
Speaker
Mutantmenacepod at gmail.com. If it involves the X-Men, even better.
00:09:44
Speaker
oh So my roommate was super drunk. He actually got escorted away by the police because we were all underage.
00:09:55
Speaker
And yeah, the police broke up the fight punched in the face stories. So the, the fight ended, the police came by and my roommate who was super drunk was still ah shouting at everybody.
00:10:07
Speaker
Is this a friend you still have? no no, no. I is. We never saw him again. um no he i dropped out of college. So I lost contact with everyone there because it was a terrible experience.
00:10:22
Speaker
Okay. um Well, that's a great punched in the face story, Pat. Do you want to read and talk about a bunch of other grown men punching each other in the face? Yeah, absolutely I do.
00:10:33
Speaker
Issue 63, War in the World Below. ok Stanley editor, Roy Thomas writer, Neil Adams artist, Tom Palmer embellisher, Sam Rosen a letterer.
00:10:45
Speaker
I really think it's disrespectful to call the anchor embellisher. I don't... it's like they're because it's like It's like they're saying they're lying. Yeah. the was 69. Magneto is back, bitch.
00:11:03
Speaker
it was december of sixty nine magneto was back bitch And gloating over the way he deceived Angel last issue. He sits in front of his big sci-fi computer while Angel flies off to confront the X-Men and K-Zar to broker a truce between them and the Savage Land Mutants.
00:11:21
Speaker
I'm sure everybody remembers all that from last episode. As Angel approaches Kesar and the other X-Men, they ponder over whether that could really be Angel, as he should be back in New York, and he's wearing a different costume.
00:11:35
Speaker
hu While they ponder over this, Kesar beats the utter hell out of Angel. Yeah, yeah. Fucking rocks him. Pulls a tree out of the ground and smacks him with it. Smacks him out of the air and then punches him just to add insult to Angel. It's like, clearly hit by a tree.
00:11:51
Speaker
The X-Men are like just sitting there like, is that Warren? Is that not? And Kezar's like, I don't give a shit. And beats him up. If you love watching Warren lose, this really well done. series of issues for Warren losing.
00:12:08
Speaker
It's so funny. Even if if you don't read the text, it's like Kezar pulls a tree out of the ground, smacks Warren, punches him in the face, and then he's on the ground like,
00:12:21
Speaker
impotently reaching out after Kesar as Kesar runs away. And then there's one of those panels of him like looking at it, like shaking his fist and looking at his fist like, ah, dang it.
00:12:32
Speaker
Like I lost. The angels, angels, first lines of the issue are, oh and hold
Xavier's Fake Death and Alien Invasion
00:12:40
Speaker
it. Yeah.
00:12:46
Speaker
i Once the X-Men finally realize it's Warren and let Kesar know he loses interest and stomps away. Warren then tells the X-Men about his adventures last issue, how he fucking died. And a guy called the creator brought him back to life.
00:13:03
Speaker
He finishes explaining just in time to see Gaza and amphibious, two of the savage land mutants attack Kesar with an army of swamp people. Khazar and Beast, but no one else, fight the army while Warren begins to realize he was deceived.
00:13:19
Speaker
Never learning his lesson, he rushes off to confront the creator alone. Of course, of course he does. Angel arrives in time to hear the creator and brainchild talking over their plans and learns first that that the creator doesn't find and help mutants like Professor x Xavier, but captures natives of the Savage Land and turns them into mutates.
00:13:40
Speaker
Second, the creator is actually Magneto. Magneto explains that he did not die back when he fought the X-Men and the Avengers, but traveled into the caves underneath the Earth, eventually finding the Savage Land.
00:13:54
Speaker
Then something off-panel glows and Angel gets really upset. There is... so much happening beneath the earth in the marvel universe even in this 60 issues of x-men there's tyrannis and his whole army right there is mole man and his whole army there is grotesque and his whole civilization and now apparently there's enough caves that it leads all the way to antarctica and the savage land Don't forget the super adaptoid. So much. It's so busy down there.
00:14:29
Speaker
must be just. Well, that's okay. Retroactively. Now, I really like the Tyrannus mole man issue concept. It's like there's so much going on down there. They have to start squabbling with each other.
00:14:41
Speaker
Well, while Magneto is explaining how he survived, yeah just sorry, that's actually, that's a very funny point. I didn't think of that. But yeah, of course they hate each other. There's so many of them down there. There's so little space left down there. They're like, I just moved because Grotesque was in my fucking backyard.
00:15:03
Speaker
And now Mole Man is here. I'm not moving again. ah Magneto also explains that when he reached a certain section of barreling through the layers of the earth, he reached a layer that was rich
Artistic Influences and Series Cancellation
00:15:20
Speaker
with alloys that humans would never know.
00:15:23
Speaker
Just another... It doesn't come up again. I think it's just to explain how he's able to transit through sub-earth. Because there's just strange metal alloys, valuable alloys growing in the ground.
00:15:38
Speaker
that That we will never discover. Elements. Elements that we have never found. Yes. magneto Magnetoium. If someone wants to explore that in the future, there's there's a whole other layer. Molmanium.
00:15:54
Speaker
Grotesquium. Hard cut. but Back to the issue. Where we have a hard cut to... Kesar and Beast wrapping up their fight with the defeated Swamp Men.
00:16:07
Speaker
They finally decide to team up and raid the creator's base, but when Cyclops blasts through the wall, a weird naked man screams and a dozen wolves leap out and the attack them.
00:16:17
Speaker
And you're not, this is not, that is the sort of nonsense that like a child would say if he was like writing a comic book. And then Cyclops blasts into the fort and then 10 wolves jump out and they have to fight all of them. But no, this happens in the comic.
00:16:33
Speaker
Kezar's saber-toothed tiger Zabu. takes the wolves out in like a second, scares them all off, and the X-Men push deeper into the fort. Brainchild helps Amphibious set up a little ambush by determining which stone on the wall would make the entire thing collapse, but Marvel Girl just knocks the rubble away telekinetically.
00:16:54
Speaker
They subdue the two mutates and force them to lead them to their leader, which they now see is Magneto. This is third Magneto reveal of the issue.
00:17:07
Speaker
Magneto introduces them to his newest mutate, Lorelai, who sings a song that entrances all of the heroes in the room that are male. Yeah. Marvel Girl, who I guess is so aggressively heterosexual that Lorelai's powers don't work on her, duels Magneto back and forth for a bit until Jean has the legit, brilliant idea of just lifting Scott's visor with telekinesis. So good.
00:17:32
Speaker
Causing him to smash Magneto's mutate creator machine to bits. Once again, the X-Men flee the castle while presuming that Magneto, surely this time, is dead under the rubble.
00:17:43
Speaker
ah With the machine gone, the mutates turn back into swamp people and the X-Men tell Kesar they'd rather not have powers. The end.
00:17:55
Speaker
Yeah, they're like, oh, we would... ah He's like, who would give up so much power? And Cyclops is like, well, us. Us five. Weird. Weird.
00:18:06
Speaker
And that's not true of Angel, at least. Right. Angel fucking loves being Angel, even though he sucks at it. Yes. Yeah. He loves getting beat And to his credit, I know we talked about this a couple episodes back, but he he pushes through. He's seen worse playing basketball or whatever.
00:18:29
Speaker
Yeah. um This is another instance Of a fight with Magneto ending with a big explosion.
00:18:39
Speaker
The X-Men get out in just in time and they just assume Magneto's dead. It's like there's two ways for a Magneto and X-Men confrontation to end. It's that exact thing or it is Magneto trying to blow up the X-Men and the X-Men escape. One of them is trying to blow the other one up and assumes that they did.
00:18:58
Speaker
Yes, the third option being an issue ends with Magneto revealing himself. Yeah, there's a couple of those. They finally named the Savage Land here. If you remember way back when we visited, they just called it a mysterious land under Antarctica.
00:19:15
Speaker
Oh, yeah. This is officially now the Savage Land. Also, Kesar's different. Yeah, he's been through some shit.
00:19:27
Speaker
he's He's a lot more... No, he's just as like brusque and aggressive. But instead of just being like, Kesar, hate weird men. and He's he's like making literary allusions and stuff. like He's a fully like well-spoken guy.
00:19:47
Speaker
He still refers to himself in the third person. Hank even mentions it, right? Hank mentions in one panel that Kesar is speaking more eloquently and he's kind of annoyed by it.
00:19:58
Speaker
like Hank thinks that he should stick to his caveman speak. He does that to one of the villains too. He's like, boy, you talk a lot and you talk fancy. ah It's really... it's He's really having like an identity crisis. He is. He's thrown he's bandying about some... ah a physician heal thyself.
00:20:24
Speaker
um Yeah. I love there's a, okay. So angel rushes in again, just over and over and over and always loses.
00:20:36
Speaker
There's a moment though, where he's thinking about how he got used to trick the X-Men, which is, that's also a funny reveal too, because when amphibious attacks them,
00:20:46
Speaker
He's like, thanks, Angel, for leading us to you did well for delaying our enemies so we could attack them. As if like that would work. Yeah, yeah. Like they make you did our best friend. You did.
00:20:58
Speaker
And then they'd start fighting Angel, which actually now that I say it out loud, that probably would happen. Yeah. He's already pretty deep into things here.
00:21:10
Speaker
So really committed. There's a whole panel where he's just he's just like monologuing in his head. It's all thoughts. Right. And he's like, oh man, they're going to turn me into a murderer. I can't believe they did this to me.
00:21:21
Speaker
And he's like, you know what? I'm going to make him pay for that. And then he yells out loud, or die trying! so Right. from everybody Everything else is a thought balloon. Actually, I want to just paint this scene, right?
00:21:34
Speaker
Iceman, Gene, and Cyclops are off-pant. They must just be standing there watching. They're just standing there, doing absolutely nothing. As Beast and Kesar fighting an army of men...
00:21:48
Speaker
And Angel just jumps up into the air and yells, or die trying! And flies off.
00:21:57
Speaker
Why are they not, why are the other X-Men not fighting? I know. Well, so Kesar, to be fair, Kesar is like, I don't want you guys fighting beside me.
00:22:07
Speaker
This is my battle. Please leave me alone. And yeah with good reason, every time he runs into the X-Men, they fuck things up for him. Yeah. But Hank is like, buddy, I can't do that to you.
00:22:21
Speaker
And just rushes right in. Everybody else is like, look, if Kesar doesn't want us to be part of this, so we have let him fucking. I really wish that Neil Adams had given us just one panel of all the other X-Men just standing there watching.
00:22:37
Speaker
I know it's. ah it's definitely missing it's so strange that it's just uh it's beautifully illustrated of course but so strange that it's just that and then the x-men fighting a bunch of wolves
00:22:56
Speaker
um the lorelei reveal also pretty okay the last time we see warren he's confronting magnino And then Magneto's like, look over there. And Angel looks.
00:23:10
Speaker
And it's this like bright like purplish pinkish light. And he says, what do you pointing at, man? Something in that glowing sphere? Something that, no, it can't be.
00:23:21
Speaker
It's just Lorelei. We find out later it's just Lorelei. is Okay, I was unclear on that because it is, again, beautifully illustrated, right? it's do You see the fear in Warren's eyes. There's a close-up on his eyes. There's light refracting everywhere.
00:23:39
Speaker
And then they cut. Yeah, yeah. And then when when we rejoin Warren a little later, nothing's happening. they're just They're just hanging out in the room.
00:23:51
Speaker
And Warren's going, there's no use fighting this guy. He's going to... Unclear. They say that he's in hint entranced because he that it's Lorelai's power.
00:24:05
Speaker
ah Sure. Yeah, yeah. ah Now it makes sense to me. But also, why would he look at her and say, no, it can't be like, that's not what her power is. You don't know who that is.
00:24:16
Speaker
yeah Why wouldn't he look at her and go, ooh, like, ooh, hot lady, and then start drooling or whatever? Maybe he thought he had a one on one fight with Magneto.
00:24:27
Speaker
And as we know, he thought he would win that. And then it's revealed that there's another mutant in the room. And that's what panics him much. And he's so upset. He's like, no, it can't be. I thought I was in... I thought this was a private conversation. yeah Lorelai's powers, by the way.
00:24:46
Speaker
Interesting. what What the fuck? So she was... I mean, she's a siren, right? Based on ah yeah Greek mythology, which yeah famously...
00:24:58
Speaker
Only affected men because men were the only subjects of those stories. Like they were the one, they were the sailors, they were the adventurers. And I guess that's where it, I think they just, they wrote themselves into a corner maybe where all of the X-Men are are entranced by Magneto.
00:25:17
Speaker
How would they possibly get out of this? Right. Oh, well, one of them was unaffected because they are a girl.
00:25:28
Speaker
I mean, i I can see the logic here that it's like, oh she entrances the mind of those who find her attractive. Oh, she makes people fall in love with her by sight.
00:25:43
Speaker
But, like, I don't understand why that power would have limits based on somebody's sexuality. Yeah, or just their gender.
00:25:53
Speaker
Like, in the comic, it's explained that this is a gendered power, which is... Which is... is straight Yeah, so, and it must not be about sexuality, because Iceman's gay. Right.
00:26:05
Speaker
Unless he's faking. He's like, ah, me too!
00:26:11
Speaker
And again, is Marvel Girl that aggressively heterosexual? So it must be, you're right, it must be just something about having, like, Being a cis man, it only affects the Y chromosome or some shit. And so if a woman if there was a woman who had an errant Y chromosome, I guess she would also be... She would be stuck.
00:26:32
Speaker
You think it's at the chromosome level? I have no... What else would be the difference? That would be pretty intense. But it is... It's a mutant power, so that's like... I think we would do I think there's, ah so gender science in the 60s wasn't super complex. All right, you're right, yeah.
00:26:51
Speaker
I very badly want to find canon reason for this to work, but it might just be ah gender essentialism.
00:27:02
Speaker
I don't think that happens late. Like, I think when Lorelei is a comic book character in the future, I think she just... She comes back? Oh, yeah. All of these. I just watched her lose her powers. That is strange, isn't it?
00:27:17
Speaker
i There's a point. I thought this was fascinating. So Beast is fighting alongside Kesar. He ah compares him to Buster Crab. And I said, that can't be a real name. So I Googled it. There is a real Buster Crab. And he was actually quite a celebrity.
00:27:36
Speaker
In 1932, he was an Olympic gold medal swimmer for the US. And in the 30s, if you were moderately famous, they started putting in the pictures. So... He had more than 50 film appearances in the 10 years following his gold medal.
00:27:51
Speaker
Those roles include Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, at Billy the Kid, and... here's what confuses me. Tarzan. Now, Kesar, we may have misinformed about this in past episodes, but was actually created in the 30s as a Tarzan ripoff, right? to Timely comics didn't have it access or didn't have the rights to Tarzan, but they wanted to make their own Tarzan. Buster Crab played Tarzan
00:28:25
Speaker
Tarzan was the inspiration for Kesar. Hank is comparing Kesar to the man that played Tarzan. This is like um TV writer Dan Harmon calls this the Monopoly guy.
00:28:40
Speaker
Where you imbue a character with a trait and then you make a joke about the trait that you gave that character. This is based on the Ace Ventura movie. Oh, sure. Where um they dress a man as the Monopoly guy.
00:28:54
Speaker
And have him walk down the steps at like some gala. And Ace Ventura is like, oh, look, it's the Monopoly guy. And it's like, it's a pretty good moment.
00:29:06
Speaker
But that's not a good joke! You dressed him up like the Monopoly guy! You were like, okay, in walks a guy named the a guy dressed like the Monopoly guy, and the main our character says, hey, it's the Monopoly guy. That's not an observation! That's not a clever... The joke isn't supposed to be that he looks like the Monopoly guy. The joke is supposed to be that Ace Ventura notices that he looks like the Monopoly guy, but you clearly wrote it for the Monopoly guy to show up.
00:29:32
Speaker
exactly absolutely ridiculous and that's what's happening here think the only person that can get away with that is adam sandler i think he does that really uh to an absurd degree in what like give me an example i like the ah table of freaks in the wedding singer okay which includes brian posain everybody loves that guy right okay Like he just grabbed freaky looking people and called them the essentially the unfuckable table.
00:30:05
Speaker
Okay. So this is also reminding me of something that we missed last issue. And I sent you a message about this. I was on the Neil Adams Wikipedia page. And okay. We mentioned how boring that ah Ben Casey thing is. Right. Don't want to, don't even want to talk about it.
00:30:21
Speaker
I don't want to talk about it at all, but. It was a reference to a comic strip that Neil Adams drew based on the television show. Right. Apparently he drew a Ben Casey comic book strip and then Roy Thomas was like, like just threw it in there as a little.
00:30:39
Speaker
That is such an old timey comics thing of like, oh yeah, we found this guy doing ah daily newspaper comic strip based on a popular but boring television show.
00:30:52
Speaker
Yeah. Okay, I want to move on to the next issue, but have one more thing. Yeah, what's your one more thing? I also have one more thing. Okay, my one more thing is, why did Magneto resurrect Angel? How did that possibly factor into his plans? Wouldn't he have been way better off just letting Angel be dead?
00:31:11
Speaker
You're like, okay, one X-Men down. All right, I only got a couple more to fight. Yeah, I think he wants his scheme to be a little more ah Machiavellian, where he's not just defeating his enemies, he is humiliating them. He's picking them apart from the inside.
00:31:30
Speaker
And I think this also plays into our larger theory that Magneto does not want to kill the X-Men. Yeah, that's true. he saw He said he saw a spark of life remaining, end use a state-of-the-art technology that he needs to advance his plans to and said instead save Angel.
00:31:49
Speaker
And he's like, oh, i this is for my plan, actually. ah yeah yeah There's a really good Scott moment in this issue where i think it's the third Magneto reveal when he reveals himself to the remaining X-Men.
00:32:06
Speaker
Scott deduces it a moment before. He's like, yeah it seems like somebody's creating mutants here today. This is a dastardly planet. The only person I could think of that would bring this all together is somebody that we're sure is dead.
00:32:21
Speaker
And then Magneto steps out of the door, but it's just like, Oh, Scott figured it out. He's solved the mystery. Which is funny because Magneto is not going to be the only character in Marvel comics to try to make their own mutants.
00:32:35
Speaker
So there's not only one person who could pull off. But anyway, Pat, I'm going to tell you about issue 64. The coming of Sunfire. Not like that, you fucking pervert.
00:32:49
Speaker
um You, the listener, is the pervert, not the... Stanley Edding, Roy Thomas Writing, Don Heck Drawing, Tom par Palmer Inking, Artie Simek Lettering.
00:33:01
Speaker
Released on November 1969. It is November 69. A brand new
00:33:07
Speaker
a brand new mut Please stop that. We've never... I will in two more issues. um A brand new mutant we've never seen before. A guy in a gaudy costume based loosely on the concept of flames and the old Japanese flag named Sunfire.
00:33:26
Speaker
Stands above New York, angry that he's better than everyone else. He registers on the X-Men's mini-cerebro as he stalks around outside the United Nations building, waiting for some ceremony to begin.
00:33:39
Speaker
A politician from Japan named Mr. Yoshida has flown to the U.S. to dedicate a monument to the youth of the world. And as he wraps up his speech and asks for a glass of water, Sunfire blasts the monument with heat rays that emanate from his hands and declares Yoshida is a traitor.
00:34:00
Speaker
Iceman, Beast, and Angel intercept him and drive him off, but Hank gets his face burned in the process. The X-Men retreat to their uptown headquarters while Sunfire retreats to hang out with his Uncle Tomo and tell him his entire origin story.
00:34:16
Speaker
You know, like you do with your uncle all the time. don't you His uncle knows it. He's like, don't you remember, uncle, how this all started? Yes, yes. Let me go back to when I was born. Oh, God, you do this every time.
00:34:31
Speaker
Every time I see you. Sunfire's mother was several miles outside of Hiroshima when the U.S. dropped a nuclear bomb on it, rendering her a, quote, invalid. o Several years later, she became pregnant and gave birth to a son, Shiro Yoshida, before dying.
00:34:48
Speaker
Shiro was then raised by his uncle, who took him to ground zero, activating Shiro's powers as he touched the soil. He found he could project super hot streams of fire from his fingertips.
00:34:59
Speaker
Wow. Sorry, Matt. They discover his powers by his uncle taking him to ground zero. Yeah. Of where a nuclear bomb was dropped.
00:35:10
Speaker
Yeah. And he's like, pick up the dirt, boy. Yeah. Digging his hands into the soil because he had a theory that this child was a mutant and this would bring out his mutant powers. If this child wasn't a mutant, this is like... He's just killed his nephew. Stage four cancer. Yeah. Yeah.
00:35:26
Speaker
Hey, you know, anything for whatever his weird goals are. um After a few years of training with Uncle Tomo, he now swears to use his powers as Sunfire to avenge his nation in front of the world by humbling the United States.
00:35:44
Speaker
The X-Men head back to the UN in their weird Fantasticar ripoff searching for Sunfire. Matt. Yeah. yeah I'm sorry. This isn't their fantastic car ripoff. This is the manta ray jet that they stole in like issue 59, but it doesn't look like it anymore.
00:36:00
Speaker
It will look like it a little bit later, but in this scene, it does. right Sorry. Maybe I'm mixing up my moments. No, it does. It's just each artist keeps drawing it like slightly differently because yeah it is the goofiest looking jet you've ever seen. It looks like shit. Yeah.
00:36:17
Speaker
Um, Okay, so yeah, in their in their weird floppy car, um they head off searching for ah Sunfire. When they pick him up on Cerebro, they have Angel follow him to the airport where he sees Mr. Yoshida, the politician, in the company of his brother Tomo and his son Shiro.
00:36:36
Speaker
Sunfire is Mr. Yoshida's son! Oh, shit. When Angel loses them in the crowd, he picks a random airplane as it takes off and flies up to see if he can see the Yoshidas on board, but instead gets sucked into the jet engine and dies.
00:36:56
Speaker
Okay, well, he would have died if Iceman and Gene didn't save him at the last second. Turns out none of that was needed because Angel, I guess, already knew from the news that the Yoshidas were headed to Washington, D.C. to speak in front of Congress, so they just go there.
00:37:11
Speaker
this is He's just showing off. And failing! He loses a fight with a jet! with He loses a fight with a plane that's not fighting back. He just gets sucked into the engine, which is how you know that he's never tried this before. he's You don't get that close to a jet engine and when it's in flight.
00:37:34
Speaker
I've never done it before and I know that. legitimate Legitimately, he's the worst X-Man. He's so bad at this. he's just He just keeps surviving. Yeah, I know.
00:37:46
Speaker
Well, speaking of that, dude, this is like the first time Angel has met another mutant who can fly. And immediately he's like, oh, this guy flies better than me and faster. Oh, shit.
00:37:58
Speaker
Yeah. I hope the gang doesn't see this. Okay, so Mr. Yoshida catches Shiro and Tomo ah planning and slaps his son, then later catches him in full Sunfire garb.
00:38:14
Speaker
Sunfire knocks his dad out and flies up in the air, planning to incinerate the Capitol building, but is interrupted by Angel at the last second. Angel gets knocked out immediately. Of course. Sunfire and Iceman face each other down. Fire versus Ice and Iceman gets knocked out too.
00:38:29
Speaker
ah Marvel Girl, using her telekinesis, flies Cyclops up to the top of the Capitol building, where he deflects Sunfire's... Sunfire? yeah And leaps off the building to tussle with Shiro in mid-air after Scott gets blasted in the face.
00:38:47
Speaker
um That's two X-Men unconscious, two blasted in the face at this point. Marvel Girl lowers Scott to the ground, leaving no one in between Sunfire and his goals.
00:38:59
Speaker
Except Mr. Yoshida. He tells his son that in order to destroy the building, he'll have to kill him. And that Tomo is a sick man trying to fan the flames of a dead war.
00:39:12
Speaker
While Sunfire wrestles with the choice, Tomo shoots Mr. Yoshida graveyard dead. Sunfire responds by blasting Uncle Tomo and rushing to his dying father's side.
00:39:24
Speaker
The X-Men awkwardly leave. Like, literally, just like like ah fucking Homer Simpson in the bushes. Like, o okay. who the ah The X-Men awkwardly leave as Sunfire cries over his father's dead body, the end.
00:39:41
Speaker
I and love this consistent theme with the X-Men where they're like, things actually turned out pretty bad for this guy. let's Let's leave him alone.
00:39:52
Speaker
They did it to Sauron's girlfriend. ah Right. And then Angel stumbled upon her a little later and she's just alone on a cliff. or Who's that weird rich guy that put on a metal costume and started shooting up the town? Yeah. They were like, oh, this is weird with your dad. You just had a touching moment with your dad.
00:40:14
Speaker
You're probably healed. Yeah. Or that they leave Tyrannus and Mole Man completely memoryless in the You guys will be fine. ah Don Heck, your boy.
00:40:30
Speaker
ah Stop calling him my boy, please. i This feels to me like i your mom saying, we're not stopping for legendary X-Men artists. We have legendary X-Men artists at home.
00:40:48
Speaker
Don Heck. You're like, aww. but um I love... You wrote this note, but I also... i so I'm just going to say it. I love i also love the opening line. It's just... Ants!
00:41:04
Speaker
Ants!
00:41:07
Speaker
i Here's what I wonder. because He's way up on a building. Does Sunfire just not have a concept of distance? No. And he sees all the like people walking around.
00:41:18
Speaker
And he's like, they're all so small. I could squirt. He does the like Saturday Night Live head squishing. Ooh, Matt, that's kids in the hall. Oh my God, that kids in the hall. Sorry, that's embarrassing.
00:41:31
Speaker
That's really embarrassing. Cut this, cut this, cut this! um We are ah dancing around it a little bit. open What's the message of this?
00:41:49
Speaker
ah the the message of the issue is, the US didn't do anything bad. it so Beginning of the issue, before we even establish that this has to do with the war, the end of World War II, it's established that this a very famous Japanese statesman. And so a man in the crowd, unnamed, waiting for this statesman to speak, says, he makes me feel like maybe the big one was worth it after all.
00:42:21
Speaker
God damn it. he's Is he...
00:42:25
Speaker
Is he referring to what I think he's referring to? He must be. Here's what I think is happening. I think this is Roy Thomas saying, after we defeated Japan in World War two they became good.
00:42:40
Speaker
And they became, and now they have these excellent statesmen that we can um invite to the U.S. and have speak and admire and...
00:42:52
Speaker
So it's it's it's it's in in some way Roy Thomas thinking he's trying to repair some fucking gulf between US and Japan relations by being like, hey, kids, we all love Japan now.
00:43:06
Speaker
We have to put the past. They might be you might run into Japanese people who are mad at us. They're crazy. ah And you might think that we did something bad.
00:43:18
Speaker
But actually, what we did made it so that Japan is our friends and they love and we love each other now.
00:43:25
Speaker
Yeah, that's fair. i You have to imagine by the 60s, that's what like the textbooks were listing about it, right? and Right. Saying like, if we hadn't done it, Japan would still be bad guys and we wouldn't be friends with them.
00:43:39
Speaker
Right. This was at a time where... Okay, in like the social sciences, social evolutionism had fallen out of favor, but in modern culture, it hadn't.
00:43:50
Speaker
So a layman's understanding of it would be, we helped push Japan into the next century. you right help We helped them evolve their civilization into its next stage, and now they've they're they're they're catching up with us, where, again...
00:44:09
Speaker
civilization is not a evolution. It is. Yeah. Yeah. A series of choices. ah Aside that aside, the other piece I'm mad about, and I knew I said I was going to let this go, but, uh, Iceman says, Holy jumping Hannah.
00:44:29
Speaker
Just, just when you had let it go, they were like, let's make it worse for him. Yeah. Let's ramp this up. Holy jumping Hannah. Here's the thing is, I'm still picturing Hannah Horvath from Girls when somebody says, holy Hannah.
00:44:47
Speaker
So when you say jump in Hannah, now I'm watching Lena Dunham jump up and down. and
00:44:57
Speaker
It's just bizarre.
00:45:00
Speaker
Yeah. ah It is bizarre. I mean, that is bizarre that you picture that. But it is ah it is also weird ah phrase, and I've never heard it besides in these comics.
00:45:15
Speaker
We get ah the reveal that the X-Men actually have a nice uptown city h q in this issue. Yeah, when I read your note on that, I got confused. I was like, oh, I think maybe this is where they've been the last few issues when we've been calling it the mansion.
00:45:33
Speaker
But then we find out next issue that, no, they have been in the mansion. so Yeah, yeah. I can't tell. Is this what was this Scott's secret identity apartment? Maybe that's like that's my best guess because it is it's just an apartment.
00:45:48
Speaker
It's a like they say HQ, but there's just like a kitchen and a living room. Yeah. i yeah But i I'm pretty sure this is our first time seeing it as their HQ. I don't think they've been here before. i think this is just to explain why they're not leaving the city.
00:46:07
Speaker
Yeah. We talk about Sunfire because Sunfire is here. Yeah. Sunfire comes back, I presume. Yes, yes. Sunfire becomes a major figure in an X-Men lore. He becomes an X-Man really soon.
00:46:27
Speaker
um I think he becomes a Horseman of Apocalypse at one point. He's part of Big Hero 6, if you've seen the Disney movie. he's um how How does that work?
00:46:38
Speaker
He wasn't in the movie. But he was a member of Big Hero 6 in the comics. um He was... Oh, ah he was an Avenger. Oh.
00:46:49
Speaker
He was an Avenger? Yeah, ah the Avengers Unity Squad. When it was... um When Rogue and Havoc led a team of Avengers.
00:47:01
Speaker
Oh, is it all mutants? It is like half mutants, half Avengers. It was... Alright. think Captain America... Thor, Scarlet Witch, Havoc, Wolverine, Rogue, Sunfire. um I'm missing somebody. I'm missing somebody.
00:47:20
Speaker
It was in Uncanny Avengers was the comic. Okay. I was going to say this sounds like it could either be a weird Avengers team or a weird X-Men team. Yeah, no, it was um in the wake of the X-Men versus Avengers crossover, I think.
00:47:37
Speaker
It was like to bring X-Men and mutants together. It's actually, it's well known for Havoc having a really, really terrible speech where he quotes, he opens up by quoting the No Effects song, Don't Call Me White, by saying, Don't Me Mutant represents everything I hate.
00:47:57
Speaker
Oh, no. And then goes on to say, I'm not, don't call me a mutant. I'm just a human like you. And and it's like a really tone deaf post-racialist speech by Rick Remender. It's like clearly not by Havoc. That checks out. Havoc has always, I guess, been a little weird about his status as a mutant. Like if anybody was going to give that speech, I could see it being Havoc, but it feels like it comes out of...
00:48:23
Speaker
rick remender's pen rather than havoc's mouth yeah sure it's a i will say this uncanny avengers is great uh uncanny x-force also by rick remender's great i think he he's done some amazing x-men comics but man that speech is one of the worst up there with um kitty pride yelling the n-word several times hmm Okay, not there not quite that bad.
00:48:53
Speaker
One thing I need to talk about in this issue, and I meant to talk about it last issue, I meant to talk about it last episode. Magneto saves Angel. who is flying around in his avenging angel costume, right? He kind of was mad at the X-Men. He was like, I don't need this nice costume that Jean made for me by hand.
00:49:13
Speaker
Instead, I'm going wear this avenging angel costume from my past. So he's wearing his avenging angel costume. He dies in the Savage Land. Magneto brings him back to life. And when he emerges from the chamber, he's got a whole different costume on. It's the avenging angel costume, but with just like navy blue, black and white.
00:49:32
Speaker
And no one mentions it. It's not the black and red Avenging Angel costume from his origins. It is this brand new costume. The X-Men do mention in issue 63 when he approaches them in Kesar. They're like, oh, how do we know this really is Warren?
00:49:48
Speaker
He's wearing a whole different costume. But that is the only mention of it. And now this is just the costume that he wears. Yeah. Why isn't anybody talking about
00:50:02
Speaker
it? Yeah. I do have some more so stuff to say about Sunfire, actually, real quick. Oh, okay. Because this is going to become really ah important in ah three episodes.
00:50:12
Speaker
Three episodes of this podcast from now. So this... Sunfire was the beginning of this idea that Roy Thomas had when talking with, I think... um Okay.
00:50:25
Speaker
Al... I'm going to get some of this wrong. So Al Landau was the person who the president of Marvel. Yeah, he was the publisher.
00:50:36
Speaker
okay yeah so al landau was the pub the publisher at marvel and landau also ran a media company called trans world that was in charge of selling marvel comics like oh like in uh foreign markets yeah yeah and in conversation with him roy thomas decided that Marvel needed more international superheroes. So the places that Marvel Comics sold really well... I don't know that Japan was one of them because this this idea never came to fruition.
00:51:08
Speaker
But I know this is why Wolverine was invented. Oh. As a Canadian. And this is why Banshee was brought back. So in in some of these markets where Marvel Comics were popular, he was like, they should have each have their own superhero.
00:51:24
Speaker
And he was going to do it in the X-Men. His actual... His original idea, and I'm going to talk about it now. We'll talk about, we'll touch on it a little bit later when the actual kind, when the idea turns into something else.
00:51:37
Speaker
But his original idea was that the X-Men would travel the world looking for mutants in a ship that disguises itself as a cloud.
00:51:47
Speaker
Okay. Real Roy Thomas-esque idea. Yeah, yeah. ah and recruit mutants from various countries. that's I mean, I think you just said this, but this does sort of happen in the future, right?
00:52:04
Speaker
Yeah. So, um I mean, instead of using the specific countries that – this is what we'll talk about in the future – Instead of using this dumb Roy Thomas cloud idea, and instead of using this... clouddo maron cloud The The cloud-o-copter.
00:52:24
Speaker
crowd The cloud-o-propulsion-net.
00:52:29
Speaker
Instead of the MUTO recruitment device. instead Instead of using the exact nations that were like their biggest markets, when there it comes to be international X-Men, it'll just be... Everywhere.
00:52:51
Speaker
It'll be everywhere, right? Yeah. So... Yeah, and I think countries chosen for their specific different political affiliations so that it can make it feel like there's tension on the team.
00:53:04
Speaker
But that's, I think, where at least the kernel of the idea of Sunfire comes from. Now... That's interesting.
00:53:15
Speaker
Patrick. Yeah. Do you want me to tell you about issue 65? No, I want to tell you about issue 65...
00:53:23
Speaker
Fine. Go fucking ahead. Thank you, Matt. Issue 65. Before i'd Be Slave. dennis o'neill writer neil adams artist aided by tom palmer inker gene is a letterer they do let us know that roy thomas is taking a brief break but we'll be back next issue okay i have to give you some more background issues yeah yeah deniel matt he goes like dennis o'neill here so denny o'neill
00:53:56
Speaker
And Neil Adams would eventually be like a ah legendary comic book team. ok They will do in the 70s a Green Arrow Green Lantern run that focuses really, really heavily on social issues.
00:54:12
Speaker
ah They will do a run on Batman that is very... ah I know Batman. That is very formative for the characters. um the The sort of Dark Knight aspect of the character comes from their run.
00:54:30
Speaker
Well known for the very big ears, Batman. Yeah. But in this instance, Neil Adams actually plotted this issue, supposedly.
00:54:41
Speaker
And then Roy Thomas thinking, ah, they've got this one. was busy that month So he passed off writing duties to Denny O'Neill. And this pissed Neil Adams off.
00:54:53
Speaker
So along with a couple other things in this issue is why Neil Adams left the X-Men. And we'll talk about those other things as we get to them. and Okay. i We'll try to top that. because Enjoy this ah recap Release date December That's when it hit shelves. December ah the The cover date is actually February 1970. The X-Men arrive back at the mansion in their street clothes, hoping to recover from the intense battle with Sunfire.
00:55:26
Speaker
But it's not to be as they are greeted at the front door by Alex Summers and Lorna Dune in their full Havoc and Polaris costumes, demanding the X-Men suit up and get ready for action.
00:55:37
Speaker
If this is your first episode, it's Lorna Dane. Pat's being a goof. Sorry. The X-Men and Havoc and Polaris spend two full pages shouting there's no time for that now back and forth until the X-Men finally relent.
00:55:50
Speaker
Once they're in costume, Alex feels comfortable explaining that there's an impending alien invasion at the South Pole. We're going back to the South Pole. i And that these aliens are transporting their entire planet into Earth's orbit with the intention of throwing off our gravity, causing all sorts of tidal waves and earthquakes, making us earthlings very easy to enslave even still after like you said two pages of no there's no time for that now and like a physical altercation because there's no time for that now he's still not telling them everything he's nobody's telling anybody there's so many very important details i also love off panel there must have been a conversation of like okay alex will listen to you and alex was like no you have to get in costume first
00:56:40
Speaker
yeah Yeah, they're like, they are yelling at, there's so much dialogue. they're And they're still not telling each other anything. The X-Men are just begging for a nap. They're like, I don't care what the emergency is, I need to rest.
00:56:58
Speaker
The X-Men are all very skeptical about the idea of an alien invasion until Alex reveals who gave him the intel. And just as he names him, who comes rolling around the corner but Professor Right.
00:57:13
Speaker
It's a Professor X reveal. Whoa. He's alive to everyone's surprise but genes. She's known all along and had been sworn to secrecy about it. ah Professor X explains what happened as he was discovering this alien invasion. Changeling, you remember Changeling, snuck into his super secret office to ask for a purpose.
00:57:35
Speaker
ah He found out, Changeling did, that he only has months left to live and wants to make up for some of the damage he caused. Xavier, immediately seeing an opportunity, tells Changeling to pose as him and lead the X-Men until he dies so Xavier can take the time he needs to focus on this alien invasion.
00:57:55
Speaker
Now, okay. we've We talked about this at the time. So, Changeling, we only ever saw him use his powers once. Off-panel.
00:58:08
Speaker
He changed into Professor X because on panel he was like, I'm Professor X. And then Professor X was like, that's not me. That's Changeling. Right. And it confused the X-Men, which confused the villain.
00:58:23
Speaker
Right. And then now he changes into Professor X. Changeling can only. Is it possible? Changeling's only power is I could change it into Professor X. His mutant power has just become Charles Xavier. One other guy.
00:58:39
Speaker
Maybe he had to pick that guy at the beginning. Like when his mutant power manifests, he had to pick a guy and Charles ah charles x Xavier is just like on TV. And it's like, oh, fuck. This is all I can do now.
00:58:50
Speaker
It's better if for years he was just changing into some guy. And then yeah at the at the height of his power, when he's working for Mutant Master, he's like, oh shit, this is the guy. This is the guy I keep changing into.
00:59:06
Speaker
Yeah. So remember how many times we pointed out Professor X using telepathy after that issue? Right. Yeah, yeah.
00:59:19
Speaker
we It like turns out that was Changeling's telepathy. Who doesn't have telepathy? Well, we also learned that Professor x Xavier was able to give a chunk of his telepathy the gene So it's possible that he was also able to give a chunk of his telepathy to Gene.
00:59:38
Speaker
utterly like utterly the x the x-men are as shocked as we are yeah but of course there's no time for that now they must train harder than they have ever trained prepare sense their counter-attack cue a pretty sick danger room splash panel yeah yeah meanwhile in the south pole nick fury and shield are mounting an attack on the alien scouting ship that was sent to the south pole It's quickly made clear that they're no match for the alien forces. So it's time for the X-Men to act.
01:00:08
Speaker
They take a rocket ship back to Antarctica. Where's the Avengers? Where's Thor? Where's anybody who? Okay, go ahead. They're off world. I'm sure. i The Fantastic Four aren't because we see them later. that's That's true. They're just sitting around in the Baxter building.
01:00:27
Speaker
ah The X-Men arrive in the alien base where they fight a Godzilla with the face of Humphrey Bogart before finding the control center. This is the other thing that made Neil Adams quit.
01:00:39
Speaker
Neil Adams drew like a reptilian alien here. Yeah, a monster, something. It doesn't look like any of the other aliens. Yes, he drew um a monster ah a monster with a monster face.
01:00:51
Speaker
Stan Lee didn't like it and had, I think, Don Heck. erase it and draw over it. No.
01:01:02
Speaker
Yeah. And draw a humanoid face. It's, and that's, that's who ends up on the cover Of this issue too. ah Is this yeah yeah horrible stupid looking monster.
01:01:13
Speaker
another reason Again another reason why. Neil Adams quit. Was like fuck this. I'm not working here anymore. It's so bizarre. It does look like they took Godzilla. And replaced his face with a cranky old man.
01:01:26
Speaker
It sucks. It's yeah. We've seen some bad art in the X-Men. This monster's face is I think the worst. The X-Men in the control center actually have a really easy time with the aliens, but there's just too many of them. The alien planet is too close. They'll never be able to stop them in time.
01:01:46
Speaker
Until the professor employs superhuman will to scan the minds of everyone on earth and unite all the minds that possess the trait of compassion, except for pilots and surgeons that are currently at work, of course.
01:02:01
Speaker
he been yeah He then, they made it very clear. He's not. Don't worry. He's not distracting any pilots. If your mom's in surgery, Professor Charles Xavier is not going to. I love it.
01:02:18
Speaker
It is for sure an editor's note. This is Stan. Nope. Can't get the surgeons. Yeah.
01:02:30
Speaker
i he scans the minds of everyone on Earth and unites all of the minds that possess the trait of compassion. This does include the Fantastic Four who were just sitting on the couch. He then... their day off.
01:02:42
Speaker
um Follow me here. He then blasts that positive energy out into the universe, has Lorna, who's standing by his side, direct it to the X-Men's location with her magnetic powers.
01:02:56
Speaker
It hits Jean in the brain, where she... yeah projects it into havoc yeah havoc uses it as a charge for his blasting powers which he blasts directly into scott's back scott absorbs that to i intensify his i-beams which he st streets shoots straight up into the air at the alien planet while bobby shoots ice at him to keep him from overheating because it's a lot of activity but these aren't his regular i-beams
01:03:29
Speaker
They are filled with the positive energy of compassionate people, and they score a direct hit... The aliens begin to be overwhelmed with feelings of love and compassion, which drives them mad enough to fly away from the earth and then blow up their entire planet.
01:03:46
Speaker
Finding death is the only escape from these foreign feelings. The end. That's it. it We friggin hate being evil now. Oh man, we was evil.
01:03:59
Speaker
i hate it. Let's die. God.
01:04:11
Speaker
Remember just like three issues ago, the X-Men was really good. Yeah, I know. i know. we if we If I can pull some gold out of this, though. This is still Neil Adams, right? There's some weird ah things going on art-wise here, but there's a moment where Havoc is warming up his powers, and it is just so damn cool. It is these concentric circles that are, like, brightest in the middle of his chest, and they're expanding out and kind of changing color and dimming a bit, and then it's also radiating out from, like, the different
01:04:47
Speaker
joints on his arm that he's preparing to. It's just, it's ah an incredibly cool visual. It's pretty iconic. I think it becomes sort of Havoc's thing moving forward. Like this is how his powers get displayed.
01:05:00
Speaker
Neil Adams really sets a lot up about havoc's costume like his costume is just a black void and that those concentric circles on his chest that grow and shrink depending on the level of energy in his body yeah yeah it moves around there's a there's a scene where he's off to the like usually it's in the center of his chest but if havoc is turned to the side it's still in the center Yeah, it looks like it's almost like a necklace that he's wearing with a big hubcap on it.
01:05:34
Speaker
You get the sense that no matter what direction you're looking at Havoc from, you will see these these circles in the center of that form.
01:05:48
Speaker
which is Yeah, yeah. Which is a very cool idea. As if there's just some optical mechanism working here that is inhuman, like doesn't exist in physics, but exists in havoc, which is really interesting.
01:06:04
Speaker
The other really great Neil Adams thing here is when Professor X is linking together all the people, all the people's compassion. It's like a little boy. It's like um what is clearly meant to be a woman in some African country.
01:06:19
Speaker
um Then what is clearly meant to be a man in some, Middle Eastern country and he's got a bandolier of bullets on. it's what Yeah, yeah. A little weird, but there's some choices here.
01:06:31
Speaker
And then what, again, I think is clearly supposed to be a Native American. And they are just, they are all just like raising fists in front of them ah full of determination. And it's like, it's really like cool. It's a really almost, it's kind of an affecting moment.
01:06:46
Speaker
Yeah, I'll be honest, I am, I know you're talking about art, but I'm also a sucker for the power of love. I think a story that uses that as its sort of deus ex machina is, I'll forgive that every time. I think it's very sweet.
01:07:04
Speaker
a Back to Neil Adams, though The one other thing I wanted to point out was the shield airship that he draws, which yeah looks like a fucking metal blimp. It's heavily riveted and armored. It's got sort of like a yeah the observation areas in the front. It's not the cockpit. The cockpit sits underneath. But the ah big windows in the front make it look like this big sort of menacing metal worm. yeah It's got...
01:07:32
Speaker
propellers on it it's really ah very imaginative and it looks impossibly large too yeah yeah it's the again neil adams and that sense of scale that he's able to put in is really just it's doing its work here so i like some of the littler things here i feel a little conflicted about how he draws the x-men out of costume in this issue like the first few pages of this are a little awkward and they're short They kind of don't look like the same people panel to panel. I don't know what's going on there because Neil Adams is usually very consistent with how he draws people.
01:08:07
Speaker
but Yeah, yeah. He does things in um like little touches. like He draws Cyclops and Jean holding hands as as they're like having conversations with people.
01:08:20
Speaker
And something about just like those little touches are just so...
01:08:26
Speaker
I don't know. I like it. I like it. Uh, yeah. Yeah. That sort of personal touch. There's sort of like a thoughtfulness that's going into how he draws.
01:08:37
Speaker
I think thoughtful is a really good word for it. It's very, there's a lot of attention to detail. There's a lot of effort put into displays of emotion, whether it's on someone's face or it's just in their body language.
01:08:50
Speaker
I'll tell you another thing that, uh, I think this whole alien invasion is such like a contrived... I think that this whole concept sucks. I think it's so contrived.
01:09:02
Speaker
I think it's so silly. They're just like, oh, we're evil. We want to enslave people. Oh, no, we're evil. We got to... But, like... Also, so what Xenox? Like, this this was also something... Xenox.
01:09:14
Speaker
This is also something that made Neil Adams quit. And this is why he was mad at Denny O'Neill's dialogue. He was like, I drew these cool aliens, and he named them Xenox. Z apostrophe and O X. Yes.
01:09:27
Speaker
Yeah. And so like in interviews, Neil Adams is like, yeah, I don't know why he named him that. That that's stupid. It's very deep. Like that is a 1950s science fiction name. And we're in the seventies now, baby. All right. So which of these insane things do we want to talk about before we move on to the next issue? Do we want to talk about x Xavier? Yeah.
01:09:54
Speaker
We've talked about all of them, but I'm sure we have more to say. we want to talk about the no time for that now-ing at the beginning where they're just shouting at each other instead of telling each other what's fucking going on?
01:10:05
Speaker
do do they Do we want to talk about Xavier faking his own death, which makes absolutely no sense and is just absolutely psychotic? Go ahead. I need to talk about Xavier faking his death because I have given this man credit in the past and I need to take that back. This is fucked up.
01:10:23
Speaker
Here is a list of things that you did. Faked your death seemingly just so you could get some work done because the X-Men were distracting you too much. The people, the children that you adopted and brought into your home.
01:10:35
Speaker
i took advantage of a dying man. Changeling walks in and says, i only have months to live. I want to serve some sort of purpose. This is a shapeshifter. There are a thousand things you could do with him just to, you change the world, but instead you say, why don't you pretend to be me and then fight and go fight grotesque and die.
01:10:56
Speaker
Yeah. I made Jean keep it a secret. I don't blame Jean for this at all. She is in innocent child. This is her mentor who's like, hey, going to fake my death. And the only other people i let you have any contact with, you need to make sure they don't find out about it.
01:11:14
Speaker
And he's he's groomed them in this way. Yeah, yeah. to what I say, you trust everything I say, you do everything I say, otherwise the world could be destroyed, is this thing that he's constantly instilling in them.
01:11:30
Speaker
he he's He always does this stuff where he's like, the fate of the world hangs in the balance. And then it's like, Gene, you gotta go to college. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And it's like, look, the fate the world didn't hang in the balance, you fucking emotionally manipulative dick!
01:11:47
Speaker
Jean's got the power of positivity. Why can't she handle this? Why couldn't he call Reed Richards and say, hey, I noticed there's an alien invasion coming. Can we work on this together? yes Yeah, you guys handle this sort of thing a lot. Yeah, you probably know how to... You've defeated the most menacing creature in the entire universe several times!
01:12:09
Speaker
I'm talking about Galactus. You could probably help. Here's what I think might be the worst part, or at least the the most impactful part.
01:12:20
Speaker
He let Changeling lead and train the team yeah without their knowledge. he He has no qualifications there. He's the one who's... creating these directives for him. You are trusting Changeling entirely to not revert back to his old ways, to have completely yeah reformed himself and be willing to not just lead a team of superheroes, but lead a team of young adults that are in an important developmental stage.
01:12:53
Speaker
Hey, thankfully he died right the fuck away. he is Yeah. like Wasn't the grotesque thing like two issues after? It was shortly after that.
01:13:05
Speaker
a Xavier didn't know that was going to happen. No, he didn't. He didn't at all. And he thought he was going to die of cancer. The fucking Xavier let the X-Men get broken up and sent across the entire country without intervening, without being like, oh, sorry, Fred.
01:13:22
Speaker
I don't know why you're calling yourself Amos now, but. You don't have to break up the X-Men. I'm still here. It's okay. Yeah, yeah. They in they had to take on brand new identities.
01:13:35
Speaker
Scott had to go get his broadcasting license. Jean had to learn to be a supermodel and get, like, sexually harassed by that dick. Yeah, her psyche has changed. She's a different person after that cover mission. And she knew!
01:13:49
Speaker
but
01:13:53
Speaker
One more thing he does that's fucked up here that I yeah didn't mention in the recap is he goes ahead and dies again. end of the issue, he had too much compassion in his head and he ah passes out from it. He collapses.
01:14:08
Speaker
And once again, the X-Men are all fearing that their leader, mentor, father figure is dead. you You mentioned here, though, when Alex is telling everybody about the invasion,
01:14:22
Speaker
that Iceman calls him Tin Hitler. Yes. I also want to mention Alex at some point calls Iceman Sonny. Remember, Alex is like three years older. He's a senior in college and Bobby is. ah Yeah, I guess you're right.
01:14:37
Speaker
I guess Alex is older than Bobby. It's not a Sonny gap. No, definitely not. Definitely not. because we Because was that what we saw that Alex was graduating college? Yeah.
01:14:48
Speaker
Yeah, Alex is Scott's older brother. and We know Scott is now two years older than. Alex is Scott's younger brother. I'm sorry, Matt, but if we go back to the issue where we met Alex Summers, it is made clear that he is Scott's older, younger brother, older brother, younger brother.
01:15:10
Speaker
Somebody look it up. Email us. Mutant Menace Pod at gmail.com. We're not going back to these old issues. We're going to look it up right now. Page two of issue 54.
01:15:22
Speaker
Imagine Scott having a kid brother. Well, I... You still got the SNL thing wrong. ah page Page three.
01:15:37
Speaker
Thanks, big brother. Okay. Okay. Is that Scott talking to Alex? No, it's Alex talking to Scott. One of them is like, oh, fuck, yeah!
01:15:50
Speaker
ah Okay. Okay, let's move on. There's no time for this now. Here's a thing that I think is a little interesting, and I think you noted it here as well, Matt, that Havoc and Polaris are...
01:16:06
Speaker
not quite members of the X-Men. Like they're second class X-Men. The rest of the X-Men look down on them and say like, Hey, your guests in our home. But at the same time, they wander around the mansion in costume, ready to fight whatever they're called upon.
01:16:24
Speaker
Right. And when the X-Men go to fight the Xenox, I guess Havoc is there at the end.
01:16:33
Speaker
But he's not in any of the fight scenes. He doesn't like fight the aliens. Yeah, yeah. And I think like once we get past this episode, we're not going to see an X-Men title for a little while. And the next time we do, the team is radically different.
01:16:48
Speaker
so But at that point, Havok and Polaris are considered, oh, like they ah they have been part of the team for a while. Yeah, I think even though in the Dark Ages, I don't think we see them. And we'll see. We'll see. Well, we'll like. Yeah, yeah. But just want to just want to visit that. It's made very clear in this issue that they're sort of like not primary. They're like X-Men reserves. It's very it's weird. It's it's weird. Whatever whatever relationship they have to the X-Men.
01:17:17
Speaker
OK, anyway, well, we'll see what relationship they have to the X-Men in issue 66. The mutant and the monster. o No, um it's not a yelling. There's no there's no punctuation.
01:17:31
Speaker
Wait, yeah, Matt, is this the first title of an X-Men issue that doesn't have punctuation at the end? I don't know. Maybe. I'm pretty sure it is.
01:17:41
Speaker
Usually it's an exclamation point. Sometimes it's an ellipses.
01:17:48
Speaker
We're in the 1970s now, Pat. We're out of the sixty s Yeah, we are fully... Our little podcast has made it to and new and next its next decade. ah new decade. We haven't quite hit 10 years of X-Men comics yet, but we are i think were four moving into the next... ah Edited by Stan Lee. Written by Roy Thomas.
01:18:09
Speaker
Drawn by Sal Buscema. Sal Buscema. Okay. Inked by Sam Granger. Lettered by Artie Symec. It's the final issue of the X-Men and the gang hovers over Xavier's bed as he lays in critical condition following his battle with the Xenox.
01:18:29
Speaker
Iceman gets mad and tries to impale Havoc with an icicle because he and Lorna are, ah but they've they've clearly gotten closer. There's some romantic tension there.
01:18:42
Speaker
And like a mutual romantic tension, which Lorna does not have with Bobby. which Bobby does not seem to grasp. ah Scott breaks up their fight by blasting the ground with a full power optic blast that somehow does absolutely no damage to anything. And everyone apologizes to each other using a mind probing device. They got from the Avengers. They dig into Xavier's mind only to find that all he's worried about is the Hulk.
01:19:08
Speaker
That's all he's thinking about as he's dying. ah Suddenly, everyone ah remembers that Gene is a telepath now. and She probes nick Xavier's mind only to find a picture of the Hulk. And that's it.
01:19:20
Speaker
This guy loves the Hulk. That's all he's thinking about on his deathbed. He just wants to think about the Hulk. So the X-Men decide to go and find the Hulk, but leave Alex and Lorna behind, of course.
01:19:33
Speaker
ah Iceman, jealous as hell, demands that he's also and like, I'm staying behind too. The X-Men take off in their floppy airplane that looks like a robin covered in several layers of goo and soon find the Hulk rampaging in Las Vegas.
01:19:48
Speaker
Angel instantly dive-bobs him and gets clapped into unconsciousness. Of course. Beast likewise leaps into battle and gets swatted away, so Cyclops gives him a full optic blast that, while it couldn't destroy a floor a few pages ago, slows the Hulk down and long enough for Marvel Girl to knock him out with her mental bolts.
01:20:07
Speaker
He instantly reverts to Bruce Banner, and before he's even fully conscious, the X-Men begin bombarding him with questions about Professor X. A military guy who's not Thunderbolt Ross, but some kind of major. I looked it up. Apparently Major Glenn Talbot.
01:20:23
Speaker
Oh, Major Glenn Talbot. I don't know this character, but he's apparently yeah neither do i best friends with the Thunderbolt Ross, which makes it even funnier that he just constantly uses thunder as an exclamation.
01:20:34
Speaker
He's like, thunder, these people are That's like me stubbing my toe and being like, oh, Reaver. What a reeb.
01:20:47
Speaker
I'll say this, Matt. Yeah. i At least he's not saying holy Hannah. ah No, no, no, no. But now apparently everyone's saying Halcyon, which I guess is a word that um Roy Thomas just learned.
01:21:00
Speaker
And they've used the word a Halcyon three times an issue for the past four issues. ah Yeah, yeah. we are it is going back before this episode. Yeah, yeah.
01:21:12
Speaker
Okay, anyway. Glenn Talbot shows up with a few tanks and tells the X-Men he's taking Banner into custody. Cyclops, for once, actually explains himself, rather than saying no time for that now, and says they need help from Banner to cure Professor Charles Xavier.
01:21:28
Speaker
This jogs Banner's memory, who had worked with Xavier on a gamma treatment for mental exhaustion. Oh boy. Together, they built a device that's still in one of Banner's secret labs.
01:21:40
Speaker
Talbot doesn't care and moves to take Banner, which makes him mad. And we don't like him when he's mad. That means he turns into the Hulk Hulk rampages through the military and leaps off into the distance pursued by the X-Men and their floppy hat ship They knock the Hulk off a cliff and the impact exposes a lab behind the rock Apparently Banner led Hulk to the secret lab with the gamma exhaustion thingy The X-Men distract the Hulk and Angel makes himself useful for once and grabs the device.
01:22:10
Speaker
They take it back to the mansion and use it on Xavier who wakes up and they all pose around Xavier for the final panel and the X-Men is cancelled. The actual end. ah Yeah.
01:22:22
Speaker
they Moment of silence.
01:22:29
Speaker
They seem to realize in the last two panels that this will be the last ever issue of the X-Men. ah they They end it with a yeah and they lived happily ever after?
01:22:44
Speaker
question mark And yet they are very clearly posing to be like, take it in. Yeah. This is... Yeah, so, I mean, we should talk we should talk for just a second about how, I mean, the X-Men continue to be published, but not written or drawn for... It's just reprints, right, for the next four or five years? 27 issues. The next 27 issues and two annuals are all reprints.
01:23:16
Speaker
um And the story of the X-Men sort of continues on in other comics. um They... they in the subsequent five years, they are just backup characters.
01:23:32
Speaker
So also, I mean, that's worth noting those 27 issues, those reprints are, that's five years. So that's what?
01:23:44
Speaker
Like roughly five issues a year.
01:23:49
Speaker
Yeah. yeah Yeah. Every two months or so. Yeah. So, you know, yeah. yeah So it's it's just a strange thing that happened. I guess, you know, people talk about this Roy Thomas and Neil Adams run and how important it was and how popular it was, at least at first.
01:24:08
Speaker
And it just was too little too late. And then as we see, Roy Thomas leaves. um the The book must have already been scheduled to be canceled by then because that's how businesses work.
01:24:19
Speaker
But yeah, yeah. The last few issues have just been bad, like right? Like we had the best we've seen so far. And then these issues are like, what, an A-minus, a B-minus, a C-minus, then a D-minus.
01:24:37
Speaker
Yeah, i just I love a good crossover. Like, I think the the dynamic between the Hulk and the X-Men here is interesting, and I like that they're exploring that. And that's typically when you have a Hulk guest starring in someone else's comic.
01:24:52
Speaker
That's what you're going to get. It's going to be how does this person interact with the Hulk and try to... break through the ah emotion driven personality. And then how do they interact with Banner, who is a little more arrogant, a little more difficult to get along with in certain ways.
01:25:11
Speaker
um So they do a really good job of that. I think this is an early ad ah version of this. And ultimately, they're like, hey, the Hulk just wants to be left alone. what's but Let's let let him be.
01:25:24
Speaker
So it's interesting like that. I guess they were trying to get like a tiny boost in sales by bringing the Hulk in. Is that what like they're like, yeah we're canceling it anyway. But so at the time, I mean,
01:25:35
Speaker
i would think that this is maybe like a last ditch effort because the Hulk is Marvel's fourth bestselling title in 1969. It's behind, uh, Spider-Man, of course, fantastic four and Thor was actually doing pretty well oh at this time.
01:25:52
Speaker
Uh, and then the Hulk comes in X-Men is second from the bottom of Marvel's titles. At this point, it is only beating out the rawhide kid, And then maybe some like smaller short run titles that they were putting out at the time. But that's wild because they keep publishing Rawhide Kid until 1979.
01:26:11
Speaker
Yes, they do. ah Do not understand that one. Yeah, that's interesting. OK, but yeah, it seems like they brought the Hulk in to say like and this was probably planned before they realized they were canceled and then.
01:26:27
Speaker
executed after, but they were like, let's put the Hulk in here because he is selling like hotcakes right now. They said that a lot in the sixties.
01:26:36
Speaker
i And the X-Men just weren't. And you know that like, it's very clear, even just from his editor's notes, Stan Lee loved the X-Men. He considered him a creation that he thought had a ton of potential.
01:26:48
Speaker
And so I'm sure he didn't want to do this.
01:26:55
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah.
01:26:58
Speaker
i ah Yeah, it's it's it's it's just it's a bit of a shame what happens here, you know? um I mean, it's it's good it's good that they took a break, right? Like, the X-Men could have turned into something worse, you know?
01:27:14
Speaker
but Yeah, yeah. They could have... reached their peak and then had pretty bad four issues to end their run into cancellation. just, I just mean, who knows what would have happened if I don't know.
01:27:29
Speaker
Anyway, um, Sal Buscema did an issue. Yeah. A legendary Marvel cover artist. He is the younger brother of John Buscema, who's already established at Marvel at the time and also has his own legendary career.
01:27:45
Speaker
i Sal had 10 year run on the Incredible Hulk. He had an eight year run on the spectacular Spider-Man. He was the when they launched the spectacular line. He was the inaugural artist.
01:27:57
Speaker
He was originally brought in by his older brother, John, who back in the 50s, he had done some inking for. But after kind of bouncing around the army, a few careers, He got pulled back into Marvel.
01:28:08
Speaker
The first work he was thrown was in 1968 to be the anchor for the coming of Gunhawk. Gunhawk was a popular character at the time, I guess. Are you sure?
01:28:20
Speaker
Not a popular character. it was a character that was supposed to be popular because it was a collaboration between Werner Roth and Jerry Siegel, who is the co-creator of Superman.
01:28:31
Speaker
Right. And it's the two words that people love the most. Gun and Hawk. That's right. but You can't get a better hero. I don't know what that hero did.
01:28:43
Speaker
I think it was a cowboy, actually. Yeah, he was a cowboy. But
End of X-Men Era and Industry Reflections
01:28:47
Speaker
it is not published until 1970, which means this issue of the X-Men actually came out before the first work that Sal was ever given on Marvel was published.
01:29:02
Speaker
Wow. But he had been published in, he had, he, this wasn't his first published work for Marvel. This is not his first publishing with Marvel. I think it might be his first like drawing credit, his penciling credit.
01:29:15
Speaker
yeah Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. Interesting. Which isn't a good sign. i mean, again, he's a legend, but it's not a good sign for how they're treating this, this title right now. The X-Men is yeah just pulling in the young people to, to fill in gaps.
01:29:32
Speaker
A couple other interesting things about Sal Buscemi. He drew on Walt Simonson's incredible Thor run, just like the definitive ah run for Thor. He is the co-creator of Starhawk of the Guardians of the Galaxy. Another Hawkman.
01:29:47
Speaker
that That's the weirdest character, too. Have you seen that guy? Yeah, it's a strange one. But he's also the co-creator of a very normal character, Gene DeWolf, a friend of Spider-Man's. Oh, I don't know. don't know.
01:30:00
Speaker
I don't know her. is the death of gene de wolf is like a defining spider-man run it's very good he also just a fun fact won an award for his portrayal of tevi at a community theater production of fiddler on the roof oh cool how about that and this isn't a bad issue art wise it's a little um marvel style right like it's a little marvel house style ah yeah yeah it's very like it's very kirby style guide right and And it's, you know, it's not bad. It's just going from Neil Adams to this feels bad.
01:30:35
Speaker
ah Yeah, it's it's a pill to swallow for sure. So, yeah, I don't know. Um... We've got, there's not much ahead that happens in this issue. We do get two really good Warren moments.
01:30:50
Speaker
Number one, everybody's around warning the professor. They discover that they got to go find the Hulk. they hop in their strange jet. They take off. Warren this whole time has just been flying around outside. He says, hey where are you guys going? Please open the hatch. I want to join you. And they don't. I, I,
01:31:10
Speaker
I wouldn't either if I was mourning my father figure and one of my brothers was just goofing off. Another great moment is the Hulk. Yeah. Seems to have calmed down a little bit. Seems to be trying to reason, not reason with the X-Men, but like he doesn't necessarily want to fight them.
01:31:28
Speaker
But they mentioning Bruce Banner. So the Hulk says, you got to stop mentioning Bruce Banner right now or else I will smash you. The next words out of Warren's mouth are, of course, Bruce Banner.
01:31:40
Speaker
So the Hulk smashes them. Yeah, yeah.
01:31:47
Speaker
Well, goodbye, X-Men. Yeah. will we hardly We hardly knew ye. not Not goodbye to Mutant Menace. We are continuing, if I don't want to spoil anything, but the X-Men do pick back up.
01:32:02
Speaker
Eventually. Post-1970, yeah. Yes, and um so and we'll be covering the gap in between. but um Damn right we will. We're going to the Dark Ages.
01:32:12
Speaker
The Dark Ages. at The epic collection for that era is actually called It's Always Darkest Before the Dawn. ah Which is also it interesting. We'll have to talk about that as it goes. There's some weird serendipity with that title where there's some characters that say that phrase.
01:32:29
Speaker
It's got a bit of prescience to it where it's like, oh yeah, this is very bad for the X-Men, but they're going to come back and own the comic book world. Yeah, yeah, yeah. um I don't know. i think with at some point we'll see Roy Thomas again.
01:32:43
Speaker
But I don't think for like a really long time. I don't think we'll see Roy Thomas again until like the 90s. He had a good run. That's fine. um We'll see Sal Buscema again.
01:32:59
Speaker
Nice. um He does an issue of Magic and he does ah New Mutants. New Mutants. um But yeah. except for Pretty much goodbye Roy Thomas.
01:33:14
Speaker
Goodbye Werner Roth. Yeah. I think goodbye Neil Adams.
01:33:21
Speaker
Goodbye Gary Friedrich, Arnold Drake. What about Sam Rosen? Sam Rosen, stick around as the letterer. We'll find out. i guess I guess we'll find out. All right.
01:33:32
Speaker
well What are your thoughts, Matt? What do you think about this little this little run here? um Okay. Do you ever play with whoopee cushions as a little kid?
01:33:43
Speaker
Yes, of course. Yeah. You know how sometimes they just like be positioned wrong? And instead of making like the squealy fart noise, it would just be like.
01:33:53
Speaker
Yeah. yeah it's Yeah. Yeah. Like a quiet fart noise. Yeah, it'd just be like, that's what this that's what this feels like. It feels like the... we you know Neil and Roy blew up a whole whoopee cushion, and then your aunt or whatever sat on it, and it was just like... And she didn't even notice.
01:34:14
Speaker
Don Heck sat on it. it just It's really... it'ss We went out with less than a whimper, you know? ah Yeah, yeah. it's a It is a rough landing, I mean...
01:34:27
Speaker
i mean We keep treating it like it's our perspective that they reached this height and then kind of fell from it. But month after month, that's what the readers would have been seeing here, too. Right.
01:34:37
Speaker
No. and And they knew. Yeah. you The creators knew it. Everybody knew what was happening. Right. Yeah. Yeah. There are, so there's an interesting bit of Stan's soapbox history here as well. the stories here feel very self-contained. They stopped sort of trying, like Kesar is two parts, but after that it's three individual stories.
01:35:01
Speaker
yeah Back in, I think it was issue 61,
01:35:06
Speaker
Stan's Soapbox, the monthly column that he wrote that got published in all Marvel Comics, was saying, hey, we've heard your feedback. What we're going to do is stop trying to tell these longer stories. We hear you.
01:35:19
Speaker
You're sick of story arcs. You want self-contained issues. weird I know. And I thought it was a joke at first, but then we read these three issues. And in issue 65, there's a new Stan's Soapbox that says...
01:35:34
Speaker
i Okay, we've heard your feedback in response to discontinuing longer story ah arcs. There are many more people writing to us, letting us know they love the long story arcs and that we should bring them back.
01:35:46
Speaker
Stan even goes on to say, i wasn't really going to do it anyway. Which, of course, isn't true because before they can get back to story arcs, the X-Men put out three self-contained stories. That's funny. I mean, and this next era...
01:36:02
Speaker
The early 70s is all about two to five issue story arcs. Yeah, yeah. its and it's like Five is maybe a little much, but two to three issue story arcs. ah Yeah, it's sort of the, it becomes the template, right? Every comic's doing it. And then as they get into the eighty s every comic is going on these like 25 issue story arcs.
01:36:24
Speaker
And I think it's because of what we're about to, you know, in a couple issues, in a couple episodes here, we'll see like Chris Claremont then takes that It's like, okay, not only am I going to do two to three issue story arcs every time, I'm going to seed things two, four, years seven years in advance. Yeah.
01:36:43
Speaker
And I'm going to do it across seven titles.
01:36:49
Speaker
Yeah, of course. And then it gets totally out of hand and they have to kind of reel it back in the trade paperback era. But, you know, it's all... It's history. it so um It is a fascinating story and we are going to get there. But it seems like we've really yeah sort of reached the end of an era. We keep saying it.
01:37:08
Speaker
End of an era. Yeah, yeah, yeah. i there's I think there's a little bit of... I think you could... like Listeners are probably picking up on this. like I think we're a little bummed.
01:37:20
Speaker
It is... It's sad. Right, because this is this part is done, right? That's the thing. It's like... We had this interesting, wacky, not amazing, but fascinating little comic book, and it is gone forever.
01:37:38
Speaker
It took a chance to, right? Like at the time you had iron Man, you had Hulk, you had the Fantastic Four, which I understand were built on taking a chance at it. That's not necessarily what comic books were at the time. But as soon as that formula started to get even the least bit stale, they brought out the Avengers and they brought out the X-Men.
01:38:00
Speaker
well And I think those are two very different theories. I think the Avengers is, what if we bring everybody... together And unlike the Justice League, we'll make them have a dynamic together.
01:38:16
Speaker
All your favorite heroes are here, but they are still your favorite. They're not just... They're not just the team. They're still all their individual personalities. Which is what the Justice League was struggling with at the time, right? Right, and it makes it makes them clash. It makes them like argue and dislike each other and quit the team and stuff and new people come on. and um While the X-Men was like...
01:38:42
Speaker
here's a slightly different concept of what the fantastic four idea could have been right like fantastic four their family who love each other but squabble and they were bombarded with cosmic rays and now they fight threats to earth and they're very famous on the other side this is a chosen family of people who were born this way that are sort of sour about it and not famous. They are infamous and they have to fight threats from within their own community.
01:39:15
Speaker
It's like, it's like this, yeah this shadow, but you know, it's like the, yeah the shadow self of the fantastic four. Right, and they the trademark of Marvel at the time is the, like, everyday problems of superheroes. And yeah this was, like, the X-Men was the title that actually made that feel grounded. Like, it's not superheroes arguing with each other over superhero issues. It's teenagers, like, dealing with their emotions yeah while they have to also be superheroes.
01:39:50
Speaker
it's It's
Pat's Steeles and Deals: Hulk Rock Song
01:39:51
Speaker
strange, Pat. I thought I would be, like, really excited about... to get to the Claremont years. But yeah, I like as we are trying to wrap up this episode and just continuing to rant like I'm just I'm feeling I think I'm doing that because I'm surprised by my own emotions here. Like I'm bummed. Yeah. Yeah.
01:40:06
Speaker
We loved these guys. Yeah. Yeah. I I can't believe we're saying despite all their flaws. Yeah. This is such a weird sensation. Let's pick it back up. Okay. matt Yeah. Yeah. I want to talk about Pat Steeles and deals. There's a Pat Steeles and deals today.
01:40:23
Speaker
There is still, despite the cancellation of the X-Men, a past steals and deals because it is only $1. one dollar Once again, we're looking at math that is too hard for me to do. So we'll say is probably around $12 to $15 in today's money, which is i you Look, it's $1. That's always a good deal if you see something that's cost $1, no matter how much that translates to today.
01:40:52
Speaker
Yeah. The title of this ad reads, Nobody Loves the Hulk. Great new rock song on 45 RPM stereo record plus second hit Better Things.
01:41:05
Speaker
Available only through this ad. Send $1 postpaid to Queen City Records. ah New Rochelle, New York. It's Hulk-erific. Now, pat this is ah Yes.
01:41:18
Speaker
You have included a YouTube link here. I absolutely have. You can find this song. We're going to play the whole Fuck it. We're going play the whole thing. we're We're analyzing it.
01:41:29
Speaker
The traits were formed in Pelham, New York 1967. This their this is their only I want to say their only hit, but it seems like aside from the B side of this 45, it might be their only song. Okay.
01:41:44
Speaker
Nobody loves the Hulk. It was publicized by Marvel comics. This was a group of high school students. They were ah very popular band at Pelham Memorial high school. The only high school, the only public high school in Pelham, New York.
01:41:59
Speaker
Prior to that, they had only appeared on like a local compilation record for a battle of the bands. Um, And this was it. This is their story. Nobody really knows what happened to them because they were just high school students that got this deal, recorded a record, sold all the rights to Marvel, and then went on about their lives.
01:42:21
Speaker
Did sell about 2,000 copies. Nobody loves the Hulk. They made
01:42:30
Speaker
ah The Pentagon announced that the Hulk has to be destroyed. They shot him with H-bombs. The Hulk only became annoyed. All he wanted to do was settle down and get employed. wayne But... Wait, wait, wait. Nobody loves the Hulk.
01:42:43
Speaker
We're going to listen to this. We're going listen to this. Here, pull up the YouTube video. We'll sync. All right.
01:42:54
Speaker
Okay, they sound like high school kids, right? Like there's... Yes, is very garage rock.
01:43:08
Speaker
Rick Jones mentioned. Oh, but hold on. Pause, pause, pause. So Rick Jones was about to go in up in a blaze of glory. So what they are positing here is that Bruce Banner stole the heroic moment of Rick Jones.
01:43:24
Speaker
That's all right. Rick Jones gets his, he's, uh, He's got plenty of glory to go around. All right, let's start again. Let's let's's start at 20 seconds.
01:43:47
Speaker
It's pretty good.
01:43:54
Speaker
Hulk as monster is ugly, oversized, and green. It's mean to call him ugly. He's ugly. Except for the Mark Ruffalo version.
01:44:06
Speaker
Yeah. Very handsome. That one's very handsome. Okay, this is a catchy chorus, though. It is. It's got a little, like, pre-punk The Who feeling to it. Okay, hold on. Pause.
01:44:24
Speaker
we don't allow no green skin people in here. That's definitely like a social commentary, right? and Yeah. There's, they are speaking from the perspective of the people that don't love the Hulk here. i don't think they're saying, and don't think they're making this. no and No, of course. yes Yeah, of course. But what they're doing is they're, they're saying we're supposed to be ah obviously on the Hulk side.
01:44:51
Speaker
So they are just like sneaking in some little comment about racism here. Yeah, good for them. High school, a couple high school kids in 1969. All right, 105, let's go.
01:45:05
Speaker
All right. Okay. Okay. Okay.
01:45:21
Speaker
They shot him with H-bombs, the Hulk only became annoyed. These kids are having fun.
01:45:29
Speaker
Right? Yeah, yeah. There's an energy here. There's a sincerity to it. They are Hulk fans for sure. Yeah. Alright, he says it again.
01:45:42
Speaker
And then they fucking rock out for another minute. Is that really just like the rest is just instrumental? I think they go back to the chorus once or twice. but All right. Let's see we can fade it out. that was That was interesting. Okay.
01:45:58
Speaker
It's a real song? It's like a very sloppy version of the Garage Rock um sort of ah revolution at the time, right? Yeah. Yeah.
01:46:11
Speaker
Like, this could have been on... ah God, what was that collection? That Garage Rock collection? Yeah.
01:46:19
Speaker
i Are you thinking of Renville Records Presents Battle of the Bands Volume 1 featuring the traits?
01:46:29
Speaker
No, I'm thinking of the Nuggets series by Rhino Records. Okay. I think it was Electra Records. I guess it was reprinted by Rhino Records. But it's got like the electric prunes and the human beings.
01:46:43
Speaker
Right. Yeah. Yeah. Let's see. What else does it have on it that we know? Like the Standells maybe? Anyway, the turtles are on it. But it's like, yeah, it's it's just because like there was this massive explosion post Beatles of just garage rock bands. People playing songs in their garage and not getting very far.
01:47:01
Speaker
a steppenwolf is on there it feels like this could have been lost strawberry alarm clock this could have been lost deep deep deep in a in like nuggets volume seven yeah yeah if there's one thing that we know about the marvel bullpen it is that they love early prog rock
01:47:28
Speaker
Constantly mentioned. This interesting. Interesting. Well, thank you for sharing. This is the one Pat Steals and Steals that I would buy. but You said you would buy the book safe in you just last episode.
01:47:44
Speaker
Okay, ah but i didn't I didn't commit to this. i hope you didn't already spend that dollar. i didn't commit to this. Well, I
Upcoming Podcast Episodes and Farewells
01:47:53
Speaker
sent it out. We'll see how long it takes them to send it back to me.
01:47:58
Speaker
Your birthday is coming up. All right, ah Thank you so much for tuning in to ah Mutant Menace for the end of the X-Men.
01:48:11
Speaker
Thank you so much, Pete. Thanks, Pete, for being here. You can follow us on Instagram, mut Mutant Menace Pod. You can email us, MutantMenacePod at gmail.com.
01:48:22
Speaker
What else can they do, Pat? ah They can send along their thanks to Krils Wilson for all of our incredible music, as well as Julia Selle for her portrayal of Trish Tilby.
01:48:35
Speaker
um This should, if if you guys didn't hear it, go back and listen to our bonus episode where we cover the origins of Angel and Beast with the two lovely folks from ah Escape the Mojoverse.
01:48:50
Speaker
Another very funny, a very interesting X-Men podcast. sir I think so. Our next two episodes are going to be the Dark Era. So we're going to be covering stuff like um Hulk 150, Amazing Adventures, Avengers, ah Captain America, Defenders, Hulk.
01:49:09
Speaker
and Oh, the original Hulk 180, 182. Yeah, I was going to say we're going to meet some very interesting characters. Yeah, maybe I'll beep out where I said... and I'll beat that part out too.
01:49:21
Speaker
This is probably also your last chance. If you want to email in and try to join us for our bonus episode, the story so far, um if you want to throw your name in the hat, we'll pick, we'll do it like a random, ah a roll of a dice or something. As long as there's a random name generator until we get a name that matches one of the people that emailed us.
01:49:43
Speaker
um But yeah, so we'll do that bonus episode. And then, you know, we're off on the Chris Claremont era. So, Pat.
01:49:53
Speaker
I think there's only one thing left to do, Matt, and that's close out the show the way we do it every week. Sure. So why don't you just say our um our catchphrase? Yeah. As always, a frog in the hand, my friend, is worth a brain in the bush.
01:50:08
Speaker
And I'm gone, little leader.