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Bonus Patreon Release: Abraham Cornelius! With Escape the Mojoverse! · Graymalkin Lane the podcast

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: Hey everybody, welcome back to the Grimoque and Lane Patreon channel where I get to hang out with some friends and talk about characters who don't get a lot of focus normally.
• 0:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: Today we are here to talk about a character you hate everyone hates this guy.
• 0:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: If you like this guy, there's something wrong with you.
• 0:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's not about Dr. Abraham Cornelius.
• 0:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I have thrilled to be joined by the costs of the incredibly lovely podcast escape of the Bojovers.
• 0:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: Let me have you both introduce yourselves a little bit.
• 0:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: Often, I let my guests choose their character.
• 0:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: You guys were gracious enough to just agree to do this guy with me.
• 0:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I know this probably wasn't your top choice, but I'd love to hear your early thoughts on Dr. Abraham Cornelius and or the Weapon X project.
• 0:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: Let's begin with Allison Parrott.
• 0:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: Allison, welcome to Graham Vulkan Lane.
• 0:44
  [SPEAKER_05]: Hi, thank you so much for having us.
• 0:46
  [SPEAKER_05]: I'm Allison, and I really have not read any of weapon acts before, so this was kind of my introduction to it.
• 0:53
  [SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, this guy sucks.
• 0:55
  [SPEAKER_05]: This guy really said, what if I came with a shirt that was like Abraham Cornelius's number one fan, and I just like fought for him the whole time?
• 1:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: Number one and only fan.
• 1:05
  [SPEAKER_05]: Number one and only fan.
• 1:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: The best part of this guy is his name.
• 1:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: Abraham Cornelius is an amazing name.
• 1:11
  [SPEAKER_05]: He has a name and he has a mustache and that's all he's got.
• 1:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: And let me also look at Matt Paret to the show.
• 1:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Hi, Matt.
• 1:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: Hi.
• 1:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm Matt, parent.
• 1:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: I used they've been pronouns and Abraham Cornelius is the only character that makes Saber tooth a protagonist character ever.
• 1:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's the only one that like you can on some, he does horrible horrible things.
• 1:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: You don't defend Saber tooth.
• 1:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: But like in escaping from this person and in dealing with this person, yeah, yeah, mess them up always.
• 1:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, but Sabertooth's cool.
• 1:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: This guy's not.
• 1:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's exactly right.
• 1:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: Style matters a lot in comics.
• 1:44
  [SPEAKER_05]: That's exactly what Abraham Cornelius's problem is is that there's villains and X-Men.
• 1:50
  [SPEAKER_05]: There's villains that are super cool that eventually just become protagonist because they're so cool.
• 1:55
  [SPEAKER_05]: This is the least cool guy I've ever read in a comic book.
• 1:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, just a truly reprehensible person.
• 2:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: Kind of just want to call him like Cornel.
• 2:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: Would you guys just share with our listeners a little bit about yourselves?
• 2:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: Share a little of your origin story as comic fans and tell everybody a little about your show.
• 2:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's fun to have some new lovely voices on the podcast to sex scene in the like little X-Men quarter of the world that we up you fire.
• 2:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've been a big fan of the X-Men for a really long time.
• 2:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: My dad had this huge collection that he
• 2:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: So to mommy that's in my house right now to you bins that I've slowly just put back like put together of like comic the Xman run from ninety four I don't have giant size like ninety four and ninety five all the way to three eighty seven the Xman are really like important to me in like the way that I learned how to read and like the way that I like got into anisey and science fiction and like
• 2:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was also, you know, really good for me is like a queer person who like see these different odd weirdos that everybody was sort of against, but they were sort of like this struggling family of people who doesn't love a hot weirdo and they're all hot that that's that's definitely the big one.
• 3:02
  [SPEAKER_05]: I do like that the X-Men fuck.
• 3:04
  [SPEAKER_05]: This gives the modivers is Matt got into the X-Men again.
• 3:08
  [SPEAKER_05]: They got really into X-Men and then they have wanting to tell me about it.
• 3:12
  [SPEAKER_05]: They have wanting to explain all of these stories that I was like, I'm not an auditory person.
• 3:16
  [SPEAKER_05]: I'm very much a visual person.
• 3:18
  [SPEAKER_05]: I got to see it.
• 3:19
  [SPEAKER_05]: And so I was like, I don't know what's going on.
• 3:21
  [SPEAKER_05]: And then finally, they were like, what if we did a podcast because I'm going to tell you all this stuff anyway?
• 3:26
  [SPEAKER_05]: And I was like, you know what?
• 3:27
  [SPEAKER_05]: Perfect.
• 3:28
  [SPEAKER_05]: I did not really read comics as a child.
• 3:31
  [SPEAKER_05]: I was much more of a library kid.
• 3:33
  [SPEAKER_05]: I liked books.
• 3:34
  [SPEAKER_05]: But I'm also really, I feel like fan fiction.
• 3:37
  [SPEAKER_05]: And I think there's something very similar about comic books and fan fiction.
• 3:40
  [SPEAKER_05]: And that it's the story that's being passed from hand to hand.
• 3:43
  [SPEAKER_05]: And there's different iterations of people.
• 3:45
  [SPEAKER_05]: And like, oh, this is their take on this character.
• 3:47
  [SPEAKER_05]: This is their take on this setting.
• 3:49
  [SPEAKER_05]: And that's what I really find appealing and how sometimes you find a comic that just really resonates with you and like really explores this corner of the human psyche.
• 3:58
  [SPEAKER_05]: I really enjoy that.
• 3:59
  [SPEAKER_05]: Now, I have barely skin the surface of comics, but I'm very excited to kind of delve in and escape the mode of versus kind of me being dragged through comic books, but in a good way, in a good way.
• 4:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: When I started my show, there was just this landscape of X-Men podcast out there.
• 4:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: And so, you know, where is my voice?
• 4:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: Where's my unique take?
• 4:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: Where do I fit into this?
• 4:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then suddenly you realize there's this whole kind of subculture.
• 4:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: And you start making friends.
• 4:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then you hang out on real life.
• 4:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: And like the friendships are super real.
• 4:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it's really lovely.
• 4:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: I hope to see you guys at some of the concerts this year.
• 4:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's some really fun groups and gatherings out there.
• 4:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: Your story is a little akin to my dear friend's Justin and Alicia Wilder from over on the X-Wife podcast, right?
• 4:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: Where they say,
• 4:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: Exhaust in X-Men not as in former wife, you know, all of their connections.
• 4:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: You guys should definitely hang out with them too.
• 4:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: They're really lovely.
• 4:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: Wolverine, we've been covering on my show in just a little bit of detail as we go, because we've been doing some of the early stuff, right?
• 4:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: We saw him in first X-Men, and we did origins with Paul Jenkins, but now he's officially debuted in, when in the incredible Hulk stuff that we covered at the end of the twenty twenty four on my show.
• 5:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: He then joins the team in twenty twenty five.
• 5:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: In his first appearance, he is called weapon X. He is taken by Canada and like dropped into fight the Hulk.
• 5:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then in giant size X number one, Professor X comes to liberate Logan from the Canadian government.
• 5:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: That story gets expanded on where when Xavier goes up to Canada to recruit Wolverine, the scene that's added there as a redcon is that Wolverine has to kill like a bunch of soldiers on the way out because they put a collar on Professor X and try to capture him.
• 5:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: And so there's a scene of Wolverine sitting on top of a pile of corpses and Xavier's like, yeah, buddy, come with me.
• 5:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: Later, we go into a few years.
• 5:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: Claremont sends Alpha Flight after Wolverine in the X-Men comic to try to get him back.
• 5:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it's the big trope for a long time that Wolverine's the guy that has no memory.
• 5:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: right he doesn't remember his real name only that he's Logan which when we're analyzing that early seventies comics it's interesting because we're looking at the trope of like Vietnam and like the soldier coming home with PTSD not having access to their memories it's very rainbow it's very I'm the rough tough guy who came home for more and don't mess with me I just want to strap a baby to my back and live a peaceful life
• 6:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: We play this up with old man Logan and so many different ways with this character over the years, but he was always that lonely soldier.
• 6:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: It wasn't until the late eighties when they really started flushing out what weapon X is.
• 6:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: Now, Claremont played up on this a little bit in his book, and then Larry Hammut.
• 6:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: took over the Wolverine main title where he added a lot of context and it became a thing for a really long time to kind of weave characters in and out of the weapon X narrative.
• 6:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's the stories where we go back and like Wolverine was a ninja in Japan in the fourteen hundredths but also he was a soldier.
• 6:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm not I'm making up the years here.
• 6:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: but also he was stronger in World War I, but also he this.
• 6:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: And we like we would add these things and it became the job of the fan for a long time to really delve in and try to keep track of everything.
• 6:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: Until the early two thousands where he gets all his memories back after House of M. And we've been a lot of continuity together here very quickly.
• 6:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: But the trope of Wolverine as the soldier also falls into another style of kind of soldier mentality or or genre of fiction I suppose if you guys have ever seen like the mentoring and candidate it's the idea of the sleeper agent we put the code in your brain and when I say ruffle still skin you go crazy and murder everybody in front of you and then when I snap my fingers you don't remember ever having done it
• 7:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: And that's another huge thing with soldiers and people with PTSD because they don't remember what they did.
• 7:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's like a trauma episode almost to look back.
• 7:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: So Wolverine's relationship with the Weapon X project was that.
• 7:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: It was the big giant mystery for so long until they finally played out what happened to him in the Weapon X project, which is where Dr. Fucking Abraham Cordelia's comes in.
• 7:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: all of the weapon X characters.
• 7:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think the messier that that gets the better it is for me near the end of this this episode.
• 7:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: I will probably have to admit something that I'd probably better.
• 7:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: I just get ahead of now that I kind of like, Romulus and I only realized that going through the notes that when I saw that moment, I was like, that's kind of, I kind of like this.
• 8:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's gone so it's weird.
• 8:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's very like brutal.
• 8:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, it was for sure we'll get one of these character episodes.
• 8:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: It was good.
• 8:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think sometimes comics and the X-Men says they're so big struggle to have like themes that can like tie to a specific character, right?
• 8:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: Scott Summers has gone through so many different eras and his story has like narrative beats that that crack all the way from the sixties to now.
• 8:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: But like it, you know, his his journey is a different thing.
• 8:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Logan's story is always about the wilderness and society being from the wild and at wanting to be part of the real like our world and the oppression of society.
• 8:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: Logan is very much about the man of two worlds, right?
• 8:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's the wild versus civilization, but it's also the good versus evil, the man versus beast, the civilized man versus the soldier, right?
• 8:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: The family man versus the man of violence.
• 8:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think there's always that juxtaposition that we're exploring with his two sides.
• 8:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: They were two because what it looks like when it goes wrong, right?
• 8:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.
• 9:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: But they conflate those two things too, where it's like society and wilderness equals evil and good.
• 9:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the best stories, I think, from about Wolverine, go into how that's not necessarily true.
• 9:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like how his wild side is not necessarily the evil side of Wolverine and how the civilized side that they like the oppressed civilized Wolverine is not necessarily the best version of him.
• 9:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: He is obviously, he didn't want to be a killer.
• 9:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: He says as much constantly.
• 9:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: But the ways that they've gone to like change him are, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a laboratory.
• 9:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's, it's the government.
• 9:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's these things that are big organizational like you will be part of the world, which we see played up with like Laura Kenny and even more tragic way because Laura starts out as a little kid in all of this, right?
• 9:45
  [SPEAKER_05]: Way more that there's like two halves five each other that different lives you have to live just like Hannah Montana.
• 9:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think there's some very basic things that make Wolverine awesome.
• 9:57
  [SPEAKER_05]: I like that he's short.
• 9:58
  [SPEAKER_05]: I like that he's hairy and I like that he fucks
• 10:10
  [SPEAKER_05]: There's just like, the MCU is just so sanitized a lot of things that whenever I read X-Men, I'm like, hell yeah, they're fucking, it's great.
• 10:17
  [SPEAKER_05]: And I really liked about this is that even of the parts that I read for this specifically, talking about Abraham Cornelius, is that he does have a moral code even when he is like a pure animal, like he doesn't, like, there's a point where like, Heinz is like, oh, just kill me fast and he chooses not to.
• 10:33
  [SPEAKER_05]: And I like the whole like beast versus man aspect of him.
• 10:36
  [SPEAKER_05]: And I also like that he's just kind of like,
• 10:39
  [SPEAKER_05]: Fuck off, I'm gonna smoke a cigar.
• 10:40
  [SPEAKER_05]: I think that's one.
• 10:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: Okay, the other huge pieces, this weapon X idea.
• 10:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: And we will eventually do, you know, sometimes instead of the trials on my show, we'll do like an about episode.
• 10:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: We just did about Cracoa.
• 10:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: One day we will do an about weapon X thing, but I'm not in a hurry.
• 10:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: We're taking a slow ride.
• 10:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: Weapon X is a really complicated thing because it's the government program.
• 10:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: It is the evil scientists trying to make weapons for the United States by enhancing man.
• 11:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it's the cold war because we're racing against every other government.
• 11:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: Weapon X has its roots way back in World War II, where the whole Abraham or skiing, all that crazy stuff with Captain America's origins in the Nazi shot.
• 11:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: There were really one perfect soldier, but a bunch of other soldiers they tried to experiment on.
• 11:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: The super soldier serum is they attempt to reinvent it multiple times over the years, which results in other characters getting superpowers, like man thing and loot cage.
• 11:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: So all of these characters are tangentially connected to the weapon X program.
• 11:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: Now, weapon X is sometimes called weapon ten, the X being the Roman numeral for ten, and it's sometimes called weapon plus, because when you turn the X on its side, it makes a plus.
• 11:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: And all of these do different things, and there's so much mythology in Marvel Comics about it.
• 11:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: Captain America's technically considered weapon one.
• 12:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: weapon two, and I'll be brief here, we'll review these another time.
• 12:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's a grant Morrison's story that ties in weapon two to animal experimentation.
• 12:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: And there's like a little squirrel with claws and like a weapon ex helmet who comes out of this program.
• 12:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's not so ties to the characters root force who are an old like Martin nineties Marvel like animal transformers band that are like tied to weapon ex because of this.
• 12:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: It goes on to create a bunch of really odd characters that are thrown in all over the place.
• 12:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: One of them is the skinless man.
• 12:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: One of them is Dr. Mind Bubble.
• 12:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's a thing called Project Sulphur.
• 12:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: When we start to get into the Vietnam stuff, the character Nuke is Frank Simpson, who's like an American flag on his face.
• 12:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: And they like amp him up with like red pills and taking down with blue pills.
• 12:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: And he's this crazy version of like the uninhibited soldier.
• 12:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: So it really goes on from there leading up to characters like Phantom X and the world.
• 12:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: And even the stepford kukus being connected here, the world is now this like place of super hyper evolution where every weapons keep coming out of it hyper revolved.
• 13:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: And this is where we have characters like the ultimaton and all god and weapon minus I think is in there.
• 13:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: We have weapon H who's like the Hulk Wolverine or Hulk Marine character that is tied to this.
• 13:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: And most recently, we have project Hellfire, which is resulting in the new
• 13:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: hell varied stuff where we're like bonding demons to Wolverine to keep that going.
• 13:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: So weapon X is a longer conversation, obviously.
• 13:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: But the version we're going to jump into, got to start in World War II.
• 13:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: And now we have Cornelius as like the scientist helping to run it during the pre-examine history when Wolverine gets involved.
• 13:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: I do a pretty good job at keeping continuity succinct, but this one's complicated.
• 13:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's a rough thing to try to sum up weapon X at a paragraph.
• 13:47
  [SPEAKER_05]: I think what I like most about the weapon next program is that it seems to be a shitty job that your your boss the professor is insane Cornelius is just like I guess I just got to be here.
• 13:58
  [SPEAKER_05]: I mean, I'm you know, I'm on LinkedIn every other day, but you know, nothing's popping up for me on indeed.
• 14:03
  [SPEAKER_05]: So I guess I'll just stay here and then like poor hines is what are you doing there girl?
• 14:08
  [SPEAKER_05]: You got to quit that job.
• 14:09
  [SPEAKER_05]: I just everyone's having a terrible time and I that's that brings true for me for jobs in general.
• 14:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: kind of the love hate relationship with WebInX as a as a concept when I was a teenager.
• 14:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: I read Frank Terry's WebInX and then I got back into comics.
• 14:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: I read Frank Terry's WebInX and it is a grim like I would never tell someone to read that you would you would have to have a very very specific taste.
• 14:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: Another character I will eventually do a Patreon on as fucking Malcolm Cole cord.
• 14:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: Oh, worst people who exist in fiction.
• 14:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: These are the protagonists of weapon X. It's like, Frank Terry is a really great writer.
• 14:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: I do sincerely believe that love is Catwoman.
• 14:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: I hey, the weapon X Malcolm Cole cords the guy you call when in the red skulls not available.
• 14:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 14:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, but it is an unpleasant read, but there was something as a teenager that was really like this dark thing you're not supposed to like and there's something like kind of like that burns itself into you.
• 15:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: You're like, what is up?
• 15:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: I have more fond memories of X-factor investigations, which also has some of that like rhymy like edgy edge lordness to it, but and I think that holds up maybe definitely better than weapon X. But weapon X as a program is always going to be a thing.
• 15:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: that I know enough about that it's hard to really hate it, right?
• 15:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like because I grew up with it a little bit, it's hard to super hate it.
• 15:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: Obviously, if a weapon X was real, I wouldn't like it.
• 15:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I think it's a cool concept.
• 15:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: Okay.
• 15:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: Now, once in a while, the book comes along that really changes things and crazy enough, this is one that really changed things.
• 15:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: All right.
• 15:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: So fast forward to the late nineties or rewind, I suppose.
• 15:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm working in a comic shop.
• 15:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: Part of my job, and I told this on the show before, is to stack the back issue bins, right?
• 15:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: So you go through and you see what's missing.
• 15:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: I was relatively new to comics, still relatively new to X-Men.
• 15:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: Marvel Comics presents would always baffling me, because the book had four stories in it, and a different cover on each side.
• 15:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: So this was a book you could flip over.
• 15:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: Now I've become pretty good friends with Terry Cavanaugh, who was the editor of this book.
• 16:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: Putting it together was insane, running it on the schedule that they did was crazy.
• 16:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: The Marvel Comics presents was running very frequently and I would always overstock it in the bins because I'd put like four copies of each one because they had different covers and I thought they were different books.
• 16:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is where I first came across the Weapon X book.
• 16:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: Barry Windsor Smith is the writer and artist on this.
• 16:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: There is a Weapon X
• 16:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: Wolverine.
• 16:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's basically starts on issue number seventy two of Marvel Comics presents and it's an eight-page story that runs for several issues in a row.
• 16:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: Marvel Comics presents has some really epic runs in different comics.
• 16:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like, there's a black Panther arc that introduces his mother from South Africa that is a really beautiful one.
• 16:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: But often they would just have like one one shot or one story that ran three or four issues.
• 16:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: Weapon X was like the lead of this title for a while and it launched it into new realms of popularity.
• 16:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: Barry Windsor Smith is a really talented British artist who came back to do something kind of revolutionary.
• 16:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: I would love to interview Barry.
• 16:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's now in nineteen eighty seven and Smith is giving us this really gritty stuff that really changed the industry and a way that like Frank Miller's dare double change the industry.
• 17:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's this really gritty, gory Wolverine is naked in stasis tubes with bubbles floating over his bits.
• 17:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it's the story of how the metal got put on his bones, which was a huge revelation at the time.
• 17:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is just a few years before Magneto ripped it off.
• 17:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: But we always assumed it was part of his mutation, but he's got bone claws underneath it.
• 17:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: Windsor Smith's art and writing on this is very slow.
• 17:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's very paste.
• 17:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's almost as though this story is taking place in a really dark medical lab and it's from the perspective of the evil scientists.
• 17:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: If we saw this in a film, we could do the entire run on Marvel Comics presents in like a ten to fifteen minute feature where there'd be like the actor waking up and then the lights would go out and then he'd wake back up and be in stasis.
• 17:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: The lights are back out.
• 17:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: He'd wake up and he'd be outside hacking it a bear with his claws.
• 17:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: The lights go back out.
• 17:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's now in the stasis tube again.
• 17:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: Lights go back out.
• 17:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's now fighting guards.
• 17:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's that thing where he has no orientation because his memories are always being changed.
• 18:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: The covers on these alone are gorgeous.
• 18:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: The first one is Wolverine, like half in costume, half naked in front of like a giant metal skull.
• 18:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's a very, very winsor Smith Jackson geese art.
• 18:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: It says before Wolverine, there was weapon X.
• 18:14
  [SPEAKER_05]: I like grit.
• 18:14
  [SPEAKER_05]: I'm always really drawn to the issues or the covers at least that have Wolverine in the weapon X thing.
• 18:19
  [SPEAKER_05]: I love all the purple wires and the big like power packs.
• 18:23
  [SPEAKER_05]: I love the half naked in the winter, which which suddenly now all makes sense.
• 18:27
  [SPEAKER_05]: I kind of was like, this is weird that he's always in the snow, but now I understand why.
• 18:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I'm gonna go just kind of down the covers here quickly.
• 18:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: I described the cover of MCP-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-
• 18:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: Uh, seventy five shows him in bondage.
• 19:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's laying naked on the cover with just wires wrapped up around his naked body as he cries out.
• 19:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's almost very sexual.
• 19:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: Seventy six shows him with a Carol Hines a very skinny white woman like in his hands.
• 19:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's holding her up in front of a backdrop of a moon or a spotlight and he's getting ready to stab her.
• 19:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: Seventy seven shows Wolverine running through the Arctic in a very barren landscape nearly naked with his claws dripping blood.
• 19:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: seventy-eight shows Wolverine in kind of profile where he's back to that long hair look and the wires are running down his body.
• 19:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: seventy-nine shows him in the iconic Cyclops helmet, right?
• 19:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's the big techie professor ex-looking helmet from Krikoa, like the red visor over it, almost like Wolverine's in some sort of virtual reality.
• 19:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: eighty shows him standing over the corpse of a guard or running away again fully naked.
• 19:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: eighty one shows a close-up of Dr. Cornelius and this is the cover for this episode holding a gun white guy with a beard a man with bloody claws covered in wires coming at him eighty two shows Wolverine again nude wearing only like a belt and like a little tech piece that covers his groin being shot at in against a backdrop of computers eighty three shows Wolverine with the professor Wolverine is on fire you
• 20:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's naked, his claws are out, and he's got this bald, awful man with glasses, like underneath his grippy foreshows a close-up of Wolverine's face.
• 20:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's like looking down as if he's sad, he's dripping with blood.
• 20:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: Even hearing me recount those covers, go look at them because the covers are beautiful, but this changed what the visual imagery for Wolverine is.
• 20:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: The claws, the blood, the sadness, the implied violence, the loneliness and isolation.
• 20:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: They're truly beautiful.
• 20:39
  [SPEAKER_05]: Oh, I really love it.
• 20:40
  [SPEAKER_05]: I think it's really beautiful.
• 20:41
  [SPEAKER_05]: I think an art style that makes you go, wow, that's really pretty, but also like let you really dive into the stories really good.
• 20:47
  [SPEAKER_05]: Also, just hearing all of those covers made me think of, I'm a really big fan of Star Trek.
• 20:52
  [SPEAKER_05]: Star Trek's like my thing that I latched onto as a child.
• 20:55
  [SPEAKER_05]: And the original series what they would do is that they they often dealt with issues that were really complicated.
• 21:01
  [SPEAKER_05]: This episode is anti-war, or this is pointing out something that's wrong with the government.
• 21:05
  [SPEAKER_05]: But they would bring a guest star, like a young woman, and put her in a really scantily-clad outfit, so that the sensors would be like, oh no, no, no, we can't have side boo on TV, and they'd completely overlook what the story actually was.
• 21:18
  [SPEAKER_05]: And I wonder if there's a little bit of that going on with Wolverine, where it's like, oh my god, he's naked, but it's like, and don't think about what the story is.
• 21:25
  [SPEAKER_05]: Just let the story go.
• 21:26
  [SPEAKER_05]: Look, look, he's naked.
• 21:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: They draw him so hot.
• 21:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's naked and hot.
• 21:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it's crazy because his hair's nuts.
• 21:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: But he's a sex symbol in this bloody weird, like nearly naked wire remote look.
• 21:38
  [SPEAKER_05]: The hair is part of it.
• 21:39
  [SPEAKER_05]: That's my apartment.
• 21:41
  [SPEAKER_05]: The hair is part of it.
• 21:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: These covers are amazing, especially, I mean, the cover that you describe the seventy nine with the helmet.
• 21:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think it's maybe the most aside from him in the like actual yellow.
• 21:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: That may be the most iconic like image of Wolverine.
• 21:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: It makes me kind of upset that visually in film.
• 21:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's got like one movie that's kind of good, you know.
• 22:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: So this is an episode where we had to do a lot of setup in order to get to the meat of this story.
• 22:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: The Marvel Comics presents number seventy two.
• 22:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: We open on Dr. Abraham Cornelius looking through old files over coffee.
• 22:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's cutting out newspaper articles about how he fled the country and avoided a malpractice suit.
• 22:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: So this is a bad dude.
• 22:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is a dude who was like profiting off of people's pain.
• 22:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's one of those crazy doctors who's doing shitty things that he got caught.
• 22:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is not a good man as we begin.
• 22:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: He has a file labeled experiment X, but he moves the letters around to say X men as he's looking at the files.
• 22:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: He remembers hiring a woman named Carol Hines, running experiments on the thresholds of Logan's healing factor.
• 22:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: Articles are there saying things like Cornelius, Saint or murderer, and there's some about the public outcry over mutants.
• 22:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: Sportingly is breaks a glass, and he bleeds, and on the desk are pills, a bottle of whiskey, a handgun, and then there's those images of Logan floating in a tank
• 22:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: flowing blood surrounded by wires.
• 22:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is like a watchman level opening.
• 23:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: If you guys have ever read Watchman, it's a low procedural piece.
• 23:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's really beautiful.
• 23:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: In issue seventy three we see Dr. Cornelius shave Logan with poultry shears and then he brings him before the professor who's a guy in true at Hudson and true at Hudson is a complicated character.
• 23:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: Does one of you want to tackle the challenge of true at Hudson in like one paragraph or less?
• 23:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's the one who believes in it.
• 23:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's the one who like really believes in it.
• 23:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he wants Logan to be his wife.
• 23:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is the big boss.
• 23:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: But this guy also has a history at Marvel.
• 23:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's related to the infamous Hudson family.
• 23:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: Now James Hudson is the director of Alpha Flight, right?
• 23:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: So department H is the one that's funding this.
• 23:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: James Hudson's the one that is Guardian and later vindicator, Mary's Heather.
• 23:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: We see him again.
• 23:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: It is like a little Captain America suit.
• 23:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: True at Hudson is his ancestor.
• 23:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: and he is the son of a guy named Fred McDonald Hudson, so Mac Hudson or James is named after him.
• 24:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: True, it was a civilian advisor to the United States Army in nineteen forty five.
• 24:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: He went by Professor Thornton.
• 24:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: He later was looking for information in a concentration camp where he met Mr. Sinister and he gets some crazy science stuff that he later turns into the weapon plus program, which means he's involved in
• 24:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: in America, stuff, he's involved in a Ravencroft and the CIA and the team X shit that produced agents such as Saber Tooth, Maverick, Castro, Silver Fox, Master Dawn.
• 24:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: So this guy has some really weird ties to a lot of the Marvel universe, but he first shows up here and he's kind of in between the scenes of a lot of things.
• 24:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: He does shop in the Romulus stuff.
• 24:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: He does shop in Wolverine Origins, but the professor, Truett Hudson, has a deeper Marvel lure than characters like Carol Heights and Abraham Cordelia's.
• 24:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: Of the three of them, he's the one you like the least.
• 24:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: Cordelia's is at least like the middle ground sort of, right?
• 24:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's like bored with it.
• 24:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: And like he's there on these, he's being blackmailed.
• 25:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's not the true believer.
• 25:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: If we play Fuck Mary Kill, Abraham Cornelius Carol Hines and the professor, you will marry Carol Hines every time you will have Cornelius every time and you will have the professor every time.
• 25:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: The professor is Cornelius's boss.
• 25:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: He has just been a shaving Wolverine and we have a little bit of a dialogue between them.
• 25:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: Good morning, professor.
• 25:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: Good morning, Dr. Cornelius.
• 25:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: Thanks, feeling so.
• 25:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: A few minutes.
• 25:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: How is the patient?
• 25:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: Could be better.
• 25:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: He put up some resistance when the boys picked him up last night.
• 25:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: They had to jossle him a bit.
• 25:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: He damaged and he peeps.
• 25:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's okay.
• 25:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: Can't afford leak it.
• 25:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: We plugged him up tight and then Dr. Carol Heinz joins us.
• 25:42
  [SPEAKER_05]: Professor Dr. Cornelius, we can begin now.
• 25:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: You get feed.
• 25:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: Can do some feed, steady feed.
• 25:49
  [SPEAKER_05]: Adam Antium break down, twenty nine and one sir.
• 25:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is an extraordinary experiment professor.
• 25:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm honored to be part of it.
• 25:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: Oh, she walked or nearly is.
• 25:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: Up at the Fino B. Two points.
• 25:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: No one point anymore of that and they'll have beans for brains.
• 26:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: Is there cause for concern?
• 26:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't think so, professor.
• 26:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: You can choose Logan for this remarkable stamina.
• 26:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: What we're getting here is automatic nervous system kicking in.
• 26:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Hard fellow, even when he's unconscious.
• 26:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Chelotation begins.
• 26:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: So the chelotation is a type of bonding.
• 26:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is real in science, where you build bond ions and their molecules to metal ions.
• 26:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: So as Dr. Cornelius works on the metal bonding process, Logan proves to be pretty resilient.
• 26:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: Hines, would you please access Mr. Logan's medical profile in history?
• 26:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: I studied it long enough, but I could have missed.
• 26:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: You're really letting me down here, Cornelius.
• 26:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: Why didn't you prepare for this in advance?
• 26:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: I thought I'd prepared for everything professor, but who could foresee this?
• 26:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: I couldn't program for that professor.
• 26:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: Actually, it really doesn't seem credible, huh?
• 26:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: It seems that Logan's highly accelerated heart rate is draining the adamantium reservoir at a rate of, and I think I can assure you there'll be no further problems, professor.
• 26:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: You see, Logan's heart rate can't possibly go up any higher, or he'd be Superman or something.
• 26:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: We've enough Thorazine in Logan to drop a bullet, so the problem is obviously more than the auto nervous system, or a cast iron constitution.
• 27:06
  [SPEAKER_05]: According to MedFacts, Mr. Logan has been shot at least five times and survived each attack for to the trunk and wants to the leg.
• 27:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: Off-Geezers, we know this Hines.
• 27:16
  [SPEAKER_05]: But the bioscan show nothing an epidernal nor internal scar tissue.
• 27:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Cornelius, didn't you say that Logan was hurt last night?
• 27:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Where are the wounds?
• 27:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Pines, do you have the readings?
• 27:25
  [SPEAKER_05]: I have a trace, but no show.
• 27:27
  [SPEAKER_05]: An hour ago, he had a dislocated jaw, cuts, abrasions, now there's nothing.
• 27:32
  [SPEAKER_05]: And like, don't know how important this is.
• 27:34
  [SPEAKER_05]: It seems silly, but Mr. Logan's hair has almost entirely grown back in just twenty minutes.
• 27:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's like he survives some gunshots and you just give him a haircut, but his hair's back.
• 27:45
  [SPEAKER_05]: Like, I just want to happen.
• 27:46
  [SPEAKER_05]: It's kind of freaky.
• 27:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: We seem to be in the midst of something unprecedented.
• 27:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: Our Mr. Logan is somewhat more than human.
• 27:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: Okay, I have to rethink this fast.
• 27:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: If the patient's wounds are now healed, his heart rate could drop.
• 27:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: He prepared to de-escalate at a second's notice.
• 27:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's plan one.
• 28:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: Plan two, if the rate continues to rise, pump equivalent of a norepinephrine to its ratio, but keep me informed of all changes.
• 28:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: Miss Heinz is the adamantium reservoir sufficient for all this.
• 28:11
  [SPEAKER_05]: It's a vision at current rates, sir.
• 28:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: Not good enough, go to reserve.
• 28:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'll need authorization from you have it madam, go to reserve at a mantium.
• 28:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: But during this intense process Cornelius notes that the professor hasn't walked out.
• 28:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: We jumped to seventy four where the professor has called his benefactor, furious that he hasn't been told that Logan was a mutant in advance.
• 28:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: Now the benefactor is set up to be, do you guys know who?
• 28:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't remember.
• 28:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's initially set up to be apocalypse, but later it kind of hints that it's Romulus, which is an interesting thing either way.
• 28:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's a lot of characters weaving in and out of this again that are very complex.
• 28:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: Matt, do you want to give us the one-two on who Romulus is?
• 28:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Romulus is the puppet master behind Logan and Stapard.
• 28:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's he's this ancient sort of like enormous Wolverine with five claws, right?
• 28:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, and he's been sort of in Wolverine's past sort of like manipulating the moment to this.
• 29:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Romulus looks like Saber tooth on mutant growth hormone.
• 29:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: He is the onslaught of Wolverine and Saber tooth, right?
• 29:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like if onslaught is the way too far too many blades version of Magneto, then Romulus is that for Wolverine and Saber tooth.
• 29:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: Romulus is a plot device that was relatively unpopular.
• 29:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: After Wolverine's origins got revealed, they did a book called Wolverine Origins where they're going back and trying to put all the pieces of his crazy past together.
• 29:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: and they needed a throughline.
• 29:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: You need a villain that serves as one throughline to all of this.
• 29:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: Mr. Sinister might have worked, but they created this massive guy with huge claws, who is manipulating Wolverine's life for decades, basically.
• 29:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: He has a hot twin sister named Remus, that's my least favorite part of it.
• 29:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: She's actually worse than he is.
• 29:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: But the director is reporting into some of these mysterious forces that are monitoring all this.
• 29:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: Now the other huge piece of Marvel lore that ties in here is Adam Antium itself.
• 29:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: Adam Antium is involved in the creation of Captain America's shield.
• 30:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: And there's an Adam Antium vibranium mix that no one in science has ever been able to replicate.
• 30:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: So Captain America shield is like an accident that happened.
• 30:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: Now it was designed by Dr. Myron McLean, who is a little known Marvel character, but the adamantium bonding process to bond it to bones was designed by a character who is the father of Lady Deathstrike.
• 30:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: Ed Lady Duffstrike is pissed because Wolverine has her dad's like shit on her bones, basically.
• 30:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: It used his process.
• 30:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: So again, there's a ton of Marvel lore.
• 30:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: We could do a whole adamanty of episode or like, oh, what for next episode?
• 30:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's very easy to get lost in all of this.
• 30:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: They have been experimenting on Logan at mysterious orders and it turns out he has a healing factor so they can really amp up what is going on.
• 30:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: So now as we're looking at Logan in the tank, he wakes up.
• 30:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: He has enough thorns in him to keep him knocked out for days, but he is awake.
• 30:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's growing back as wounds are healing.
• 30:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: His hands are bleeding, spiked, claws, emerge, and the technicians panic.
• 30:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: And Logan breaks free, killing one of the new guards, again named Cole.
• 31:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: We jumped to issue seventy-five.
• 31:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: If you knew what you were really up to, Professor, I might be very upset with you.
• 31:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: I've helped you to create a monster.
• 31:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's a mindless murdering animal.
• 31:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: But we can make it behave.
• 31:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: Behave?
• 31:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: Good God, man.
• 31:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: It slaughtered an innocent boy in here.
• 31:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: Then it came after me and the guards straight through the blasted window as if it wasn't there.
• 31:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: Logan could have killed us all.
• 31:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: I met his eyes for a second filled with hate and fury, but I couldn't tell if it was some animal bloodlust or horror at what we've done to him.
• 31:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: Then with his life supports torn away, he collapsed.
• 31:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: Those terrible knives sunk back into his body, and I thanked God for my future.
• 31:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: So the professor tells Cordelia that Logan's a mutant and therefore not.
• 31:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: Human, and he says, um, Professor, the experiment, the adamantium bonding process, are you saying, and mutated Logan into this infernal thing?
• 31:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, Doctor, you must understand that this infernal thing is what Logan has always been.
• 31:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: A determinedly violent individual pummeling his way through a purposeless life.
• 32:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: One day, distinguished from the next, only by the changing patterns of bruises and blood from last night's drunken fights.
• 32:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: But then inexplicably, the wounds are healed and gone before noon in his first beer.
• 32:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: I doubt if you've ever suffered hangovers.
• 32:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: All his years, Logan has endured this, suffering a destiny that ported him from his guts outward battling a fate to creed him by nature.
• 32:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: He became a government agent and was ideally suited to the danger of the work.
• 32:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: He had nothing to lose.
• 32:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Not even his God forsaken life, shot, stabbed.
• 32:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: and beaten in the course of duty, recklessly seeking the honor of dying for his country, how pitifully desperate he must have become.
• 32:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: But now, his demon is free, released by the intervention of experiment acts thus the double it is supplanted by the super ego.
• 32:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: and all of Logan's primal instincts are focused and resolved, and what you're looking at right now, Dr. is the most formidable tactical weapon ever can see.
• 33:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: I can tell you how the theater background, because that was a monologue, my friend.
• 33:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: Cordelia says, yes, the knife's been in his hands pure adamantium.
• 33:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: You've not heard a word I've said.
• 33:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're not knives, Cornelius.
• 33:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're claws.
• 33:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is crazy science.
• 33:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's taking such joy in this.
• 33:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's twirling his fucking mustache if he had one.
• 33:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: So, Logan attacks again.
• 33:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: They hit him with some offensive weapons.
• 33:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: They leave him literally like a smoking corpse on the ground.
• 33:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: Can't we treat him better than this?
• 33:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's still human in some ways, isn't he?
• 33:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: but the professor orders Logan to be reprogrammed into a weapon.
• 33:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: We jumped to seventy-six.
• 33:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: Cornelius and Hines have strapped Logan down to run tests on him as the professor begins pushing from her mental conditioning.
• 33:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: They work to erase Logan's prior identity and make him believe he was an animal to be commanded.
• 33:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: But as they connect Logan to the computer, a manifestation of his pain screams out on the screen
• 33:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: Logan wakes up during the procedure and nearly kills the scientist before he's sedated again.
• 33:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: The professor is furious and wants to kill the creature that Cornelius calms him down.
• 34:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: Logan projects the image of the murdered professor on the screen from his own mind.
• 34:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm coming after you bitches.
• 34:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: Now, there's a character later added by Larry Hammock called Cyborg, PSI-Borg that is involved in this process, like suppressing Wolverines memories.
• 34:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's another mutant guy.
• 34:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, Eldo Ferro, I think is his name.
• 34:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: We will talk about it today.
• 34:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: We jumped to seventy-seven.
• 34:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: Logan is field tested against animals like sheep and wolves and they closely monitor his progress, releasing the adamantium, realizing the adamantium had grafted to his bones to make claws for nearly as cause Logan the perfect killing machine.
• 34:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: He was left out overnight at fifteen below weather to test his healing factor.
• 34:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: Alice and you mentioned earlier that working for Weapon X is super shitty.
• 34:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm going to give you the worst job.
• 34:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: You are the animal wrangler.
• 34:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's your job to go out in the Arctic and get animals bring them back on chains and make them ready to fight Logan at the second notice.
• 34:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: You got to keep them ravenous like you're in the gladiator pits of Rome.
• 35:02
  [SPEAKER_05]: Here are my two weeks.
• 35:04
  [SPEAKER_05]: I will not serve the whole two weeks.
• 35:05
  [SPEAKER_05]: Here's just my resignation.
• 35:07
  [SPEAKER_05]: I'm leaving right now.
• 35:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: We need some moose, a couple of grizzly bears.
• 35:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: We need like seven or eight grizzly bears.
• 35:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: Make sure there's a tiger just in case, maybe a pack of wolves go.
• 35:18
  [SPEAKER_05]: I'm gonna be like a dog.
• 35:20
  [SPEAKER_05]: What about a cat?
• 35:21
  [SPEAKER_05]: I think it's like cat.
• 35:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: We jump to seventy eight cornealis has implanted mind control technology into Logan's brain that has like a ten mile radius on it.
• 35:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: If you want to pup it, you've got to have strings.
• 35:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: He says there's a jepetto here.
• 35:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: But he was aware that Logan could deeply feel the procedures in his brain and he was conscious through this.
• 35:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: Logan's like broken memories for years and years after this, right?
• 35:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's rough.
• 35:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: Wolverine is now nearly naked.
• 35:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's got a new tech helmet and a remote control hanging over his junk and now they can control him.
• 35:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: So in seventy nine, the team tests Logan and they start calling him experiment.
• 35:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: He fights a rogue bear in the wild.
• 35:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: The professor's anxious to use Logan in the field, but Cornelius notes that the control helmet and the battery packs, but Logan is carrying it to combat, are not ideal.
• 36:10
  [SPEAKER_05]: You think that he'd notice that?
• 36:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: This cosplay look, it's a hat and a remote on your junk, and that's it.
• 36:16
  [SPEAKER_05]: At no point where they like, yes, pants.
• 36:19
  [SPEAKER_05]: The government can pay for pants.
• 36:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: The professor orders Logan to be feel tested against human targets now.
• 36:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: First time told, we're creating a kind of super soldier from experiment text, then it turns out he's some sort of mutant animal thing.
• 36:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: I got virtually blackmailed into this whole affair.
• 36:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like, what's this thing going to do?
• 36:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: Is the weapon going to protect us from the commies or something?
• 36:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like, some kind of assassin?
• 36:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: I ain't got murder inside me, hines, not like the professor.
• 36:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: Okay, Cornelius is a fucking winer.
• 36:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's another thing about this guy that you need to learn from the way.
• 36:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: So Wolverine breaks free.
• 36:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: He starts killing guards and things are going crazy.
• 36:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's getting worse and worse.
• 36:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: Matt, do you want to draw a parallel between this and X-II-III's origins for just a minute?
• 36:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm in the facility.
• 36:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: They kind of do a better job of perfecting what they're doing here with Wolverine in that she has that like kill switch, right?
• 37:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like there's the thing that like she does not have the like once that is launched, that becomes Laura's arc, right?
• 37:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: Go overcoming her kill switch.
• 37:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: Laura is born to be a weapon, right?
• 37:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like they're they're putting clone embryos in women.
• 37:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, they shoot Logan in the head and drag him to weapon X. Like he wasn't he did not volunteer.
• 37:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's not it's not experimental origins Wolverine where he's like I will do that.
• 37:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm signing up for this.
• 37:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: He did not
• 37:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: But I'd become really dear friends with Erica Schultz, who's writing Laura Kinney, and she's like, that's the difference, is Wolverine still had a childhood, even though he lost his childhood.
• 37:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: Laura didn't have one, which is a crazy thing to realize.
• 37:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: Okay, we jumped to issue eighty.
• 37:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: Logan is rampaging, and all the security systems are down, and all the guards are slaughtered.
• 37:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: And Cornelius assumes that the professor has done all of this on purpose, and the professor's in a different room, and he's accidentally left the intercom on, as he calls his employer, who had set Logan free to quote,
• 37:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: clear the deadwood.
• 38:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: So he accidentally brought himself on the intercom.
• 38:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's like everybody's being hunted down.
• 38:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: We're Wolverine in the next room.
• 38:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: PlayStation remote, just moving Wolverine around killing these guards somewhere.
• 38:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: The poor professor gets his glasses broken by Wolverine and now he's like kill him kill the beast right like it's very Prince John from Robin Hood and Disney if you guys remember he wants to go suck his thumb in the corner now that he's in danger to an issue everyone's a big back scientist until your mutant killing machine starts killing you
• 38:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: In anyone, Logan is just killing.
• 38:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's a fucking crazy man with claws, and we get sound effects like shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh, shhh,
• 38:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: So Cornelius uses his tie to tie off the wound and they head for the safety and the adamantium reactor where Cornelius is holding a rifle and even then the professor will not tell them who the manufacturer is.
• 38:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: The professor uses the computer to try to call for help emphasizing the he's the only one there that's not expendable.
• 39:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: Kill these other two but get me out of here.
• 39:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is a terrible bust.
• 39:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: But the benefactor just shuts the power down, inflying that the professor is expendable, and now weapon X is attacking.
• 39:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: In eighty-two, Cornelius is hesitant to shoot weapon X with the rifle.
• 39:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's just standing there covered in the blood of guards.
• 39:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: So the professor hits Cornelius, which then makes the gun go off, and then in response, weapon X seemingly impales Cornelius with his claws.
• 39:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: The professor and hines go running for it.
• 39:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: as Cornelius lays dying covered in blood.
• 39:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: The professor throws Carol Hines then into the reactor as bait for weapon X and then runs for it.
• 39:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: As Wolverine is trapped in there with Carol Hines, weapon X then approaches and the professor opens a fission gate to kill everyone within the adamantum reactor.
• 39:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: Jump to eighty-three.
• 39:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: Carol is begging for her life.
• 39:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: Please kill me quickly.
• 39:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like Wolverine says you mean nothing to me, basically.
• 39:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: Then the professor opens up the vision gates, Carol is struck a few times before she leaves from the pit, and Logan is then caught in the burning fiery explosions inside.
• 40:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: But then the professor's benefactor turns the gate off, and Logan comes bursting through the window, killing the professor with three claws to the head.
• 40:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: Okay, before we get to the big final battle, there's a lot of crazy shit going on here, and I know I covered some of it quickly, but it's really powerful, it's a strong read.
• 40:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: Allison, what are your thoughts on the professor as a boss?
• 40:25
  [SPEAKER_05]: I think Cornelius is getting way too much flack when the professors the one that's in charge of everything.
• 40:29
  [SPEAKER_05]: Honestly, I'm kind of like Abraham seems pretty okay.
• 40:33
  [SPEAKER_05]: I think the professor is the one that should be getting all the credit for being a kuku bananas nut job.
• 40:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's pretty violent.
• 40:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: The fission factor is the character's all getting killed.
• 40:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's crazy.
• 40:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's so much
• 40:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: bloodier than I remember, who?
• 40:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I know.
• 40:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's crazy.
• 40:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: So he's like, you meant me nothing to me to Carol, but he's also like, I'm not an animal.
• 40:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe he's not, he's a mercy for her, but it's mercy for himself, right?
• 40:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: Wolverine really gets a hand on the wheel for a second there.
• 40:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it's Wolverine berserker.
• 40:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
• 40:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: He doesn't have his memories.
• 41:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: And he's in a fucking trauma episode.
• 41:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: And he's like in a super hyper vigilant dissociative state and hacks everything around him.
• 41:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it's because they fucking messed with his mind.
• 41:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: And everyone in the facility deserves to die, including Carol Hines, even there's the least couple
• 41:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: So then we jump to Eighty Four.
• 41:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: It opens with Logan throwing the body of the professor into the incinerator, and Logan wanders free.
• 41:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's naked, and his memories are slowly starting to return, but then he hears the panicked responses of the men in charge through his headset.
• 41:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: So he's running free, he's hacking through the fence, and Logan works to like, stave off his Bzirka rage, and he runs straight into a fucking Siberian tiger outside.
• 41:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: Allison did her job.
• 41:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: We got a tiger.
• 41:39
  [SPEAKER_05]: I did it.
• 41:39
  [SPEAKER_05]: I got a cat.
• 41:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: So the voices in his mind continue as Logan is slaughtering the animal and we're gonna read these three again up.
• 41:47
  [SPEAKER_05]: It's extraordinary isn't not a Cornelius, a creature of such power shaken by his own shadow driven by fear of himself.
• 41:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, but he's pulling through despite it all.
• 41:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: He thinks so.
• 41:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: We shall see what.
• 41:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I guess we will professor.
• 42:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, he's still standing isn't he?
• 42:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: He didn't buckle.
• 42:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: He didn't get in.
• 42:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: He didn't even retract his claws when we gave him the power to do it.
• 42:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, Ash, or nearly a sound, the snow.
• 42:10
  [SPEAKER_05]: Siberian tiger, sir.
• 42:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
• 42:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: Thank you, madam.
• 42:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: This man does not enjoy being corrected by women in the workplace.
• 42:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: We could have set this up better.
• 42:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: How do you mean, Doctor?
• 42:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: If Logan had had to seek it out, you know, lump the thing down, just based on instinct to kill it or confront it or whatever, instead of the tiger just being there, it had been more telling, I think.
• 42:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, I suppose you're right, but still, it is an acceptable scenario for one such as Logan's simplistic perception.
• 42:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Look at that, Logan's right in there.
• 42:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's just as wild as before.
• 42:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: It may seem so professor, but in the few past few days, weapon X has been changed irrevocable.
• 42:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: A savagery is now tempered by ego and racyocination.
• 42:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: Racyocination, man.
• 42:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: Any hesitation, any a moment of fear or mere caution, and he will be undone.
• 42:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, like literally, right?
• 42:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's been necessary that Logan should not know of his indestructible skeleton.
• 43:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: Won't help him if he gets disemboweled, Professor?
• 43:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, he could learn it the hard way.
• 43:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's true.
• 43:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's gaining the advantage, Professor.
• 43:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: But not so long ago, weapon X-beheaded, a grizzly bear, without hesitation.
• 43:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: But that's so much as a tussle.
• 43:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: That is what I call getting the advantage.
• 43:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: You gotta have some faith, Professor.
• 43:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: Look, I'll lay you a hundred on Logan.
• 43:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: What do you think of that?
• 43:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is not a game, Cornelius.
• 43:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: You were telling me, that slash could have got it in, and I'd be able to see note.
• 43:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: You don't see, Doctor.
• 43:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: That was a faint, Logan is drawing in the kill.
• 43:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: Look, a magnificent blow.
• 43:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: He, not the one straight to the hot sun of a gunsmaunt brutal enough.
• 43:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: So what do you say then, Professor?
• 43:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: Indeed, Cornelius remarkable his instincts and reflexes though, perhaps more pragmatic than seen quite undiminished.
• 43:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: And his ferocity is unparalleled.
• 43:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: Pity, I couldn't get you to make that bad, huh?
• 43:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm not silly, the nature of scientific endeavor with wagers, Cornelius.
• 43:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, well, that's just because you'd have lost a bundle.
• 43:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: You underestimated in your prize professor.
• 43:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: Logan was set up.
• 43:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: We gave him a chance to escape that he didn't run and steady turned around and brutalize the lot of us.
• 44:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: Then we jammed his psyche with his fear of mutantism.
• 44:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: Didn't phase him.
• 44:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'd say he came through A-Wan, wouldn't you?
• 44:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, yes.
• 44:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: And yet, he failed to kill Heinz, an act of mercy that leaves doubt still in my mind.
• 44:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's just because Heinz was never a threat to Logan professor.
• 44:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's like we just proved he'll kill only if threatened with death or Or out of hunger.
• 44:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, or out of hunger and like who'd want to eat Heinz, huh?
• 44:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so we're like Courtney at the SS pose.
• 44:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: We should consider this experiment to success law though it may be I was like I'm right here bitches
• 44:36
  [SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, why are you talking about being like, I'm not in the room.
• 44:38
  [SPEAKER_05]: I'm right here.
• 44:39
  [SPEAKER_05]: But if I may say, Doctor, I think Mr. Logan only killed you because of that accidental shooting sir.
• 44:44
  [SPEAKER_05]: I don't think he would have attacked you otherwise.
• 44:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, that's right.
• 44:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: Thanks, Heinz.
• 44:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: So what have we got, Professor?
• 44:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: Logan thinks he killed just about all of us getting to you.
• 44:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: The focus of his vengeance.
• 44:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: But now he knows he ain't a human and with that he knows it was you who harnessed his dark secret.
• 44:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Indeed, so we had to destroy me, did he not?
• 45:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: And in the act of killing his creator is once incomparable savagery is transformed into the cunning of a ruthless killer.
• 45:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: I savor the fence, Cornelius.
• 45:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, well, you did kind of hedge your bets a little, you know?
• 45:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: What do you mean, Cornelius?
• 45:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, making up that stuff about how you were actually working for somebody else, some great power or something.
• 45:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yes, uh, why?
• 45:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like, you were just a studger of flunky instead of the genius behind experiment X.
• 45:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, that was a mere psychological rule.
• 45:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: It was good setting yourself up for your own murder, but then playing it being betrayed by the real creator of weapon X in the end, working for sympathy, testing Logan to see if he'd reason that you were the worth the real threat, clever, tricky.
• 45:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: Indeed, when he had dramatic flow, I that proved the great deal about the nature of the beast.
• 45:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, real cute.
• 45:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: But then they realized that Logan has actually killed his Wranglers on a scape, and then Logan actually breaks in.
• 45:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: And as Logan is wandering off in the snow, the last dialogue is Heinz questioning Cornelius, realizing that Logan was a person in this against his will.
• 46:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: And Cornelius assumes that Logan isn't even human, but Heinz knows that he is, he's human, and he doesn't deserve this.
• 46:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: And that is the end of the fucking Weapon X saga by Barry Windsor Smith.
• 46:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: Alison, thank you for being patient with our long dialogue tropes here.
• 46:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: What was the big rules?
• 46:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's this, there's like a big final issue revealed.
• 46:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's actually quite jarring.
• 46:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: What's going on for Logan's or this?
• 46:21
  [SPEAKER_05]: He's smarter than they think he is.
• 46:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: So yeah, it's a big brainwash scenario, right?
• 46:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: elaborately long.
• 46:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's like fucking arcade or like Mysterio.
• 46:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: They're like messing with Logan's mind and like making him think he's done all these things.
• 46:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: Just to test the parameters of what he'll do.
• 46:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is like Mr. Sinister playing with like a little mouse.
• 46:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, it's crazy.
• 46:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's also a four issue of it.
• 46:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's like a full actual like normal link comic where we just think he's killed all of them.
• 46:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right.
• 46:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then the reveal is that no, they were doing the thing they did before where they like messed with his brain and they made him imagine the scenario.
• 46:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: By the way, the word raseosination basically just means the process of exact thinking or reasoning.
• 47:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: So there's your toilet paper word of the day.
• 47:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is a really impactful thing.
• 47:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: And again, we are still kind of dealing with the repercussions of all of this for a Wolverine.
• 47:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: Now, there's a lot of shit going on all over the place.
• 47:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: But the next time we see Cornelius directly is in Wolverine volume two numbers forty eight through fifty.
• 47:19
  [SPEAKER_05]: It's kind of like a look at this the marble present story of a kind of from Wolverine's point of view of how him trying to how he's trying to remember it him and Jubilee go to the weapons facility and he's like knows it's something familiar and he goes and he's walking around and he's having these memory flashes as he's walking around.
• 47:35
  [SPEAKER_05]: There's the car that he was abducted in.
• 47:37
  [SPEAKER_05]: There's a little pouch from Silver Fox.
• 47:39
  [SPEAKER_05]: There's stuff that he's remembering and then he also finds like
• 47:42
  [SPEAKER_05]: sets that they use, he sets off some alarms, and now Carol Heinz and the professor, or not the professor, Cornelius, know that he's been there, and so Carol Heinz has to track him down.
• 47:54
  [SPEAKER_05]: So she just watches him from afar, not very good.
• 47:56
  [SPEAKER_05]: She's not a spy.
• 47:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: So Stan was here that the weapon ex-facilities and remote northern Alberta, which is where Cyclops later makes his base during the like the Jean Grey School Professor ex-school era of schism, which is crazy to me.
• 48:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: But keep going, Logan goes up to New York.
• 48:12
  [SPEAKER_05]: And Professor X and Jean Grey are trying to help him confront some memories.
• 48:15
  [SPEAKER_05]: So they like do a little bit of a psychic rescue thing.
• 48:18
  [SPEAKER_05]: They see him fighting the bear at the facility.
• 48:20
  [SPEAKER_05]: Hines calls in the professor to check in.
• 48:22
  [SPEAKER_05]: And he's like, just observe.
• 48:23
  [SPEAKER_05]: She doesn't like a pay phone.
• 48:24
  [SPEAKER_05]: And I will say that when I saw her at the pay phone, I was like, isn't Wolverine's hoping that he can smell people?
• 48:30
  [SPEAKER_05]: Like, he's gonna figure out she's there.
• 48:32
  [SPEAKER_05]: And then that the professor has created Chieva to kill Logan, but we don't really know what Chieva is.
• 48:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: is.
• 48:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, she was a giant fucking death robot.
• 48:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is like the, it's Wolverine number fifty, right?
• 48:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: So it's the weapons program creating an AI to go after Wolverine to bring him in.
• 48:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it's like a self perpetuating scary robot.
• 48:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's, it's, it's, it's, it's kind of a fun design, but it's not a thing that's used very often in the comics.
• 48:50
  [SPEAKER_05]: It looks a little bit like, drive, but I might just be saying that because I just read strife at a new mutant comic.
• 48:55
  [SPEAKER_05]: Then there's this whole thing where Logan writes his motorcycle into a building into an elevator to go talk to Nick Fury.
• 49:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's that good Larry Han.
• 49:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, truly, Marks of Usory, Larry Hammock, can write a story where Wolverine writes his motorcycle into a shield base to go ask Nick Fury a question, and it's my favorite.
• 49:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's so good.
• 49:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: I love that.
• 49:14
  [SPEAKER_05]: My favorite part of that is that there's a little like in the past where he's like, hey, forge.
• 49:18
  [SPEAKER_05]: Where did they put that big fucking Quinn jet thing?
• 49:20
  [SPEAKER_05]: And he's gorgeous.
• 49:22
  [SPEAKER_05]: Oh, uh, secret place.
• 49:23
  [SPEAKER_05]: And he's like, do you know where that secret place is?
• 49:24
  [SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, it's over there.
• 49:25
  [SPEAKER_05]: Why?
• 49:26
  [SPEAKER_05]: He's like, no reason.
• 49:27
  [SPEAKER_05]: Just go about your, go about your tinkering.
• 49:28
  [SPEAKER_05]: You're fine.
• 49:29
  [SPEAKER_05]: You're fine.
• 49:30
  [SPEAKER_05]: And no point for just like, I shouldn't tell the guy who's kind of crazy.
• 49:33
  [SPEAKER_05]: Like where shield is.
• 49:34
  [SPEAKER_05]: But he goes up.
• 49:35
  [SPEAKER_05]: He rides his motorcycle.
• 49:36
  [SPEAKER_05]: He gets him descended dossier, which I think we've been debating.
• 49:39
  [SPEAKER_05]: Was it fifty thousand pages this dossier is?
• 49:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's insane.
• 49:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: The other thing that's really entertaining here is the secret base of like Hines and the professor here is in the Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C., which is referenced in other Wolverine comics.
• 49:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: And there's once I'm when Carol Danvers is part of this, like if you go to that Wolverine minus one comic that we've reviewed on my show, again, crazy Marvel shit that's all mixed together.
• 50:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's insane.
• 50:03
  [SPEAKER_05]: specifically it's the pest control section of the department of agriculture.
• 50:07
  [SPEAKER_05]: I love it because Wolverine goes in there and the lady at the desk is like, this is an apartment of agriculture.
• 50:11
  [SPEAKER_05]: You can't just come in here and I'm like, is the department of agriculture?
• 50:15
  [SPEAKER_05]: Can you be that more like, oh, you're in the department of agriculture?
• 50:17
  [SPEAKER_05]: I just feel like that's not.
• 50:18
  [SPEAKER_05]: I feel like it's a little bit more laid back than that.
• 50:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: So Wolverine has this giant file, and he takes the X-Men with him back to the Weapon X compound.
• 50:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: We got Cyclops, Schinger, Xavier, Jubilee, and the Black Bird.
• 50:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then we got the professor here, and the movie set, and a calendar about artichokes, and the professor's glasses, and there are other operatives that have also had their memories affected.
• 50:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: Wolverine's really trying to struggle to remember who they are, like Saber Tooth, and Silver Fox, and Castro, who's John Ray, and Vol, this is Cyborg,
• 50:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: Mastodon and wildcat wildcat is maverick.
• 50:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's crazy because there's all these codenames that the characters like Mastodon we've never really done anything with I could totally do an episode on cyborg and on John Ray and fucking on silver fox for sure I keep thinking about the floppy disks that they said they're like they're selling million floppy disks We're going through mega bites of data.
• 51:10
  [SPEAKER_05]: It's so funny
• 51:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: Shiva attacks, and there's a giant battle because Shiva can keep rebuilding bodies for itself.
• 51:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's like one of those supper-applicating AIs, and Silver Fox is here.
• 51:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: Silver Fox is confusing.
• 51:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: She's a Native American woman who was Wolverine's lover, who was raped and killed by Sabre Tooth.
• 51:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: But also, she was either beforehand or after really an agent of weaponics the whole time.
• 51:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: And she's around in a couple of really weird missions.
• 51:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: We'll talk about her another time.
• 51:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: But she's an interesting character that has been well remembered because she's in the movie versions, right?
• 51:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: She's the the ladies able to kill that one time.
• 51:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: But she's got some really interesting connections.
• 51:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: Anyway, Silver Fox shows up and been part of Weapon X for like a really long time and she realizes her own memories have been changed.
• 51:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: She hits hines with the butt of her gun and then turns it on the professor and shoots of the bunch and hines screams and the professor's dead and silver prox's gone and the Shiva protocols have all left to go after Saber tooth the end.
• 52:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: All of these stories go dot dot dot in different directions, but this is the Weapon X madness that Larry Hammer writes in the early nineties.
• 52:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's truly crazy.
• 52:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: Matt, do you want to continue us with Wolverine's sixty two sixty three?
• 52:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: Again, we're keeping over a bunch of stuff here.
• 52:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: John Ray has us like God and Sabre to in a position where he's basically chained to them and he's he's sort of a unwilling participant in this as John Wolverine mass is a mass but it's messed on another one, but he like melts away and she believes arms and she freaks out
• 52:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, eventually Silver Fox who shows up who's part of Hydra at the time.
• 52:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: She once she realizes that her memories have been messed with like Wolverine Taz.
• 52:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: She shoots Saber two.
• 52:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: She's going to shoot Wolverine.
• 52:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: They end up teaming up to go like blow this mission after the eight six pizzas.
• 52:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's important that they do eat six pizzas.
• 52:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: They go to Cuba because they were
• 52:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like, weapon X is tied to like Cuban crime families and there's that how do ferro or science that I mentioned before is who's in Cuba now when they fight him, he like turns into like a big like tumor man, and he also goes by bowl.
• 53:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, he's vol.
• 53:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 53:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: That makes sense.
• 53:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: Cyborg is also vol.
• 53:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: If your heads are hurting, even as we're telling you these stories, we're like, wait, which character was that?
• 53:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: And where did they fit here?
• 53:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: And we're keeping it simple.
• 53:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's really, it's really complex.
• 53:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: We do get a long flashback here where we see where Aldo Farrow joins the team.
• 53:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: So he's part of that initial group with Cornelius and Hines in the Professor.
• 53:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: And he's like, we don't need movie sets in memory implants anymore.
• 53:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: I can just secretly program all the memories and Pharaoh's torturing operatives for fun.
• 53:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then we can jump back to the present where Heinz hits him with a brick to the head.
• 53:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: She does not like this man.
• 53:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's messed with all of their memories it seems.
• 53:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: Do you want to give us Heinz speech here, Allison?
• 53:42
  [SPEAKER_05]: Farrow didn't just come in and plant those false memories in all of you.
• 53:45
  [SPEAKER_05]: He's the one who came up with the idea to link up your false memories to your pain receptors.
• 53:49
  [SPEAKER_05]: His theories came with a lot of pseudo-scientific baggage and make it all palpable.
• 53:53
  [SPEAKER_05]: The initiation rights of the mandance, the Australian Aborigines, African tribal scarring, pain, and memory reinforcements linked to cultural survival.
• 54:01
  [SPEAKER_05]: We went along with it because it worked so much better than our own method, but then we realized that he enjoyed it.
• 54:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then Pharaoh breaks Heinz's neck before horribly mutating into this giant like pustule of a man and then he just explodes.
• 54:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: But it turns out he didn't actually break her neck.
• 54:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: She just like died from fear it implies we don't know how much of this is psychic craziness, right?
• 54:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's what happens when you have telepaths.
• 54:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: So Cyborg is there.
• 54:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's a giant fight.
• 54:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: He tortures Wolverine in his friends with visions from their past and all the X-Men are here, right?
• 54:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: So they get some individual kind of psychic visions.
• 54:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then he admits that the professor was supposed to give Aldo Farrow anti-aging benefits because of his work, but he never got them.
• 54:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: So in the end, Wolverine has lost silver fox again.
• 54:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's learned all of his memories with her real.
• 54:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: He lays her to rest.
• 54:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: Cyborg explodes at the end.
• 54:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's a huge story about his memory in plants.
• 54:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it's insane.
• 54:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's so many details going on.
• 54:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: And we haven't even broken into like the Maverick T-Mex and Mega Red Crazy.
• 54:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: It goes so many directions.
• 54:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I like this story.
• 55:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think I like that sometimes Larry Hama will be writing something in one panel and on that same page, just like, she broke her neck.
• 55:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, she died of fear.
• 55:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's, it's Maverick who says both things.
• 55:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, it's almost like he stopped, he came back and it was like, it's got to be something else.
• 55:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot, but it fits, right, with the memory, like theme of it all, right?
• 55:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: It fits that like not everything went exactly the way you think it went, even when it's happening.
• 55:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: So, rest in peace, Carol Hines, do we like her or not?
• 55:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: She's the best of the three of us.
• 55:32
  [SPEAKER_05]: She's also a bit whiny, like, uh, you could be in the club.
• 55:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: The professor gets points for not being, like, so whiny except for that one moment where she's running into the, uh, the base to kill him.
• 55:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: Cornelius and the professor get a significant amount of backstory, at least to some degree, Heinz never really gets any.
• 55:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: She's kind of just a woman trying to make it in a crazy world.
• 55:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: I do think we get told that she worked for NASA in a line of dialogue prior to coming here, and then she was recruited to this like CIA program, right?
• 56:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: So she's been part of this, and she's like the agent just trying to do her job, but it is corrupt, but also she's corrupt too.
• 56:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: I don't know.
• 56:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: Rest in peace Carol Heinz, we'll probably won't talk about you again unless we review an issue that you're in.
• 56:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: So we're going to jump forward to the Frank Terry series we referenced earlier Malcolm Cole-Cord and the quick version of this guy he was basically a guard at Weapon X who gets hacked up by Wolverine and it scars his face and he's so upset about his facial scarring that become he becomes an abusive horrible monster who beats rapes kills and scars women in front of him
• 56:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: He does it to Aurora on panel.
• 56:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's formed concentration camps.
• 56:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: He has murdering children right in left.
• 56:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: And he's weaponized a group of people who have memory implants.
• 56:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: And they're all super villains.
• 56:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: Mesmeros here, Soron is here, Saber tooth and wild child are here.
• 56:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's a crazy series.
• 56:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: We jump to issues twenty-three through twenty-five, which is where we see the flashback of the professor finding one of Mr. Sinister's labs.
• 56:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is the sinister who later had to deprogram races and out of himself because he worked in the Nazi concentration camps, rough story, who knows how it fits in after the sins of sinister revelations.
• 57:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: discovers Sinister's journals on mutants inside then.
• 57:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: So now we go to the flashback where he's taken Cornelius and Hines to Alaska.
• 57:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's reading files on Xavier Magneto, name or Wolverine that Mr. Sinister has been keeping.
• 57:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the professor says, Well, even I must admit Dr. Hines, when it came to my research regarding these creatures, Fortune has always been on my side.
• 57:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: Cornelius says, says you, how fortunate were you for all those years you had to toil on those early weapon plus programs, only to be passed over a year after year.
• 57:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: About time they finally gave you your own program, you ask me.
• 57:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: We're in flanks as significant history for the professor with weapon plus.
• 57:47
  [SPEAKER_05]: Here here, which number is this one anyway, Professor?
• 57:49
  [SPEAKER_05]: It's the ten, so X, if you will.
• 57:52
  [SPEAKER_05]: Kind of apropel.
• 57:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: And in this version, we see Malcolm Cole-Cord working as a guard outside the compound.
• 57:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: John Sublime is also here.
• 57:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's the assistant to court earliest, and he assures the professor that Sublime is harmless.
• 58:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's a germ that makes you racist kind of.
• 58:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's like a metaphor for racism, but a real person also.
• 58:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's a big smiling, like a book salesman, and also a germ that turns you racist.
• 58:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yes, that's an excellent description.
• 58:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: More some creation who's billions of years old.
• 58:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's kind of all you need.
• 58:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: So he's here too.
• 58:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: And that just makes it, it's said.
• 58:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: So we now flash forward a bit.
• 58:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: We see supply and the professor talking in front of the screen showing pictures of Maverick, John Rath, Silver Fox, and we see Maverick training in the facility.
• 58:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: Their funding has been pulled.
• 58:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: And weapons, eleven and twelve were failures.
• 58:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: So now we have weapon thirteen being developed.
• 58:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: Phenomax, we love phenomax.
• 58:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: The professor chooses to break weapon X off from the plus programs entirely.
• 58:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: So now it's become its own branch, which is still going on in the comics now.
• 58:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: Again, Project Hellfire and Helverine and all that.
• 58:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: We now jump forward a little bit further.
• 58:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: The professor is dead.
• 58:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: Sublime helps cool-cored build the new weapon X program at this time with concentration camps.
• 58:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: And we jumped to twenty five, we're Cornelius and the professor, walk the streets of Roenau, Virginia, where Logan has just slaughtered dozens of innocent civilians at their command.
• 59:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: Cornelius feels the test was very distasteful, but he recognizes it was necessary.
• 59:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: A hundred and sixteen people are killed, and their bodies are burned.
• 59:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: So we're getting more and more bloody history for Wolverine.
• 59:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is a rough series, but the flashbacks do fit nicely in continuity, even though it makes it insane.
• 59:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think this is a really good story within it.
• 59:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: I like the the war of the programs kind of mostly because fan of acts as a ton of fun stuff to do, but this this reveal really makes Cornelius much worse than he was even in the original series that they like they did the thing that they finally said they were going to do they're going to drop them on a city and they say here it's like what if it's not grown up
• 59:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: Next time it'll be Moscow and Tehran and like they're planning to do like this like international terror, which is kind of what weapon acts like deals with like the book weapon acts deals with.
• 59:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's interesting that she was rowing up to there's a whole season of American horror story work where there's that famous story about a group of people that went missing mysteriously.
• 1:00:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: I don't know that we clearly elucidated by the way at the end of Wolverine number fifty it's heavily implied that silver fox killed the professor who was no longer around so true at Hudson is dead at this point.
• 1:00:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: Um, okay.
• 1:00:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: We're going to jump forward again.
• 1:00:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: And Matt, do you want to cover a death of Wolverine for us?
• 1:00:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is a story that went on for so long.
• 1:00:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: I love death of Wolverine.
• 1:00:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's it's Charles Silly sort of this like last little moment where Wolverine is dying and read Richard can't fix him a couple of other people can't fix him and
• 1:00:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: His healing packers gone and he's like dying slowly of adamanty important.
• 1:00:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: But that amantium poison.
• 1:00:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: Every time he pops his claws, he's a little closer to death.
• 1:00:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh man, it's really, it's really some good stuff there.
• 1:00:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: The person who's sending these people to come and kill him, turns out to be hornyly.
• 1:00:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: Right.
• 1:00:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: So Heinz is dead.
• 1:00:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: The professor dead but hornyly is still out there and they bring him back as the big bad for this one story and it's actually really good.
• 1:00:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: So he's in Nevada and he's like experimenting on humans because he wants to perfect his process and like remain relevant.
• 1:00:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's the dying white man who just has to do something terrible before he goes.
• 1:01:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm getting it right Logan.
• 1:01:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm taking everything I've learned in my life.
• 1:01:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: All of my failures and I'm getting it right.
• 1:01:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: I deserve to be known for something other than helping to make a killer unkillable.
• 1:01:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: When I made you an Allison, do you want to read Wolverine here?
• 1:01:13
  [SPEAKER_05]: You didn't make me.
• 1:01:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: I give you your adamanty and skeleton made your claws unbreakable.
• 1:01:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: I've kept up with what you've been doing, Mr. Logan.
• 1:01:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: You think you would ever have become a superhero without me, brightly colored costumes, all that pageantry, you don't belong in bright colors.
• 1:01:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: So he's boosted the subsystems in his subjects to superhuman levels, neurological, endocrine muscular, that perfect
• 1:01:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's even smelted his own adamantium.
• 1:01:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: But every time he injects it into someone, they die horribly, which of course you're putting fucking metal into people.
• 1:01:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: Now he wants Wolverine's healing factor, but Wolverine has lost his healing factor.
• 1:01:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: So he can't perfect his experiments without it.
• 1:01:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: So Cornelius orders him killed by again a major sharp who is a character that ties into weapon X.
• 1:01:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: and has a short life in a marble title that we won't talk about today called The Wolverines.
• 1:02:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's his finest new experiment.
• 1:02:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: So Wolverine's fighting for his life against major sharp and Cornelius is ranting on a loudspeaker.
• 1:02:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, my mistake.
• 1:02:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: I thought about it a lot.
• 1:02:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: I used an animal.
• 1:02:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: You're an animal.
• 1:02:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: They call you Wolverine.
• 1:02:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: I know they do.
• 1:02:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: I kept tabs.
• 1:02:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: Do you know the taxonomic name for Wolverine?
• 1:02:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: Gullo Gullo Latin for gluttonous glutton.
• 1:02:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: They're thirsty horrible creatures.
• 1:02:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: They're steeper killing.
• 1:02:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: They're one of the only creatures that kills for pleasure.
• 1:02:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: other than man, of course.
• 1:02:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's a good name for you.
• 1:02:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: Make something perfect and you're immortal.
• 1:02:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: You matter.
• 1:02:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: I did it wrong the first time around.
• 1:02:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: My mistake.
• 1:02:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: I will change the world for the better before I die.
• 1:02:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: I will.
• 1:02:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: So we'll bring tricks sharp into breaking into Cornelius's office.
• 1:02:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: Cornelius gets impaled by a piece of glass.
• 1:02:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: He runs for it.
• 1:02:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: He tries drowning Wolverine in the smelted adamantium.
• 1:02:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's like this liquid metal that's forming and will be an unbreakable thing.
• 1:02:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: And Wolverine walks toward Cornelius as the adamantium hardens over him.
• 1:03:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: At least I tried.
• 1:03:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: I tried to make something.
• 1:03:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: I tried to change the world.
• 1:03:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: What did you ever do but kill people?
• 1:03:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: What did you ever do?
• 1:03:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: do.
• 1:03:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then Cornelius dies on the roof, drowning in adamantium.
• 1:03:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: The end forever.
• 1:03:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: Fuck you very much, sir.
• 1:03:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's so good.
• 1:03:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Still good because through this whole run and because Charles Solis is genius, Wolverine does do more than just kill people.
• 1:03:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's merciful to Lady Deathstrike and to save her to and to nuke these people who like are coming to hurt and kill him.
• 1:03:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: Wolverine is totally being the actual hero, the like the much more white night and in the end, you know, Cornelius has got to die.
• 1:03:41
  [SPEAKER_05]: I think Wolverine looks really cool.
• 1:03:43
  [SPEAKER_05]: What he's all covered in a hand of Antium when he's dying.
• 1:03:45
  [SPEAKER_05]: I also didn't know that he dies.
• 1:03:47
  [SPEAKER_05]: I went, wait, Matt, does he actually die?
• 1:03:49
  [SPEAKER_05]: And you said that he does.
• 1:03:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: Wolverine does die.
• 1:03:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's then an event launch called The Death of Wolverine, which spins into a bunch of limited series.
• 1:03:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: But then Old Man Logan also gets to come in and be part of the title.
• 1:04:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: So he's not really gone.
• 1:04:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then he comes back because Kate, like, Kate pride, like phased him out of the Antium.
• 1:04:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then people of much of people get his like bones and clone him.
• 1:04:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: And like he turns into all kinds of weapons.
• 1:04:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: It doesn't go well for Krakow.
• 1:04:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: Wolverine is the character that Krakawa was worst for.
• 1:04:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think it really is just a terrible time for him.
• 1:04:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: I love when writers kind of dig in on the Wolverine mythos like Wolverines are real scrapers.
• 1:04:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, they're they're like burrowers.
• 1:04:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's why and then this guy is like they're gluttonous.
• 1:04:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: They're gluttonous gluttones.
• 1:04:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like that's what makes you so crazy.
• 1:04:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think it's dehumanizing though, right?
• 1:04:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, that's the whole thing.
• 1:04:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Is it, that's what, that's what Cornelius has to do to go to sleep at night.
• 1:04:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: He asked the professor how to use sleep at night in, in one of the books.
• 1:04:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: He says, oh, easily in my bed.
• 1:04:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think Cornelius really doesn't sleep very well having done this.
• 1:04:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: So he's like, you are an animal, and I can only live with myself if you are the professor.
• 1:04:49
  [SPEAKER_05]: They say when they're, the Roanoke issue, and he says with a quilt made by my aunt, Trudy.
• 1:04:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: Cornelius is a character who was an unethical scientist who gets recruited into this crazy project and bringing him as the big bad for this fight scene and then writing his death the way they do is so great.
• 1:05:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's a really phenomenal that he drowns an out of man team and as far as we know he's still dead.
• 1:05:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: It wasn't a ruse all three of the scientists are dead at this point.
• 1:05:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: We do see him in a bunch of different flashbacks from modern stories.
• 1:05:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: We're not going to cover them in detail, but we do see him in like old man Logan, twenty one Wolverine exit wounds Wolverine black white and blood.
• 1:05:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then we get him in X lives of Wolverine.
• 1:05:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: But do you want to tell us what this series is?
• 1:05:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's a really fun then Percy ride.
• 1:05:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is the best story in Korea.
• 1:05:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I will fight someone who disagrees with me.
• 1:05:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think it's the best thing.
• 1:05:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's Omega Red in Russia being sent through time to kill Wolverine or Professor X while Jean Grey and the professor said Wolverine to fight him.
• 1:05:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's this incredible because it happens in time.
• 1:05:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Everything they do really happens.
• 1:05:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: Jean Grey says a professor in Jean Grey have a whole conversation where it's like, what are we going to do with time?
• 1:05:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: Omega Red becomes the midwife delivering Charles Xavier.
• 1:06:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: He becomes his wife as they lay together to have a hockey hero.
• 1:06:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: He was inside of Omega Red.
• 1:06:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's no other way to read that than that Logan was inside Omega Red.
• 1:06:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: So there is one scene of Cornelius experimenting on Logan through all of this.
• 1:06:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: In X-Lives of Wolverine four, you won't remember this.
• 1:06:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: As I continue to study the limits and potential of your body, you'll be mind-wipe daily.
• 1:06:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: You're such a promising basin ingredient, like hot steel before it's hammered into a blade, but I've noted some impurities.
• 1:06:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: A closer examination of your blood has revealed some sort of contagion or parasite.
• 1:06:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: He notices there's a symbiote in Wolverine's blood, which is a thing because Wolverine bonded with the symbiote back in Vietnam.
• 1:06:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: Basically, we'll get to that story at other time.
• 1:06:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: Before we root it out of you, I'm going to run a few experiments to better understand the anomaly.
• 1:06:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: Do you mind?
• 1:06:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: Of course you don't.
• 1:06:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then he's possessed by a mega red as part of this adventure.
• 1:06:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: A mega red possessed Dr. Cordelia's during all of this.
• 1:06:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: But he bounces out of his form and Cordelia's gets to like a room and uses some sonics to like blast the symbiote off of Logan.
• 1:07:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: The end.
• 1:07:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then there's the Romulus of it all.
• 1:07:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: But that's the end for Dr. Cordelia.
• 1:07:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: So what are your thoughts on Cordelia's versus the symbiote?
• 1:07:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: This poor man.
• 1:07:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: Oh no, man.
• 1:07:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: This fucking asshole nevermind.
• 1:07:13
  [SPEAKER_05]: Matt, what's the name of the symbiote?
• 1:07:14
  [SPEAKER_05]: You said it wasn't venom.
• 1:07:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's not.
• 1:07:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's the name of the comic that he appears to.
• 1:07:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: I like his design.
• 1:07:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: I like the big sorely red face.
• 1:07:23
  [SPEAKER_05]: It's really funny to zoom in on the microscope, but there's a bunch of tiny bit of them.
• 1:07:27
  [SPEAKER_05]: That's really funny.
• 1:07:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: I do weekly episodes of my show.
• 1:07:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: We could go to early Wolverine stories that are modern stories set in his prehistory, and I could do a full four to six months on my show, just covering those stories.
• 1:07:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: One of them is the Vietnam Wolverine free cool.
• 1:07:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: The rich interior world of Dr. Abraham Cornelius.
• 1:07:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is a fascinating character in some ways.
• 1:07:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: I fucking hate him, but I like the space that he occupies one more insane Marvel mad scientist.
• 1:07:55
  [SPEAKER_05]: He gives off like dad who is not in contact with his children anymore, sitting alone with a TV dinner, watching TV and falling asleep in a lazy boy.
• 1:08:03
  [SPEAKER_05]: That's the kind of energy that he gives me.
• 1:08:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: he gives me if you guys have seen breaking that he gives me Walter White after he is like paid to have his identity like if you remember those in the later season he like he gets to live he escapes but he has to live in a trailer in the middle of nowhere with like no contact with that he would be so sad and he just wants so badly to be relevant and that big rant of like I created you Wolverine you should be grateful for what I've done a fuck you man
• 1:08:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: The only thing he did, right?
• 1:08:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: He has no other laurels to rest on other than making Wolverine.
• 1:08:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: So he's trying to make.
• 1:08:35
  [SPEAKER_05]: You're a doctor.
• 1:08:36
  [SPEAKER_05]: You should know what happens when you put hot metal in people's bodies.
• 1:08:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: He had to think that they were just killing a guy, right?
• 1:08:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: When they didn't know he was a mutant, that is a thing that is always bothered being about the original story.
• 1:08:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: What did you think was going to happen to just some guy?
• 1:08:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: I don't need to see this character back.
• 1:08:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: I do think it's fun to ask the question like what story do we need.
• 1:08:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: It would be fun to have like he has a child who wants to like do good and Wolverine's life because her dad was a fucking evil monster.
• 1:09:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: Or it would be interesting to see like he created an AI version of himself who like ends up in like a Shiva unit and comes after Wolverine.
• 1:09:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I think there's some fun things to do with him, but this is not a character I need to see again.
• 1:09:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm almost more interested in seeing Carol Hines back than I have, Dr. Cordelia's, because I think there's some interesting things for her, because we don't get that deeper exploration.
• 1:09:22
  [SPEAKER_05]: Same the whole time I was like, okay, focus on Cornelia's, and I was like, but what's going on with this bitch Carol Hines over here?
• 1:09:28
  [SPEAKER_05]: She seems very, why are you in this job?
• 1:09:31
  [SPEAKER_05]: Why are you dealing with this bullshit?
• 1:09:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: Harold Hines is like six foot and like a hundred and ten pound.
• 1:09:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: She's kind of like a bean pole.
• 1:09:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: And she's this like tightly short, like little Bob Brown hairdo.
• 1:09:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think I don't know.
• 1:09:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think she's really interesting.
• 1:09:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: She gives off kind of like June cleaver vibes a little bit.
• 1:09:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think she's really, I would love to do something.
• 1:09:49
  [SPEAKER_05]: You're just kind of like, why are you here?
• 1:09:51
  [SPEAKER_05]: And that's an interesting question.
• 1:09:52
  [SPEAKER_05]: Like I know why Cornelius is here.
• 1:09:54
  [SPEAKER_05]: I know why the professors here.
• 1:09:55
  [SPEAKER_05]: I totally get it.
• 1:09:56
  [SPEAKER_05]: But I'm like, why are you here?
• 1:09:57
  [SPEAKER_05]: I'm interested.
• 1:09:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: I love I love making these episodes because it solidifies storylines and character in my brain and it's only when we talk about it that we see the possibility so I'd love to as we're wrapping up here any final thoughts you have about Dr. Abraham Cornelius and then as we're wrapping up where can people find you both online and what would you like to plug for the end of February?
• 1:10:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think having had this conversation with everybody, he's the worst of the three of easily, because he's the least committed to it.
• 1:10:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's wishy-washy by the end.
• 1:10:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: He thinks he did it all, but there were two other people for many other people.
• 1:10:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's just the fucking worst and rest in peace, rest in hell, dude.
• 1:10:33
  [SPEAKER_05]: If you're going to be evil, fucking commit, you can find us at
• 1:10:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: I can't remember who's escape mode on blue sky and escape the mode reverse on Instagram.
• 1:10:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm Matt parent on blue sky and that Allison is Allison parent on blue sky.
• 1:10:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's so easy.
• 1:10:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I just have a really fun energy.
• 1:10:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: I really enjoy the interchange between you and I hope to come on your show sometime and I'd love to on mine sometime
• 1:10:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: Gremalken Lane, you can follow Gremalken Underscored Lane on Instagram.
• 1:11:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: We're also Gremalken Lane on Blue Sky.
• 1:11:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I keep my on social media private because I get the two of you are welcome to add me just ask.
• 1:11:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: On the show for the next Patreon episode after this, you can find me and we're delving into an early seventies mutant little known never associated with the X-Men called the Gibbon.
• 1:11:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's a really lame Spider-Man foe and he's a mutant.
• 1:11:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's going to be a delightful recording.
• 1:11:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: Out on the main show, watch for our script reading of X-Men, Ninety-Five, jumping into the new month.
• 1:11:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: And in March, we're going to be celebrating the character John Proud star, or Thunderbird.
• 1:11:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm featuring native voices in native talent through much of the month.
• 1:11:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: And the trial at the end of month, the month will be called about John Proud star, or about Thunderbird.
• 1:11:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I'm really excited.
• 1:11:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: I worked really hard out at it.
• 1:11:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's going to be a wonderful series to put together.
• 1:11:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: One of my goals on the Patreon this year is we're covering a lot of the crazy, but I also, as we're introducing new characters like Storm, Colossus, Wolverine and Nightcrawler, I wanna have some side episodes that explore characters around them.
• 1:11:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: Matt and Allison, it was so wonderful to see you both so great to meet you.
• 1:11:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: I can't wait to hang out again, and thank you everybody for listening.
• 1:12:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: I hope you learned some stuff and had a good time, and we'll see you all back here next time on The Great Mocking Lane, Patreon Show.
• 1:12:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: And now stay tuned for some thoughts on fascism, as a special guest and I talked about a red skull story, and it's modern applications.
• 1:12:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: For over three months, in nineteen forty, the Nazis launched a massive aerial campaign over Great Britain attempting to destroy the royal air force, and thus clear the way for an invasion on land.
• 1:12:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: But the RAF held their ground in what has come to be known as the Battle of Britain.
• 1:12:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: giving Hitler his first great military defeat.
• 1:12:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: Over the next few years, Germany continually bombed London and other major cities seeking to break British morale, requiring civilians to sacrifice and live in danger and chaos for months and months.
• 1:12:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: Listen to my conversation with Paul Jenkins from last time for some real world applications in that times impact on his family personally.
• 1:12:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: Over forty thousand civilians were killed during the course of these bombings, so it was a pretty big deal.
• 1:13:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: We're gonna jump to Captain Britain, numbers twenty through twenty-seven.
• 1:13:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: We're gonna get a little head, we're doing Captain Britain's stories on the show, but this was fun to read ahead.
• 1:13:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: Believing his greatest photo be dead, the Red Skull gathered his Nazi agents in Britain and looking at a photo, a personal photo that he kept of Adolf Hitler, he vowed to conquer Britain.
• 1:13:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: Then the Red Skull captured real-life Prime Minister James Calligan, and he yells in his face, for a decade, I haven't done a British stubbornness.
• 1:13:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: I watched your unbending people resist the onslaught of the their marked, and eventually defeat my beloved fielder, but no longer will our destiny be denied.
• 1:13:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now victory will be ours.
• 1:13:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: You are mad, yells, Kelligan.
• 1:13:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: If Hitler's army couldn't defeat us, what could you and your henchmen hope to accomplish?
• 1:13:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: I will allow you to ponder that in the loneliness of a cell where the rabble usually ponder my ultimatum, surrounded within twelve hours of face annihilation.
• 1:13:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: Meanwhile, Captain Britain and Captain America have saved the kidnapped Jamie and Betsy Braddock from being tied to chairs in their rich white house.
• 1:14:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: And they rushed to fight back, but the red skull has loyal agents among the British populace.
• 1:14:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: We also get a Captain Britain fun page here by the way where there is literally a maze to the mind of the red skull.
• 1:14:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's just a swastika in the center.
• 1:14:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: So it's a little maze.
• 1:14:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's a big face of the red skull when you get to the center.
• 1:14:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's just a swastika in the middle.
• 1:14:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's on a Captain Britain fun page.
• 1:14:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's just crazy.
• 1:14:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: So Captain Britain and Captain America, once again, attacked the red skull and rejoicing and watching them fight his armed men.
• 1:14:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: I allow you to live a bit longer to witness the utter defeat of this liberty-loving land, this land of fools who have always resisted the indescribable joy of tyranny, a holding both captains and the Prime Minister hostage, the Red Skull demands that Parliament's surrender-governmental control to him threatening to set off a German bomb inside a big ban if they don't.
• 1:14:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: The heroes eventually narrowly stop the bomb from going off.
• 1:14:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's a battle on big ban, which is the most British thing possible, and the Red Skull manages to teleport away to safety in the end.
• 1:15:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: and oversimplifies summary of a pretty fun story, but again, some very jarring real world applications as well.
• 1:15:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: Let me welcome one of my favorite people in the world, Robin Mothet, to talk about this crazy story.
• 1:15:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: Robin, are you a red skull fan?
• 1:15:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: I wouldn't call myself a fan.
• 1:15:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: I have to say I appreciate the one thing I do really enjoy about the red skull is taking something that is especially historically has been a terrifyingness in that season and allowing characters like the red skull to exist it really lamp in them.
• 1:15:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: A successful way, I think it prunes Nazis, which could be a very unsettling thing to have in comics and makes it silly enough to fit into the universe, but also kind of removes it while still allowing us to ridicule and lampoon Nazi ideology.
• 1:15:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: I like what the Red Skull of Represents and how we can take the piss out of that.
• 1:15:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: I wouldn't say I'm a fan of them, I think he's a bit of a dickhead.
• 1:15:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: I love how he keeps just a little picture of it off Hitler on the wall.
• 1:16:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: You picked like like good night before he goes to sleep.
• 1:16:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: I don't know.
• 1:16:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's like, I'm going to do this crazy world.
• 1:16:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Honestly, you cannot tell me that that's the only thing he does with that picture.
• 1:16:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like that man is homo erotic.
• 1:16:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: His sexuality is Hitler.
• 1:16:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it is concerning.
• 1:16:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: I have always thought he was a little bit fruity.
• 1:16:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then reading this comic from the seven years, I'm like, oh, that man's a homosexual.
• 1:16:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's why he joined the party.
• 1:16:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was like, I need to repress this.
• 1:16:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: When you read his origin, when you read his origin, Hitler sees a bellhop working in a hotel and was like, there, that bellhop.
• 1:16:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: He looks at me with such evil.
• 1:16:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: I will make him the most evil man ever.
• 1:16:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's very, it's very liberal, with like a young protege.
• 1:16:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, you are joking.
• 1:16:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's not joking.
• 1:16:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's a real, that's the real origin.
• 1:16:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh my god, that is so unsettling.
• 1:16:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: The idea, imagine going to a hotel in Germany and the red skull is your bellboy.
• 1:16:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh no, that's too much.
• 1:16:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: I can't handle that.
• 1:17:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: This story obviously has a lot of crazy silly can't be moments where there's some things that really stood out to you as like favorite moments.
• 1:17:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, let's be in the germ bomb in Big Ben.
• 1:17:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh my god, the germ bomb was insane.
• 1:17:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: The person from the government climbing the side of Big Ben almost getting stuck on the hands of Big Ben and then realizing, oh no, the arms of Big Ben are going to swing down and I'm going to fall to my desk and I'm like, did you not consider how clocks work?
• 1:17:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is a, that's generally something that most of us understand about clock.
• 1:17:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, this was the weirdest, most like,
• 1:17:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: soft to sigh, sigh, version of a James Bond film I have ever seen.
• 1:17:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was fascinating.
• 1:17:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's so many, honestly it is a fever dream.
• 1:17:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you're listening to this and you have not read it, please just go ahead and read this.
• 1:17:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's on Marvel Limited.
• 1:17:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is insanity.
• 1:17:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: We could sit here for three hours and explain it and you wouldn't quite understand just how bonkers the story is.
• 1:17:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is fun.
• 1:17:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's wild.
• 1:17:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm tracking the red skull from story to story throughout this.
• 1:18:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's truly insane, especially the early stuff.
• 1:18:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's so silly.
• 1:18:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then it gets so dark.
• 1:18:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: So he's kidnapped a prime minister.
• 1:18:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: We keep talking about the real world applications of fascism where there's very much, let's have the giant superhero fight over here to draw everyone's attention.
• 1:18:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: Meanwhile, I have my secret agents doing this thing.
• 1:18:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: No one's paying attention to over there.
• 1:18:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's very that, but it's a silly superhero story at the same time.
• 1:18:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: People tied to chairs, you know, no one actually dies, but it's fascism that they're fighting, which is, which is a crazy thing.
• 1:18:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's weird because like you say, the way that the Prime Minister is kidnapped, it's not even like in a James Bond way where like agents come in and grab them.
• 1:18:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: You literally just disappears in the puff of smoke like it is really silly, but as you say, it's very much pulling on and riffing on very messy and concerns that
• 1:18:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: unfortunately are just as relevant in twenty twenty five as they have ever been.
• 1:18:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: This story I think is fun because it sets at a good distance that aspects of this that are really concerning.
• 1:19:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's as kind of just have fun with it because obviously if you took everything in this story very seriously not that many changes would have to happen for this to be like an actual sort of noir thriller scale but it just sets on this
• 1:19:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: like junction of super hero comics in North Railroad that is just silly but yeah it is really pulling on a lot of more concerning things I would say.
• 1:19:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: I really enjoy watching straight porn sometimes if it's good there was a straight porn movie I watched years ago I wouldn't even know where to find this but the plot line was there was like a mad man who had put like a bomb that was gonna go off and kill millions unless the really hot prime minister fucked a porn star on camera on BBC for everyone to watch.
• 1:19:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: What was it?
• 1:19:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Was it the red skull?
• 1:19:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's the only way that makes sense.
• 1:19:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the prime minister was really hot.
• 1:19:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh my god.
• 1:19:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: I cannot say that I've seen that film.
• 1:19:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'll maybe try and go and find it after that.
• 1:19:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: But now you're going to go on board and I know it.
• 1:20:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Purely for research purposes.
• 1:20:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Purely for research.
• 1:20:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's the real one of the application I opened with as well.
• 1:20:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, Britain really fought hard and so many people died and it was the place that
• 1:20:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: that the Nazis never took over.
• 1:20:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: But here, the Red Skull's trying to tie up loose business from years ago.
• 1:20:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's taken over governments wherever he can.
• 1:20:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: So it's interesting to watch this guy not just fighting Captain America, but jumping around the world and trying to do these different platforms along the way.
• 1:20:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think just here and you say that is really interesting because, for anyone who doesn't know, I study German at university, when you study a language like German,
• 1:20:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: It means that you anytime I said to anyone over the age of like forty, why was studying at university?
• 1:20:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: I would get all sorts of stories about World War II.
• 1:20:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: I've heard a lot of it from the older generation, and it was interesting.
• 1:20:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: First of all, I'm over forty, and thank you for calling me the older generation.
• 1:20:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I mean, I was like nineteen when I started my university court.
• 1:20:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: No, I was like seventeen when I started my university court.
• 1:20:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: So forty to seventeen, that was an older generation.
• 1:21:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: I have almost part, I'm not going into, I'm not going into.
• 1:21:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I've heard a lot of stories from people who have more direct experiences with World War II and Nazism.
• 1:21:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And one thing that's always very relevant, not relevant.
• 1:21:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of the things that's always there is the way that national socialism is determined
• 1:21:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: to feel nostalgic for something that never really existed.
• 1:21:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that actually that's what we're seeing in this story is the red skull is nostalgic for a conquered Britain, which has never actually happened.
• 1:21:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Nazis never did that, but his ideologies so determined that that needs to happen that it almost feels like he's the nostalgic for it.
• 1:21:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in much the same way Hitler was nostalgic for an ideal of Germany that had never actually existed, but he wanted to almost rewrite history.
• 1:21:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was interested in how there's that thread of the guest illusion in the core of that ideology.
• 1:21:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it's really interesting the story picks it that in a way that I think is probably not intentional, but is just it's such a common beat in that
• 1:22:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: We have the theme package that I read, where he says, I'll allow you to live a little bit longer to witness the other defeat of this liberty loving land.
• 1:22:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yes, land of fools who have always resisted the quote, the indescribable joys of tyranny.
• 1:22:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, for who?
• 1:22:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: Fuck you, man.
• 1:22:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: Okay, so this is, I've done a few of these reds called stories now, more than ten.
• 1:22:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: the truly most insane moment thus far and maybe ever, I'll have to see because I'm doing them one to time.
• 1:22:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: The Captain Britain fun page, it's a red skull head maze and you get to the middle of the maze and it's just a little swastika that you find, this is for children.
• 1:22:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is like crazy.
• 1:22:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is insane, but I guess that also does make sense because when you think about the demographic of, like this was coming, this was what?
• 1:22:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:22:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: You're talking about people who these are now the children of the children of people who had gone off to war in World War II.
• 1:22:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I think it actually does make a lot of sense that we're seeing that because there is that it's that point where there's so much distance that you've got three generations of impact from this and now it's at the point where it's like, well, we can be kind of silly with this.
• 1:23:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's been so much like we are so far removed from that.
• 1:23:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: We don't really have to take it as seriously anymore.
• 1:23:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I can see how that's there.
• 1:23:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: But given that the fascist ideology has just come right back round, it's kind of unsettling when you're going back to this in twenty twenty five and going, oh God, how rules tinted it must have been to be there in nineteen seventy seven and be like, oh yeah, my kids are doing a fun page with a swastika in the middle of it.
• 1:23:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's fine.
• 1:23:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: If we put your head on a Captain Britain fun page, what would be the single image in the center of your maze?
• 1:23:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, God, right?
• 1:23:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is it going to be a diamond for Emma Frost?
• 1:23:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Or is it going to be a little baby Phoenix for Rachel Summers?
• 1:23:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is it going to be a little baby Phoenix holding a diamond?
• 1:23:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: There we go.
• 1:23:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: We also got to see Rachel's girlfriend Betsy.
• 1:23:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: Who is clearly not a well-developed character here?
• 1:23:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: Because the Red School has just tied up like a telepath and an Omega altering mutant in shares in the background.
• 1:24:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 1:24:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: I, I, I, I said, she bought stuff.
• 1:24:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was just like, oh, okay.
• 1:24:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, okay, she's she's nothing character here.
• 1:24:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: She is like, it's it's really fun.
• 1:24:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when we've been doing the Captain Britain, we've been through is we're seeing all these characters that have so much more dementia and sort of so much more dementia and so much more in TBR to them.
• 1:24:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: But when you're going back to these very early stories, it's just fascinating.
• 1:24:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And obviously there's the hope, how does that fit?
• 1:24:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: And she's a telepath.
• 1:24:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: She should be able to do something about this.
• 1:24:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: But like, you just put that to the side.
• 1:24:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
• 1:24:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's weird.
• 1:24:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: The last thing I'll mention here, and we'll play up on this more in future episodes, but we get to see Captain Britain and Captain America working together, right?
• 1:24:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's a representation of the allied forces.
• 1:24:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: If we can all work together, we can triumph over Nazism together, right?
• 1:24:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: So that's one of the themes that we see explored here, as well.
• 1:24:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: I don't know if you had any thoughts on this team up before we wrap up.
• 1:24:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I think what's interesting is the positioning them together actually kind of highlights the ways that they're different because for me I've always kind of just thought of them I think I've said this before Captain Britain when you were Scottish he doesn't really represent my country because I see my country as Scotland not Britain so he's always felt like oh that he's Captain England basically he's for another country watching the so I can't just think of Captain
• 1:25:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Captain Britain caps in America, they're the same.
• 1:25:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: When I see them together, I see the ways in which they actually are very different, because Captain Britain with his secret identity, he pulls a lot more from similar experience to Spider-Man.
• 1:25:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it's really interesting to see a Captain America figure, but with the Spider-Man backstory, I think it's really interesting the way that they played together.
• 1:25:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Obviously, you've got the M allegory to
• 1:25:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: allied forces, but then I'm like, well, can we get a little Captain France in here?
• 1:25:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, there's so many more characters that we should be seeing, but of course, it's British and American comics, so we're just going to see these.
• 1:25:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it's more of a modern read to understand that America and Britain, because these are two men dressed in flags who are, you know, long.
• 1:25:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: white guys who have certain status as a privilege, you know, Brian more than Steve Rogers of course, but both both countries being colonialists who have kind of had fascist turns in recent years and kind of have always been there.
• 1:26:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: So, you know, colonialism versus fascism isn't a great read, but it's what existed at the time.
• 1:26:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: So it's an interesting view.
• 1:26:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: Any final thoughts, Robin Martin?
• 1:26:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: My final thoughts are, if you have not already in your listen to this, please go and read this story.
• 1:26:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is bonkers.
• 1:26:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: As Tritad and I have discussed, it does pull on and will briefly reference a lot of and much more serious themes.
• 1:26:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: But at the end of the day, this is just a really fun and silly story.
• 1:26:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that especially in this era that we're currently living in, sometimes
• 1:26:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: having a little bit of distance but still being able to take the piss out of things that are genuinely quite scary can be a way to feel a little bit more powerful in this world so please go and read it and just enjoy and that's he being an absolute shit hit.
• 1:26:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's very least you're like up the Captain Britain fun page.
• 1:26:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: Oh my god.
• 1:26:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: Alright everybody thank you so much.
• 1:27:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: Thank you Robin Muffett.
• 1:27:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: We'll see you back next time for the next installment.