(quirky music)
- Hello and welcome to Back Issue Book Club.
A weekly examination
of the most memorable storylines in comics.
This is our first ever episode.
Thank you for being here to celebrate.
We're gonna do the biggest, best-selling comic ever.
I am Tristan Cooper from Dorkly
and my mutant power is leaving parties
without anybody noticing.
Andrew Bridgman from Dorkly,
what is your mutant power?
- My codename is Blood Murder - [Tristan] Okay.
- And my power is the ability to
silently poop in the bathroom when I hear
someone's come in. - [Tristan] Wow.
- So they don't know I'm pooping.
It's true.
- [Tristan] But they can probably see your feet?
Probably see your feet there.
- He said silently, not invisibly.
- Maybe I lift up my feet, I don't know.
- Okay, very creative.
Also with us today, Carolyn Page from Dorkly.
Could you tell us your mutant power?
- Yeah, my mutant power is sort of Hulk-ish.
So if I'm awoken from a slumber,
I am full of rage and I grow three sizes
and then I punch whoever has awoken me.
- [Tristan] The Incredible Woke.
- The Incredible Woke, exactly.
- A very deceptive name.
- Not what you think it means. - No, it's not goin'
where you think it's gonna go.
- As you might have guessed, we are talkin'
all about X-Men this week.
- [Carolyn] ♪ Na na na na na na na na ♪
(all singing X-Men theme song)
- Okay, whoa, you're gettin' too accurate.
The YouTube algorithm is gonna flag us.
- Oh. - Well, we can sing
that amount- - Okay, okay.
- And then we have to stop. - Just that amount.
X-Men number one by Chris Claremont and Jim Lee
is what we're talking about today.
And, oh boy, it is the biggest-selling comic book ever
and it is all about the return of Magneto,
Magneto is like kind of retired,
chilling out on an asteroid,
some new followers come to him,
convince him to just return to his old ways,
he starts wreaking havoc, the X-Men have a struggle,
and then they eventually win the day
because it's not called Magneto, the comic book,
it's called X-Men, the comic book.
- Wait, hold on, he's right, he's right.
- Checks out. - It checks out.
It checks out.
Carolyn, could you tell me a little bit
about the context that you came into the comic with?
Like how did you approach this,
what's your history with the characters,
with this era of comics?
- So, X-Men is kind of how I was introduced to comics first.
I got introduced like my senior year of high school
and then that was it, it was like full-on nerd train,
like, let's go, X-Men.
And I have a personal affinity for this
because Magneto is like super-hot to me?
- [Tristan] Sure. - He's like one of
the hottest characters in all of the multiverses.
- [Andrew] Only the Ian McKellen version, to me though.
- Okay, fair enough.
I mean, you definitely have a point.
So I love, I think Magneto's powers are super cool,
I just, I've always loved the X-Men,
it hits me right in like the Harry Potter sweet spot
of like, this is a school, this is such a contained world
and it's strictly defined but there's so much
variance within it that you can do.
And so I was really excited to read this
and what a wild ride.
- Wow. - What a wild ride.
- You get a lot of Magneto here.
- Yeah. - You get a lot of hot Magneto
- A lot of cut old man.
That's what I'm here for.
- Great, perfect.
Andrew, what about you?
Were you familiar with the X-Men cartoon,
which is like, almost like where this stemmed from?
- Yeah, I'd say a lot of my early development as a nerd
stems from that early, like, X-Men was huge
in the early 90s.
- [Tristan] It was, yeah.
- It's like really difficult to explain
because X-Men as of the last 10 years
hasn't been nearly as big,
but as a kid, there was the X-Men cartoons,
there were the trading cards that were so big,
and so I was very big fans of all those.
I wasn't super familiar with the comics.
I bought one comic because it had
like a holographic Gambit on it,
and I was like, that looks cool.
But it was like in the middle of a very big arc
and I had no idea what was going on as a child,
and was like, well, I don't know what this is,
but the cover's very cool.
- Right. This one is supposed to,
and I think it does an okay job
of reintroducing all of the characters to you.
I came from a very similar place in that
I was very familiar with the cartoon,
the arcade game, this version of the characters is,
when I think of Cyclops, I think about the visor
and then the hair flowing right over the visor.
- Yeah, not the 60s where he's all covered up.
- Yeah the bright blue and yellow, all of that stuff.
So this was a fascinating look into the past,
like, basically the origin point of where all
this stuff came from, because this kind of established
the X-Men for years and years until probably
like, Astonishing X-Men/the Bryan Singer movies.
- Yeah. - So, we should probably
just get right into it as far as the story goes.
Well, speaking of Magneto- - Was there a story?
- [Andrew] There was a story. - Was there a linear
throughline? - [Tristan] Well-
- Before we dive too deeply into it
I think adding some context to this,
this is the best-selling comic of all time.
- [Carolyn] That is- - By a wide margin, too.
- [Carolyn] astonishing to me.
- It's the Astonishing X-Men.
- [Carolyn] It is the Astonishing X-Men.
- [Tristan] This is the big boom right here.
- Yeah. - Right before this was
X-Force, which sold millions of copies,
millions and millions of copies.
- Yes, and like the Todd McFarlane Spiderman,
which sold, I don't know how many millions.
- And right after this was the death of Superman.
- Yeah. - Which was also millions,
not as much as X-Men, but still this was around the era
where they started putting out variant covers of everything,
it was super collectible, people were buying hundreds,
maybe thousands of copies of the same issue
just to think, "Ah, this is gonna
"put my kids through college, I'm gonna make bank"
and it did kind of lead to a bust.
- Oh, it led to a major bust.
And even this one specifically,
I think the official sales numbers
are like eight million copies sold,
but, there's a but there, those were sold to comic shops
in the direct market, and what those comic shops
actually sold to their consumers is
far less than eight million.
- [Tristan] I think it's like maybe half.
- Yeah, the estimates are like four million or so
and like a lot of comic shops were destroyed by this comic
because at this point, again, X-Force was huge,
Spiderman one was really big, and so Marvel was telling
these comic shops, you've gotta buy all of these.
We're gonna have five variant covers or four variant covers
and a gate-fold to combine them all,
so you gotta buy enough for all your consumers.
And they were like, "Alright, I guess
"we'll buy thousands of these,"
and then a lot of people are like,
"Well, I don't want the same comic five times."
- They released them week-by-week, too,
- [Andrew] Yeah. - Over a whole month.
- So, like the first one sold a ton,
and they said like by the fourth one
it was like no one was buying this anymore.
- So was it the best-selling from a consumer standpoint
or just from, like Marvel sold the most?
- [Andrew] I think so. - [Tristan] I think both.
- Oh, okay. - It is both, it's just like
the gap between what they sold the comic shops
versus what they sold to actual human beings
was really vast, and apparently like,
there's stories of comic shops
just burning these extra copies
or just throwing them away.
- That doesn't seem- - Nah, probably not safe.
There's probably a lot of toxic fumes goin' on.
- Yeah, yeah.
- So, I mean, there's so much going into this historically.
It's the foundation of what the X-Men look and act like
and how you think of them and had their media portrayals
right on the back of this issue here,
we've got the X-Men action figures.
- Yeah. - Sweet.
- And that's not even the right costume for Cyclops.
- Oh. - [Andrew] I had that Cyclops.
His eyes would light up and then
the battery would die after one day
and it just never lit up again.
- Oh yeah, he looks like, I don't know,
he looks like one of the Canadian-
- Yeah, he looks like he's from, gosh,
they all die all the time, that's the joke.
I can't believe I'm blanking.
- Who dies all the time?
- The Canadian X-Men.
- Puck is there. - Wolverine.
- Yeah, I'm thinking of Wolverine.
- He's Canadian.
- And I think the action figure thing makes a lot of sense
because that's what a lot of the characters
in the book look like.
- [Andrew] Yes.
- Like, these big action figures,
when we start the story, Magneto is chilling out
on Asteroid M. - [Andrew] Yep.
His space home. - His space home.
A lot of people thinkin' about like retiring to the country
or whatever, he retires to space.
- [Andrew] Yeah.
- [Tristan] And he's just sorta chillin' out there,
but he's also doing squats, I guess, all the time,
'cause he's completely jacked.
- Oh my God. - Super, super cut.
- Like, conservatively, 60 years old, maybe,
at this point, right?
- At least, 'cause he was a child during the Holocaust.
He's one of those ones where they are just stuck
in a place in time with him.
Like they can update Tony Stark so he's like,
instead of captured during Vietnam,
he was captured during the Gulf War.
- Same with the Punisher as well,
they can change the war that it takes place in,
but since Magneto is so tied to World War II, specifically-
- [Andrew] The Holocaust!
- He just gets older and older,
and he's keepin' it tight, to say the least.
- [Andrew] Oh my God, he's doin' great.
- Yeah, yeah.
Which, one of my first thoughts was
they mention that he's keeping that asteroid in orbit,
like, in not quite the orbit that it would be in
if it was just naturally orbiting,
and like, that's gotta be a lot of work.
So maybe that's like affecting his abs?
- Oh, that's really good for your core.
Asteroids in orbit is really good for your core.
- It's better than a Bowflex,
I would have to assume at this point.
- [Andrew] Yeah, you combine them with the right diet-
- [Carolyn] Bowflex, wow, takin' it back.
- [Tristan] I almost went with Shake Weight,
but I changed it.
So when we meet Magneto, he's just sort of chilling out
being very jacked and then he is approached by several
mutants that want to be his followers,
they're called the Acolytes,
and if you don't remember them, that's okay,
they don't show up very much in other comic books.
- You don't remember Delgado and Cortez?
- You know what, I don't.
- [Carolyn] Classic characters.
- I do not. - [Andrew] How could you
forget Delgado and Cortez?
And also there's another guy
named Delgado who's chasing them
who works for S.H.I.E.L.D.,
and they're not the same character.
And I got very confused.
- Yeah, I think I maybe lost the thread there as well.
- The characters in the story get confused.
- [Andrew] Yeah, they're like, wait,
is this the S.H.I.E.L.D. guy?
- The same guy?
Which I think makes sense, like,
Delgado is a very, very popular last name.
- [Tristan] Sure. - [Andrew] It's like Smith.
- Yeah, exactly.
- [Andrew] It goes Smith, Jones, Delgado.
- Yeah, yeah.
- And so while this is all happening, the X-Men go through,
a lot of the first issue is just like a danger room-ish
like, training montage, two teams pitted against each other,
it's like Wolverine and I think Psylocke
are on the blue team, right, and Cyclops?
- Okay, listen, I think I can name them from the leaders,
'cause it's Cyclops is leading, the blue team, I believe,
and Storm's leading the gold team?
Am I wrong? - [Tristan] Right.
That sounds right.
- I think I'm right on that.
And then-
- Well, that's important because the teams get
split up at one point and pit against each other
towards the end of the story,
not to jump ahead.
- Well, this is the beginning of that idea
of the two separate teams, I think.
- Yeah, well, this is like the second comic as well,
because at this point the Uncanny X-Men comic
is still going, it's still very popular,
but then it's just adjectiveless X-Men that we have,
number one, so-
- These are very canny X-Men.
They're not uncanny,
these are just the canny ones.
- The canny ones.
- The teams have sort of continued to this day.
There are very recent comics with X-Men blue and gold.
- [Andrew] I thought it was red now.
- There might have been a red as well.
- Yeah, because like Jean Grey is leading a team now.
- Right, which one, the young one?
- No, they said- - Or the old one?
- Oh my God, see, that's the other thing.
This comic really just throws you in there
and it's a decent introduction
but there is like just all of this history
you need to know. - [Tristan] Right.
- [Carolyn] Yeah. - To my knowledge,
the young X-Men have been sent back to their correct times,
and are no longer in present-day.
- Oh, okay.
So, the way that we are introduced to these X-Men
is through this like giant splash page
of some people in the danger room,
everyone is like striking a pose.
- Everyone looks super cool and hot.
- Let's talk about the poses,
because reading comics as a kid and a younger person,
I was like, it wasn't so much that like
I thought that there were like
body expectations to look that way,
it was just expectations to like pose that way.
- [Andrew] Yes. - I was like, I can't
get my feet to like point that much.
(laughter)
- Everyone has such pointy feet in the 90s.
- So pointy, like perfect line from your ankle to your toes,
like more than a ballerina would have.
- With just the thickest thighs imaginable.
- Huge thighs, which I'm all for the thick thigh, but-
- [Andrew] Yeah, sure.
- And like the hip-jutting and like how you twist,
someone's gotta be poppin' spleens.
Psylocke's gotta be poppin' spleens.
- [Andrew] Psylocke's body has got
a lot of issues, probably.
- It's the old, what they call like the Hawkeye
problem of like, that was the Hawkeye initiative, I think,
was to make, what if Hawkeye was in a position
that every woman in a comic book is supposed to be in?
- [Andrew] Oh, yeah, with his butt bein' exposed?
- And this happens in this comic as well.
- You never don't see Psylocke's butt.
- Yeah. - You have to see
like boobs and butt in the same shot,
so they're like twisting, cracking spleens,
like cracking spines to just get these angles.
And the men in the comic book in comparison
are allowed to like, sit?
They're like allowed to sit down,
they're allowed to have different poses.
- [Carolyn] That's a good point.
- Can be very thoughtful.
- There's no woman sitting.
They're either standing
or being violently thrown to the floor.
- There's like a tiny shot,
because this is something I looked for throughout the comic,
and there's a tiny shot of Jubilee with her feet up
but like you don't, on a table, I think.
- Which is funny that it's Jubilee
because she was like one of the least sexualized.
- Well, she was a child, so.
- Maybe that's why.
That's good.
- They were like, well, we can't,
she's the one we won't sexualize.
- You know, I could be wrong that maybe it wasn't
'cause it was such a small, tiny drawing,
and Jubilee is not really in this comic.
- [Andrew] No, I was about to say,
I don't really remember Jubilee in there.
- No, no.
- But she's always kind of around
when Gambit's around, right?
- [Tristan] Yeah, I would have to imagine that's the case.
- Yeah, every woman has an impossible body,
wears basically nothing,
most of them are wearing some kind of thong or g-string?
- This brings me to another point,
which is Jean Grey's outfit.
And this comes up for other characters too,
but like, I understand that she's wearing,
like she has her skin-tone colored pants on,
but are they like boots, or are they pants with boots?
- They're just really high boots?
- Or are they really high boots
with like a thong-onesie over them?
- That go all the way up to the butt?
- And like how does she pee,
and then I was like, maybe she can just
telekinetically make that not an issue for herself?
- Well, yeah, like in Harry Potter,
she can use her telepathic abilities
to eliminate her feces and urine.
- Eliminate waste, yeah.
- [Carolyn] Does that happen in Harry Potter?
- There was a thing recently- - [Andrew] Oh man,
you missed it.
They do that, apparently, I guess.
- Ew, okay.
- This is getting off-topic, but it is something
that I'm very interested in and it's somewhat relevant.
In Harry Potter-
- [Carolyn] Talkin' Scat with Tristan.
- Apparently before a few hundred years ago
before they adopted toilets,
everyone just sort of like shit their pants
and then like zapped it out of themselves.
- They like shit the floor, I think,
'cause they don't, do they have to do a cleaning spell
on their pants every time?
- [Tristan] Yeah. - Oh, god.
- This is kinda cool.
I'm into it.
- It's just one of those J.K. Rowling things
where she's like, you know,
actually Dumbledore joined ISIS later.
- She's like, j.k., Rowling.
(laughter)
- Yeah, that makes me, because you don't see
an X-Man going to the toilet.
- No, and Jean Grey's not the only one with this problem.
They would all, everyone except for Beast, I feel,
would have a very difficult time going to the bathroom.
- Yeah. - Like, Gambit's outfit,
I don't know where it starts,
where it ends, what he, to get his pants off,
he has like those metal shin guards or whatever,
he's got like three different
types of shirt on at all times.
- I will say, the only person who ever looks comfortable
in this comic is Magneto
when he's wearing his space pajamas.
- [Andrew] Oh my God.
- Those are incredible.
- Yeah, it's flowing.
- [Carolyn] Billowing.
- [Tristan] Billowing, yes, absolutely.
- [Carolyn] He looks like a ninja, like, angel, amalgam.
- And it's only for, like very quickly.
- [Both] Yeah.
- 'Cause he's in his full Magneto garb when
he takes in the followers to Asteroid M,
and then he's like, "welcome to my domain,
"I quickly changed into these space pajamas."
And then he puts back on his regular stuff
for just a little bit there.
So he's very into wardrobe changes, I've noticed.
- Yeah, the fashion throughout this whole arc
was pretty great.
- To eight-year-old me or whatever watching the cartoon,
I was like "Oh, this is all the coolest stuff possible.
"This is as cool as you can look."
- [Carolyn] Yeah. - [Tristan] Right.
- Yeah, the full-face turtleneck, right?
Gambit has-
- [Andrew] Gambit's outfit. (laughter)
- I think Cyclops has it, too,
but it like comes up, I just wanna know what that fabric is.
- [Andrew] It stops like here.
- It stops here-
- And then their hair just pops out.
- And then it comes like it's on their cheekbones.
- [Both] Yeah.
- But like how does that stay flat there?
- You get like the tape.
- Oh, yeah, yeah.
Like body tape?
- Body tape, yeah.
- It does seem like the costumes, the poses, the action
are placed with a higher priority
than the story in this comic because-
- [Andrew] Oh yeah. - [Carolyn] Or the characters.
- Or, yeah, the characters because Magneto is retired,
he's like, "No, I've put that past behind me."
Like, at this point in the comics, he's gone from being
an evil person to joining the X-Men for a little bit,
trying to be a good guy, and then he's just like,
immediately falls back into like an irredeemable villain.
- [Andrew] Well, he was being manipulated by Fabian Cortez.
- Ugh.
- [Andrew] That infamous villain we all know and love.
- [Carolyn] Classic.
- [Tristan] Classic Cortez.
- [Andrew] Classic Cortez! - [Carolyn] Damn you, Fabian!
(laughter)
- So- - Maybe we should explain,
he's retired, he's living in Amsterdam,
and then these new people come-
- [Tristan] The Acolytes. - and they're like, "Hey man,
"you need to protect yourself with nukes,"
and he's like, "That' probably a good idea,
"so I'm gonna go grab some nukes."
And the X-Men are like, "Don't grab those nukes,"
and, "We don't trust you with those nukes,"
and they fight, Magneto grabs,
Magneto blows up-
- Gets away with the nukes. - [Andrew] Well, he blows up
with the nukes. - Oh yeah, he does
in the stratosphere.
- [Andrew] Russia gets blown up with a nuke.
- [Tristan] Yeah, so does Rogue as well.
- Yeah, Rogue got hit by a nuke, and then she's fine.
- Well, everyone's fine in this comic until the very end.
- And then, even then, they're like, "We're still fine.
"Basically, none of this happened."
(laughter)
- The Acolytes, eh, maybe we won't see you for a while,
but Magneto, eh, he's fine.
- Yeah, but they blow up Russia with a nuke,
which becomes a mild plot-point for the rest of the book,
even though this is in the midst of the Cold War.
- [Tristan] No, no, no, this is after
the Berlin Wall falls, right?
- Is it?
- '92?
- Hmm, it seemed like there was some tension, still.
I dunno. I dunno history, Tristan, okay?
- There's some tension now, still.
- [Andrew] Is there? - Oh.
- [Andrew] I know, I know.
- I haven't looked at the news since-
- I get all of my news from Facebook memes, so-
- Okay, so a lot of minions.
- Unless a minion has told me-
- Is there another place to get news?
- Not that I'm aware of, no.
- That's where you get the real news.
- The real news.
Eagle.net told me that.
- So, throughout these stories,
we're getting a lot of our exoposition-
- [Carolyn] X-position?
- Oh boy.
Okay, let's just take a moment and appreciate that and then-
- That reminds me of one of my favorite moments
when they're talking about Genosha.
Genosha comes up in a little bit.
That's where Rogue lands, I guess?
- [Tristan] Right. - [Carolyn] Um-hum.
- She gets knocked to the coast of Africa from Russia?
- [Tristan] Sure. - Normal.
And they talk about a previous plotline
that happens in Genosha there,
"Ah yes, we have code named that the X-tinction Agenda."
Like they code-named it like a cool X-Men name.
- Wasn't it the-
- [Andrew] The actual, like, bureaucrats.
I thought it was funny.
- There's a lot of like, X-talk in there.
Isn't there like an X-gene?
- As often as they can slap X in front of everything,
which, Xavier, like, what an ego trip.
- [Andrew] No kidding.
- He's like, all of this is for me!
- That's true, "It's my X-Men."
- I can't walk but I have everything else!
- So if his parents named him like, Professor Jeff-
(laughter)
would they be like the J-Men?
- [Andrew] They'd change his last name?
- Wait, wait, wait, is his first name Professor,
and he's just not-
- [Tristan] It's Charles. - [Andrew] It's Charles.
- No, I know.
- But that'd be funny, yeah, because it's just,
"Oh, he's Professor."
- Yeah. - It'll save some time.
(laughter)
- Before I forget, I wanted to bring this up
about all of the characters and the characterization.
Because reading this, I realize that there's
only two personalities that anyone has in the comic,
except for Beast, which is kind of a combo.
So there's either, they're always serious
with very flowery language, or they're just sassy.
- [Andrew] Yeah- - Like, Gambit is sassy,
and then everyone else is flowery language.
But then Beast has flowery language,
but also sassy.
- That's true.
Well, with the sassy characters, they also,
well, they have accents.
That's how you know they're different.
- Right, and that's, and all of the characterization
is just filled in by like nationality.
- Yeah. - Right.
- You know? - He goes, "Moi subet,"
or whatever. - Yeah.
- Mon cheri.
- There's, yeah, and there's "Bub."
- [Andrew] "Bub."
- And there's also Banshee-
- [Andrew] There's Banshee, who speaks Scottish,
Moira McTaggert-
- Moira McTaggert is more serious, I think, at least.
- [Andrew] Oh, she's very serious, yeah.
- She is the, I have a theory and a question
to pose to the group.
Is Moira McTaggert actually the ultimate villain
in the X-Men universe?
Because what's the biggest problem they've ever had?
Like, Dark Phoenix, right? - Sure.
- When Dark Phoenix was possessed by Proteus.
Whose fault is that?
It's the mom's fault.
If there's one thing I've learned from therapy,
it's that it's your parents' fault.
So, it's definitely Moira's fault there.
- Okay. - This also seems like
a lot of it is her fault.
- This is jumping ahead a little bit.
Tristan, do you want to talk about
the reveal of the background of this whole thing?
Because it's very important and weird.
- [Carolyn] Well, at least it's weird.
- [Andrew] It's very weird.
- The reason that Magneto- - [Andrew] We have some
very good panels to show people.
- The reason that Magneto is angry at the X-Men
and Moira McTaggert in particular, is because,
at one point, in canon, Magneto was turned into a baby.
- Yeah.
He got the Babality.
- [Tristan] He got the Babality,
it took a while, they did not immediately turn him back,
and for a while, Moira McTaggert was experimenting on him
as we learn in this comic, she was experimenting on him
to see if, "Oh, does he have some sort of predilection
of becoming a villain, is there something I could do
to fix him and not-
- She's like a Nazi. - [Andrew] Yeah!
- She's like the worst person in the world.
- She's really bad, and like-
- [Carolyn] And she lies, too!
- Yeah. - [Carolyn] Baby jail.
- Well, that's the thing.
In this comic, they seem like,
"Oh, she was like raising him when he was a baby,"
back to normal health and experimented on him a little.
But if you go back to like the comics they're referencing,
he was kept in her secret mutant jail, as a baby,
just playing with a toy bear.
- [Tristan] Baby jail, yeah.
- But there was a baby jail.
He was in a cell, as a baby.
- [Carolyn] Terrible.
- And then he was like suddenly grown back-
- And it's comics, so yeah,
he was just turned back into a man.
- Yeah, sure, why not.
- An old man, they didn't even like,
they just turned him back to like, "you're 63."
- [Andrew] What do you mean make him old again?
Oh yeah, they could have turned-
- Not that 63 is old.
- [Andrew] him back into a 40-year-old or somethin'.
- Yeah.
- That could have been a way to like reset him.
- This is all a good point.
This all makes sense now.
(laughter)
It makes total, normal, logical sense.
- It is weird because this situation is treated
with such gravity, it's such a serious situation.
Like, Magneto is so pissed,
that he will kill millions of people or whatnot,
and then it's just like, but the story that it stems from
is very silly.
- [Andrew] It was a gag, basically.
- It was a gag, you see the Blob,
you see like other characters-
- They're all like crying babies, they have oversized
costumes left on them from when they were adults,
it's like a big gag.
(laughter)
- [Tristan] It's very silver-age.
And to bring that into the gritty, modern age,
and treat it with no irony, no self-awareness whatsoever-
- This is a serious thing that happened to me.
- Yeah, like real pathos.
- Yeah, well, you turn into a baby,
that's gonna leave a mark, you know?
- I mean, look, I think that would be like
a traumatic experience for anyone,
but that's the thing with comics with decades
of continuity in them, is that like everything happened
unless you do like a hard reboot of the universe,
everything happened and you can't ignore it,
but also maybe sometimes you should.
- Maybe sometimes you do, right?
- [Carolyn] Yeah.
- [Tristan] Maybe sometimes it's okay.
- And of all the messed up stuff that's happened
to all these characters, over and over again,
being turned into a baby seems like,
I guess being imprisoned would be bad
and like being turned into a baby is kind of like
being in a prison of your own mind.
- It's not really clear if his mind was left normal
or if he had the mind of a baby also.
That's a good question. - [Carolyn] Right.
And would he even remember when you were like a tiny baby?
- [Tristan] A lot of questions maybe we cannot answer.
- Maybe not.
- Let's get Chris Claremont on the line
and see if he can elucidate us.
- Well, this is his last run.
He famously did a lot of the most famous X-Men comics ever,
including Dark Phoenix, as you mentioned.
He was on there for years and years,
established and is responsible for,
probably the X-Men being popular to this day.
Because when Stan Lee
and I think it was Jack Kirby who both-
- They started X-Men, it was not popular.
- It was not popular and they both kind of ditched it
a lot sooner than a lot of their other comics.
And it wasn't until Claremont and a lot of it was-
- Whoever did, I don't think Claremont
started the big reboot, whatever,
like Giant-Size X-Men,
where they introduce like Nightcrawler
and Colossus, and all of those people,
but they took it over like immediately after.
And they're what made it popular.
- Right.
But I mean, he's been doing it for so long,
and then he comes out and he almost reinvents
a lot of what the X-Men is and then immediately leaves
after this arc, after the third issue, before this issue
came out, he was like, "I'm done," and then he's gone
from the comic for years and years.
- Yeah, something like maybe a decade or something?
- I think that's probably close to, yeah.
So, it's kind of wild for him to come in
and just sort of like set the stage
and then just kind of peace out.
- Well, I think at this point,
this was the era when, there were writers
who were really popular, but the artists were like huge.
Like, Jim Lee was massive.
He wasn't, he was probably at least close to on par
with Rob Liefeld-
- Yeah.
I think, yeah-
- [Andrew] In terms of popularity.
Not in terms of talent.
- Right, and there's Todd McFarlane as well.
- [Andrew] And Todd McFarlane, yeah, yeah.
- You know, everyone who moved on
to Image comics, basically.
- [Andrew] Yeah, totally.
- Which was like a year after this.
And you can see that kind of like Image comic-siness
in it because there's these huge splash pages
of really dramatic action.
There's one with like Magneto whose just kind of like
casting his arms everywhere and then everyone's
just kind of ready to go.
And then all around the page are like a very long-
- [Carolyn] Unintelligible.
- The layout of this comic is,
it's the most confusing comic I've ever read, really,
in terms of like where do my eyes go?
- It is a lot of maybe a result of
like the artist-first approach.
The action figures that they
wanna sell on the back of the comic,
the marketability- - Which, to be fair,
were very cool.
I gotta- - [Tristan] Well, it worked
on me. - I can't say this enough,
it was very, very cool.
- No, did I have a full-size X-Men t-shirt that
like covered toe-to-chin, I was all X-Men all the time.
(laughter)
And it worked but at the time,
like when you go back and read these comics,
the comics today are very different and they're
a little bit more cinematic.
Here, the way that the text kind of wraps around
the characters and they're all like,
comic book panels are freeze-frames, right?
Of a certain moment, in action.
- [Carolyn] A vignette, if you will.
- Yeah, a little vignette, a little diorama, almost,
of like a moment in time.
And then you go from panel to panel,
you fill in the gaps with your mind of the action
and you show, each panel should show
the most important split-second of a given moment.
But here, with these giant splash pages,
it's the entire conversation, and you're just
imagining Magneto going through an entire monologue
while his hands are like up in the air
just sort of like hanging there and then
everyone's going back and forth
and nobody's choosing to act, they're just waiting
for the conversation to be done
and then just kind of like holding still.
- [Andrew] Yeah, yeah.
- [Tristan] And you know, that's just kinda the way
comics were back then.
Like, today, Jim Lee, he's a super-talented artist.
He's grown, I think, a lot like even compared to a lot
of the Image comics artists, I think he's probably
just personally my favorite out of the Image boys.
- Oh yeah, he's incredibly talented.
There are plenty of criticisms about a lot of his art,
but I'd say he's kind of like Michael Bay-
- [Tristan] Wow, okay. - in that, listen,
okay, I got this figured out.
- I'm listening, I'm listening.
- [Carolyn] Okay, okay.
- It looks really cool.
Like, Transformers, Bad Boys 2, looks really cool.
It doesn't always make sense when you're trying to like,
"I don't know how these Transformers work,
"there's too many moving parts,
"the scenes are really garbled
"and kind of framed poorly sometimes,"
but everything looks badass all the time.
And it's cool.
- I loved how they, especially with Magneto,
like so many of the head-on, like, straight-on shots-
- Oh yeah, they're nice and symmetrical.
- They're like, "I'm serious."
Like, this is the real shit right here.
And he's just like staring you in those steely blue eyes.
- Come back, come back.
- Ah!
(laughter)
- Can we get that Magneto in his pajamas again?
- Yeah. - Do we have that?
- It's so good. - I think it might be up now.
Yeah, his art is great.
- We should all wear this outfit every day.
- [Andrew] Oh my God, let's wear it next time.
- [Carolyn] Okay.
Uniform for the show. - [Tristan] We should
coordinate. - [Andrew] We should,
oh my God, it would be so comfortable.
- I was gonna wear it, but I was afraid
that everyone else would wear it,
so I didn't wanna be, but.
- [Andrew] My body's a little better than Magneto's
so I didn't wanna like- - Wow.
- [Andrew] Embarrass people because my body is so good.
- You've been holding two asteroids in orbit.
(laughter)
- It's even better for you.
Three is too much, though, don't do three.
- You'll hurt your back.
- Yeah, you'll strain yourself.
- So, at this point, in the story,
I know, well, Magneto basically fights the blue team,
I believe it is, of the X-Men. - Yeah, the one
led by Cyclops.
- They are defeated and he's kind of brainwashed by Moira.
- Well, like, they changed their DNA somehow.
- Well, first he like captures Moira.
He encapsulates her in like- - [Tristan] Chrome.
- Silver Surfer blood or whatever,
and the one panel where he's just like,
"Shutup, woman," basically.
He was like, "I don't have to explain, that's your job."
I was just like, "Cool, I see you, early 90s."
- It's not just the way that women are drawn in this comic,
it's also the way that they're treated.
It's something we both talked about before the show,
was that, in each issue of these three issues
that we are covering, a woman is subject
to a non-consensual kiss.
- [Carolyn] Forcibly grabbed and kissed.
And then in one of them, afterwards she's like,
"I liked it."
(laughter)
But it's like, it's still,
this is your, I get that you're like a superhero
and it's kind of a different job than most people have,
but like, you're still at the workplace,
like, that's harassment.
(laughter)
And just like, forcibly kissed, I don't know.
And the fact that it happened in every single issue,
it was like, what are you even trying to say?
- In two of them it's also, the women are
immediately attacked by the person forcibly kissing them
immediately after the forcible kiss.
- [Carolyn] Right! - So it's like even worse.
- What is the X-Men's like HR situation?
- I think it's just Forge, like-
- He's got a lot on his plate already.
- Yeah, Forge doesn't do- - He doesn't do his real,
well, he makes the invisible jet, glider thing.
- Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- That's the one thing he does.
But here's the thing- - He gives them
Wonder Woman's car.
- One of the reasons Chris Claremont didn't want to continue
with X-Men after this is because they forced him
to include Professor X as a character again,
who had been kind of written out of the series.
- [Tristan] Right, right.
- And they said, "No, Professor X has to come back."
and he's like, "well, alright, fine, but I quit after this."
And that goes back to the HR situation.
Their boss is a guy who can read
everyone's minds all the time.
So he should constantly know if there are problems,
and constantly be able to deal with that instantly.
But he doesn't, because Professor X
is like, a really problematic character
to have from a narrative standpoint.
And that's why in every single movie with him,
they have to like nerf his power instantly
because, otherwise, they're just like,
"Oh, well, just use your brain to fix this,
"because you can control everyone with your brain."
- I think Professor X is so tragic
because the amount of times that he's been able to walk
and then lost that ability, you're just like,
you have to feel for the guy.
That's hard.
- But also, like in the first few issues,
he was kind of in love with Jean Grey.
- He was explicitly in love with Jean Grey,
his child-like student.
- Not good, not good.
- He's done some pretty rotten things with those powers,
and not that I think that he doesn't deserve to walk, but-
(laughter)
- It's not for you to say, you're not God, Tristan.
- But I do have mixed feelings about him as a character,
but, like, I almost have to side with Marvel on this because
it does form, it is such a huge reboot,
if you want to see the X-Men, like,
"Here they are again, here are all the
"familiar faces and figures that you see,
"that are fighting the same battles"
but it's for a new generation.
And I kind of see why Marvel would wanna
bring the mastermind into this.
- Sure, it's just that, like, you know,
every movie has to be like, "Oh we gotta take out this guy,
"we have to remove him from the equation,"
every single time,
otherwise the question's always going to be,
why didn't he do something?
(laughter)
So, they have to get like blue goo in his brain,
or he gets brainwashed by Styker's son,
or he gets murdered by the Phoenix.
- Right, in this case he's- - Special pills that
make him walk but hurt his brain.
- Yeah, in this comic, he's like
knocked out of commission, too.
- [Carolyn] Makes him so grumpy.
- [Andrew] He's so sad.
- Yeah, he just gets knocked out.
- Yeah, they're just like, "Oh, well now he can't
"use his powers 'cause Magneto gave him gas" or something.
- So, the amount of times,
and this is just a classic, like, through all superheroes,
the amount of times that they have the chance
to like kill the other one, but don't
because they're like merciful or some thin reason,
but then like, thousands of people end up dying instead?
- Probably millions.
- [Carolyn] Millions of people!
- The nuke went off!
- [Carolyn] You gotta wonder.
- Well, at this point, so, in the story, to move ahead,
part of the group is brainwashed on Asteroid M,
X-Men gold tries to save them-
- They sneak on board into space.
- And you get what you want, which is the X-Men
are fighting the X-Men, but this time it's for real.
- Yup. - Yeah.
(laughter)
- And then the brainwashing just like, "Oh, nevermind.
"We're not brainwashed anymore."
- Oh, we got time here, we've gotta wrap up
this story thread here real quick, so.
- Yeah like, "Oh, we're not brainwashed anymore,"
and then it's all, "Oh yeah, when you use your powers,
"then you're not brainwashed anymore."
So Magneto wasn't actually brainwashed.
- Right! Which Moira could have
explained from the beginning-
- [Andrew] Yes!
- When Magneto was like, "This is your fault."
What's his accent like?
He's like Austrian, right?
- Well, yeah, that's the thing,
I can only think of him as British now
and same with Professor X, even though he's not British,
he grew up in Westchester.
So- - Well, that's close enough.
- [Tristan] Well, that's like American British.
- Yeah.
At the beginning they kept being like, Lord Magneto,
Lord Magneto, and I started hearing it in my head
as like a cowboy voice, like,
(with Southern accent) "Lawd Magneto, you are sure?
"So if you can read this comic with a cowboy voice
"the whole way through, it's a lot better."
- Wow, I wish you would have told me that
before I read the comic. - [Andrew] That would have
been nice, yeah. - It's fine,
maybe we'll do a read-along.
- Oh, when the MCU gets X-Men back,
they should make them all cowboys.
- Awesome.
- That would make it different.
- Yeah, I'm sure that's, I'm sure they've done that.
- That's probably what's gonna happen.
- We haven't even touched on Nick Fury,
who is in this comic-
- [Andrew] Oh, Nick Fury, yes.
- in and out, and when we first see him,
he's wearing a full three-piece suit,
but his abs are just rippling right through them.
- Oh yeah, he's poppin' buttons.
- Yeah, he's lookin' good.
He's lookin' real David Hasselhoff, early 90s.
- But then the only other thing that he really does
in the comic is say, "Hey, by the way, X-Men,
"the Russians are going to blow up Asteroid M
"with a plasma cannon."
But he like puts on a bunch of guns and pouches to do so,
and then just kind of like jumps out.
- Can we go back to that?
Russia has a laser weapon that's the Death Star.
It is explicitly made to blow up planets.
- [Carolyn] Yeah. - What were they
gonna use that for?
- [Carolyn] They knew.
- I guess just Asteroid M?
Is that part of the Magneto protocols?
Did I miss that?
They just had a cannon that blows up planets.
- This is, you know, right after the Cold War.
- [Andrew] What were they gonna aim that at?
- You know, it's the whole Star Wars situation.
- They weren't gonna aim it at Earth.
- Their enemies, there's extra-terrestrial threats
at this point.
- That's true, they have come up against the Shi'ar Empire
like nine times already.
- [Carolyn] Yeah. - Nevermind, this is,
this makes sense. - With the Shi'ar, like,
X-Men, and it's not in the movies really, but,
they were always tied up in space like way more.
Because probably when it started
like in the 60s, astronauts were so cool.
Astronauts are still very cool, but they've always been-
- I'm gonna take a hard anti-astronaut stance.
- Okay, okay.
Hot take, hot take.
But they've always been so mixed up
with space and the Shi-ar, and like, why?
I don't know.
- I think that was a lot of like Claremont's doing.
Like, he thought space was cool,
and they're like, "Well, we own aliens."
- That's fair, that's fair.
So, after the scuffle, basically Moira reveals that,
"Hey Magneto, you were bad all along
and I couldn't change you, everything was your doing,"
he's like, "No, no."
- [Andrew] Ah!
- And essentially, what ends up happening
is that the asteroid is destroyed,
almost all the acolytes die except for,
Magneto is presumed dead, obviously not dead.
- [Andrew] Cortez escapes.
- Cortez escapes, because this was his plan all along
because he wanted to martyr Magneto and say,
"Oh yeah, I was trying to help him,
"now you should all follow me instead,"
because he wants to be the new Magneto.
- Yep. - That did not happen
for various reasons. - I don't know why.
(laughter)
- And all the X-Men are saved.
- Yeah. - They sure are.
And they go back and go get into the danger room.
- It's off to new adventures without Chris Claremont.
- Yeah, and that was the best-selling comic ever.
- Well, the first issue, yeah.
- Although, I don't know what the sales,
I tried to look up the sales for issues two and three,
just to see like what the drop-off was,
and I couldn't find them anywhere.
So I gotta imagine probably not that big?
- I would imagine it's still in the hundreds of thousands.
- Oh and like if everything, like the average
back in the early 90s for comics,
what was like 500,000 for a lot of big titles.
- And today, that's like the biggest-selling comic in years,
was that, I don't know if you remember that Barack Obama
Spiderman comic; that was big for a while,
they put out a bunch of versions, that was like
half a million.
And they got close to one million with
the Marvel Star Wars comic that launched recently,
but that had, and this might have been a typo,
but that had allegedly 74 variant covers.
- [Carolyn] What? - [Andrew] What?
- That was what I read, I was like,
"Okay, I want to look up the facts and figures
"on this X-Men comic,"
and then like right along there was almost a million
with that Star Wars comic and like that seems-
- I wanna get the gate-fold that has all 74 covers in one.
- [Carolyn] We'll stretch it out.
- Yeah, you stretch it all the way out,
it goes around the room, pretty cool.
- So, now that we're kind of wrapping up,
would you recommend this comic to an X-Men fan,
someone who wants to look up the past,
would you say to someone, you should read this comic
or would you recommend them read something else?
- Like, it's not good, okay?
(laughter)
But I think if you're eight years old,
it looks very cool.
So if you're eight years old, check it out,
it's really good.
All the eight year olds watching the show, it's good.
To everyone else, it's, again,
it's like this is like a Michael Bay movie.
It's very problematic, it doesn't make a lot of sense,
there's some cool imagery,
and then Rob Liefeld is like Paul W.S. Anderson,
where it's like a lot of his stuff is kind of cool
but obviously a step down from Michael Bay
and worse in pretty much every way.
- [Tristan] Okay.
- That's the metaphor I'm goin' with.
- Wow, really solid, really solid.
- It makes sense.
The viewers will get it, they're smart.
- I think it's like Michael Bay mixed with Inception,
like the way that the dialogue is laid out,
and even the panel flow, like, where your eyes go,
you're just like, one, am I dreaming or hallucinating?
Two, who's talking when, are these layers, what's happening?
- Yeah, it's a really bad introduction comic.
- So, yes to the recommendation is what I'm hearing?
- I would say you could,
if you've read all the other comics.
(laughter)
- Sure, sure.
- Historically, it's relevant.
- Or if you wanna like find some ways to pop your spleen.
- [Tristan] Yeah, yeah. - [Andrew] You gotta find
the perfect body type, or someone with no organs.
- I think if you just wanna read a cool X-Men story,
I think there are others out there
that read a little easier,
modern comics have just evolved in a lot of ways.
But if you are a big fan of the cartoon and are
kind of interested maybe in a historical
or contextual angle, I guess, I think that would be
kind of fun just to see what comics were like
and where these characters came from,
that would be interesting but, like, it's hard.
There's a reason that this story is not one of the
ones you call back to when it's like, the greatest
X-Men stories ever told, it's you know, Dark Phoenix
is there, but like, this storyline, which has
a few different names in each issue,
is not one that people call back to.
I think that's for a reason.
It was largely setting a lot of ground work
and it was also, as we mentioned, very art-first
as opposed to story first.
- Yeah, I mean, the art is beautiful, a lot of it.
It's super cool.
And the fashion, is like, pretty awesome, some of it.
- A lot of the costumes, kind of ridiculous or not,
they have kind of like stood the test of time
in a lot of ways that we still see variants
of these costumes to this day.
- Yeah, or if you wanna piss off
your Women's Studies professor,
you can show them this comic.
- Any page from this, basically.
- [Tristan] That also.
- [Carolyn] Or see Psylocke's ass, I dunno.
- Well, thank you so much everyone for joining us
on this episode of Back Issue Book Club.
Next week, we are going to cover Superman Red Sun
from DC Comics, you can find that, support your local
comic book store if you wanna read along.
You can pick up a trade paperback,
probably available anywhere,
or you can also pick one up on ComiXology.
Andrew and Carolyn, thank you so much for being here.
- Yeah. - Carolyn, do you wanna
sing the end of the X-Men song?
It goes, (singing)
(both) ♪ da na na da na na na na na na na na na na na ♪
- Alright, and that's a wrap for us.
We will see you in the funny papers.
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