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Episode 54 - Alpha Flight #13-18
2 Playsin 7 hours
We're flying back up north this week, and visiting our favorite Canadian Super Team, Alpha Flight! But it's not all fun and games, as we work through pain, loss, and a pile of scrambled eggs. This is where Alpha Flight realllly gets good, so tune in!
TOPICS DISCUSSED:
Pee-wee Herman. John Byrne, fashionista. Bing-bonging Namor. Ursula K Leguin. Solemn, respectful silence, except for the screeching owl. Smart Alec’s disturbing fate. Pierre Trudeau’s resignation. Snowbird is 6 years old. Not a good-time scream. Saving the stroller. All vampires are dead. Draw us a toilet. Elizabeth Twoyoungmen is here! Douglas Thompson returns. Like a moth between the stubby fingers of a small boy. FISH SHIP. Madison Jeffries is here! We’re not canceling Puck. Jeff VanderMeer. “Dialogue.” Wolverine! What the FUCK Walter. Big year. Chekhov’s scrambled eggs. Good issue. You’re in a team book dude.
TIMESTAMPS:
0:45 - Hello and Pee-wee Herman impressions
2:29 - Alpha Flight recap and initial thoughts
11:53 - Pat’s Email Corner
22:08 - X-Men-related things we’ve done this week
25:33 - Alpha Flight 13 - “Nightmare”
38:58 - Alpha Flight 14 - “Biology Class”
57:19 - Alpha Flight 15 - “Blind Date”
1:12:22 - Alpha Flight 16 - “…and Forsaking All Others…”
1:26:24 - Alpha Flight 17 - “Dreams Die Hard…”
1:39:35 - Alpha Flight 18 - “How Long Will A Man Lie In The Earth ‘Ere He Rot?”
2:00:00 - Final Thoughts
2:05:10 - Pat’s Steals ‘n’ Deals
2:09:55 - Signoffs
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Transcript
Introduction and Mutant Menace Overview
00:00:01
Speaker
I'm Trish Toby 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.
00:00:37
Speaker
Hey everybody, I'm Pat Reber. And I'm Matt Alcant. And say it with us, sweet Douglas.
00:00:47
Speaker
Welcome to Mutant Menace. Oh, Matt. Patrick. Hello, good evening. Good evening!
00:00:59
Speaker
Thank you for welcoming me to this evening! How are you, uh... How are you doing
Personal Anecdotes and Listener Engagement
00:01:07
Speaker
today? i' been I've been better. I've been i' been sick again. Again. oh Eagly listeners will go, man, didn't that guy get sick like four times in this past couple months? Yes.
00:01:20
Speaker
Yes, he And what the hell? What's your best Pee Wee Herman impression? This has been bugging me. I watched Pee Wee Herman as himself. hu that's not bad that's just the laugh can you do his voice his voice is so say say um hold on uh are you still there miss hudson hello Are you still there, Miss Hudson? Hello?
00:01:46
Speaker
Are you still there? Are you still there, Miss Hudson? He's got two voices, and one of them is kind of like, and one of them. And one of them. And one of them.
00:02:01
Speaker
And one of them. Ooh, that's not that. That's getting there. I was working on it so hard, man. i spent in like an entire. And one of them. And what? but then But then he's got a second one where he goes like this when he gets excited. Yeah. And, uh, yeah. hi it's impossible It's impossible. He's got an impossible voice to do.
00:02:29
Speaker
Pat, what are we what are we talking about today? What are we
Alpha Flight Series Analysis
00:02:32
Speaker
talking about today? Today, matt we're talking about the nation of Canada. Okay. It was founded in, hold on, let me pull up my let me pull up the notes that I took from all of my research. You know where you can find all of this information, Matt, actually, is in the pages of Alpha Flight. Yeah, you're probably right.
00:02:55
Speaker
John Byrne loves to tell us all about the geographical relativity of different but cities in Canada. Yeah, but yeah, we are reading John Byrne's Alpha Flight. Yeah.
00:03:11
Speaker
Once again, for the third time, I believe. Yeah, we won't. We're not stopping. You guys were like, they won't do this more than twice. We will. We'll do it more than three times. We're probably going to do it at least five or six times. Oh,
00:03:28
Speaker
um and you said Now, episode one, if I recall, we were both kind of like, what the fuck is going on here? Episode two, we were like, oh, this is fine.
00:03:43
Speaker
There's a way to read Alpha Flight. That makes it enjoyable. i It is, number one, remembering that they're not real superheroes, right? They're kind of like, they are the B team. And although they never acknowledge it, it's just clear through their actions.
00:04:01
Speaker
Right. Number two. And we don't know if that was John Byrne's intent But it is a good but read on it. Yeah. Yeah. It is the lens through which we're viewing it.
00:04:13
Speaker
And number two, you just kind of have to ignore John Burns actual writing, like the the narration, the dialogue. You need it for the facts, but you have to take that out of consideration if you want to enjoy the comic.
00:04:30
Speaker
Just kind of like absorb it as a visual storytelling piece. Yeah. I don't know yeah the words are there to to help tamp that down, to help hold it back so you don't blow your mind from the honestly beautiful art. the There's so much care put into the put into these issues. And just like really good, again, visual storytelling. If if anybody else, we besides maybe like Bill Mantlo, were handling this script. But okay, what so though though that was one and two. What did you think about three?
00:05:07
Speaker
So three, I was actually a bit enamored with. I really liked it. Yeah, I will say, you and we can talk more about this ah at the end of the episode, but the dialogue's a problem. The narration is a problem. The pacing of these stories. And again, the the beautiful, whether it's action packed or just seven different angles of the same hospital room, the art is impeccable.
00:05:39
Speaker
Right. I absolutely... this is the This is the... When I told you i think you'll love this, this is the era that I was imagining. This is what this is what I was remembering.
00:05:53
Speaker
Okay. Yeah, this is... It is something different, which is what I think I love more than anything about it. It's like there's... it's a different way to tell superhero stories and it's being done. It's being executed perfectly story-wise.
00:06:13
Speaker
Yeah, but like you're saying, again, we'll talk about this more towards the end, but this this this dialogue is a fucking mess. So I really love these characters, and i love these characters because of Byrne's run. He's creating this really cool world with these really cool characters who have a real inner lives and...
00:06:36
Speaker
cool costumes and cool people like there's there's so much good here but the moment to moment of reading these books is fucking it's rough when you look at a page you're like yes and then uh when you're halfway through reading a page you're like god there's still more words yeah you're sick of the art by the time you're done reading the words in each panel why One last thing to note, John Byrne continues to be a true fashionista.
00:07:05
Speaker
Everyone, when not in costume, is impeccably dressed. Yeah. they're Extremely fashionable, very 80s, but also with a bit of a timeless twist.
00:07:16
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. he He puts a lot of thought into people's clothing and costumes. Like, at one point during this, Marina gets a um right a costume update, and it's like, that's harder to draw.
00:07:32
Speaker
Like, what you've done for yourself is is you've taken her very simple costume and made it incredibly hard to draw. ah He did that to himself because he was like, this looks cooler.
00:07:43
Speaker
But, yeah, everybody looks great. it's Or they're nude. There's a lot of. A lot of nudity. Yes. And John Byrne's good at drawing people nude. Well, the women, he only draws women nude, but yeah, he's good at drawing it. Or he draws a man's hairy chest, I guess, a lot. And there's a lot of Namor. No, no, im take it I take it back. There's a lot of nude. A lot of Namor in his budgie smuggler.
00:08:10
Speaker
So where did we leave Alpha Flight after number two?
Listener Challenges and Interactions
00:08:14
Speaker
ah So after number two, they had fought Omega Flight. If you remember a collection of Beta and Gamma Flight rejects that were gathered by Jerry Jackson to take revenge out on Guardian for stealing the Guardian suit that he invented.
00:08:35
Speaker
That he invented, right, who is you because he didn't want it to be used for ah nefarious purposes by the Canadian government. Who is your favorite Omega flight? Honestly, and it it's it'll pay off here, ah Box, Roger Box, that guy. Same.
00:08:52
Speaker
Clearly ruled. Yeah, he's just a... he's just a he's a chip Well, I want to say chubby, but I think he's just... beefy yes he is extremely ah muscular up top and also like it you can throw chubby in there too that's not he's just like ah a chubby muscular man nerdy looking man he's a bull in a wheelchair he does he's he's um missing both of his legs and he invented a robot Yeah, that has that same like physical structure, but also stands at 10 feet tall.
00:09:28
Speaker
And is that all we know about Box at this point? He invented a robot. That's all. i Yes. And that he was a beta flight member. ah He had a close relationship with Guardian, which is why he refused to fight when Omega Flight attacked Guardian.
00:09:46
Speaker
it was actually Jerry Jackson who was controlling the box robot. Guardian ended up dying in that fight. He defeated the robot, but died himself. Right. And if you know if you know more about Box, we don't know that stuff about Box yet, just so you know.
00:10:03
Speaker
There's more? Oops. Okay. so So what happened? ah So Guardian died in that fight. His helmet blew up in his hands. Heather Hedson McDonald, his wife, was standing right there. She saw it happen. She saw him just burn to a crisp. He kind of had this this thing where he was he was trying to disassemble the battery pack on his uniform, and he had it timed down to the second, and he was like...
00:10:35
Speaker
if i fuck ah if i waste even one second here i'll die and then heather popped in to the room and she was like what's going on in here and then he it blew up he burnt to cinders yeah she had no way of no second one yeah yes yeah yeah so ah seems tragic but also it's comic books yeah And then, of course, Marina, our undersea alien. Our amphibious human-shaped alien green lady.
00:11:07
Speaker
Is hanging out with Namor. I believe you referred to it as bing-bonging. Yeah, she's just busy bing-bonging Namor all over Atlantis, right? Like, that's why she didn't come on this adventure. Because she was like, I'm too busy bing-bonging everybody.
00:11:20
Speaker
Yeah. Not bing-bonging everybody. Hey, everybody, comma, I'm too busy bing-bonging this one man.
00:11:28
Speaker
And I think that's where we left him. Yeah. I think you're right. And I think what you had said, you were like, obviously, Guardian's coming right back. Maybe you didn't say right back.
00:11:38
Speaker
But I said, like, how long is he really dead for? Yeah. And we're about to find out. We'll find this out. But first, Matt.
00:11:50
Speaker
Yeah. Do you mind elbowing the piano player? Thank you.
00:11:57
Speaker
He fell asleep.
00:12:02
Speaker
Wait, he's still asleep. Okay. Nudge him again. him again. He's playing, but he's like asleep. I'm nudging him. I'm nudging him. People don't want to just listen to this. I'm nudging him and he won't stop. It's only funny when it's brief.
00:12:18
Speaker
Okay. Yeah. Fade him out. Thank you. Yeah. Hey, He's still playing behind me. I just... Welcome to Pat's email corner.
00:12:31
Speaker
We did have a brief moratorium on pilk discussion. And I think Matt, we got it. I think this chat has reached its pinnacle and I'll explain exactly why here. ah First up.
00:12:45
Speaker
To help me explain is email Michael. He says, hey, Pat, tell Matt that I heard his complaint about nobody sending videos of themselves drinking pill cloud and clear and posted a video of myself doing so on the discord. This was a couple of weeks ago at this point. But ah if you are not on the discord, get in there. i guarantee it is a lovely video where.
00:13:07
Speaker
email Michael drinks pilk. He says, so if anyone wants to see email, Michael getting annoyed at drinking pilk, it's out there now. Never ask me to eat or drink anything for you again. you Okay.
00:13:21
Speaker
What do we. use So there's been some discussion over this. i I recall us being like being disappointed that nobody was taking up the reins of the pilk challenge. And it seems like email Michael did this before Mikey two males, let everybody know that he had done the same thing.
00:13:44
Speaker
He had gone through and drank pilk. Right. What do you think about the phrase? the Like never ask me. Cause we did technically. Yeah, it is true. We did ask our listeners to drink pilk and send us videos of it.
00:13:59
Speaker
Yeah. So was that irresponsible of us or were people supposed to know that that was a joke and it's ah it's on them for actually doing it? Listen, I'm glad that they did it. I don't want to anybody anybody to feel like there was no sincerity behind our request. I wanted to know. So much like a breakup.
00:14:20
Speaker
like I'm glad that all this happened. And look, we we got a lot out of this. and And we appreciated it when it was happening. Yeah. i I will be forever changed by the pilk discussion.
00:14:37
Speaker
but
00:14:40
Speaker
No. Email Michael. Thank you for doing this again. this was This was before we got tired of it. So this was absolutely... We have was we thank you for your service. We have one more here from Mikey Two Mails. Matt, if you recall, Mikey Two Mails already drank pilk. He sent us a video of it, but the perspective...
00:15:02
Speaker
didn't allow us to see it curdling didn't allow us to see it curdling so he sent us a new video yeah he does let us know he didn't drink it again which you know was not a requirement it seems like a waste of pilk but all right we watched the video he's absolutely right he pours a can of pepsi over a small amount of milk and yes right away it curdles uh it He says curdles. It seems more like foam, but it's also. Yeah, I don't think it curdles.
00:15:39
Speaker
I think it's just foams. I don't know if we've answered the question then. yeah It's hard to tell. Yeah, I think we need to I think we need to see some like I think we would have needed to see. And Mikey two males. We are not we demanding that you do this again. we email Michael. We're not asking you to do this. I think we would have needed to see flattened soda.
00:16:01
Speaker
poured into milk or you're right the foam is obscuring it because or because of the same reaction right it's causing the foam to to generate so quickly maybe or the milk poured kind of in a way where we can see the liquid before the foam i don't know i don't know i don't know i've never made it i've never made pilk so look yeah don't let me be your backseat pilker pilk pilk uh Pilkemist. The backseat piver.
00:16:38
Speaker
don't think you need to add driver there. I think at this point, we've done enough experimentation. we need an expert to weigh in. So if anybody does understand the science behind milk curdling and can help us understand though mutant menace pod at gmail.com there's there's only two things that can further this discussion number one an expert yeah number two you guys raising enough money on our patreon that we have to drink it we are still not there can you believe that i know we said like it was we came so close i think we're at 85 dollars It was wild that we skyrocketed up to um up to the amount that we're at now. And then and then it just froze, ah which is fair. We haven't released any bonus content really in the majority of the month of March.
00:17:38
Speaker
We're sorry for that. And also, that you give us money at all is like... ah yeah but blows my mind very appreciative so thank you got some more bonus content coming for you patreon folk uh but tell your friends tell your friends to give us five to ten dollars and we'll be uh we'll be at that that sweet sweet hundred dollar level and we'll be drowning in pilk
00:18:05
Speaker
sorry i just pictured drowning in pilk and i was Well, if it does curdle, then you have some chunks to really help pull you up. thats like these Yeah, but you're still trapped under all that foam and all the gas inside.
00:18:19
Speaker
oh my God. great would you rather. The idea of trying to... d Like, trying to... You're drowning in just an incredible amount of liquid and you're you're you're trying to swim up to the top, but you keep hitting the foam.
00:18:35
Speaker
and so you're getting little tiny bits of air from the foam bubbles, but it's still water coming into your mouth and lungs. It's like you're waterboarding yourself while trying to gas like gasp for breath. And also gas such a small percentage of those bubbles is oxygen too.
00:18:54
Speaker
Oh my God. I didn't even think about that. So you're breathing. You're breathing and not feeling like you've taken a breath. You're going to start and still feeling like you are completely starved of oxygen. Wow.
00:19:10
Speaker
Here's our, cause this is the, here's our, here's a would you rather mutant menace pod at gmail.com where that, where this kind of podcast now, would you rather drown in pilk or pilk mayonnaise?
00:19:27
Speaker
Would you rather drown in pilk or mayonnaise? And why? MutantMenacePod at gmail.com. This will be great for when our guest comes on can yeah Can we though say like, ah and what X-Men would you would you like to drown next to? Like we've got to get some x-man X-Men stuff in here. guys nobody's Nobody's writing to us about X-Men stuff, Matt. they Would you rather drown in Pilk or mayonnaise? And what X-Men would you drown next to?
00:19:58
Speaker
if you had if you had to drown If you had to drown next to an X-Man. If you're drowning in one, an X-Man is drowning in the other. Choose that X-Man. And you can't choose an X-Man that'll save. Like, this X-Man isn't saving you. if you yeah if They can't be immune to mayonnaise. If you are saved from this drowning, it is only through your own efforts.
00:20:18
Speaker
But yeah when as the drowning is beginning to occur, there's an X-Man next to you. Who is it?
00:20:28
Speaker
And what is that what are you drowning in? And how happy are you?
00:20:35
Speaker
One to ten. How are you these Versus some other option that would give us the, we need to understand your scale. ah One one more emailer Matt we actually got two emails from Sweet Douglas if you noticed at the top of the show he submitted his name as ah somebody to and you bet and you better have Sweet Douglas you better have said welcome Mutant Menace at the top of this show yeah yeah we we did this for you but Sweet Douglas is now among our
00:21:15
Speaker
cast of names. If you want to be on that list, where Sweet Douglas gets the formatting exactly right here. No subject in the body. Just send us your name and that's it.
00:21:26
Speaker
That's what you need to do. And then you're in. And then Sweet Douglas also ignores formatting rules in a second email. He says, hey, guys, here's my address so I can spread the joy of your amazing podcast. He's joining our street team. All right. Read that address out to the listeners. So...
00:21:45
Speaker
ah Douglas, please stand by. We'll have some mailers out soon as well as everybody else that has provided us their their addresses. i promise if you haven't gotten them yet, they are they will be on their way within the next couple of weeks. Thank you for your patience.
00:22:05
Speaker
Yeah.
Hosts' Personal Interests and Activities
00:22:08
Speaker
And that's the end of Patsy Mo Corner.
00:22:14
Speaker
His eyes are, I'm telling you, his eyes are still closed. He tells us he's good enough to play in his sleep and then he's like this.
00:22:28
Speaker
He did that fade out, though. He did that fade out. That was strange that he did the fade out while asleep. And now he's just he's sitting up straight in his chair.
00:22:40
Speaker
Looking forward at the piano with his with his hands folded over the piano. But he's still he's actually snoring. OK, he's snoring because his eyes are wide open.
00:22:52
Speaker
oh Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. I should have mentioned that. I've gotten used to it by now. But yeah, he sleeps with his eyes open. So I can tell when he's asleep and when he's just staring off into space, which also happens a lot. He's a very sad guy. The key signifier being his snoring.
00:23:11
Speaker
no Matt. Yeah, please. ah did you Have you done anything X-Men related this week? um Again, i got... i got so As if I've been being attacked by some... ah By some supervillain.
00:23:32
Speaker
I got sick again. Right. So it's kind of like when the X-Men get attacked by a supervillain who makes them sick. Sounds a lot like the movie Osmosis Jones.
00:23:46
Speaker
Also... I read a lot of X-Men comics. Pat, have you done anything X-Men related this week? In fact, I have, Matt. I started reading a new book called The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin.
00:24:02
Speaker
i I've read The Left Hand of Darkness, which was the only other book I've read by her, but loved it and picked up another fairly popular title of hers. So... Uh, already loving this one. It is incredible the way that she, can build a world or sort of a society with just a few words. She knows exactly how to just lay out the rules that you need, uh, without making it seem clunky or expositional. It's, um,
00:24:35
Speaker
Yeah, really good stuff. I've actually never read Ursula K. Le Guin. I watched the Tales of Earthsea movie, the Studio Ghibli adaptation, and I loved it. And I've always been like, I got to read some Ursula K. Le Guin. And then I just I just I have not gotten around to it. But it's it's worth it. It's well worth it.
00:24:54
Speaker
Yeah. Left Hand of Darkness for me was, i think, a great entry point. i I picked that up and I couldn't put it down. That's awesome. Yeah. and how And what was X-Men related about that?
00:25:05
Speaker
Oh, well, she has the most X-Men name I've ever heard.
00:25:12
Speaker
my name is Ursula K. Le Guin. Yeah. A mutant for sure. Well, all that having been said.
Alpha Flight Issue Recaps and Storylines
00:25:21
Speaker
yeah Are you ready to read with me some Alpha Flight?
00:25:26
Speaker
Oh, right. We should have asked about Canadian things. Did you do anything Canadian this week? No, me neither. Then yeah, let's get, let's get into alpha flight number 13, Matt nightmare.
00:25:39
Speaker
matt nightmare ah We once again get some hidden credits here. They're hard to, yeah, they're they're they're hard to read and they don't have jobs assigned. yeah They don't have jobs, but we have Byrne, Yankus, Higgins, O'Neill, and Puder.
00:25:55
Speaker
Release date, May 15th, 1984. Cover date, August 1984. We open on the somber, silent funeral of James McDonald Hudson, also known as Mac or Guardian or Vindicator or the Canadian Captain America.
00:26:10
Speaker
The entire team, except Mariana, are graveside and say goodbye to Heather one by one, leaving her alone. There's a scene of snowbirds saying goodbye to her and then transforming into an owl. And there's just this moment where her black dress is like starting to form around her like giant wings before she anamorphs into an owl. And it looks so noisy among this really solemn crowd and these wordless panels. It's pages and pages of wordless panels. Again, just imagine a somber moment.
00:26:46
Speaker
being interrupted by her going oh um yeah back to silence it's again though also just like you're right pages of silent we are 13 issues in and we have had two issues so far In which he does like eight wordless pages.
00:27:14
Speaker
We did an issue where he did eight pictureless pages. They were just blank. And all that was there was words. Right. I forgot about that. Yeah. And then so then now he's doing it again and. He'll do something else very similar to like this guy does not want to be writing this fucking book.
00:27:38
Speaker
And imagine it's there's eight wordless pages and we're still complaining about the amount of words per page. That's true. Yeah, if if only he would just write less words, then maybe he wouldn't have to give us so many wordless pages. But it's effective here because it's ah it's a funeral. And yeah you can he communicates a lot with each person's goodbye.
00:28:04
Speaker
Yes. So like, like shaman comes up and gives it, gives her like a tender touch on the shoulder and a hug and then snowbird.
00:28:13
Speaker
It's kind of tender. Like she wipes the, moves the hair out of her face, but then turns into a screech owl and flies away. So it's like, like very snowbird, like caring, but very distant.
00:28:25
Speaker
Aurora and Sasquatch are just kind of like, They're holding on to each other the whole time. They say goodbye at like a bit of a distance. And then yeah Walter has to kind of console Aurora as they walk away. So they they're sympathetic. They love Heather.
00:28:42
Speaker
But they're so wrapped into their own emotions that clearly yeah it's more about Aurora and Walter than it is about Heather in this moment. even Even when Aurora hugs Heather, it seems more like Heather's comforting Aurora than the reverse.
00:29:00
Speaker
Then Northstar, who won't approach her, turns his head away, flies away. he theses He's either angry at her or he's angry at himself. It's hard to tell. Right. and then And then Puck is just really, really warm and comforting and kind. So it's like each person kind of shows their personality in the way that they say goodbye, which is cool.
00:29:23
Speaker
And then we get Wolverine yeah watching from a hillside nearby. Also very Wolverine. And thankfully so, as the grave cracks open and the burning form of Guardian comes bursting from it.
00:29:39
Speaker
He buys Heather enough time to flee before burning to cinders himself at Guardian's touch. But the victory is short lived as Max Flaming Corpse catches up to her and she wakes up screaming.
00:29:51
Speaker
Wait.
00:29:53
Speaker
Oh, OK. This is he got me there. Wolverine is on the cover of this issue for this moment. ah These two pages where he's in somebody's dream and gets burnt to death.
00:30:10
Speaker
Hey, this is the first half of the issue. The issue is half over. That's true. ah Heather wakes up confused, looking for Mac, but Michael rushes into the room to calm her and put her back to bed.
00:30:26
Speaker
He and Judd have been staying with her for the past month. While Puck wants Shaman to fix her mind with magic, Michael insists she must go through this on her own. They talk about how Smart Alec is now action figure sized and lives in Shaman's medicine bag. What?
00:30:47
Speaker
So this was the decision. because Okay, so remember last, during the fight with Omega Fight, Omega Fight, Smart Alex is like, I'm smart enough to figure out this friggin' magic bag. Steals it From Shaman. And Shaman's like. Oh i wait. Don't look in there. You're you're not going to like this. And Smart Alec's like. Yeah. Yeah. i'm so I'm too smart for this. Looks in.
00:31:11
Speaker
And immediately goes insane. And he's catatonic. He comprehends it. But the human brain can't actually hold all of that. So yeah. He goes catatonic. And he's just standing there like a statue. And they're like. What the fuck are we supposed to do with this?
00:31:26
Speaker
And what Puck wants to do. He's like. we should kill the guy. He. I blame him for Guardian's death. And Shaman, I guess, was like, no, I'm going to shrink him to a little action figure and keep him in my What a fucked up thing to to put him out of his misery.
00:31:48
Speaker
squash him. shrink him down to action figure size and then while he's catatonic just have him float around some netherworld in the place that drove him insane to begin with so like if he even starts to recover he's immediately being hit by that same sensory input and like shaman's like I'll figure out a way to cure him but dude
00:32:15
Speaker
unbelievable oh The next day, the three head to Parliament Hill to meet with Gary Cody and tell him what happened to Gardner. Which one? Who, Gary or...
00:32:26
Speaker
Now, if you're Canadian or have any knowledge of Canadian politics, you might be saying, Parliament Hill, isn't that the Prime Minister of Canada's office? And yes, yes, it is. They mention that...
00:32:42
Speaker
ah Pierre Trudeau resigned the day before. And so this was the most convenient office space Gary Cody could find to meet with the remaining members of Alpha Flight. Holy shit.
00:32:55
Speaker
In real life. At the time of this of them writing this issue. Pierre Trudeau announced his resignation and then said, I'm going to stay until my successor is chosen. Essentially, he wasn't going to win the next election. So he resigned to give someone else a chance, agreed to stay on until that election was decided and they could put somebody else in. Yeah, normal shit.
00:33:22
Speaker
In John Byrne's mind. He announced his resignation and then just left and the country was prime minister-less for a few months. And look, listen, to be fair to him...
00:33:38
Speaker
like Donald Trump is like the one of the worst human beings to ever walk the earth. So like who can blame us for this? But if he did the right thing and was like, you know what? I suck at this. I'm leaving. yeah we would be We would do the same thing. We'd be like, look, and he's even a little fucking bitch walking out of the office like a little fucking asshole. Exactly.
00:33:57
Speaker
That's what you guys wanted. Dancing on his grave. Yeah. When you don't like a politician, they literally can do nothing right, even quit. Yeah. All right.
00:34:09
Speaker
So they are in the prime minister's office in Parliament Hill since it's not being used.
00:34:19
Speaker
butdd Heather struggles through the story before asking Cody what the government intends to do about all of this, about Guardian's death. Nothing, Gary says. Hey, Gary.
00:34:33
Speaker
Alpha Flight was a part of Department H, which was top secret. He even reinforces it. It's like top secret. ah yeah but John Byrne wrote the clap. emos Oh, fuck. Do you think when we get to like 2020s comics, there will be clap emojis written into dialogue balloons? I hope so. I hope it's already in. i don't know.
00:34:56
Speaker
Ms. Marvel. Squirrel Girl. ah ah When Department H closed down, it and everything connected to it was wiped from existence as far as the government was concerned. And with Pierre Trudeau's resignation, there's no one left who even knows about this stuff.
00:35:14
Speaker
Another thing you fucked up, Trudeau. You're black ops programs. Now what are they supposed to do without you? They're all homeless. On top of that, Alpha Flight was not an official team anymore.
00:35:28
Speaker
Judd wants to beat up Cody. But Heather. He's like, if we can't get money from you, I'm going to beat you up. At least that'll make me feel better. But Heather thanks him for being honest and they all leave.
00:35:44
Speaker
Over some fast food, the trio keep chatting and it turns out that Heather can't even cash in on Max life insurance. She has no home, no job, no family and no alpha flight.
00:35:56
Speaker
She's fucked. Yeah. Hey, but Heather McNeil Hudson isn't beaten yet. We don't know that here. This was a real bum. She says it, but yeah, we don't know it. It does look like there's nothing for this quick epilogue. We cut to Toronto where a dude is running for his life along some docks and gets pulled into the water screaming, which is the only signal we get that there will be another issue of Alpha Flight.
00:36:24
Speaker
At the end of this. They could have ended Alpha Flight right here. it would have been a bummer note. But Heather is just like, yeah, Alpha Flight doesn't exist anymore. And we're all moving on. They make it so clear. Like, they go so far to be like, they're like, well, you could stay with your family. And she's like, I don't have, i i cut off my family when I married Mac.
00:36:47
Speaker
And then they're like, oh, well, you can stay with your friends. She's I don't have any friends. My only friends were Alpha Flight and Mac and he's dead. And you guys are all living. scattered across the country and then like okay well you know at least you have your house nope nope nope we um we we were we tried to buy a new house we wouldn't didn't finish that process yet and uh our old house is gone so i'm homeless like like she's literally just like one by one like i have i have the clothes i'm wearing the end yeah yeah um and that's the end of alpha flight
00:37:23
Speaker
Yeah. Well, thank you guys for for coming. No, it's not. Just kidding. Next is Alpha Flight 14. Man, more also more just like, it's hard to figure out Judd's moral code.
00:37:37
Speaker
ah Yeah, it's... This is, i I'm sure we've talked about this before, but just tied to John Byrne's baffling view of masculinity, right? It's, if it would be cool to threaten to beat someone up or kill someone, yeah then that's his reaction. If it would be cooler to be worldly or peaceful in this situation, then that's his reaction. Because the problem here is that it's just like Judd is...
00:38:09
Speaker
supposed to not be like a Wolverine he's supposed to not be like a wild card he's supposed to be like a worldly smart thoughtful guy and yet he's just constantly like we should kill this guy we should beat this guy up I want this guy yeah yeah I think all drug dealers should die just running on impulse yeah and it made sense when it was Wolverine but with Puck it just it doesn't make any fucking sense yeah So you got this character, he's building this character who's so cool and really nice, like really ah fun to be around until he has these moments where you're like, who is are you? Yeah, where if you were, if this were real life, you'd be like, yeah calm down, dude. Yeah, exactly, exactly.
00:38:57
Speaker
All right, we're going to get a lot more puck this episode. So why don't we move on to issue 14, biology class, created By John Byrne.
00:39:09
Speaker
Colored by Andy Yankus. Letterer. Michael Higgins. Editor Denny O'Neill. And editor-in-chief Jucky Jucky. Jucky Shucky. How about that one? That's good. Jucky Shucky. Release date June 12th, 1984. September The issue opens.
00:39:28
Speaker
With a silly poem about Canada. A snowboard descends from the sky, landing in the wilderness next to Dr. Michael Tujungman. He reminds her that she's not immortal and is actually six years... Finally, somebody's acknowledging she's fucking six years old. Right?
00:39:48
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. It's not... So she's... Yeah. She's a six-year-old demigod, so there's a difference in... She's not a six-year-old child. Yeah. Well... But at the same time... You learn your... we yeah We're going to have to talk about this because like later she'll do some very mature things. But it's also uncomfortable that people treat her like a mature woman. So like I think we have to discuss what...
00:40:16
Speaker
what What is the concept of maturity we are going with here? Yeah. Well, so Shaman puts it well here, I think, where he says that she has the wisdom of the gods, but is still but a babe.
00:40:33
Speaker
She is mature beyond her six years, but at the same time, she doesn't have the experience to back that up. And I think her character really tracks with that. where like If it's a decision that would rely on common sense, she makes the the right and smart choice. If it's a decision that would rely on experience...
00:40:53
Speaker
She doesn't necessarily. I almost want to say the opposite of that, actually, because she'll do things like she will she will take responsibility for her actions, which is something that relies on thought and wisdom and experience.
00:41:09
Speaker
She keeps an adult job. She maintains life responsibilities that have literal world shattering consequences. Sure.
00:41:19
Speaker
And next issue, I'll just jump ahead a little bit. Next issue, she will go and give that guy Doug, remember him? Spoiler warning. She'll go give him an explanation for why she broke out of jail.
00:41:32
Speaker
um That's a really mature ass thing to do. It's a thing that a six year old, 12 year old, 20 year old would not do. yeah So file all that under wisdom of the gods.
00:41:46
Speaker
Right. But she's also impulsive and kind of immature at times. like she'll be Like she'll smash out of jail. She won't tell anybody who she is even when like she's facing a fucking...
00:42:00
Speaker
AWOL charge like she will do these wild immature impulsive things but when it comes to actually living her life she's got a maturity that's like how where did you learn this I guess from the gods but usually you learn these things from experience it's a really hard concept to I think it's a really hard concept to grasp is like how mature is she And then then in a couple issues, when somebody's in love with her, it's like, what are you in are you in love what are you in love with? She has the qualities of a mature adult in that you can say, yeah, she's very responsible. She's very um honorable. She's very ah kind and compassionate.
00:42:47
Speaker
But then she has the qualities she also has these other qualities of like a child, which is like. She's the original manic pixie dream girl. That's a good, yeah, all right, yeah, good point.
00:43:00
Speaker
but So she should be resting and recovering from their battle in New York. You remember that? She thanks him, and despite just having arrived home moments ago, she flies off.
00:43:12
Speaker
and In her wake, unnoticed by both of them, a strange eldritch stain starts to spread on the ground. Ooh. Meanwhile, Heather and Judd are taking some and Heather's wearing a fucking fantastic outfit here.
00:43:28
Speaker
Yes, she's got a puffy shirt. It's very 80s. It's got a cool pattern on it. And it's got like this like big, big stitching holding different colored strips of fabric together. Yeah, yeah.
00:43:42
Speaker
um They're taking some much needed time away walking along the Toronto waterfront when a scream pierces the air. They both run towards it, finding a woman screaming that her baby was taken by something in the water.
00:43:53
Speaker
Oh, no. Heather instinctively tears her shirt off and jumps in. but it's only This is why he put her in that puffy shirt. Yeah, yeah. but She's only able to find the child's stroller, the child having been ripped out of it.
00:44:07
Speaker
Ooh. She... All right. Couple things. First, Judd is like, oh, ah that was a scream and doesn't sound like a good time scream. Puck! o Not... He's not wrong. But...
00:44:23
Speaker
But also, like, did you have to did you have to say That was for us, the reader, so we didn't think that the scream piercing the night air was sexual. Yeah, yeah. So so it's not like we're reading and we're like, no, guys, stop running towards it. They're just having sex. Yeah. Also...
00:44:44
Speaker
um also Okay, she goes looking for the stroller. She finds it and she goes, oh man, looks like the baby's gone. they took the The monster took the baby. so But at least I can do for this woman is I can get her stroller back.
00:45:02
Speaker
She doesn't need the stroller. No, just leave it, dude. if i If I lost my baby and somebody's like, don't worry, I got your stroller back.
00:45:15
Speaker
yeah I would not feel even like, oh, phew, that thing was expensive. i'm I'm so sorry for your loss, but now maybe you can sell this?
00:45:30
Speaker
I'll vouch for you on Facebook Marketplace if you need a review. And the last thing I'll say is in the art here, fucking John Byrne is doing crazy things with her boobs.
00:45:42
Speaker
in the water. Oh my God. well, yes, he is animating them panel to panel, but also yeah we didn't talk about this tentacle porn ass cover on the comic that just has Heather in a bra screaming while, uh,
00:46:00
Speaker
a set of tentacles start wrapping around her. Up her leg. Yeah, exactly. and And again, her boobs are going crazy. She's in a bra, but they're like, like it's the sort of thing. I mean, we've all seen boob physics in water.
00:46:15
Speaker
It's like when somebody's in, a woman's in water, the boobs kind of do go crazy. But like, it's... It's wild that he's, and like you said, animating them in this way. They're in every panel. They're pointing in wild directions.
00:46:31
Speaker
It seems like John Burns spent all his research time on Canadian geography and the movement of breasts in water. Yeah, he brought like his girlfriend or his wife or something to their pool and was like, all right, now I need to swim up really fast. Okay, now left really fast. Okay, now right really fast. it's
00:46:51
Speaker
So she swims to the surface with the stroller. She turns around and she screams in horror as three dastardly looking tentacles reach out, wrap up her leg and start pulling her down. Oh no.
00:47:01
Speaker
Puck manages to grab her hand and pull her free from its grip just as the police finally show up. The creature returns to the deep.
00:47:11
Speaker
Puck's mean to the police. Always got to mention when somebody's to the police. Love it. Yes, the police are not helpful here. At ease, blue boy. Save the heroics. In a brief interlude, we see Aurora taking a shower at Sasquatch's apartment. Again, just there's so many naked people in these issues. Yeah, she's fully nude.
00:47:30
Speaker
um When she's confronted by her... Because she's taking a shower. You shouldn't... It would be expected that you would be fully nude. So Aurora's... Yeah, she's getting out of the shower when she's suddenly confronted by her Jean-Marie personality in the mirror. She cowers in the corner as the narrator gives him pretty outdated diagnosis.
00:47:50
Speaker
He's like, if you're an idiot, you would say it's schizophrenic. layman would refer to it as schizophrenic. But the medical term is classic paranoia.
00:48:03
Speaker
I don't think so. i'm not a doctor. and she's clutching the toilet. I hate this. do They do this all the time in like movies and TV and comics where...
00:48:19
Speaker
somebody has some sort of like they're attacked by something in the bathroom or they have a breakdown in the bathroom or they're smoking pot in the bathroom and they really comfortable with their toilets.
00:48:31
Speaker
And I just like, yeah for example, throwing up and hugging the bowl is something you see in movies. Okay. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
00:48:44
Speaker
that It cor grosses me out so fucking bad. Don't touch a toilet. Well, you're already throwing up. Yeah, but don't touch the toilet. You have to. How are you going to support yourself? You just lean, man. You just engage your core and you lean.
00:49:04
Speaker
It's not. you just Maybe you hold the top of the tank to steady yourself. Maybe you hold the sink on one side and you like shower on the other. ah i e I do need the support of the toilet here.
00:49:18
Speaker
God. think this is a you thing. Like, I'll sit on my toilet to get something done in the bathroom. Yucky. Like, if I have to clip my toenails, you don't sit on the toilet that? clip my toenails in the bathroom. my clip You don't clip your like toenails? No, I clip them. I clip them over i clip em over a tissue in a normal place.
00:49:37
Speaker
While you're standing? i know i was like, sit, nod in the bathroom. and Because that would be cool.
00:49:47
Speaker
It's a brilliant rendering of the toilet. It's really hard to draw a toilet. yeah she Yeah, he does. It's it's glimmering. it does It looks like an attractive toilet. looks great. Try it. Mutantmenacepod at gmail.com. Draw us a toilet. But it's got a fuzzy toilet seat lid.
00:50:02
Speaker
It does. I miss that era. Although that's unsanitary. You should never do that. But it's very cool that for a time people didn't care. No shag in your bathroom at all.
00:50:13
Speaker
At all. Do you remember they used to have shag toilet seats in like the 60s and 70s? Yes. Disgusting. Horrifying. Absolutely.
00:50:25
Speaker
Probably pretty good to throw up on though. ah ah Back in town while Heather recovers at the hospital, Puck relays the full experience to a detective who pulls down a chart he's made of 16 other victims of the creature.
Anthropological and Character Explorations
00:50:42
Speaker
What do you think he drew those pictures? that's he's He pulls down like a classroom world map style, like the projector screen, but he's got 16 people all lined up. in it It looks like a game of guess who. He's like... He's like, I got John Byrne. These are my murder victims. I got John Byrne to draw these for me. 16 other victims that they've managed to keep quiet. Any remains they've found have shown the victims were dissected alive.
00:51:14
Speaker
They discuss the possibilities of a serial killer, a vampire, or an alien before Puck decides there's only one member of Alpha Flight that can help. couple things there's another doctor who comments on the attractiveness of of her female patient yes she's like uh why yeah exactly she's like her her legs are all cut up from that tentacle uh she won't be starring in any the legs commercials anytime soon like fucking shut up and then there's a weird thing there's like this nod to the fact that
00:51:49
Speaker
In Doctor Strange, I guess all vampires are dead. Oh, right. they the The policeman is like, yeah I'd say it was a vampire if that wasn't such a ridiculous thought. And Puck's like, actually, Inspector, vampires exist. Or at least they did until they all died.
00:52:11
Speaker
ah So weird. um There is a there's also a line. He's like, there we got a serial killer here that makes Jack the Ripper look like strawberry shortcake.
00:52:27
Speaker
How many people did strawberry shortcake murder? Didn't she kill that ah spider? She was eating her curds and whey.
00:52:41
Speaker
Cut to Atlantis where Namor is practically proposing to Marina. This is where she gets the cool outfit. It's got like ah stringy sleeves. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And it's other than that, it's a one piece bathing suit.
00:52:53
Speaker
Yeah. True. um But she had a one piece bathing suit already, but now she's got stringy sleeves. That's right. But Marina gets an alpha flight call. Namor accompanies her as she responds despite some Atlantean bullshit he's got going on Marina meets Puck where he's summoned to her. She apologizes for almost killing him last time they met.
00:53:14
Speaker
Clearly, they're not just going to redo the same plot over again. He's like, hey, i i I've forgiven you. I don't hold a grudge. Besides, the writer wouldn't do the same plot a second time, ah beat for beat.
00:53:30
Speaker
um yeah ah He is dressed so sharply here. Yeah. Between his, like, turtleneck sweater and the took and the the jacket. Yeah, he looks great. He explains his theory. The same alien machine that created her might have created another cosmic egg. Cut!
00:53:49
Speaker
Oh, no. To Calgary. where we zoom in on an archaeological dig site as the narrator takes some shots at the city's economic development. We see a student at the dig, Elizabeth, two young men, uncover a human skull.
00:54:06
Speaker
Oh, great. Another anthropologist. We've not had luck with anthropology, anthropologists here. and We had... The living monolith.
00:54:17
Speaker
Right. And Bolivar Trask. the Right. And now we have Elizabeth to Youngman. and She also, she finds this skull and she goes, the skull and the skull of a white man at that God, she a phrenologist.
00:54:36
Speaker
This is so I had this fight one time on Blue Sky ah where somebody was like, it's going to go. It's somebody was like, you can actually tell race based on somebody's skeleton.
00:54:50
Speaker
And I was like, well, OK, no, you can't. You can tell maybe like their genetic pool. based on their skeleton. You can say, yeah, this skeleton has these features that are very similar to all these other people in this area. But unless you already know what the race of one of those people is, what their skin color was,
00:55:14
Speaker
You're not going to know. Right. And archaeologists talk all the time about the deep variance between the the types that they classify to, right?
00:55:25
Speaker
Yeah. Because, again, you could say, like, oh, heavy brow ridges mean this race, right? But there are people of every race with heavy brow ridges. She's a student. She's learning. She's probably got some illicit influences at that school.
00:55:43
Speaker
Plus, I only have a bachelor's degree. Who knows? She seems to be doing post-grad work, so maybe maybe maybe she knows more than I do. Maybe they they teach you that phrenology is real once you get there.
00:55:55
Speaker
All right. Suddenly, the visage of a giant contorted face plumes out of the skull, shrieking, REVENGE!
00:56:06
Speaker
That's how I imagined it, because it's like a real... REVENGE! Before, it in your best peewee voice. It's a terrifying contorted pace. Revenge! Revenge! Revenge! right We've lost it. It's impossible. It's impossible to do a peewee voice. um Elizabeth is terrified, but it appears no one else could see the apparition, so she knows there's only one man she can talk to.
00:56:33
Speaker
Her father, who she hasn't seen in 15 years. Michael, two young men. oh They treat this like a reveal, but it's like many people named two young men. Yeah, yeah. It's a pretty unique list. This is either his daughter or his sister.
00:56:54
Speaker
um Yeah. Wild stuff. But I do have to say, like The art here, the the skull that she finds, the visage popping out of it. Like, it's it's very cool. It's creepy. You're like, oh, this is some sort of Elder God's face that I'm looking at.
00:57:15
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. If you don't read any of this too close, this issue rules. Yeah. Let's continue that trend, Matt. Oh, okay.
00:57:27
Speaker
With Alpha Flight number 15, Blind Date. two That sounds exciting, doesn't it? I forgot this was the name of it. Do we know why it's called that?
00:57:40
Speaker
i
00:57:44
Speaker
don't. I cannot figure out I mean, there's a point. There's one panel where Namor... Sorry, Namor's in this one. Where Namor gets blinded.
00:57:55
Speaker
Just for, ah like, temporarily. Just for a minute. Was that maybe the last thing Byrne wrote before he wrote that? gotta be it, right?
00:58:05
Speaker
Yeah. It's gotta to be. There's nothing else. Anyway. John Byrne, writer, penciler, and he yank us, colorist, Rick Parker, letterer, Denny O'Neill, editor, and jumpy shumpy editor in chief.
00:58:19
Speaker
Release date July 1984. Cover date October
00:58:25
Speaker
anne mackenzie remember her ah Yeah, we just saw our last video. Goes to the Northwest Territories to see her old coworker at the RCMP, Sergeant Douglas Thompson. Remember him? Yeah. The guy you who kind of tried to vouch for and then she just broke out of prison through the wall. And he's like, damn it.
00:58:48
Speaker
ah She sees him to explain why she broke out of her jail cell and disappeared. She reveals that she's actually Snowbird, the daughter of Nelvana, goddess of the Northern Lights.
00:59:00
Speaker
And Anne McKenzie is just kind of a fake persona. yeah Nonetheless, Doug springs in I love you on her. God, who, how, how? It's literally just her looks. It's literally just her looks. There's nothing to love about her. She's got like nothing about her. There's no, she, it's a fake personality. So she doesn't have any personal characteristics. He doesn't know the real her at all.
00:59:26
Speaker
It's just, you're hot. I love you. No, it's the, it is the wise, but the wise, but, it's the It's that wise butt. You have a really wise butt.
00:59:37
Speaker
And then that mixed with that childlike innocence. Again, this is this is... She is the pixie dream girl and Douglas Thompson is the Zach Braff writing her. Do you think... Like, I don't think she's actually...
00:59:54
Speaker
that type of person i think this is what what douglas is seeing in her it just it still feels thoughtless it still feels like a thoughtless characterization and kind of again like i don't want to overemphasize this but like because i i think this is only a slight but slightly problematic to me I'm feeling it for her. I think that makes sense that she's going into this ah this way, that she's like, well, I don't...
01:00:25
Speaker
I'm not sure that I love you because I don't know that i understand that emotion because I am, like I just said, demigod. I'm six. I'm six years old.
01:00:37
Speaker
I, um, yeah, I think my conviction on this is getting a little shaken. um yes, but I don't. So it's a point for Pat. Yeah.
01:00:49
Speaker
But i like there's still something that feels weird about it to me. I wonder if I'll be able to articulate it as we keep reading or or if it'll just fade away and I'll just feel good about it.
01:01:00
Speaker
Well, you chew on that, Matt. Meanwhile, back in Toronto, Marana leaves Puck on the shore to go searching Lake Ontario for the monster that's been killing people. They're trying to do this like creature creature of the deep dark sea, but they have to keep reminding us that it takes place in one of the Great Lakes. Although they do, they're like, they're like hey, just so you know.
01:01:27
Speaker
The Great Lakes are pretty big. The surface area of Lake Ontario is bigger than um it Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
01:01:39
Speaker
Here's where the rest of John Byrne's research time went into researching the square footage of u s states so he could figure out which ones were one-fifth the size. And I looked it up and he's... I mean, it's it's really hard to judge exact square footage of, like, ah ah a landmass that big because you got to think of, like, altitude and whatever. um Sure. But...
01:02:07
Speaker
He's, for the most part, correct. All of these are one-fifth. So if you took Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and New Jersey and smashed them all together, that's roughly the size of Lake Ontario.
01:02:24
Speaker
Interesting. Ha ha ha ha ha!
01:02:31
Speaker
After swimming around using her enhanced underwater senses, which this art is, again, very cool. Her like boobs are normal. It's got a radar effect. Her boobs, because of her physiology, her her amphibious physiology are totally normal. Her eye the the puffy sleeves, the like fringy puffy sleeves are waving around in the water. really effectively ah It's and the some of the underwater scapes she comes across. It's just very cool.
01:03:00
Speaker
Yeah, there's a lot of... and Because she's so deep in the water at some point, everything becomes just shadow. So it's her on like black outlines of the the geology of it. And it's yeah really cool. Though the only thing I'll say that is weird, absolutely no marine wildlife.
01:03:25
Speaker
That's true. She's swimming around a completely empty lake. There's also, i'm I'm sure there's a lot more art to see, but every panel is half filled with Marina explaining her emotions to herself. Oh my gosh, yeah.
01:03:41
Speaker
As she uses her enhanced underwater senses, she feels an intense loneliness coming from some chasm. She swims into its black depths only to find a weird air-filled cavern lit up by bioluminescent algae.
01:03:56
Speaker
She feels drawn to it. And we see her face frozen in shock. She, John Byrne does the same, I'm a little smarter than you thing again, where he's like, actually, this is not, she's not, she's no longer underwater. She must've made her way to the shore.
01:04:14
Speaker
She made her, she must've made her way under solid land because water levels will even out. she, It would be impossible to have like an air pocket like this underneath water.
01:04:27
Speaker
Yeah. Isn't she stupid for having thought of this concept? Because it's impossible. but
01:04:36
Speaker
So she must be under the land and not under the water anymore. Like, okay, all right, fine. I don't care. Shut up. And when she, at one point when the the thing gets narrow, she gets caught between some rocks um as the tunnel gets narrow. And here's what he says. He says, like a moth between the stubby fingers of a small boy. Yeah.
01:05:01
Speaker
What a visualization. You're a poet, John Byrne.
01:05:07
Speaker
my My love for you is caught like the sands of Tower Quest through time. Like a moth caught in the chubby fingers of a small toddler. Your heart has gar grasped my soul like like ah a weird little boy grabbing onto some sand in the sandbox and it's s slipping. Like the sticky sausage fingers a chubby little boy. Like a chubby, a sticky, chubby little boy. And he's grabbing some, I don't know, like a toy his parents bought him. And it's kind of like squishing a little bit. And he spit up a little. That's how much I love you, Juliet.
01:05:48
Speaker
don't fucking
01:05:53
Speaker
ah Then, after a short interlude of a nude Aurora deciding to affirm her identity's claim on her body by taking scissors to her hair. Okay. We see Marina rising back up out of the water where Puck is still waiting for her.
01:06:09
Speaker
but she's back in her monstrous form and lunges at him. He dodges and uses his bullfighting training that he picked up in Spain with Ernest Hemingway to try and tire her out.
01:06:23
Speaker
they it's It's a fun throwaway line until we get to the bullfighting art, which again is uniquely talented. Yes.
01:06:35
Speaker
But again, they're like, Just like he mentioned that time he spent with the famous American poet in Spain earned him his respect. And when Hemingway told his friends that Puck was worthy, they were stunned. Shut the... Shut up! Show us... Show him doing something cool. Do not just sit here and tell us how one guy told us, told a bunch of other guys that this guy was cool.
01:07:06
Speaker
be quiet i'm trying to read comics he also has some so fucking ridiculous dialogue here he has puck saying um saying well yes the narrator saying in all these years puck has never seen marina show any signs of aggression and yet and then immediately as puck thinking this is the second time this has happened yes We've seen... What the fuck are you talking about? We've never seen this before.
01:07:39
Speaker
you wrote it! You wrote it, my friend! and then... Yeah. Yeah. Then Namor shows up and we get a hundred, as he's doing all this, Namor shows up. We get a hundred more words about how graceful and cool and beautiful Namor is. It's not even that. It's like, um ah it's a shame no one was here to see that because if if there was a guy that was here and saw this, they'd be like, whoa, I can't believe I'm seeing this right now. Fuck Fuck
01:08:10
Speaker
And among these, what, six to eight panels where he's describing the potential cool of Namor, Namor's only line is, what the...
01:08:24
Speaker
And has Puck. When Puck is is doing his bullfighting, he's like, all of my instincts, this is going to be tough because all my instincts are offensive, not defensive. I'm not going to be able to dodge for very long. Again, all we've seen you do is dodge.
01:08:40
Speaker
All you ever do is i dodge. I thought that was your thing. Your whole thing is defensive. Dodging and tucking and rolling and jumping around. And why are you having... He just... John Byrne...
01:08:54
Speaker
You don't have to fill up the panels with this many words. Number one. Number two, stop lying to us. So Namor appears from the water and misunderstanding the situation immediately knocks Puck out.
01:09:11
Speaker
Hands off my girlfriend. ah
01:09:16
Speaker
Uh, meanwhile, Elizabeth, two young men bursts into her father's office, intentionally interrupting an appointment with a patient. Don't do this. Yeah, this is a HIPAA violation.
01:09:28
Speaker
absolutely and the woman has to like pull her shirt back on right like she's like she's getting a full exam like yeah it's like fucking private space when john burn is trying to mimic when they do this to somebody who's like they're like he's in a meeting and they're like i don't give a shit and then burst in it's like father but where is my allowance He might be giving out a cancer diagnosis. Right. This is a doctor. This isn't just some businessman or something. This is a doctor with a patient. You asshole.
01:10:02
Speaker
Well, he also just ignores his patient. He tries to reconnect immediately, but she's not here to talk about family stuff. She needs to talk to Shaman. hu Back in Toronto, Namor has realized his mistake as Marina attacks him.
01:10:20
Speaker
Puck wakes up only to be immediately nerve pinched back into unconsciousness. Poor Puck. ah By a mysterious figure. By a mysterious figure who is watching the fight from the shore. I say mysterious figure, but it's clear from the first line of his thoughts that it's the master of the world.
Villainous Returns and Confrontations
01:10:41
Speaker
ah Remember him?
01:10:43
Speaker
He's been planning for this and he's interested to see how Mariana will fare against Namor because his plans will require him to eventually destroy all the Atlanteans. Okay. I guess. Instead of letting it play out, though, he steps in to explain that Mariana secretes an oil that causes temporary blindness and nerve strikes Namor unconscious.
01:11:05
Speaker
What? to be continued why he's like ah this isn't going exactly according to my plans i want to see how an atlantean fares against marina one of my creatures and then he comes in and stops the fight wow what what well he's got big plans matt he is the master of the world yeah yeah i will say at this point it's been 40 000 years
01:11:37
Speaker
If you remember the master of the world's whole story, he was a caveman 40,000 years ago. And then he found this device that produces cosmic eggs that create killing aliens, world killing aliens.
01:11:50
Speaker
Nobody knows who he as Aside from Alpha Flight, nobody knows who he is. You can't call yourself the master of the world if the first person to hear of you met you a year ago. It's like that guy in New England who used to walk around calling himself the king of America. Because it's like nobody's ever called themselves king before, so I can just declare myself king and I have no competition. That's master of the world. He's like, I am the master of the world. And they're like, yeah, you are, honey. Do you need a bagel today? Yeah.
01:12:23
Speaker
ah ah All right. That's it for number 15. We're halfway through, Matt. You want to keep taking us into outslide number 16? Yeah. yeah And forsaking all others. Ooh.
01:12:37
Speaker
John Byrne, creator, writer, penciler, Bob Wyacek, finisher, finish, finisher. Andy Yankes, colorer, Rick Parker on lettering. New name. hes Some new techniques here, too. Yeah, he goes pretty crazy from the the jump. He just makes all the letters very small so they can all fit. And he does, like, weird, like, kerning that it's, like...
01:13:00
Speaker
Yeah. He's trying some stuff out. Denny O'Neill is editor and Juicy Sherbert is editor in chief. Release date August 14th, 1984. Cover date November 1984. The master of the world cruises along in his giant fish ship.
01:13:19
Speaker
Fish ship. Fish ship. It's got a big fish ship. Just a big submarine, but it's shaped like like a cartoon fish, like the fish from American Dad. I made a ship. I made it look like a fish.
01:13:34
Speaker
Fish ship. Fish ship. ah Deep below the surface of Lake Ontario. And Puck and Neymar, they're contained in tubes behind him, weak and with very little oxygen and hydration, respectively. ah The master's impressed by their wills. He explains his whole thing.
01:13:49
Speaker
Takes a long time explain. Takes like seven pages. Somebody, I think it was Puck, was like, what's going on here? And he's like, you know what? You guys got spunk. I'll tell you my plan.
01:14:01
Speaker
ah he sir Okay, his his thing is, I wanted you guys to beat me up, actually. Remember when you beat my ass back in issue four? I wanted my ass beaten, and you played right into my hands.
01:14:16
Speaker
But, Patrick, I went back to issue four. He does say basically every time we feel like he's losing. And we didn't comment on this because I don't think we noticed. He's like, everything's going according to plans.
01:14:30
Speaker
And then but we like he disappears from that issue about halfway through. Right. And doesn't appear again. And then we are immediately misdirected by all the other shit going on So we don't think about the fact that like, oh, what was the deal with Master of the World?
01:14:50
Speaker
So this long convoluted plan that he recaps could have actually potentially been in John Byrne's head all the way back in Alpha Flight number four. I think it was, which is all right. Cool. I mean, yeah, that is impressive. It's interesting. Again, I got no problem with the so the story structure here. Yeah. Yeah. Except for they're doing the exact same plot again.
01:15:15
Speaker
Well, yes. So, so He survived the explosion of his old ship, escaped to his fish ship. Fish ship. And found a new cosmic a new cosmic egg that's been unprogrammed. Didn't touch Martha Smallwood or whoever.
01:15:31
Speaker
He reveals a pharaoh Mariner and then introduces a new hatchling in the same tank. This is the fourth time that we get a fake creature reveal where...
01:15:44
Speaker
one or two characters are like oh my god and then you turn the page and it's just a different scene it's a scene in moose jaw saskatchewan uh mr jeffries pat madison jeffries is here madison jeffries i didn't catch his first name i don't think they say it here but it's that's not a spoiler is madison jeffries hey i love this guy He's at the apartment of Roger Box after being offered $1,000 plus travel expenses. He says, I'll go anywhere for $1,000. Box's plan is very simple. Avenge the assassination of Guardian by the coward Jerry Jackson.
01:16:25
Speaker
He wants to rebuild Box, his robot that was used by Jackson to kill Guardian. so that no one but himself can use it. Mr. Jeffries plays coy, but Box knows his secret. He's a transmutator, able to naturally understand mechanics and reshape inorganic material into any mechanical device he needs. throws like a bunch of He pulls one of those like, yeah oh, your arms are broken?
01:16:48
Speaker
Think fast! And throws a basketball baseball at somebody and they catch it and the whole courtroom is like, ooh. it's like that he throws a bunch of mechanical parts at jeffrey's and then it just floats in midair and turns into a bionic arm yeah yeah and it's very cool and it's such a cool power i i don't know if i'm thinking of this guy or somebody else but if i'm thinking of this guy then i also love him yeah if that makes sense he'll play a big role in the uh
01:17:21
Speaker
mid 2000s okay x-men that that doesn't help oh yes it does okay he's kind of like forge in that way like but instead of being able to it's it doesn't happen in his mind it happens physically in front of him and he doesn't know and where forge understands his mind it just naturally understands how to invent things jeffrey's ah he doesn't understand it just happens um it's like telepathy versus telekinesis almost Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah.
01:17:52
Speaker
So halfway across the continent, Heather's processing her grief in the hospital when she's visited by an old pal, Wolverine! he's finally here in reality. But back in the fish chip fish ship... Fish ship....we finally see the terrible creature that's been hatched from the second cosmic egg, a blob of shifting ooze that occasionally takes the form of one of the creatures it's killed.
01:18:14
Speaker
In this case, a tot the toddler from a couple issues back and slowly shifts its features into a monster. ah This is, to me, this is scary. This is an amorphous blob. Like, it's got tentacles and strands sticking out from it. But it takes the features of the toddler that it killed and then... i just turns it into like it gives it huge fangs and it slowly morphs into a monster that is capable of killing many humans. It's very i not to keep recommending books. this This isn't that sort of podcast, but It's a podcast explicitly about books, Pat. Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach series, the the first of which is Annihilation. They made a movie based on it.
01:19:07
Speaker
It's very reminiscent of that sort of stuff where it's like, oh, there's some sort of unknown horror that can assume... the genetic code of another creature and figure out how to manipulate it into a more deadly creature it's got like it's got shades of philip k dick but it's ed but it's also got the um general feel of like lovecraft yeah yeah that like that sense of dread that you should have about it right right um scary stuff
01:19:42
Speaker
and It and Marina immediately engage in what the master refers to as combat, though Puck thinks they're doing something else. He's right. ah No time for that now, though. He's got to find a way out of this tube.
01:19:57
Speaker
he knows exactly what will get the master to release him. He dies. Oh. So, and then the issue ends and Puck is gone.
01:20:08
Speaker
Now, are epoch all of his life monitoring systems flatline and the master curious about how he could have possibly died so suddenly, even though three panels ago, he was at wondering how he was still alive.
01:20:22
Speaker
He opens the tube, but of course, Puck was only pretending to be dead. ah pat it was with a ah a trick he learned in the Orient. Which you're allowed to say. Dude, that's not. Wait. I don't think you are. No, you're allowed to refer to the area as the Orient. It's strange. It's old timey, but that part isn't racist. I thought you were. ah Or if it is, we should cut this. I thought you were only allowed to, well, we can look it up, but I thought you were only allowed to refer to um human-made goods from that region as Oriental, but you were not allowed to refer to it as the Orient, nor were you prefer allowed to refer to people. Nor should you ever refer to people as if they're objects.
01:21:14
Speaker
Okay, so it's not a slur. Yeah, okay, so we did some looking. If we're forward-thinking people, we shouldn't be saying it. probably shouldn't be saying it because it's, it's yeah, it is... Centralizes the West. Yeah, but...
01:21:28
Speaker
He's not fully. He's not saying a slur. We're not canceling Puck. We're not canceling Puck. We're just saying Puck needs to do some learning. He needs to sit his ass down and listen. And so do we. Of course, Puck was only pretending to be dead. Oh, yeah. He was fooling all the censors through his indomitable will.
01:21:46
Speaker
He kicks the master and lets Namor out of his tube, then rips the helmet off the master's head. and threat What? This reminds me of something. Okay, we'll get to it. And throws it at the tank, releasing Marina and the creature.
01:21:59
Speaker
But it turns out the helmet was actually melded to the master and provided him with his ability to control the monster. this There's a scene in something, and I cannot remember what it is, where somebody rips what looks like a hat or a mask or something off somebody, and they're like, ah that's part of my face! Ugh.
01:22:18
Speaker
but And it was like it it was played for laughs and whatever this was. But this is that same scene. It's pretty graphic here where you you see the skin of the top half of his head ripped off. Yeah. When he's like, you idiot. That wasn't a helmet. That was the top of my head. That was my head, actually.
01:22:39
Speaker
That hurt. And also the monster is now loose. yeah Now it's, now it's, loose so now you're right. It's loose. It's flailing around inside the fish ship.
01:22:52
Speaker
Fish ship. And triggers the self-destruct mechanism. Namor trying to fight off Pharaoh Marina without hurting her, hurls her out of a breach in the hall and grabs Puck and pulls him to the surface just as the fish ship.
01:23:06
Speaker
Fish ship. Explodes. No more fish ship. then Puck dies from the bends. good
01:23:15
Speaker
They do. They shoot to the surface very fast. Very, very fast. And they make it so clear how deep underwater they are. And they even make it clear. he even makes it clear in one of the panels how heavy the pressure on the ship is.
01:23:32
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Anyway. That would have been extremely funny. For Namor to make it to the surface with Puck and then be like, Puck?
01:23:46
Speaker
Puck? I didn't know. i do this all the time.
Character Dynamics and Developments
01:23:52
Speaker
Right? Does Namor know what the bends are? How many people has he done this to?
01:23:59
Speaker
Namor returns to find Marina, but only finds the remains of the creature in his ship. And the ship, no sign of her or the master. He tells Puck he respects him.
01:24:10
Speaker
And then flies off to get back to his dumb Namor ship. I'll tell you, yeah I don't care about Namor. I don't care about the shit that he has going on. find Namor stuff so boring. Probably the most boring part of the Marvel Universe.
01:24:25
Speaker
but But if there's one quality of Namor's that everyone knows, it's that he's incredibly arrogant, right? Yeah. He thinks of himself very highly. This moment where he's like, Puck, I got to say, you're a great warrior. You have my respect.
01:24:45
Speaker
So long. is I got chills. I was like, shit, Namor. is humbling himself in front of Puck. This guy yeah fucking rules.
01:24:56
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Just then, Marina comes out of hiding and explains to Judd why she didn't reveal herself. She was actually trying to mate and soul bond with that creature.
01:25:06
Speaker
Told you learn that she has lots to learn about herself. She calls herself a monster as she walks into the sea, ah the lake.
01:25:17
Speaker
Pat, this is this is just the same story. It's just the same story. It's just Marino went crazy, hurt Puck, ah like a attacked Puck, and then disappeared into the water. An Alpha Flight guy had to chase her, found her, confronted the Master of the Universe.
01:25:38
Speaker
I guess it's different because they got kidnapped this time. Well, yeah if you remember, Matt, blew up the Master of the Universe's ship, that Last time, you yes, this is the exact same plot, but last time it was all of Alpha Flight except Puck.
01:25:55
Speaker
ah So he was like, we got to get Puck in there. it's like It's like if you you take a family picture and one of your relatives isn't there, they they they can't make it. So you have somebody professionally, like you take their picture separately so you can professionally Photoshop them in.
01:26:14
Speaker
Yeah. Or like your grandma has a picture of the whole family without you. And then also a picture, a picture of you next to it. Picture of you with her.
01:26:26
Speaker
All right, Pat. So let's say let's keep moving, Matt. Let's talk about these Alpha Flight number 17. want to. Dreams die hard.
01:26:38
Speaker
Okay. The credits on this one are a little wild. So we have John Byrne, creator chronicler, Andy Yankus, colorist, Joe Rosen, letterer, Denny O'Neill, editor, Jim Dummy, editor in chief, and then additional material, pages eight through 11 and 13 through 16. Chris Claremont dialogue.
01:26:59
Speaker
Terry Austin inks. Very funny. That he only says dialogue. For John Byrne. is Credits himself as creator and chronicler, which is is absolutely right for Alpha Flight, but only gives Claremont the dialogue credit for the story that ripped from the pages of X-Men. Yeah.
01:27:20
Speaker
And it is just, again, it is just pages from X-Men. Yes, half of this. It is, yeah. Release date September 4th, 1984. Cover date December 1984.
01:27:36
Speaker
We're reaching the end of the book year, Matt. Whoa. In Heather Hudson's hospital room, she and Logan talk through old memories. We see the day Wolverine joined the X-Men from her point of view.
01:27:51
Speaker
Guardian was trying on his suit for the first time when he gets a call that Weapon X slashed some dude's tie and quit Department A. It's so so funny to see the general's reaction to that scene. yeah It's giant size X-Men number one, right? Yeah, exactly. Where Wolverine gets recruited by the X-Men and just slices the tie off of some G-Man. And now we see that guy going like... He sliced my tie. tried to kill me. I never want to see that guy again.
01:28:22
Speaker
yeah
01:28:25
Speaker
That night, James is working through it emotionally with Heather. He feels betrayed after all he'd done for Logan. The two were best friends. He and Heather were almost like surrogate parents to Logan at a difficult time in his life.
01:28:39
Speaker
Mac gets a call from Gary Cody and the two were summoned three, right? Mac, Gary, Cody. And the three are summoned in the middle of the night to Parliament Hill. They say, either bring Gary or Cody. I do not want to see both of you.
01:28:55
Speaker
i Where they're told that they must get Weapon X back, even if it means covertly invading U.S. soil to do so. No. No. Meanwhile, Logan had become Wolverine and been going on a bunch of X-Men adventures until the infamous day when he rode along to touch deer in the woods while Storm, Colossus, Moira, and Banshee had a picnic.
01:29:15
Speaker
Remember that? Then we get eight full pages of direct reprints from X-Men 109 when James Hudson as Weapon Alpha first fought the X-Men. The reprints end when Weapon Alpha escapes, and we get to an explanation that his suit can fix itself in space while the planet rotates to transport himself a thousand plus miles per hour. This is...
01:29:39
Speaker
extremely cool. Yeah. know you're sighing, but this is the shit that, that this is, this is what you like yeah from comics. It's like, he is flying through the air. yeah He separates his suit, separates itself from the earth's gravitational pull. He is his own object in space, free of any constraints
Science, Time Travel, and Apollo Missions
01:30:02
Speaker
of gravity. So the earth continues to rotate, but he stays in the same place in space while the earth rotates under him enabling him to seem like he's moving at a thousand miles per hour so okay yeah the the earth rotates at a thousand miles and how fast does the earth travel around the the sun okay so that is where this would get a little complicated but i also think about this with time travel all the time it's like if you time traveled
01:30:34
Speaker
You would do this exact point in space. Yeah. You'd just end up in the vacuum of space and die. Like what if we've already invented time travel and then they just didn't think this part through, which i've haven it I've recently been trying to come back to warn us and they're all just floating in space. I've been recently listening to this podcast about, um, the, uh, original, uh,
01:31:00
Speaker
the Apollo, the the mission to the moon, the landing on the moon. Yeah, yeah, Apollo 11. how, first of all, how it's just a bunch of 26 and 27-year-olds. Like, all of mission control, all the engineers on it. The oldest guy working in NASA at the time was 36. Oh my god, it's like professional sports.
01:31:22
Speaker
Just a ah bunch of children creating the most, like... the greatest feat mankind has ever achieved the greatest technical feat anyway and it the the idea that they had to think of stuff like this and calculate for it is great so i guess all to say i just wanted to talk about how cool that was that that that the podcast and that mission, but yeah, well, this is 1984, Matt. They could have had that same science applied here. Well, that's kind of what I'm saying is like, yeah, I guess if you're that on that level of scientist, you're,
01:32:02
Speaker
Maybe you do you're think you're probably accounting for. Maybe he has some sort of
Soap Opera Narratives and Story Critiques
01:32:07
Speaker
propulsion mechanism that he doesn't even mention because he's just like. Although it's not worth mentioning. Science happens through trial and error. So you might be right that anybody to discover this.
01:32:20
Speaker
If they don't account for that detail. ah hu Probably doesn't get the second round of trial and error. Though. Nobody, we didn't crash into the moon ever.
01:32:35
Speaker
We did think that stuff through pretty well before we got there. That's true. And that was 1969. Nice, dude. Thanks. Back in the hospital, in the present.
01:32:50
Speaker
Back in the hospital. Heather mourns her husband. She's pieced together. the mu I'm sorry. So much of Alpha Flight. It only just occurs to me. So much of Alpha Flight takes place in a hospital.
01:33:04
Speaker
We've been in the hospital. Yes. Almost every issue of this book. And dude, this is. so we're talking about the letters getting smaller and smaller as it goes on. And they are tiny here so that they can fit.
01:33:21
Speaker
Thousands of words yeah into this comic book while giving us just several angles of this same hospital room where the two, just two characters talking to each other. And I'll tell you, it's beautiful. This is the soap opera part that like, we always wish we had a little more of the next men. It is just Logan and Heather talking about the past and kind of talking through their grief. And none of that,
01:33:50
Speaker
makes up for the fact that like i've read an i've read a novel gives exactly yeah yeah it's so funny too because there's these reprints here that you can see the difference in lettering all of a sudden you know the lettering gets so much bigger and then tiny again right because tom words a kowski knows how to make that shit fit And yeah I guess Chris Claremont, who we thought of as the wordiest man on earth, was not, had nothing on John Burr. Yeah.
01:34:31
Speaker
Heather has pieced together that the last moments of his life were spent trying to disarm his battery pack, and she blames herself for his death. Aww.
01:34:43
Speaker
Logan tries to console her when Jean Judd walks in. So I didn't mention this earlier, but in the the initial issue of the sea monster thing where she jumps into the water, Puck looks directly into the camera and says she's doing this because she feels guilty for James's death. ah ah
01:35:07
Speaker
This is a bit more subtle. Yeah. Logan tries to console her when Eugene Judd walks in. Judd and Logan, who had known each other only by reputation, finally meet.
01:35:18
Speaker
It's cool. They discuss it's the only person that Logan can refer to as short.
01:35:27
Speaker
ah It's not politically correct. But also very funny. But it is true. He's found one person shorter than him. So he's going to he's going to take that opportunity to comment on his height.
01:35:40
Speaker
Yeah. They discussed some old times. They were on opposite sides of the same mission and never actually saw each other and commit to getting coffee later to talk it all out.
01:35:51
Speaker
Aw. It's very cute. It's what your two favorite characters, yeah what you want your two favorite characters to do. Very cool friendship. I want to see that miniseries where they just sit in a coffee shop and talk about their old secret agent days. Yeah, yeah.
Character Transformations and Leadership
01:36:05
Speaker
Heather suggests disbanding Alpha Flight, but Puck and Logan both demand that she doesn't do that. Instead, they inspire her to become its new leader.
01:36:16
Speaker
Just the absolute flip. She's like, yeah, I don't think, I guess we're done with Alpha Flight. And they're like, no! And she's like, okay, I'll lead it. Okay, I'll be the leader.
01:36:27
Speaker
Okay, I'm gonna be this leader. It's an earned moment, but it is a very quick change of pace for her. Yeah, yeah. We cut to Walter Lankowski's lab, where Aurora floats nude in some tank of green liquid. Her hair short...
01:36:46
Speaker
i yeah I'm not saying that celebratorily. I'm saying that because said that. More nude women. More nude women. Can't wait. Oh, boy.
01:36:57
Speaker
He asks if she's sure this thing that he's about to do is what she really wants. And she tells him she definitely is. He flips a switch and it causes her so much pain, she bursts through the tank screaming, but it turns out she's okay.
01:37:14
Speaker
Oh, never mind. What he did was put her through a molecular realignment so that she would keep her powers but not be a mutant any anymore. What the What? is So my understanding is that what he told her is that this is going to combine your personalities. She thought it was a realignment of something, but he in his head is like, what she doesn't know is that
01:37:45
Speaker
I'm trying to remove her mutant power. But he doesn't. then like, because mutants are dangerous and they want to enslave humans. He doesn't say anything. I mean, he does say that. He does say some bigoted shit in his head.
01:37:59
Speaker
yeah He does not like mutants, it turns out. Yeah. But. Oh, no, you are right. You are absolutely right. He says, I wonder what the university would say if they knew the real purpose for using this equipment, or even Aurora for that matter. How would she respond if she knew I wasn't doing this for her just to help her sever the bonds to her brother Northstar? Oh, okay. So yeah, he is what he's trying to do is remove the connection the two of them have.
01:38:29
Speaker
He's trying to de-brother her. He's trying to to make them scientifically no longer family. It's it's um it's unclear, though, based like in that wording, if she knows he's unmutanting her or not. like It might be that she knows what's happening. She just thinks...
01:38:49
Speaker
It's because she doesn't want to be linked to Northstar anymore, where he is like, actually, I'm doing this because I don't want you to be a mutant, a filthy mutie anymore.
01:39:00
Speaker
Yes, exactly. What he's actually saying is I'm worried for her because anti-mutant pan hysteria is increasing and I don't want her to be caught up in it and like killed by sentinels or whatever. But he goes on to say, yeah. Also.
01:39:16
Speaker
Also, I agree with them. I agree with the sentinels. Yeah. ah ah i Anyway, his bigoted thoughts are interrupted when she appears in what looks like it might be a new costume.
01:39:29
Speaker
But it's again, because it's John Byrne. It's off panel and he's just like, yeah, we just see the elbow. And that's the end of the issue. All right. Fucked up, Walter. I was rooting for you. I always knew you were a piece of shit, Walter, from the very first time you appeared. All right. Let's close this out, Matt.
01:39:51
Speaker
Alpha Flight 18. How long will a man lie in the earth air he rot? They acknowledge the length of the title. yeah Oh, that makes better. Instead of doing something about it. Yeah. yeah God. All right. John Byrne, writer and pencils. Bob Wyachek inks. Andy Yankus colors. Rick Parker's back for the lettering. Denny O'Neill's the editor. and ah Just Shoddy, editor-in-chief. Release date, October 2nd, 1984. Cover date, January Whoa. pat is almost alive.
01:40:24
Speaker
<unk> a big year Why is it a big year? it's Because I'm almost alive. I'm still dead, but... I'll be dead for another year, but you will be alive and kicking before this year's up. I'm about to be resurrected into my first life.
01:40:43
Speaker
Heather Hudson looks over the guardian costume left in James's closet, reflecting on her memories of him in a noticeably happier place as Judd stops by with some McDonald's for lunch. eha Why didn't they go to Jojo's again?
01:40:57
Speaker
That's where they go in issue 13. They talk about the relaunch of Alpha Flight. First step is contacting the members. First up is North Star. And an incredibly handsome man, like a muscular man in a bathing suit answers.
01:41:16
Speaker
And it's like, yeah, with a French accent. And she's like, she's like, is North Star or is his Jean Paul there? And he's like, yep. And it cuts to Jean-Paul swimming.
01:41:27
Speaker
Do you, and there's a woman sunbathing also next to the pool. m Do you think they made John Byrne put that woman in there? Oh, interesting. Because it's like, okay, his boyfriend answers the phone and.
01:41:42
Speaker
it wouldn't be uncommon for a gay man to have his boyfriend as well as a lady friend who just hangs out in Sunday. It's a lot. Or like, yeah, or like that guy's sister or something. Yeah. I mean, like, I wonder if it's that.
01:41:58
Speaker
If it's just him sort of like imagining the gay lifestyle, or I wonder if he was like, and his boyfriend answers the phone and jump chubby was like, no, you can't have this in a comic book. You cannot have two shirtless men in a panel without a shirtless woman. Just to be like, oh, he has guests over. He has friends over. Yeah. That's not his boyfriend.
01:42:22
Speaker
Anyway, he lets her know Kirtley has no interest in rejoining due to his dispute with Aurora. Next up is Shaman, but when she calls the office of Dr. Two Young Men, she finds out he ran off with a young woman. we cut What?
Mystical Investigations and Family Dynamics
01:42:34
Speaker
We cut to Calgary, where that young woman, Elizabeth Two Young Men, her papa, Michael, investigate the skull that produced an apparition. Remember it?
01:42:45
Speaker
I do. For the second time, they mention that Calgary is generally known as a cow town.
01:42:53
Speaker
It's trying to shed its reputation. He just... he This is an educational book about Canada. is But one chapter is like, and these folks are all hillbillies. Yeah, are written by guy who kind of... You're just trying figure it out. Written by a guy who kind of hates Canada. But but like John Byrne...
01:43:12
Speaker
Everything he loves, he also kind of hates. That's true. Yeah, yeah. um Shaman expects the skull and suspects an evil force. He warns Elizabeth about the investigation, noting that her innate but untrained skill in mysticism appears to have triggered this force to appear.
01:43:31
Speaker
She's magic. She's got some magic. They return to his office to do some research. Do you know who Elizabeth to Youngman is? No. Okay. Okay. On a lonely estate inside a mansion, a cranky old man named Lucas Stang, amazing name.
01:43:47
Speaker
Great. It's a good one. Is arguing with his nurse, refusing to take his pills. He's 117 years old. He take his damn pills when he wants to. His great granddaughter, Emily, comes in to calm him down.
01:44:01
Speaker
Lucas pushed all his family away years ago, but despite his efforts, she reconnected with him and refuses to abandon him. He shows her some love and takes his pills, but continues to warn her against getting too close.
01:44:14
Speaker
She goes off to make him some eggs. ah ah This is right where it gets good. This is um this is Chekhov's scrambled eggs. She goes off to make him some eggs while she ponders his words. It's almost as if he's been so nasty to his family to protect them from something.
01:44:35
Speaker
All the while, her scrambled eggs continue to grow in size behind her. Yes. Fuck yes. Cut to Michael's two young men's office where he and his daughter get the news that Lucas Stang's great-granddaughter has been attacked by her scrambled eggs. Yes.
01:44:54
Speaker
Shaman has been expecting this, of course, as eggs symbolize both new life and life unfulfilled. okay sure. They'll investigate once and Elizabeth blackmails him into bringing her with him.
01:45:08
Speaker
ah Yeah, she threatens to expose his secret identity. what a dick she's such a dick that that's pretty bad like i don't i don't know what he did to her but like she's already no matter how bad a father of as he is she's like making it not just his problem but everybody's problem and like yeah she's just like taking it like she's like being a just like all right you're a kind of the bad guy now actually ah yeah you kicked a sick old lady out of his office And now you're
Romantic Conflicts and Humorous Moments
01:45:42
Speaker
blackmailing. Blackmailing a superhero with revealing his secret identity.
01:45:48
Speaker
ah Somewhere out in the wilderness, Douglas meets Snowbird. God. Awaiting her answer to his declaration of love. You gotta tell me.
01:45:58
Speaker
You gotta answer. You can't. I told you I loved you and then came out to meet you in the woods. You owe me an answer. You owe me. ah When she tells him no,
01:46:10
Speaker
He grabs her and kisses her against her will. ah Douglas, i was I was rooting for you up until this point. Why were you rooting? Because he brought her to the towel?
01:46:21
Speaker
Yeah, just because he seemed like a nice enough guy fell in love with the demigod, but he turned out to be a real Zach Braff. Yeah, that's, i mean, that's...
01:46:36
Speaker
All right. She staggers and reveals that her current form is a manifestation just like any of her animal forms. Holy shit. The conflict that her love creates for Douglas.
01:46:47
Speaker
hey The conflict that her love. She loves him too, folks. The conflict that her love for Douglas creates within her combined with his actions have made her too weak to maintain her human form.
01:46:59
Speaker
Oh, shit. So this is the immaturity thing again, dude. yeah she is She's never had a kiss before. So this man grabs her and kisses her and she's like, I'm in love with you.
01:47:13
Speaker
I think, again, I think that this tracks because she's like, or at first she's like, no, i don't have the means to love you, which is which makes sense. Yeah. You don't really understand what love is. That's not, it's not just because you are also half God, but because you haven't experienced the things that build that sense of love within you.
01:47:36
Speaker
yeah. And that's what she's trying to say is like, and he's like I have an affection for you that I'm not old enough to explore. I'm not actually mature enough to explore. And then yeah he dives in and kisses her. And he pepies right on top of her. Also, if I'm understanding this correctly, she's choosing to be a white woman.
01:48:06
Speaker
She can only look, she can only be white things. Right. She can be she can be anything she wants as long as it lives in Canada and she can make a white version of it.
01:48:21
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. So so i have i have these friends who um they're married and they started dating when they were like teenagers. And they just told me the story a couple weeks ago of their first kiss, which is she was watching something that was like scandalous about kissing and about why kissing feels good. Like the the the like how many nerve endings are in your lips and how it feels good. And she watches this documentary and that week,
01:48:52
Speaker
is the first time they make out. and Like, to me, that's what's happening here. Anne doesn't, she doesn't love Douglas.
01:49:05
Speaker
She just loves, she just likes kissing. She didn't realize she liked kissing, and then somebody kisses her, and she's like, ooh, this feels really good. i love you. oh interesting.
01:49:19
Speaker
take because she doesn't actually you say that she loves him until after he kisses her yes yeah yeah no i think i think it is she can't properly control the emotions but the way that a kid can't which is oh i kissed somebody i'm in love with them yeah yeah my friends they were in love they were in love they did get married they've been married for fucking like no 15 years i think and they've been together for like 30 it's like insane i Either way, we don't get the reveal here. We don't get to see what her without human form looks like.
01:49:54
Speaker
And we don't even get ah to see his reaction like we normally do. Yeah.
Magical Battles and Power Debates
01:49:59
Speaker
if We just cut back to some eggs. We cut back to Calvary where Michael and Elizabeth confront the scrambled egg monster. Yes. here He does. he He gets out of the way. he does a big, large, wordless, almost full page panel of shaman fighting scrambled eggs.
01:50:20
Speaker
ah Before them stands a towering pile of scrambled eggs with a gaping maw. Eggs are everywhere. Shaman hurls some magic right into its mouth. And in a colorful explosion of light, the eggs disappear.
01:50:33
Speaker
There's... i can't... I can't put this into words. He walks through a door.
01:50:44
Speaker
yeah The panel is filled with scrambled eggs. Yeah.
01:50:51
Speaker
They cut to to Emily and Elizabeth and scrambled eggs are just flying past their face. It's like snowflakes of scrambled eggs flying down. And then he shoots it. He blasts this pile of scrambled eggs. The whole thing explodes. The house explodes in a bunch of scrambled egg colored You know that smells fucking crazy, too.
01:51:15
Speaker
you it's gross and then and then yeah it's gone it's like it never happened i will say if everything truly went back to normal there should be two scrambled eggs there the eggs were an illusion the whole time even the original eggs even her original the eggs she took out of the fridge were not real That was too easy.
01:51:42
Speaker
Shaman notes, likely this was just a diversion from something bigger. They returned to Lucas only to find his room now exists in a formless white plane. oh good. Another reason for John Byrne not to draw something. With his demonic form sitting in an armchair. A hundred years ago, he explains, he was cursed by ancient evils who would use his loved ones to emerge into this plane of existence.
01:52:07
Speaker
the best explanation we get i think strang zaps shaman when he tries to stop him and then casts a spell on his great granddaughter possessing her with the spirit of ranak the great devourer oh emily zaps elizabeth with her new godly powers but to everyone's surprise elizabeth not only survives but eventually resists the betlast he seems to get stronger from them Yeah. um And zaps Emily with a magic blast of her own. As Shaman notes, she's controlling mystic energies without the years of training that he had, but just as effectively, she must be a mutant!
01:52:47
Speaker
Hell yeah. Okay. All right. So, number one, you still don't know who this person is, correct?
01:52:57
Speaker
It's his daughter. you don't You don't know what Marvel hero this is? No, not at all. Okay, cool, cool, cool. um But this bothers me so much.
01:53:10
Speaker
Mutant powers that are what you can do is absorb and redirect magic.
01:53:17
Speaker
Is that what the power, like she has to be hit with magic in order yeah to be able to. she can Oh, Zorb and redirect. It's this bothers me the same as when somebody is like your powers are. You can make an ax really strong.
01:53:32
Speaker
Like axe. Exactly. Like, what if you don't have an axe? You don't have powers? If you don't get exposed to magic, as most people ever don't, you don't have power? Like, it's it's just such a crazy... When somebody's powers are that situational...
01:53:50
Speaker
It always, it bugs me that clearly their powers would have to be, if I were in this universe, I'd be like, okay, your powers are something else. This is one of the manifestations of them. Clearly you can do something There's something that you can do that you can, if you want, focus into an axe and make that axe super strong. But you could also focus that into a penny or right or a or you know a grain of sand. if you want Like, if you wanted a bat, a baseball bat, if you wanted to. And this thing, like, she can absorb and redirect magic be like, well, you can...
01:54:29
Speaker
Whatever you do has an effect on magic, but you clearly do something other than that. Because your power can't be i absorb and redirect magic.
01:54:41
Speaker
It's, I mean, maybe, and maybe this happens down the road, but there's like some natural remnant of magic all around us, right? There's a thread that binds the the weave.
01:54:56
Speaker
Yeah, I guess in the Marvel Universe, magic is technically science, right? Because we know it exists. We see it. So it is a scientific force. So if you can absorb and redirect kinetic energy, that makes scientific sense.
01:55:11
Speaker
So absorbing and redirecting magic makes scientific sense. But it doesn't feel like it does, and it still bugs me. maybe you Maybe you would also work with like radioactivity or some other science that we're still still exploring.
01:55:27
Speaker
ah He recovers enough to throw some watch parts at Emily. Okay, to throw some watch parts at Emily. but He calls it some like baubles from his his bag, but it's funny. It does look in in in your original issue that you took a picture of and sent to me.
01:55:45
Speaker
Just to so I could see what you meant here. Of course. um Because we were just... We were vehemently arguing the definition of a bauble. It does look like gears and springs and screws. um In the cleaned up reprint, it is clear that it is a bunch of, like, gems.
01:56:09
Speaker
Oh. All right. Yeah, my... yeah I mean, you know that I... went out and bought the original copy so the inks have smeared a bit some of the lines aren't quite so clear i love this when this happens is like when we see these original prints and they are it's like printing techniques have given you a different experience than i've gotten yeah yeah i get to see the and original intent in these like reprinted i have the alpha flight um ah the alpha flight by john burn omnibus by the way um
01:56:42
Speaker
And my compulsion of collecting is going to make me buy that Alpha Flight by Bill Mantlo omnibus that's coming out. Oh, no. Anyway, so he recovers enough to throw some watch parts at Emily, and she's unpossessed.
01:56:54
Speaker
Thank God. Pretty well exploded, but everyone is fine, except the except the nurse. we yeah and We never see her again. ah Shaman explains to his daughter... That this is just
Anticipation for Team Reunions
01:57:07
Speaker
the beginning. And to get the bot to the bottom of all this evil, they must travel back in time 100 years!
01:57:15
Speaker
The end. The end. That's just how. They just fight a scrambled egg monster and then they gotta go back in time. Great. Great. Great. Every comic should be this. I, this, sincerely, i loved this issue.
01:57:30
Speaker
The scrambled egg monster is such a funny idea to in the middle of all this. You are dealing with eldritch magic and ancient gods. Yeah.
01:57:44
Speaker
And the representation that we're going to go with here is a giant pile of scrambled eggs. It is. I laughed out loud and I was hooting and hollering from my chair as I read these. Because in the past, we've gotten like what we got, tundra.
01:57:59
Speaker
And ah yes, we got like a big mound of earth. We got like these like manifestations of different forms of nature. Like it's it's been these big, really interesting creatures.
01:58:14
Speaker
And then just eggs. Scrambled eggs. Yes. It's so funny. And clearly it's meant to be funny, right? It's gotta be. There's notion in my head where John Byrne is like, and scrambled eggs are scary. But...
01:58:29
Speaker
just It works. It's you I laughed out loud about it and got very excited to to talk about it. And then the monster is creepy, right? Like the like. Yeah. Yeah.
01:58:42
Speaker
When it first appears and then when it possesses her, like it's scary. Like Yeah. it yeah Good issue. Good issue. Good issue. Well, Heather is wearing a shirt at the very beginning that says it's a black T-shirt and written in white lettering on it just says, where the heck is High River?
01:59:04
Speaker
This is so tell you funny. Yeah. He revealed finally in 2021. Oh, really? Because I was going to say this is a longstanding mystery.
01:59:15
Speaker
The internet does not know what this means. Yes. Okay. So i went to, what is it? It was, it's burn robotics.com. Oh, right. His website. And he's got a blog or he's got like a forum set up there where he occasionally answers questions from people that post their questions in there. And he said in 2021, Oh, yeah. I don't remember who, but I just saw somebody wearing that shirt and I i just stuck in my head. I wanted Heather to wear it.
01:59:46
Speaker
Fantastic. John Byrne. That is so fucking funny. Rando on the street wearing a homemade T-shirt. He was like. Mine's mine. That's so good.
01:59:58
Speaker
So.
02:00:01
Speaker
I'll tell you what I'm, what I really like about this issue. I think it'll lead into sort of our final thoughts here, but this happened in our first Alpha Flight episode. It happened in Alpha Flight episode two, and it's kind of happening here again where,
02:00:18
Speaker
they are preparing to reunite everyone. We have watched them go on these individualized arcs. They, they pair up in a lot of them. It's like a hard sci-fi or fantasy series where like you meet this core cast of characters and eventually they have reasons to split up. But every once in a while, they're going to group back together for some big event. yeah,
02:00:42
Speaker
Clearly, that's happening. The first few pages of this issue are Heather struggling to get the band back together. Right. So we're building up to that. We don't get to see it this episode, which is fine. We're going a little longer than usual without them reuniting. But that's clearly what this is building to. And this time, now that I know that that's what we should expect. It's so exciting to be like, yes, this is the moment that it's happening. it is a good, it is a really good way to run a team book, right? Again, Byrne has these really cool concepts.
02:01:19
Speaker
And this whole, re like his run is like this, are yeah, you're you're right. This leads to final thoughts because like John Byrne is a terrible writer, but there's something really cool about this run. It's,
02:01:32
Speaker
If you turn your brain off, it's fun. Like, if you turn your brain off and skim a lot of this narration, yeah can be, so which is probably what I did the first time I read it, which is why I loved it, and this time I'm not liking it as much.
02:01:46
Speaker
If you turn your brain off, if you skim, it's really great. it's It's breezy in this way that, like, again, if you don't read all of it, it it the the story, like you said earlier, the pacing, it moves. And It's probably because anytime he tries to tackle something a little, like, deep with more depth, he sucks at it.
02:02:10
Speaker
He just, yeah, he switches to a different storyline and instead. Yeah, he just, he can, and when you're reading him try to be deep, you're like, yeah, this is dumb. And you kind of move on. Yeah, yeah. So, like, so you're not, you don't get hung up on that stuff. Unlike X-Men, where you really have to think about shit, because Claremont is good at getting deep.
02:02:30
Speaker
Um... The art's fantastic. The visual storytelling is top, not like top, top tier. Yes. Like, imagine this on the shelf and Sienkiewicz's New Mutants on the shelf and you get both of them.
02:02:45
Speaker
God damn, dude. And even i know I've this is the third time, third or fourth time I've mentioned the fact that we get seven or eight panels of the same hospital scene just from different angles. Even that is part of that storytelling. Like like I like the reason we go panel to panel is so that you can naturally change the emotion on their face. And if you remove the dialogue there, you know, you still understand what they're talking about and where they're at in that conversation from panel to panel. apps Absolutely. um
02:03:20
Speaker
And i like all the characters. yeah Even the ones that I hate, like I hate, I like, even though we're supposed to kind of dislike North Star, I like him. Even though we're supposed to like Sasquatch, I hate him. um Yeah, and I love to hate him now. ah i Yeah, I love these characters.
02:03:40
Speaker
And a lot of these concepts are cool, including what you're talking about, this overall concept of i'll I'll focus on the individual characters in their own lives and then bring them together. Even Heather says at one point, I think during this issue, she's like, one of the first things we have to do is get a headquarters because we are scattered across the entire continent.
02:03:59
Speaker
um Yeah, yeah. And that is not good for a team. and And Puck says in his first adventure, he's like, ooh, I probably should have called Alpha Flight rather than just Marina.
02:04:11
Speaker
Yes. ah Yeah, you're in a team book. And if he had none of that would have happened. do You know what i mean? Like unless, of course, none of the members of Alpha Flight showed up because they were all like they did when Heather finally tried calling them. But he sucks at dialogue. He sucks at narration. He sucks at continuity. Characters' motivations change from issue to issue. Characters' beliefs and personalities change from issue to issue. So like the but there's so it's it's almost like we glean this thing about Puck. Puck rules.
02:04:44
Speaker
As long as you don't read all of his dialogue. ah Yeah, yeah. Yeah. you yeah If you are i forget. There's a name for it. But the the speed reading thing where you're able to just like...
02:04:57
Speaker
scan a paragraph, pick up the keywords and understand the idea of it, I think is the perfect way to consume this. Yeah, you're absolutely Don't read every word. Don't waste your time on every word.
02:05:10
Speaker
boy, Matt, we are...
02:05:23
Speaker
matt we are back another pats steals and deals can you believe it i explicitly can well believe it i i do i didn't even not ah for a little bit today we have one ad uh sort of a novelty holy shit company with a ah few different items here try not to try not to look ahead matt First item is a key chain. Okay.
02:05:54
Speaker
That's shaped like a switchblade, a tiny switchblade. And inside of it, scissors, tweezers, nail file. Oh, cool. Perfect for sewing, crafts, gifts, three great something. The text is a little hard to read on this one. Handy handy for cutting coupons, doing fingernails and tweezing eyebrows. Okay, so so you you whip this out.
02:06:16
Speaker
I got a switchblade. Mom, I got a switchblade in the mail. What? Just kidding. Just kidding. It's for clipping my little nails. It's a pair of scissors. Actually, it appears that these are three separate. You could get a scissors one, tweezers one, or a nail file one. All three for $5. You still can't bring it on an airplane.
02:06:37
Speaker
Up next, real switchblade ballpoint pen. Mom. Push button snap. I got it. So open and lock. What?
02:06:49
Speaker
Looks and works just like a real switchblade. But we're just kidding, mom. It's a fine point ballpoint pen. You you fucked your mom up, dude. She's $2.95. She looks like such a dumb idiot now because of this.
02:07:05
Speaker
Good work. $2.95 or three for $10. OK. Now, that make sense?
02:07:11
Speaker
now does that make sense
02:07:14
Speaker
$2.95 or $3 for only...
02:07:21
Speaker
Interesting. Up next, Switchblade Comb. Matt, this is a classic for $2.95 or again, $3 for $10. Those are actually intimidating. If you see somebody pop one of them out and ah comb their hair, you're going to run.
02:07:36
Speaker
yeah That's a cool dude. Yeah, you don't want to mess with him. Yeah, fucking not not today, buddy. Fool your friends, novel and useful push button comb blade springs open nine inches overall length.
02:07:50
Speaker
And then finally, what'd you order there, buddy? What'd you order from the mail? A knife. Nah, kidding. Just kidding. It's a comb. Just kidding, ma. You're always telling me clean my hair.
02:08:01
Speaker
And then the final item here, the knuckle buckle. Great gift. Huh? Oh, this is just ah brass knuckles. This is just a pair of brass knuckles.
02:08:15
Speaker
ah Punky, funky, functional. The most novel buckle ever made. Pow! Expertly cast hand metal. Brass plated. Fits all standard belts. Novelty purposes only. Not intended for other uses. What'd you get what' you get there, son?
02:08:31
Speaker
I got a brass knuckles. All right, you've gotten me so many other times. What is it? It's a belt buckle. Oh, you got me.
02:08:42
Speaker
But it's also just actually brass But it's a functional pair knuckles. can hit you with them. this This is fucking... these now these are illegal. These are the United States of America, I'm pretty sure. ah Wow.
02:09:00
Speaker
ah So $4.95 or two for $10 for the knuckle buckle. Wow. Incredibly dangerous.
02:09:10
Speaker
Christ. And again, $4.95 or two for $10. Anyway, Stone Sales Department Inc. P.O. Box 208 Chicago, Illinois 60635. Get your pair of brass knuckles. Head on down, guys. If you live in Chicago, go to that.
02:09:26
Speaker
but Oh, it's just a post-off at that. Go to that P.O. box and stand around. Wait for somebody to show them. They don't have a real knife. Hope hope they don't have it. Yeah, that's not a real knife, but those are real brass knuckles. He's got an eye out, stuff that you could buy out.
02:09:45
Speaker
If you had a time machine that you would like to try out. It can feel, feel.
02:09:56
Speaker
Oh, my goodness, Matt. Thank you so much for being here with me as we record our silly little podcast every week. And thank you, the person listening, for listening to us record the silly little podcast every week. I'm assuming you listen every week. And if you do, please, even if you don't, even if this is your second episode, if they want to thank us.
02:10:23
Speaker
Go out there and like things from us, subscribe or follow to us, comment, review, just is what you on top of everything or this even above that on your list of kind things you can do for us.
02:10:38
Speaker
Tell a friend. We're a stranger. We're both. That would be wildly, wildly helpful. That would be, that would be even more helpful than the other thing that you can do. If you really, really appreciate what this podcast offers you, which is join our Patreon. That's right. There is a, it's patreon.com slash mutant menace. There is a free tier where you can get our periodic reading lists. So you can keep up with the podcast and and read the comics ahead.
02:11:06
Speaker
um So, you know, if you if you want to If you want to read along with us. Or for any amount of money, a dollar upwards.
02:11:18
Speaker
Just some random shit. You'll get some outtakes. some It's a silly podcast we call Puffy Faffin with Matt and Pat. It's only like 10, 15 minutes and comes out kind of like you know once or twice a month.
02:11:30
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Bunch of bonus content from us. ah Early bonus episodes as well. Please check us out on Instagram at Mutant Menace Pod. You can find us on YouTube. We've been putting up little video clips recently. They're very cute. i Mutant Menace Pod at gmail.com. If you want to be featured on Pat's email corner.
02:11:51
Speaker
You know who I would like to thank? Who's that, Matt? I would like to thank Julia Selle for the voice of Trish Tilby and Krill Wilson for our amazing theme music.
02:12:03
Speaker
Yeah, 100%. And I guess that brings us to the end of the show, Matt. Is there anything else we should do? I think we should just tell. We always close. that If you're new to the show, we always close the show out the same exact way. We say the same thing at the end of every episode, just to kind of give you some famous sign off. um So, Pat, you want to give it to him?
02:12:21
Speaker
Yeah. As always, folks, it has been said that Lake Ontario, like the rest of the Great Lakes, might more properly be called an inland sea for only the fact that its waters are fresh, not salt, earn it the more diminutive title.
02:12:36
Speaker
And as we always say, would you tell the otter not to swim, the caribou not to run?