Latest / Graymalkin Lane the podcast / Uncanny Origin 8: From Circus Freak to X-Man! Featuring Bailie Rosenlund and Anthony Oliveira!

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Uncanny Origin 8: From Circus Freak to X-Man! Featuring Bailie Rosenlund and Anthony Oliveira! · Graymalkin Lane the podcast

• 0:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Hey everybody, welcome back to The Great Mulk and Lane podcast.
• 0:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: We are queer friends and allies, gathered to review and discuss the original X-Men comics in continuity order, and hey happy new year, we're recording this in November, but it's going to come out in January, so I hope you had an amazing holiday season.
• 0:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: I am so happy to be joined by the incredible Bailey Rosenland and the incredible Anthony Olavera, two of the powerhouse team members behind Avengers Academy.
• 0:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: And today, at least in the early half, it's gonna be a full celebration of all Avengers Academy wonderfulness.
• 0:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I'm really happy to have you both here.
• 0:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: This has been one of my favorite books in a long time.
• 0:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I'm so sad it's not coming out every week at I know we're all feeling that way.
• 0:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Let me have, you both introduce yourselves very quickly with your name and pronouns and my initial question to you both, simply because there's nightcrawler month on the show.
• 0:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's what do you love about Kurt Wagner?
• 0:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: Let me welcome Bailey Rosenland back to the show, Hi Bailey.
• 0:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hi, thanks for having me.
• 0:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Bailey Russland for an answer.
• 1:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: She her.
• 1:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm one of the artists on academy and I don't know.
• 1:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think ever since I was like a kid I just thought that crawler was so cool.
• 1:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
• 1:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's got the teleport and he's just fun.
• 1:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: You look good dance.
• 1:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah
• 1:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: And Anthony Oliveira is here too.
• 1:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: Hi, Anthony.
• 1:18
  [SPEAKER_04]: Hello.
• 1:18
  [SPEAKER_04]: Hi.
• 1:19
  [SPEAKER_04]: Uh, I'm Anthony Oliveira.
• 1:20
  [SPEAKER_04]: Uh, any pronouns or fine.
• 1:22
  [SPEAKER_04]: I am the writer, un Avengers Academy.
• 1:24
  [SPEAKER_04]: Uh, or I was the writer, I'm just a Academy RIP.
• 1:26
  [SPEAKER_04]: Avengers Academy.
• 1:27
  [SPEAKER_04]: Uh, what do I love about Kurt Wagner?
• 1:30
  [SPEAKER_04]: I, there's a lot to love about Kurt.
• 1:31
  [SPEAKER_04]: I think he's a lot of people's first monster fucker.
• 1:34
  [SPEAKER_04]: But I love Kurt because he's a Catholic character, which is rare.
• 1:39
  [SPEAKER_04]: But he's a Catholic character who has fun, which I think is also important.
• 1:42
  [SPEAKER_04]: Like, we've got Daredevil to be sad, but we've got Kurt to have that zest for life that I feel like is important.
• 1:47
  [SPEAKER_04]: I have an eye chance to write him, really, and I'd love a crack at that boy.
• 1:51
  [SPEAKER_04]: Oh, who wouldn't?
• 1:53
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
• 1:54
  [SPEAKER_04]: What that tale do?
• 1:57
  [UNKNOWN]: So sad.
• 1:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: The today we're going to begin our conversation.
• 2:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm doing a non-traditional interview for Avengers Academy today.
• 2:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm just going to introduce some topics and we're going to let the conversations go where they may.
• 2:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: I recently got to do an entire read through of this series.
• 2:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: I loved it.
• 2:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: I got emotional, the final issue packed such a delicious punch.
• 2:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm a huge fan of this book and of both of you.
• 2:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: Anthony, tell me about the delicious flavors of Niffelheimer Schmitz.
• 2:21
  [SPEAKER_04]: Oh, yeah, I knew there's something I think about a lot.
• 2:26
  [SPEAKER_04]: I think it was Mark Wade who said it.
• 2:29
  [SPEAKER_04]: But when you're designing a comic book, you have to think about the play sets.
• 2:33
  [SPEAKER_04]: You have to think about where the characters go and where they hang out.
• 2:37
  [SPEAKER_04]: Same as true for like sitcoms and stuff like that.
• 2:39
  [SPEAKER_04]: So I knew I needed third places for characters to congregate and because they were underage, many of them are all of them in the United States.
• 2:47
  [SPEAKER_04]: So a nice cream place seemed logical to me.
• 2:50
  [SPEAKER_04]: I love ice cream.
• 2:50
  [SPEAKER_04]: There's a lot of ice cream places near me and they all know me by name at this point So I had that and then I knew I wanted this as guardian character in the background So I think the flavors at niffelheim Richmond.
• 3:03
  [SPEAKER_04]: We know a few of them.
• 3:04
  [SPEAKER_04]: They have a mint chocolate They have tiger tail, which is kind of Canadian actually apparently, but it's black licorice
• 3:11
  [SPEAKER_04]: an orange Herbert in stripes and we know from the garden party episode but they are using as guardian goat milk in the ice cream.
• 3:23
  [SPEAKER_04]: So, uh, allergists beware, I think.
• 3:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Billy, tell me about the gothic fashions of animal debate.
• 3:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, I mean, they're great.
• 3:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I think, like, Carolina designed a positive, right?
• 3:37
  [SPEAKER_05]: Yes, yeah.
• 3:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 3:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I didn't have much of a hand in her look, but like, I don't know, like, the full leather trench coat with, like, the, the, like, boots that turn into pants.
• 3:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't think you can really, like, beat that.
• 3:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Interesting.
• 3:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: And iconic look.
• 3:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Anthony, tell me about the cosmic amplification of Sheila Saxon.
• 3:57
  [SPEAKER_04]: Oh, yeah.
• 4:00
  [SPEAKER_04]: When I knew I wanted Sheila on the team, like she was kind of one of the pieces that the whole book was built around.
• 4:07
  [SPEAKER_04]: And the thing that fans always complained about Escapade was that her power set was confusing.
• 4:15
  [SPEAKER_04]: That was kind of the problem of Escapade as we inherited her.
• 4:18
  [SPEAKER_04]: What interested me is I felt like Escapade also was confused by her powers that it was unclear to her how this was working.
• 4:25
  [SPEAKER_04]: And she in a very dazzle or kind of way had not interrogated it too much.
• 4:30
  [SPEAKER_04]: I always think that panel where Cyclops asks does they're like don't you wonder where your powers can much Like nope, and I felt like ascaped was not interested in like the house and why is but I was and so I knew from the very beginning Where we were going for the finale that RIP the finale that has not
• 4:47
  [SPEAKER_04]: materialized, but as reality warping became increasingly something I wanted to think about, I knew that Escapade's power was going to be kind of this Einstein Rosenbridge to other realities that she was pulling facts and configurations from other worlds into hours and holding it like a muscle for a minute.
• 5:06
  [SPEAKER_04]: And I knew that that meant that this power could be developed.
• 5:10
  [SPEAKER_04]: And gradually that turned into the beat that pays off the M-play arc where proximity becomes not as it wouldn't in post Einstein, in physics.
• 5:19
  [SPEAKER_04]: Paximate doesn't matter.
• 5:20
  [SPEAKER_04]: She can kind of pull as she needs to.
• 5:23
  [SPEAKER_04]: And then now you input it up for the pride issue.
• 5:25
  [SPEAKER_04]: And now it's become part of this character's journey.
• 5:27
  [SPEAKER_04]: I think is going to be like, well, what are the limits here?
• 5:30
  [SPEAKER_04]: And it's attracting bigger scarier fish, as we saw towards the end of the book.
• 5:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: Marvel voices story that Al-Yuing wrote used Sheila trading places with the cosmic entity the the queen of never's and using it to wipe out the Yeah, you pull them that longer like it was it was it was quite the quite it was it was fascinating like I didn't know He was doing that until the issue came out and it's like, oh, this is like that Al wrote the Avengers Academy book for pride and I didn't which I think is very
• 6:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: Uh, Bailey, tell me about the narrative inconvenience of Devil Dinosaur.
• 6:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wait, like, how do you mean, like, you can interpret that however you like, I just I feel like he's a character that's very difficult to work into a scrolling book off to Oh, yeah, you really have to be careful on like how to frame everything because scale wise he's just so massive.
• 6:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: So a lot of times you kind of have to like budget a little like sometimes Lou now is writing him and she's a lot bigger than she probably should be and you just kind of have to make that work
• 6:35
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I knew he was going to be a problem from the jump.
• 6:38
  [SPEAKER_04]: He's great in a Lunalla solo book, but as soon as you put her on a team, it's like, well, there's also a giant dinosaur in the book.
• 6:45
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's called Avengers Academy, we're inside most of the time.
• 6:48
  [SPEAKER_04]: So it was very important to me early on to be like, there's a paddock for dinosaurs.
• 6:52
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's attached to the savage land.
• 6:53
  [SPEAKER_04]: He's so happy.
• 6:54
  [SPEAKER_04]: Look at him with his ball.
• 6:56
  [SPEAKER_04]: He's here when we need him.
• 6:58
  [SPEAKER_04]: I did want to do an all-pets issue.
• 6:59
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's in the sort of flashboard and issue 60, but we'd never got to happen unfortunately.
• 7:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: What have been so fun?
• 7:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: Anthony, tell me about the pimply globes of Daniel Burkhardt.
• 7:10
  [SPEAKER_04]: Hudson Burkhardt, Daniel Burkhardt.
• 7:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, yes, yes, yes, I'm sorry.
• 7:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Hudson Burkhardt.
• 7:15
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, Hudson's the worst thing I've ever done.
• 7:18
  [SPEAKER_04]: I think like a jack.
• 7:21
  [SPEAKER_04]: Jaco Lanter is a horrible little Grimlin.
• 7:24
  [SPEAKER_04]: Unfortunately, I fall in love with him and I am shocked to the other people did too.
• 7:29
  [SPEAKER_04]: I wanted him to be everyone's first gay hook-up, but like what if we had affection and kindness for that character?
• 7:37
  [SPEAKER_04]: Like he is, I went to an all-boys Catholic school.
• 7:40
  [SPEAKER_04]: I fold around with many a Hudson Burkhardt when I was a kid.
• 7:44
  [SPEAKER_04]: I know that character very, very well, unfortunately.
• 7:48
  [SPEAKER_04]: And the butts, they were pimply.
• 7:50
  [SPEAKER_04]: That's just the truth of the matter.
• 7:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: Bailey, tell me about the pink power of Cindy Shears.
• 7:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, I love Sydney.
• 8:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: She was so much red.
• 8:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think, um, was it back and she appeared in issue four for the first time, right?
• 8:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Remember being told she was just kind of like a, like, she will only exist in that one panel and then never again.
• 8:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then like a few weeks later I get issue diet and we're like no Cindy's back.
• 8:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: She's here to stay Which I was very happy about.
• 8:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: She was so much fun.
• 8:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know she's just like I love her like Peanuts and Colin everyone dweaves and like and there's just got a good energy and we all deserve a little pink power from Cindy's years
• 8:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: Anthony, tell me about the sexual liberation of Justin Jin.
• 8:38
  [SPEAKER_04]: Oh, yeah, this was so important to me.
• 8:40
  [SPEAKER_04]: I've written Wikin and Hulkling a lot.
• 8:43
  [SPEAKER_04]: And I love them and they meant a lot to me as a kid.
• 8:45
  [SPEAKER_04]: But Wikin and Hulkling are sort of an action figure set.
• 8:48
  [SPEAKER_04]: They arrive together, right?
• 8:49
  [SPEAKER_04]: Like, can't have one without the other.
• 8:51
  [SPEAKER_04]: And that's kind of the point of their representation, like happy gay couple.
• 8:54
  [SPEAKER_04]: and I love writing them and I think they're so important and it's fun to sort of monkey with that.
• 8:58
  [SPEAKER_04]: But what I wanted to do was the thing that almost never happens.
• 9:02
  [SPEAKER_04]: Big two comics tend to have queer representation and those characters are very often paired off very early.
• 9:08
  [SPEAKER_04]: I think it's well-meaning, but I think it's
• 9:10
  [SPEAKER_04]: I think queer characters are rushed to the end.
• 9:12
  [SPEAKER_04]: They get married.
• 9:13
  [SPEAKER_04]: They adopt kids and they live happily ever after.
• 9:16
  [SPEAKER_04]: And it's like happily ever after doesn't happen in comics.
• 9:18
  [SPEAKER_04]: So I wanted a character who lives a whole journey as a queer person and gets to have.
• 9:24
  [SPEAKER_04]: Doesn't meet their one true love at the beginning.
• 9:26
  [SPEAKER_04]: a thing that I feel like we don't see much in comics, especially big two comics is queer characters who get to arrive in stories and be messy and make mistakes and date the wrong people and hook up with the wrong people.
• 9:38
  [SPEAKER_04]: I think we rush queer characters to the ends of their journeys a lot.
• 9:43
  [SPEAKER_04]: We give them a happy ending to early and it's very well-meaning, but
• 9:46
  [SPEAKER_04]: There are no endings in comics, so I wanted a character who's just starting out and who's going to make a terrible mess along the way.
• 9:52
  [SPEAKER_04]: And that was that is what I wanted for Justin.
• 9:54
  [SPEAKER_04]: I I really wanted to get to that throttle and I lived in terror that they pull the rug out from under me the whole time, but we got there.
• 10:03
  [SPEAKER_04]: We slipped it in under the door at the end, but we got there.
• 10:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm very proud of that.
• 10:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: Bailey, tell me about the sexy come gutters of black heart.
• 10:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: The sexy come guys, those are the little sexy muscles on the side of the stomach.
• 10:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: You do it the center of the devil's so hot.
• 10:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean like he just had to be high.
• 10:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know, he just called to you in that way.
• 10:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm glad that people like him a lot.
• 10:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: I love the little trash goblin, center of the devil.
• 10:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: Do you want to talk about designing the human form for this character and like your the way you drew tendrils and like the shadows it's gorgeous work.
• 10:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
• 10:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Um, yeah.
• 10:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I'm trying to call that it was like just a way you're going to think I got the assignment to design him.
• 10:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: think the description I had from Anthony was he had like a kind of lean swimmer's body who's going to be full of Catholic guilt and I believe he's Latino as well.
• 11:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so I just kind of like took a bit of that like reading some of the script about him Anthony scripts are really really good at like evoking character that it's like the personality just kind of like seeps out of them.
• 11:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: What I imagined black heart would look like and we just kind of like I don't know what from there.
• 11:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: It took a while to get the hair right.
• 11:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: I got his face pretty quick, but I went through a lot of hair styles that I don't think I ever sent you guys.
• 11:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think I was like looking at like I was like asking my sister what like would like a sexy men's haircut.
• 11:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: And she's like, I don't know, like, like, Jonathan Bailey or like, and sort of looking and then eventually just came up with the one he has, I kind of wanted to evoke to like his like demon firm design has those full like spiky flares and I wanted to make sure that there was still kind of a nod to his original form like keeping like the red eyes and that and just those kind of like sweeping spikes in his hair.
• 12:05
  [SPEAKER_04]: We have a lot of hair cut is also very nineties like he's such a nineties character and his his look is that floppy Nick Carter kind of look Yeah, you'll keep heartthrob you know exactly Anthony tell me about family lore of Daven Chikari.
• 12:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: Oh, I will not do that.
• 12:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: I absolutely will not
• 12:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Do you want to talk around why?
• 12:29
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, um, we see a panel in the very last issue about the life of the character we've been calling Macron, where she says her father was difficult or
• 12:42
  [SPEAKER_04]: and her mother was complicated and we see a shot of her as a young person as the emperor de Ken is talking to the person who masqueraded as Eric the red whoever they were sometimes called Daven Shigari but not always and I will not say more.
• 12:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Do you want to lean into the origins of the Macron while we're there?
• 13:03
  [SPEAKER_04]: The problem of talking about Macron is always going to be that cause and effect don't really come in the same order for characters like this.
• 13:12
  [SPEAKER_04]: She is an entity of the crystal.
• 13:14
  [SPEAKER_04]: She is possibly contiguous with the crystal.
• 13:29
  [SPEAKER_04]: And maybe someday we'll get more details about it.
• 13:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: Bailey, tell me about the Tradwife fascism of Cheney Crane.
• 13:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Honestly, it's like, what am I favorite things to tell people when I'm like, pitch in the comic to the, I was like, yeah, it's like this great, like, sound family kind of career story, but also, like, one of the lead antagonists is like a, a Tradwife, not so you like, take a take time.
• 13:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then I was like, what, yeah, it's funny.
• 13:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like I admittedly I have not been on TikTok in a few years.
• 14:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Um, probably thank you, but I was there, like, when that kind of travel, I was like, seeping in a little bit.
• 14:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's so interesting to kind of, like, look at social media and this, like, seeping, like, conservativeism and how it's like, kind of, I don't know, it's like, it's presented as, like, just nothing.
• 14:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Really?
• 14:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: it's like content to consume but then there's like this kind of like sinister undertones to it all and it's like I think it was really smart and interesting to have that as like a basis of a main antagonist in a story that is like you're to like kind of team that which is like something that they're seeing every day and maybe not necessarily realizing the effects that that kind of content has on us.
• 14:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Anthony, tell me about the silent heroism of Arnie Roth.
• 14:45
  [SPEAKER_04]: Oh, yeah, Arnie Roth.
• 14:46
  [SPEAKER_04]: I can't think of the character really that matters more to me in comic book history than Arnie Roth.
• 14:51
  [SPEAKER_04]: Like, at the height of the eighths, crisis, jam, timetace was like, we can't just let end at the height of, frankly, some of Marvel's most homophobic policies, right?
• 15:01
  [SPEAKER_04]: Like, there were no queer characters at Marvel at the time.
• 15:03
  [SPEAKER_04]: Bye.
• 15:04
  [SPEAKER_04]: like editorial fiat, so to have Dmitage say Captain America had a best friend who was gay and he loved him in the 90s and to have that on panel, it's still somewhat subtext but almost not even, it's basically the tax and by the end it is kind of the taxed.
• 15:24
  [SPEAKER_04]: I think that mattered so much.
• 15:26
  [SPEAKER_04]: But again, in the 90s, Arnie, as most gay characters, is like a sidekick.
• 15:31
  [SPEAKER_04]: He's like a quiet.
• 15:32
  [SPEAKER_04]: He is one of Marvel's only people from that era who was allowed to get old and get Chubby and loses hair and dye.
• 15:38
  [SPEAKER_04]: And that's great, but I think that there was room to sort of expand his story beyond sort of being another victim of the red skull.
• 15:46
  [SPEAKER_04]: So I wanted to a remind people of that character and be sort of crack open his story and make him one of the many unsung queer heroes of World War II.
• 15:56
  [SPEAKER_04]: Like so many people came back from that war and were given their blue slips and dishonorably discharged.
• 16:02
  [SPEAKER_04]: That's why San Francisco is what it is because those men were sort of stranded there on the west coast.
• 16:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, Bailey, tell me about the mysterious shadows of the Midnight Chapel.
• 16:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ooh, they're out of like spoilers.
• 16:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, actually, I don't know if I make things work out of it.
• 16:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's not designed.
• 16:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: You designed that, right?
• 16:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: For which?
• 16:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Midnight Chapel itself?
• 16:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: No, I think that was Carola.
• 16:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's in Carola.
• 16:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's in Carola.
• 16:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: Beautiful.
• 16:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: So cool.
• 16:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was very fun to draw, though.
• 16:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: I will say that.
• 16:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Tell me about the tragic loss of Abigail Houseman, Bailey.
• 16:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, Bailey, why not knock it for Bailey?
• 16:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, I really loved trying that issue.
• 16:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't think it's like any surprise that any like Black Heart focused issue was probably my favorite.
• 16:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: But there is something very like deeply beautiful about that one, you know like we first kind of like mentioned Abigail in the New Year's issue 29 and you see her briefly and like I think like originally she only got like a mention on the original like black heart debut right where they just kind of say like just a woman who was murdered so being able to give her this like whole kind of story of like you know it's like a
• 17:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: being like a cunning woman and like you know helping the community and like having this relationship that she gets to have with Blackheart who like has this lot of kind of guilt around his existence being the source of her death and then
• 17:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: having to have him face that and not be able to do anything about it and just kind of watch is like this deeply tragic and like beautiful story.
• 17:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I love things that are inherently very tragic and sad.
• 17:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like I love having a not happy ending.
• 17:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I think that was just a really beautiful story and like some nice kind of character like spotlight for black heart.
• 18:06
  [SPEAKER_04]: I think that's your best work in the whole book that you do you think like I I think when I saw those pages I was like oh shit.
• 18:13
  [SPEAKER_04]: What oh, thank you.
• 18:15
  [SPEAKER_04]: They mourn to do
• 18:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, getting to play in like kind of the Puritanical New England also was like really fine I watched the Mitch for the first time to like prepare for it And I was like Aber not seeing this movie, but it helps up the tone for sure But yeah, it was you know, it was it was a joy to draw despite the tone of the issue itself It looks incredible.
• 18:37
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's like a weird fairy tale incredible work, Bailey.
• 18:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's beautiful.
• 18:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
• 18:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Anthony, tell me about the weird horror of George Baker.
• 18:46
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, so DOA has always been emplates weird little no-mesistent, sort of a character that is never really made any sense or had a backstory.
• 18:58
  [SPEAKER_04]: He's obviously like a Renfield-esque zombie creature.
• 19:02
  [SPEAKER_04]: He has some of emplates qualities, but it's not clear what relationship they had.
• 19:07
  [SPEAKER_04]: And at some point, Chad, one of your editor friends on some issue called him Alius George Baker.
• 19:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's just in the Emplaint profile in one of the handbooks, which I think it was like a Wolverine profile.
• 19:21
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's that his name was like, he's a bad guy and he's one of Wolverine's bad guys, which is bizarre.
• 19:26
  [SPEAKER_04]: I don't think they've ever even met.
• 19:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, there was a policy for a little while not for every character, but like if they were writing about a character in the handbooks who did not have a name, there was often an attempt to give them a name either by asking the creator for a name or coming up with some sort of gimmick to name the characters.
• 19:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know exactly where DOA's name come from, but that was common to put names and profiles in that way.
• 19:46
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, so I had inherited this character.
• 19:48
  [SPEAKER_04]: I've always been obsessed with Emplay and DOA.
• 19:51
  [SPEAKER_04]: And he had a name, George Baker, and in developing Emplay's backstory, I was interested in the idea that, I'm very interested in the tragedy of Emplay and Vampires in general.
• 20:01
  [SPEAKER_04]: And I like to the idea that Emplay does his, or DOA is Emplayed servant, but he's also his jailer that he is in some ways a manifestation of the reality that Emplayed is trapped within.
• 20:14
  [SPEAKER_04]: Which felt right.
• 20:15
  [SPEAKER_04]: He's sort of a man's servant.
• 20:16
  [SPEAKER_04]: He is both emplates privilege and the problem of emplates privilege.
• 20:22
  [SPEAKER_04]: So I sort of made him a servant of the house.
• 20:24
  [SPEAKER_04]: He seems to be some version of the dimension that emplates trapped in.
• 20:28
  [SPEAKER_04]: But he's also,
• 20:29
  [SPEAKER_04]: seems to have himself been a sorcerer, maybe a bookseller, who is himself sort of trapped in this world.
• 20:35
  [SPEAKER_04]: He says that George Baker died, rich in rotten.
• 20:40
  [SPEAKER_04]: I'm just what they scraped off the street.
• 20:42
  [SPEAKER_04]: He always loved a limo, and like that to me is his whole narrative is there.
• 20:46
  [SPEAKER_04]: He got everything he wanted, and now he's the servant of the thing that he wanted, and maybe some part of him used to be a man named George Baker, but he's also something much worse, I think.
• 20:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: Bailey, tell me about the Calamari chaos of Nayarla giraffes.
• 21:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I got a lot of tentacles there.
• 21:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: That would was really fun.
• 21:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: I got to drum the cross time keeper with Chilambreel.
• 21:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he's just like, you know, vomiting goo and like tentacles everywhere, which is a lot to drop, but very fun to like incorporate, especially in the vertical scroll.
• 21:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think it worked really well to like kind of force this like fluidity and flow between panels.
• 21:26
  [SPEAKER_04]: I feel like you really changed the game of what these infinity comics look like like the way you sort of altered what it meant for a comic even have a margin anymore like I feel like you really blew the lid off the well we're not on a page anymore and let's stop pretending we are I think that was incredible to watch you do across.
• 21:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: I love the comic book that makes me slow down.
• 21:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: A lot of infinity comics take me like 45 seconds to read.
• 21:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, they're pretty.
• 21:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: But Avengers Academy would take me 10 or 15 minutes to read.
• 21:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like I wanted to slow down and enjoy the background.
• 21:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: There was so much work put into it.
• 22:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: Excellent work for both of you.
• 22:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: Anthony, tell me about the unresolved traumas of Aaron Fisher.
• 22:05
  [SPEAKER_04]: Oh, boy.
• 22:06
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I do love a traumatized boy, don't I?
• 22:11
  [SPEAKER_04]: I inherited most of Aaron's dramas just as we inherited most of Aaron's tattoos which were truly like I had to make a chart of the poor artists and then the artists would nail it and then we have to do it all again for the colorists because like is this one kind of blue is this one more green so Aaron came to me damaged.
• 22:33
  [SPEAKER_04]: But we knew he had run away.
• 22:34
  [SPEAKER_04]: I wanted to think about what that meant to be a runaway.
• 22:37
  [SPEAKER_04]: I was a runaway when I was a teenager.
• 22:39
  [SPEAKER_04]: And we have a lot of runaways in the book.
• 22:41
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's a conversation that happens quite early in the book.
• 22:45
  [SPEAKER_04]: Where Carol brings our three runaways into her office and says, like, there's people looking for you and what I will not be doing is telling them where you are.
• 22:54
  [SPEAKER_04]: Which felt to me like an important beat for Carol.
• 22:57
  [SPEAKER_04]: Like, this is a character who, after all,
• 23:00
  [SPEAKER_04]: To me, she only makes sense if she's sort of processing her guilt about what it have means to have just been only following orders all her life.
• 23:08
  [SPEAKER_04]: So Erin, I knew as soon as Erin was in the book that he had to talk to Carol.
• 23:12
  [SPEAKER_04]: So that's why their first issue is the two of them, as which Bailey did really incredible work as Erin is sort of in a homeless encampment that is cleared out by Taskmaster, which became kind of to me, a thesis work for what this book was going to be about.
• 23:27
  [SPEAKER_04]: Aaron is supposed to be what it means to be Captain America now, and to me that means being a person who, what kind of person dresses in the American flag and means it to me is only there's only two answers and one is like the people who stormed the capital on January 6.
• 23:45
  [SPEAKER_04]: And the other is a person who says, I will not let you have it.
• 23:49
  [SPEAKER_04]: This has to mean something.
• 23:51
  [SPEAKER_04]: And the only way for that to mean anything is for that character to genuinely know how traumatic that those colors can be.
• 23:58
  [SPEAKER_04]: So Aaron is a gay man whose family rejected him who's only caregiver died.
• 24:04
  [SPEAKER_04]: And it was been on the run ever since.
• 24:06
  [SPEAKER_04]: And that is what makes him so sad.
• 24:08
  [SPEAKER_04]: And that is what makes him a hero.
• 24:10
  [SPEAKER_04]: And that to me is why I came to really love that character.
• 24:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, he also represents, I don't know, the underclass, right?
• 24:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's the more locks of humanity, like get their voice through him.
• 24:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: He understands that side.
• 24:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's a beautiful character.
• 24:23
  [SPEAKER_04]: I think that the thing I'm always scared of is even in comics I write, a dimension of fandom that cares about the characters' feats, that cares about how powerful the character is and is impressed when, look at how strong my fav is my fav because they're the strongest one.
• 24:39
  [SPEAKER_04]: I love a character whose powers are
• 24:43
  [SPEAKER_04]: and like that that makes it mean something that he fights like he really takes his fingers.
• 24:49
  [SPEAKER_04]: He did lose his hearing in one ear like me along the way and in the course of Andrew's Academy.
• 24:54
  [SPEAKER_04]: I think he never quite recovered from that battle with sin.
• 24:58
  [SPEAKER_04]: I think seeing just how awful the world can be right now and how awful America can be right now is kind of the point of his journey in this book.
• 25:06
  [SPEAKER_04]: and finding a way to carve out joy even amidst that was kind of the arc I wanted him on in this.
• 25:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Bailey, tell me about the generational expectations of Normia's born.
• 25:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Haha poor boy.
• 25:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, like it is kind of sad.
• 25:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's like, he's like, oh, like my family's evil.
• 25:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: So like I'm evil, you know, like that kind of, um, oh, what's the, what's the word like that.
• 25:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is the generational kind of like.
• 25:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: burden of like, you know, living up to your, your like parent's expectations.
• 25:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in his case, especially like his grandfather's expectations.
• 25:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: And like wanting to be kind of different and carving something else, despite like being born into the very privileged situation is, which is like, I think, like, sometimes that's like a, oh, boo for you.
• 25:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: I like people have a charter, but like, I think it is interesting to see a perspective like that as well of being like, you know, you can,
• 26:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: No matter who you are, you can always try to be a better person or like aim to be who you want to be.
• 26:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's really lovely.
• 26:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Anthony talks me about the market impact of Avengers Academy.
• 26:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: Oh, what a good question.
• 26:20
  [SPEAKER_04]: The market impact.
• 26:22
  [SPEAKER_04]: I mean, one of the things that was liberating about the experiment of this book to me was that we went into it without having to worry about how many issues we were selling.
• 26:33
  [SPEAKER_04]: Sarah Brunstedt and I developed this book knowing like, they're not going to kill us after five.
• 26:38
  [SPEAKER_04]: In fact, the way she pitched it to me is like, and you can write it until you physically cannot write it anymore.
• 26:45
  [SPEAKER_04]: And I think I was supposed to flunk out much sooner than I did, but I just held on for dear life.
• 26:51
  [SPEAKER_04]: And Sarah God bless her, even as she was heading out the door, sort of held our budget for us for 66 issues, at least, which changed, but so I knew how to long run.
• 27:02
  [SPEAKER_04]: And that's a thing that is rare.
• 27:04
  [SPEAKER_04]: writers, even writers I love don't have time to develop the characters the way they'd like.
• 27:10
  [SPEAKER_04]: Chris Claremont's run on X-Men is partly so good because it's so long it has room to to breathe and not just in a macro level but that means it has space to go like we're going to go to the mall we're going to hang out we're going to be sad by the pool today you know like
• 27:26
  [SPEAKER_04]: So, I knew that I could let these characters breathe and talk to each other and grow very early on.
• 27:34
  [SPEAKER_04]: Issue three is a sleepover.
• 27:35
  [SPEAKER_04]: Issue three, they're just going to that.
• 27:37
  [SPEAKER_04]: That's the whole issue.
• 27:38
  [SPEAKER_04]: It was Bailey's first.
• 27:40
  [SPEAKER_04]: And that was a real experiment.
• 27:41
  [SPEAKER_04]: You're going to, like you said, the page makes you slow down.
• 27:44
  [SPEAKER_04]: I wanted the book to slow people down too.
• 27:46
  [SPEAKER_04]: As far as market, we knew we had a hit.
• 27:50
  [SPEAKER_04]: very early on.
• 27:51
  [SPEAKER_04]: We were outpacing the ex books on the app.
• 27:54
  [SPEAKER_04]: This book was driving subscriptions and driving readership and retaining it, which is something that's very rare for projects like this, which was amazing to see.
• 28:03
  [SPEAKER_04]: But beyond that, it
• 28:05
  [SPEAKER_04]: There's no measurable way to be like, and it caused this many subscriptions or whatever, so it's market value.
• 28:12
  [SPEAKER_04]: As with much of this book, it always felt like our dreams and capitalism, the old systems of capitalism were kind of getting in the way.
• 28:19
  [SPEAKER_04]: Like, we had a budget for six pages and then five pages and it's like, well, what does a page look like anymore when Bailey Rosenland has changed the meaning of pages in front of our
• 28:31
  [SPEAKER_04]: And it took me a while to realize, like, oh, they're mad about how long the issue is, even when it's blank space, if I'm dropping someone down a page, because the length of the PDF is still determining wages.
• 28:44
  [SPEAKER_04]: So it's really interesting to sort of feel the technology fighting against older systems.
• 28:50
  [SPEAKER_04]: That was fascinating to me.
• 28:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: Bailey, tell me about the unrealized potential of a venture.
• 28:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean like, oh god, I'm pretty sure we get it.
• 29:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's like it's said in the final issue, there's like so much unsaid and I think like when we found out that we were ending like early to like knowing that you know some of the issues that were supposed to be getting and like being told the themes and then finding out we're not gonna be doing it any more and then getting issue 60 and like
• 29:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: each panel that we were all assigned was kind of like, well, this was going to potentially be a plot line.
• 29:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: You would have drawn in that and the story to explore and just seeing it like I went through another phase of morning of like everything that was lost.
• 29:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was genuinely like so sad and I'm so sad that you know, our readers don't get to see what could have been.
• 29:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think there is so much space to I mean, every week like,
• 29:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: I, I like stalked the tags, you know, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious, I'm curious
• 30:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
• 30:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was just so much potential that you can't even really say what is lost because we don't have it to see you know it.
• 30:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: Since the very beginning at Marvel Comics, there's always been the teenage sidekick, Captain America had Bucky and Jim Hammond had Toro and etc.
• 30:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: etc.
• 30:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: That exists in other companies as well.
• 30:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we had a team book back at the beginning, the young allies, the teen sidekicks of the World War II superheroes getting up to crazy adventures on the side.
• 30:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right?
• 30:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: Then we have the legacy of what it means when a new character is carrying the legacy of an old character.
• 30:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: Some of my favorite books along the way, and books that matter to readers for generations fall into the category of books like the new mutants and the new warriors and the runaways, and in a more queer-focused book, although some of those books are all queer as well, of course.
• 31:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: We have the young Avengers by Kieran Gillin,
• 31:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: We have X-Factor, Biley Williams, we have the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl by Ryan North, stories about generations that are set in continuity, that give narrative structure and crazy superhero cookie adventures for fans that have payoffs every issue.
• 31:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: This has been my favorite book for a while.
• 31:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Avengers Academy, when I look forward to every week, I hold it in the esteem of the other books I just mentioned, which are always some of my very favorites.
• 31:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um, I had a moment with Leo Williams where she was at the uncanny experience and all of these queer fans were just coming up to her right and left talking about how much it Exfactor had impacted her and I remember talking to her afterward, you know, exfactor being canceled was such a tragedy But I said, Leah, I hope this is what sits with you for now on though like the number of people that will remember this book You're gonna have people walking up for you for the rest of your life talking to you how much this impacted them and I think Avengers Academy falls into that category
• 31:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Very special, lasting legacy, especially for queer readers and people who feel unrepresented, Escapade in your book is the most transness we've ever seen in a Marvel comic consistently ever.
• 32:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: And did that issue with the enchantress making the characters speak their truths?
• 32:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Is my very favorite.
• 32:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: I cry.
• 32:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: Wonderful.
• 32:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: So thank you for this wonderful book.
• 32:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I hope you feel a little celebrated by this episode today.
• 32:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know, I mean, like, like, for me on a personal level, the book, like, it meant so much to me.
• 32:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think, like, I don't know.
• 32:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: I feel like I grew so much as an artist and I so attached to these, like, amazing characters and story and, like, working on a team alongside other, like, regular artists and other guest artists was, like, a very fulfilling experience, just being, like, so inspired by the other artists and how we won handles everything, like, page layout and character approaches.
• 32:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was just the beautiful cute little family.
• 32:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's like on a personal level, I think like Avengers Academy is always going to have a very special place in my heart and just like, I don't know, I hope that like seeing how people responded and saying that, you know, they did feel so seen and it was really special to them.
• 33:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: I hope that, you know, it had a special place that continues in people's hearts as well, if this was like,
• 33:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Maybe an intro to get into comics for that or like maybe it's like one of like the hundreds of comics they've read.
• 33:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Um, I hope that people love it as much as we did and do.
• 33:25
  [SPEAKER_04]: Oh, God.
• 33:26
  [SPEAKER_04]: Well, thank you for both of you for your kind words like this project meant everything to me.
• 33:32
  [SPEAKER_04]: God, uh, between the working on the launch and then the five issues, the six issues before actual Avengers Academy and then the kid juggernaut mini series was like a year and a half of a marathon.
• 33:45
  [SPEAKER_04]: Like every week I had to have a script in.
• 33:47
  [SPEAKER_04]: and it was a lot of work.
• 33:51
  [SPEAKER_04]: It was an intense amount of work.
• 33:53
  [SPEAKER_04]: It was a lot of battles.
• 33:55
  [SPEAKER_04]: It was a lot of working with this very tight group of artists like Bailey and Carla and Pablo once he came on board in our guest service and it it
• 34:06
  [SPEAKER_04]: felt like such a labor of love every minute.
• 34:09
  [SPEAKER_04]: And then because it was weekly, we were also getting so much fan feedback every week.
• 34:14
  [SPEAKER_04]: Like I could see fans responding to things in real time really fast after we had finished the work on it.
• 34:21
  [SPEAKER_04]: So it felt like such an amazing journey.
• 34:25
  [SPEAKER_04]: It felt like when I was a kid, the thing that's kind of gone now, where like a show would be on every week.
• 34:29
  [SPEAKER_04]: I was above
• 34:35
  [SPEAKER_04]: Every week, it was the occasion for community to assemble and like, reach together, watch something together, and then comment and fanficking fan art.
• 34:45
  [SPEAKER_04]: And like, I know Bailey was drowning in fan art from people.
• 34:48
  [SPEAKER_04]: They're out there on.
• 34:49
  [SPEAKER_04]: And then to have it end, and then to have it end, so abruptly, it was hard.
• 34:54
  [SPEAKER_04]: Like, very, you can feel my depression in those last two issues.
• 34:57
  [SPEAKER_04]: I had two issues to wrap it.
• 34:59
  [SPEAKER_04]: I basically blacked out in high park here in Toronto and wrote them on my notes app.
• 35:03
  [SPEAKER_04]: And they're about the question you're asking Chad like well what happens now is there any legacy at all like it was very aware that this was a work that only existed online in a platform that they seemed to be phasing out which seems to be the web tune thing and like I've heard nothing about transferring it over there's no there's no plans that I know of for printing so one of the questions was like well will there be it's the question that ends the book like will anyone remember us like
• 35:30
  [SPEAKER_04]: And Macron is wiser than me and says like well, maybe maybe maybe this will matter, but if it doesn't if it isn't remembered at least we built something worth building and I loved doing it and like working with my editors and with my artists and with my letterists and with this community meant so much to me and even if no one ever reads it again, that'll lament this is one of the major things I did with my life, and I'm extremely extremely proud of it.
• 35:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: and you should be it's excellent and I love it and I hope this helped people remember everybody will take time to go read the book front-to-back.
• 36:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Give yourself a day, give it if it takes you a month.
• 36:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's well worth it.
• 36:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's so much nuance.
• 36:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: The story telling is there right from the start.
• 36:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's great.
• 36:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for honoring Avengers Academy with me today, both of you.
• 36:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've been a norm of this kind.
• 36:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much, Chad.
• 36:18
  [SPEAKER_04]: I think there are a warm in half.
• 36:19
  [SPEAKER_04]: Good, good, good.
• 36:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I
• 36:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was not surprising, but I actually read this show, right?
• 36:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a new line of books called Uncanny Origins being published, alongside other titles like Professor Xavier in the X-Men, it's Marvel's new 99 cent line, it only lasted about a year.
• 37:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's run by my friend Terry Kavanaugh as the editor.
• 37:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Every issue of this book, Uncanny Origins, is kind of doing a Saturday morning cartoon style, like, hey, here's the history of a character as it exists in 1997.
• 37:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Let's make you a big fan.
• 37:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: The issue just before this was about Venom, the one that just after this is about the Black Knight, or no, it's Storm.
• 37:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Quick Silvers in one of them, Angel, and Beast, and Cyclops are in this series as well.
• 37:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: So there's some fun X-Men content.
• 37:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: We've reviewed a few of these books on the show before.
• 37:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: The writer on this book is Bill Roseman, who has not done a lot for Marvel.
• 37:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: Mark Campos is the artist.
• 37:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Both of them have a little
• 37:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm Aaron loose ties to some random X-Men smattering books along the way.
• 37:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Scott Rockwell is the colorist, Jack Morelle, who's married to the colorist Christy Shield, by the way, is the letter around this book as well.
• 37:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Where were the both of you in the early part of 1997?
• 37:51
  [SPEAKER_04]: Oh boy.
• 37:52
  [SPEAKER_04]: 1997 I would have been 13 years old.
• 37:56
  [SPEAKER_04]: I would have just started ninth grade again in all boys Catholic school run by bazillion priests and I would have been very sad and in a tie, a sleep on a go train every day.
• 38:08
  [SPEAKER_04]: I'll just point out Chad though Bill Roseman is I think currently the vice president of creative at Marvel games So he's still in the game for sure.
• 38:16
  [SPEAKER_04]: Oh, he's just not yeah.
• 38:17
  [SPEAKER_04]: He's just not writing He got promoted to the point where he's credits no longer a mass I don't know much about him.
• 38:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah Billy, where were you in 97 Bailey were you being born?
• 38:29
  [SPEAKER_05]: Oh, God
• 38:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: three years old okay and we had just moved to a small town it's kind of London Ontario and I was probably playing with my Barbie dolls.
• 38:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, now the art on this is very Saturday morning cartoon.
• 38:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: The entire month on the show is about Kurt Wagner and Nightcrawler and all the patrons over on the channel are about Kurt and I'm kind of approaching this character from a bunch of different lenses.
• 38:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I want to focus a little bit on this
• 39:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's so many red cons that make this character up.
• 39:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you're writing the handbook profile, you have to mash a bunch of stuff together and kind of make it work.
• 39:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: And Kurt is already kind of complicated.
• 39:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: But if you want to talk to us about this cover, this is when Kurt is in Excalibur.
• 39:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's just like Shaved his head and grown a Goatie and got in like a pirate earring.
• 39:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you're reading Excalibur during this time, there's a lot of images of him drawn with quite a substantial like bulge between his legs.
• 39:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: No joke.
• 39:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to look scallop in this area and know what I'm talking about.
• 39:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: Go look for some of those covers.
• 39:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: But what are your thoughts on this image with Kurt kind of swash buckling in with a sword?
• 39:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Um, it's very fun.
• 39:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: I, one of the first things I noticed was the earring because it is like a bright yellow against all of the blue and red.
• 39:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it took me a while to realize that he also had a go to you, which I don't think I've ever really seen a much with.
• 39:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: He doesn't get portrayed with one often.
• 39:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it could be wrong.
• 39:51
  [SPEAKER_05]: No, it's very rare.
• 39:52
  [SPEAKER_05]: Very rare.
• 39:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Very rare.
• 39:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: OK, I thought so.
• 39:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Um, yeah, it's, um, I love the like, uh, energy in like the lions and the coloring in this whole issue.
• 40:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: But you see it, especially so in the cover.
• 40:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Um, yeah, he's like lunging forward in a very priority looking vibe with this sword out front.
• 40:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: There are dreams in their own nightmares, we say as we open the book.
• 40:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: This man born with a swash buckling spirit, this mutant born with amazing abilities has lived both.
• 40:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: From humanity's darkest fears, he leaps a demonic vision of Indigo skin and barbed tail, teleporting out of the shadows in an explosion of smoke and brimstone.
• 40:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: come now on a perilous journey.
• 40:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: As I learn how Kurt Wagner, known now as Knightfrawler, grew from Circus Freet to X-Man, which is the title of this book.
• 40:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: I do not love the term of Freet, anytime we are talking about the circus, it's the late 90s.
• 40:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: I feel like we should know better, but we also get the word jipsy in this book, which isn't no longer, uh,
• 40:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: really great either.
• 40:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now we're going to focus on continuity craziness for Kurt number one.
• 40:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you say tuned over on the Patreon channel this month, I have an episode all about Azazel with Chuck Austin, the creator.
• 41:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're jumping deep into the origins of Nightcrawler.
• 41:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: I also have an episode on Margali Shardos, his foster mother, and her complications as well.
• 41:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I'll save some of my thoughts on these characters, but the Redcombe very quickly.
• 41:17
  [SPEAKER_04]: Hey, on Chad, once again, Bailey, do you know
• 41:21
  [SPEAKER_04]: Oh fantastic!
• 41:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: We made very quick stuff with Kurt.
• 41:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: We first meet him in Winseldorf Germany outrunning a mob.
• 41:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: We don't learn for about five years until an X-Men annual, some more of his origin story, where he grew up in a Romani camp as a circus performer, with a mother who is kind of a mystic or a witch.
• 41:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: She has the maiden mother crowing thing going, we'll talk about that another time.
• 41:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: She has two children,
• 41:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: one of them is Stefan and one of them is Germain.
• 41:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now Stefan apparently had some sort of evil in his soul and asked Kurt.
• 41:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: If I ever turn evil in the future will you please kill me and Kurt's like never, of course not.
• 42:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: That story has been revisited a few times.
• 42:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: Margolly might be responsible Stefan might have been an evil sorcerer or a child murderer, but we get that part of his origin quite
• 42:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's not for many years until we see a acknowledged on the page that Mystique was Knight Crawler's mother.
• 42:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is in the early 90s, the story is not that old before we open this book, where we get that uncanny or excuse me, the X-Men Unlimited story where Mystique had Knight Crawler in Germany, and a mob was after her, and so she posed as someone else in through him over a waterfall.
• 42:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that story was very impactful at the time.
• 42:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's written by Fabian Miseza, but it ties Kurt into a larger family system with Rogue as his foster sister.
• 42:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's also realizing the potential of what Chris Climber always wanted for this character where Mystique was supposed to be the birth father for the character and destiny was supposed to be the birth mother.
• 42:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: So that's where we open here.
• 42:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: We have this kind of early red con being shown of mystique throwing them off of the waterfall.
• 43:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: In the early 2000s, Chuck Austin told us that Nightcrawler's father was actually a zazil, a red, bamfing demon who also has a lot of other teleporting children all over the world.
• 43:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that mystique was the mother.
• 43:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then we have the more recent for Colin Redconn, where all of that was just kind of a messy plot.
• 43:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's not the father, Mystique is the father, but she's using Azale's template.
• 43:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Destiny is the mother, and Charles Xavier altered the memories in their minds to make it all wonky because Destiny predicted a certain future.
• 43:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm throwing a ton at you there.
• 43:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: Anthony, how do you feel for Bailey?
• 43:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: For Bailey.
• 43:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Do you see like the smoke coming out of my brain right now?
• 43:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: Welcome to the next event.
• 43:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think what are your thoughts on the Mystique Destiny relationship tonight, Crawler?
• 43:48
  [SPEAKER_04]: Oh, I mean, the original Claremont page is so audacious, right?
• 43:52
  [SPEAKER_04]: And like, so, so Claremont and also like, it always felt like it almost was there on the page.
• 43:59
  [SPEAKER_04]: Just wrote it emotionally like it was there.
• 44:01
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's part of the weirdest things about the Mystique Night Crawler thing.
• 44:05
  [SPEAKER_04]: He's like, she hocks that baby off a waterfall and yet the way.
• 44:09
  [SPEAKER_04]: Like, the way it's written, there is something weirdly complicated about that gesture.
• 44:15
  [SPEAKER_04]: Like, I love the original Claremont pitch for this.
• 44:17
  [SPEAKER_04]: I love the idea of being like, yeah, like, the mistake is this gender fuck performance.
• 44:24
  [SPEAKER_04]: She can be whatever gender she decides to be.
• 44:26
  [SPEAKER_04]: Why couldn't she be a father?
• 44:28
  [SPEAKER_04]: But I also see why Marvel was like, now, now and gives us what we ended up with.
• 44:33
  [SPEAKER_04]: which is many years of creating retcons until it all turns out to be Charles Xavier's fault.
• 44:40
  [SPEAKER_04]: As most things are in my experience, while it's rational with this crawler.
• 44:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we get the religion in that close origin right from the very beginning.
• 44:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's kind of the Moses thrown into the river kind of big.
• 44:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: right and then the adoptive mother we uh we cut to Margolly Shardos finding him she's looking gorgeous in this I love this outfit for her it's very pretty it's very scarlet witch but then she picks up the ugliest baby with the giant just had you've ever seen the river.
• 45:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right artists could not often draw babies, but the image of that color space is horrifying.
• 45:13
  [SPEAKER_04]: Bailey does a great baby, most comic book artists.
• 45:17
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's like watching people before the Renaissance try to draw the baby Jesus, and it's like, it's just like a little fat person, right?
• 45:24
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's like, no, you have made something I never want to look at again.
• 45:28
  [SPEAKER_04]: The worst are John Burns babies, but this one is up there for sure.
• 45:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now we have two more retcons.
• 45:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'll mix together very quickly here.
• 45:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's two portrayals usually shown of Kurt's childhood in the circus.
• 45:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: One of them is he's very happy.
• 45:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's a circus performer, and that's the version we get in this story.
• 45:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: So Claremont often uses the characters from Derry Armark where there are these circus quote-unquote freaks or performers who are living in this traveling circus under a man named Eric Gettman.
• 45:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: As many of them are super powered, they're used in Claremont stories sometimes.
• 46:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: We get to see like sword swallowers and fire eaters and acrobats and people kind of all performing.
• 46:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: And in this world, Kirk is training as kind of a swashbuckler.
• 46:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's using his natural agility, but he's kind of always just a step away from being attacked by the mobs, right?
• 46:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a moment in this issue where they try to get him to cover his face with a mask.
• 46:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he's like, no, my mother taught me to be more proud of myself.
• 46:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm not going to wear a mask because he's just been chased down by a mob earlier in this issue.
• 46:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that is birth.
• 46:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: And when we first meet him in the X-Men, the second version of Metcrollers Origins.
• 46:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you go to X-Men Origins, Metcroller number one, which we have reviewed on the show last year.
• 46:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: Uh, and that crawler was a very abused child.
• 46:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: Erght, none of the circus was keeping him in cages, was tranquilizing him, was frequently beating him, was letting people throw things at him, was advertising him as a demon, as a monster.
• 46:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: And in the midst of all of this, he has this odd trauma bond with a mother who's sometimes available sometimes not.
• 46:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: A brother who he's promised to kill and a sister that he likes to make out within the corner.
• 47:00
  [SPEAKER_05]: That's a little way.
• 47:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's a story.
• 47:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: that we get in kind of various, various examples.
• 47:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: But do you know the character Germain Shardos or Amanda Scepton at all?
• 47:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: No, I found her about Germain in this issue.
• 47:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: She's a character, she's a pretty character in the X-Men world.
• 47:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then you have a good shot on Germain Shardos.
• 47:19
  [SPEAKER_04]: I kind of forgot until checking again, like, oh yeah, this is Amanda Scepton.
• 47:24
  [SPEAKER_04]: She goes by this name, because to me, she's always been Amanda Scepton, but like, that is the alias she uses
• 47:29
  [SPEAKER_04]: to sneak up on him in his new life, right?
• 47:32
  [SPEAKER_04]: She pretends to be a flight attendant.
• 47:33
  [SPEAKER_04]: She now just kind of uses that name all the time.
• 47:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: I read all of that, it's just a sexy role play.
• 47:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like they're both in on it.
• 47:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: But you're like, oh, I met you at the bar and my husband's at home.
• 47:43
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I don't know.
• 47:44
  [SPEAKER_04]: But oh, like this to me is some straight nonsense.
• 47:47
  [SPEAKER_04]: Like the day trip her, her co-name is sometimes day triper, Bailey, as a joke about night crawler versus day triper.
• 47:55
  [SPEAKER_04]: But it is definitely, it's so, so long.
• 47:58
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, it's so so popular, right?
• 48:00
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's like, but also weirdly like, very marry Shelley.
• 48:03
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's like, this is my sister that I'm in love with.
• 48:05
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's like, I don't know about any of this curt.
• 48:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: But one more thing I want to introduce, Kurt's also obsessed with Errol Flynn.
• 48:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Uh, that's the thing that Clairemont gave to him.
• 48:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you go back and watch two Errol Flynn movies, one of them is Captain Blood, which was revolutionary at the time.
• 48:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: The other was the Adventures Robin Hood, which was also revolutionary.
• 48:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you've seen Disney's Robin Hood, it's almost like a frame by frame ray creation of the Errol Flynn Robin Hood from the 1930s, uh, and Kurt has obsessed with these films.
• 48:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: Errol Flynn is a great leading man in these old 1930s.
• 48:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's very playful.
• 48:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's got a lot of like Peter Pan energy.
• 48:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's good with the sword.
• 48:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: He does his own stunts.
• 48:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's handsome enough in tall, right?
• 48:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: Turns out he was also probably not probably.
• 48:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: He was also a pedophile and got blacklisted from Hollywood because of 15-year-old like held him accountable for having sex with Errol.
• 48:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's a whole thing.
• 48:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he was a very bitter, kind of drunk person as a result of all of that.
• 48:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: So not the best idol.
• 49:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: Anthony, have you seen any of these old Errol Flynn films?
• 49:02
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I did not know that, but he has, you can see what it is that Claremont wants for Kurt from him, he has sort of this endless charisma and charm for sure that apparently he used for terrible things, but also he's got the little GoT a lot, which
• 49:22
  [SPEAKER_04]: Race is a lot of questions for me about how a person covered in blue fur grows a go tea, but I like the the redesign from the 90s.
• 49:30
  [SPEAKER_04]: I like this earring and the the go tea.
• 49:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's very 90s, but it works always he's always grown facial hair over his fur.
• 49:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's a recurring beat for the characters.
• 49:39
  [SPEAKER_04]: But what does that mean?
• 49:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's like shaving down his facial hair out of the time, like I guess so You know, if you ever had a like I have a dog with a double coat, there's like the thin layer and then the like why are he still?
• 49:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was like the like mustache and a little go tea on a dog.
• 49:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I proud This is my first time realizing that night crawlers covered in hair.
• 50:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: I just thought it was skin
• 50:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, he's often described it's like indigo velvety, like the ladies love it apparently It's like very sexy.
• 50:08
  [SPEAKER_04]: He's a sex Marine calls him furry blue elf, which Interesting to talk about the tactile sensation of your friend Logan, but okay
• 50:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I don't think I have that famous cover.
• 50:21
  [SPEAKER_04]: Be sure to.
• 50:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 50:24
  [UNKNOWN]: I'm not sure.
• 50:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I'm going to go through this page by page very quickly.
• 50:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: The visual of this character is often will make some fun.
• 50:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: The two toes, the two fingers, the tail, the blue, the bump, the yellow eyes, right?
• 50:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we open on that crawler swashbuckling.
• 50:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: We get mystique throwing him off the waterfall.
• 50:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: We get Margolly finding him.
• 50:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: We advance a few years to him growing up half-lead happily in the circus and jokingly promising to kill his brother one day.
• 50:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: We get him practicing years later, like this arrow Flynn kind of energy, and a mob ends up chasing him and he has his first public fear.
• 50:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, I'm not safe away from my family.
• 50:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: He says after he experiences this, he says, so he does what any child would do.
• 51:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: He ran home to his mother.
• 51:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Then Margali is not very patient.
• 51:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: She says, I'm disappointed in you, Kurt.
• 51:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: I did not raise you to crawl like a worm.
• 51:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he named himself for a worm later, right?
• 51:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's a night crawler.
• 51:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: We are proud people.
• 51:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: We deal with our problems.
• 51:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: We do not run from them.
• 51:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: But you look like you have much to learn.
• 51:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: Which is it, Ruff, because he's also experiencing child abuse and other versions of this story.
• 51:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a trap he's master named Saboo, who gives him harsh love, almost wants to kill it.
• 51:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, shoves him off a trap he's a platformen is like, you better sore little worms, sore, which is hard to believe, is any kind of supportive.
• 51:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: So Nightcrawler's resilience through all this is impressive.
• 51:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: But he learns how to entertain, he refuses to wear the mask.
• 51:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: in the arena.
• 51:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: When he stands up for himself, Margali tells him my son today, you have made me the happiest mother in the world where you once crawled now you stand for all to see.
• 51:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: You have learned to take pride in your actions over appearances.
• 51:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now, Nightcrawler, if we're gonna pause here for a moment, is an odd name for this character.
• 51:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: He crawls through the night.
• 51:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think it's just a cool sounding name, but when people try to equate it to like, oh, he's a worm.
• 52:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Let's talk about why he's named this.
• 52:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's always interesting.
• 52:09
  [SPEAKER_04]: So his chair is a weird thing.
• 52:11
  [SPEAKER_04]: I mean, he's also like, I doubt that that's the term in German anyway, right?
• 52:16
  [SPEAKER_04]: Like, I doubt that like that's what they call them in German.
• 52:19
  [SPEAKER_04]: Presumably he has a German codename before he has an English one.
• 52:22
  [SPEAKER_04]: He does have that power everyone forgets about where he's invisible in shadows.
• 52:26
  [SPEAKER_04]: So he is a night crawler in a very specific way.
• 52:29
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's a great codename.
• 52:30
  [SPEAKER_04]: I don't think we need to link it to worms at all.
• 52:32
  [SPEAKER_04]: They only have you ever drawn him.
• 52:34
  [SPEAKER_04]: He seems like such a character for you.
• 52:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: I, you know, I received what that would.
• 52:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was reading this earlier and I was like, I really need to draw it because I haven't.
• 52:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'd love to.
• 52:44
  [SPEAKER_04]: He's like a sexy blue little monster.
• 52:46
  [SPEAKER_04]: Like teleports.
• 52:47
  [SPEAKER_04]: He's got that tail.
• 52:48
  [SPEAKER_04]: Like everything about this feels, it feels like you designed him honestly.
• 52:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: So Kurt's performing for the crowd.
• 52:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: They are cheering.
• 52:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: They call him the death-defying night crawler.
• 52:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's swirling his tail.
• 52:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's using it to spin around But then Germaine who's performing on a tight way a like high wire wearing this little green sletty number with giant pink feathers in her hair
• 53:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: She falls and Kurt Bamps in order to save her.
• 53:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now, the other story is that he bants when a mob attacks him and he ends up in a church that they then burned down because he escaped after being child abused.
• 53:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: So there's different versions of this.
• 53:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: But when he bants, he suddenly realizes he's quite powerful and performs for the crowd.
• 53:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: Then we need a character named Amis Jardine.
• 53:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is an old character from some Marvel 2 and 1 or team up stories from the late, oh, this is amazing.
• 53:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's been existing.
• 53:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: This character also gets used by Chris Claremont in Nightcrawler Volume 3.
• 53:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a Southern guy like a Texas oil barren kind of who wants to buy the circus out.
• 53:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's the one I want, Dag Navit, and what I want, I get.
• 53:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Amazard Jardine didn't build the second biggest circus in America on cow patties.
• 53:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're going to buy that circus, strip out the money makers like that, their blue boy, shipping down to Florida, and we'll beat those wringling brothers yet.
• 54:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: If he's the star attraction of Amazardine's jaw drop and heart stop and blad or elucinin per 100% authentic freight show, Anthony, I think you would dress like this man.
• 54:11
  [SPEAKER_04]: Well, how dare you.
• 54:12
  [SPEAKER_04]: I hope I could at least put together a better color story than this.
• 54:16
  [SPEAKER_04]: Why own all these pieces?
• 54:17
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yes, would I ever combine them in this way?
• 54:20
  [SPEAKER_04]: Absolutely not.
• 54:21
  [SPEAKER_04]: No.
• 54:21
  [SPEAKER_04]: I also don't love this like lowing silver hair situation.
• 54:26
  [SPEAKER_04]: I can't believe this is a pre-existing character.
• 54:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, he exists.
• 54:31
  [SPEAKER_04]: He's fucked up.
• 54:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's fucked up.
• 54:32
  [SPEAKER_04]: He's fucked up.
• 54:32
  [SPEAKER_04]: He's fucked up.
• 54:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's fucked up.
• 54:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's fucked up.
• 54:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's fucked up.
• 54:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's fucked up.
• 54:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's fucked up.
• 54:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's fucked up.
• 54:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's fucked up.
• 54:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's fucked up.
• 54:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's fucked up.
• 54:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's fucked up.
• 54:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's fucked up.
• 54:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's fucked up.
• 54:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's fucked up.
• 54:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's fucked up.
• 54:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's fucked up.
• 54:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I have heard the word mutants spoken in reference to me, and I must found out why I am the way I am.
• 54:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: So he goes out in the world.
• 54:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: He comes across Stefan, his brother, who it's not quite stated, but it almost looks like he's been eating people he murdered by a fire.
• 55:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's reference to him murdering children.
• 55:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: Stefan has gone dark or evil, likely due to black magic.
• 55:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that crawler in a brief moment of like, no, I don't want to have to.
• 55:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: knock stuff in in that classic thing where the his head hits a rock and now he's dead.
• 55:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: So the mob in town not only assume he's killed Stefan but also Stefan's victims.
• 55:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: They chase him down with torches.
• 55:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: They set fire to the church.
• 55:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: And here comes Charles Xavier to save the day.
• 55:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: The dialogue between Xavier and that crawler is pulled directly from giant size X-Men number one.
• 55:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: And on the final page, we see that crawler saying, my family taught me to be proud of who I am for Fessert.
• 55:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: Never will I hide my face.
• 55:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: And this will be my costume.
• 55:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: The regalia I was given only after I had outgrown the trappings of a child.
• 55:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: As for my codename, my family has given me that too.
• 55:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: It is that crawler, a name I earned when I came out of the shadows and embraced the spotlight.
• 55:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: I will use it to remind myself that I need never again hide in fear.
• 56:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: Goodbye, Mother Farewell, Sabu.
• 56:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Until we meet again, my sweet Jamaid.
• 56:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then we get this kind of montage at the end of him adventuring with the X-Men and Excalibur in the 1990s.
• 56:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Let me hear from Bailey on the art in this issue.
• 56:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you have any thoughts you'd like to share, and then let me hear from Anthony on the storybeats.
• 56:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: If there's anything that stands out.
• 56:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I just want to point out, I think this has my favorite drawing of Charles Xavier I've ever seen.
• 56:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm page 22, the close-up with his like big lips and like sparkling eyes.
• 56:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's like beautiful.
• 56:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: I love this so much.
• 56:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's really good, I just didn't, in general though, like, I think the arts really fun.
• 56:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: I love the, um, like the line weight, um, it has a lot of like flow, um, and motion in it.
• 56:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: And like you like into earlier to like the kind of 90s cartoons, and it really feels like that.
• 56:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: And like it kind of, there's like a few panels here that almost make me think a little of like Dragon Ball Z in the state language in that, which makes me wonder if that was maybe a bit of influence at the time.
• 56:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
• 57:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, the colors are so like bright and vibrant and the the flow between the panels.
• 57:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: I like a page 19 a lot because it feels very infinity scroll with a very long vertical panels.
• 57:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, it's it's very fun.
• 57:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: It seems to me like the artist really enjoyed drawing this every image of my father's tail.
• 57:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's like swirling around like he's having fun drawing this character.
• 57:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
• 57:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I love when you can like see that to on a page and like seeing like, oh, yes, this artist like loved this moment and they put that extra like little juicy into it, you know, and I feel like that reads throughout the whole issue.
• 57:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: I love that you put it up this image of Xavier.
• 57:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's my favorite thing.
• 57:43
  [SPEAKER_05]: It's so good.
• 57:44
  [SPEAKER_05]: It's so good.
• 57:46
  [SPEAKER_04]: It wasn't even the one I thought you were going to talk about.
• 57:48
  [SPEAKER_04]: I thought you were talking about the first one where we see him and he's like this solid tank in his chair.
• 57:54
  [SPEAKER_04]: Oh my god.
• 57:57
  [SPEAKER_04]: He looks like he's nine feet tall in that one.
• 58:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't think he's actually there.
• 58:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think he's psychically projecting himself there.
• 58:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's my real theory from giant size.
• 58:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's like getting all the X-Men from around the world at the same time, you know?
• 58:10
  [SPEAKER_04]: I like the idea that he's also making himself into handsome squidward in this panel, but this is like him projecting.
• 58:17
  [SPEAKER_04]: Like, you like jogging out of himself a little bit.
• 58:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: I love it.
• 58:22
  [SPEAKER_04]: A huge amount of anime influence in the 97 comics, like Joe Medirera comes on board and designs.
• 58:29
  [SPEAKER_04]: I have an onslaught costume that I wore once for Halloween Party and everyone kept calling me anime magneto.
• 58:35
  [SPEAKER_04]: This was the mandate and these 99 sense issues are where they were definitely trying out like a more manga style in the books for sure.
• 58:44
  [SPEAKER_04]: I...
• 58:44
  [SPEAKER_04]: I mean, it feels like what it is, which is like an editor synthesizing all this material and retcons into something coherent and being like this is Nikreler's story.
• 58:55
  [SPEAKER_04]: I feel like it doesn't have a real, it doesn't have a throughline, through it.
• 59:00
  [SPEAKER_04]: The one part I find
• 59:01
  [SPEAKER_04]: really interesting and embedded in it is the critique of Charles Xavier, which is like, I will never hide my face, Nightcrawler says, and then he spends quite a lot of those first issues wearing the image inducer that Charles Xavier makes him wear and looking like Errol Flynn when he does it, right?
• 59:17
  [SPEAKER_04]: Until that issue where they're fighting the Hellfire Club and he refuses to turn it on.
• 59:21
  [SPEAKER_04]: He tells Charles Xavier, I'm not doing this anymore, and Charles like you have to, and he's like,
• 59:25
  [SPEAKER_04]: No, this is my face, people have to deal with it.
• 59:27
  [SPEAKER_04]: Like, I think that night crawler, one of the things giant sized X men did really well is give us characters who are visibly mutated, who are something other than a shame to it, right?
• 59:41
  [SPEAKER_04]: original five xmen we have like angel we have beasts feet we have cyclopsis visor and all three are by Charles Xavier given apparatus to disguise their difference beast has his weird shoes cyclops has his glasses and angel has to wear that harness and that to me is like everything wrong with Charles Xavier is right there i built the iceman pride story around those panels
• 1:00:06
  [SPEAKER_04]: This is a man who thinks that the way we will overcome is by blending in and by being palatable.
• 1:00:11
  [SPEAKER_04]: And night crawlers really the first person in X-Men who says, fuck you, this is my face.
• 1:00:17
  [SPEAKER_04]: And I'm gonna wear it out and I don't care what people say.
• 1:00:20
  [SPEAKER_04]: And that matters to me a lot.
• 1:00:21
  [SPEAKER_04]: I mean, Angel does it to you and he's like, I'm rich, no one's gonna sue, but like.
• 1:00:25
  [SPEAKER_04]: So I like that.
• 1:00:25
  [SPEAKER_04]: I like that.
• 1:00:26
  [SPEAKER_04]: This is built into the character that like I'm not wearing that mask.
• 1:00:29
  [SPEAKER_04]: Thanks.
• 1:00:30
  [SPEAKER_04]: And Charles Xavier is just the latest person to be like, please put on this mask.
• 1:00:34
  [SPEAKER_04]: Again, I do not.
• 1:00:35
  [SPEAKER_04]: I love Charles Xavier as a character.
• 1:00:37
  [SPEAKER_04]: I think he's one of the most reprehensible characters in fiction.
• 1:00:42
  [SPEAKER_04]: But he's great.
• 1:00:42
  [SPEAKER_04]: And look at him.
• 1:00:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is the order, or this is the episode, I mean we're here for Avengers Academy today, but this is the episode for night crawler Where I just wanted to focus on the crazy retcons and this kind of obsession We have with getting the origin right you have to stack it all together We have like three different origins why he was running from the mob and like what his life in the circus was like and we have like four origins of who his parents are and We just love the character anyway, right?
• 1:01:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: These are not the things we love about the character, but it is fun to have a messy X-Men family, so I do love that part
• 1:01:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Stay tuned next week for the trial of Kurt Wagner on Dream Locking Lane and follow the show at a Dream Locking underscore lane on Instagram.
• 1:01:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: All the patrons this month are also night crawler.
• 1:01:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the theme for February coming up is going to be all about Voodoo.
• 1:01:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's the trial of brother Voodoo at the end of the month that I built a whole show around the Voodoo theme that I'm very excited about to share with you all.
• 1:01:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was a crazy research journey.
• 1:01:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: I really enjoyed the process.
• 1:01:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you both for coming to celebrate the show with me today and to celebrate your incredible work Um, yeah, you can find me on Instagram and flu sky at Bailey Rosenland.
• 1:01:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm coming work.
• 1:01:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Everything I've worked on right now is not announced.
• 1:01:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I do have a series that should hopefully be out in January.
• 1:01:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's upcoming.
• 1:01:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's a new Marvel unlimited mini series.
• 1:01:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: So keep an eye out for
• 1:02:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: We will definitely help you spread the word as well.
• 1:02:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Big fan, hopefully it's a year today.
• 1:02:09
  [SPEAKER_04]: Anthony.
• 1:02:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for having me.
• 1:02:10
  [SPEAKER_04]: I'm on most things as Mia Cooper, MIA K. O. O. P. A.
• 1:02:15
  [SPEAKER_04]: A man January, January.
• 1:02:17
  [SPEAKER_04]: What can I say about January?
• 1:02:18
  [SPEAKER_04]: 26th, we will have already done our screening of the 90s Captain America movie with Chips Darski as my guest.
• 1:02:26
  [SPEAKER_04]: So you'll have missed it.
• 1:02:26
  [SPEAKER_04]: Sorry, everybody.
• 1:02:27
  [SPEAKER_04]: I don't know what February's movie is yet.
• 1:02:29
  [SPEAKER_04]: Reading wise, I don't think I have anything
• 1:02:33
  [SPEAKER_04]: yet for then.
• 1:02:35
  [SPEAKER_04]: So but keep an eye out.
• 1:02:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot of fun stuff in the works for sure.
• 1:02:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: Excellent to see you both.
• 1:02:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you everybody for listening and for the ongoing support.
• 1:02:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: Hope you're enjoying that color month.
• 1:02:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: And go read Avengers Academy front to back.
• 1:02:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: I promise you we'll enjoy it.
• 1:02:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thanks everyone.
• 1:02:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you Anthony.
• 1:02:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you Bailey.
• 1:02:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: We will see you all back here.
• 1:02:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thanks Chad.
• 1:02:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.
• 1:02:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.
• 1:02:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Bye.
• 1:02:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: And now stay tuned for some thoughts on fascism as a special
• 1:03:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: In the early 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy turned the nation's Cold War anxieties into a stage for his own rise, transforming congressional hearings into high-drama interrogations about communist infiltration in the federal government, the military, and American culture.
• 1:03:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: These weren't trials in the legal sense, they were public performances built on accusation,
• 1:03:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: crumbled under the weight of rumor and the boundaries between national security and political spectacle, political spectacle blurred almost overnight.
• 1:03:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot of pressure that people were put on to sign particular lists, and if you didn't admit you were a comedy, there were ads running publicly.
• 1:03:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you see a woman reading a newspaper alone at a street corner, she might be a communist.
• 1:03:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you see a man who is looking at another man, he might be a child molester and a
• 1:03:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: like really uncomfortable propaganda ads going everywhere, and there's been recent plays and television shows even about this era and American history.
• 1:04:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: One of McCarthy's most fateful confrontations came out in 1954 with Major General Ralph W's ZWICAR ZWICAR, a decorated World War II officer who had survived the Normandy landings and carried himself with quiet dignity.
• 1:04:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Call to testify about an American promotion McCarthy viewed as suspicious.
• 1:04:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: Zwicker refused to violate protocol or reveal protected personality tales, so McCarthy responded by berating him on live television declaring him quote not fit to where the uniform.
• 1:04:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: McCarthy, by the way, had the full backing of Jay Edgar Hoover and the FBI in his witch hunts as they called them.
• 1:04:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was a stunning moment, a senator attacking a war hero whose credibility far exceeded his own.
• 1:04:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Public sympathy shifted immediately as Wicker became a symbol of military honor under assault and McCarthy's aura of invincibility began to crack.
• 1:04:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Observers at the time, the end history isn't since, have noted that McCarthy's methods echoed the show trial practices of authoritarian regimes, particularly in the early Nazi era and in America in the last 10 years under a certain administration.
• 1:05:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: The parallel was not ideological, it was procedural.
• 1:05:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Nazis have perfected the use of public hearings as weapons, accusations delivered as verdicts, guilt established by association, the humiliation of targets under the bright glare of orchestrated outrage.
• 1:05:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: McCarthy's interrogations lacked the brutality of the Germans,
• 1:05:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: But they shared the same theatrical DNA, the performance of justice rather than the pursuit of it.
• 1:05:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: The cultivation of fear to keep the power unchallenged and the spectacle of a single man recreating or recasting suspicion as fact.
• 1:05:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: What made this whole episode, especially striking was its timing.
• 1:05:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: Less than a decade after Americans had fought and died to defeat fascism, aspects of his machinery, including public shaming, loyalty tests, and the evaluation of political paranoia to hold it home fueled my nuclear dread and the sudden shadow of the Soviet Union.
• 1:05:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: McCarthy's reign was brief, undone in part by his own excesses, his potential own closeted homosexuality, and his attack on Zwitt General's Wicker, but it revealed something unsettling that even in a victorious post-war democracy fear can open the door to tactics uncomfortably reminiscent of the very authoritarianism the country believed it had vanquished.
• 1:06:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now we're jumping to a story from Captain America, red, white, and blue that plays off of this piece of history.
• 1:06:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is a story by Max Allen Collins, and I do not know how to say this artist's name.
• 1:06:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's Vache Mavlian.
• 1:06:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: We open on an image of Captain America protecting a woman from gunfire.
• 1:06:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: In front of the Lincoln Memorial, except in this world, it is not the Lincoln Memorial.
• 1:06:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: It is a giant visage of the red skull sitting in the throne.
• 1:06:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: in this alternate world, Captain America in the 1950s.
• 1:06:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: And if you remember in the real Marvel comics, there was a 50s comedy smasher, Captain America, but this is our Steve Rogers in this alternate world.
• 1:06:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's called to testify before an aggressive, congressional committee led by Senator McRouter, or so, not a difficult parallel from McCarthy.
• 1:06:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: During the height of 1954 anti-communist hysteria,
• 1:07:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Though worn by his lawyer, Mr. Levine, about McRouter's tactics, especially what happened to Brigadier General Zwillier in this world, Capapier's voluntarily believing he has nothing to hide.
• 1:07:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: The committee immediately challenges his legitimacy, demanding his real name, questioning his right to call himself Captain, and insisting he remove his mask.
• 1:07:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: When Cap and Levine, who is a Jewish name, by the way, request a recess before answering McRouter escalates by accusing him of hiding subversive activity, even hinting at misconduct
• 1:07:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: after the hearing adjourns, Steve secretly meets with FBI agent Betty Ross, who's a real Marvel character from the 1940s, one of the only few people who knows his identity, and confides his discomfort of being forced into evasiveness.
• 1:07:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Betty shares classified suspicions that the McRouter now leading the charge may not be the real senator and that his behavior changed drastically only after a possible murder and replacement plot, supported by unexplained surveillance photos.
• 1:07:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: So when Steve studies the photos, he recognizes the men with McRuter as not wanted Nazi war criminals.
• 1:08:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Realizing a deeper threat is manipulating the hearings.
• 1:08:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: He returns to Congress and challenges McRuter directly, provoking the senator to insist publicly and forcefully that cap unmask.
• 1:08:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: Steve complies in dramatic fashion only to reveal not his own face, but the true red menace.
• 1:08:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: The red skull hiding behind McRuter's identity.
• 1:08:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: He unmasks the senator as the red skull in hiding.
• 1:08:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: A fight erupts in the chamber as Capic sposes the skull's infiltration and denounces the spread of hatred in paranoia.
• 1:08:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: In the final confrontation, Captain America defeats the Red Skull before Congress and delivers his declaration of identity, not his civilian name, but the symbolic one.
• 1:08:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you want my name, it's America, Captain America, and I am here to welcome my dear friend, Jason Lowe, to talk about this crazy story with me, hi Jason, are you a Red Skull fan, my friend?
• 1:08:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: heck no thanks for having me Chad I appreciate you joining me we had a chance to get together and try out our recently it was so lovely to see you we had dinner together tell everybody a little about your thoughts on this crazy story called a red under the mask
• 1:09:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, for first off that, that's a great history of Justin that that you just gave me being a Canadian, I only have a general idea of the Cold War and MacArthur and I guess the witch hunts, the witch hunts trials with the communist or the accused.
• 1:09:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: The communists?
• 1:09:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, this was definitely a great analogy to fit Captain Rogers into that to refer to those trials.
• 1:09:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: I do like the art style.
• 1:09:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: It kind of has that political, caricature field to it.
• 1:09:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: It really gets the job done.
• 1:09:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: It goes straight to the point.
• 1:09:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's very brief.
• 1:09:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, a painter, a story that really gives you just like a deep dive in American history.
• 1:09:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: But in a comic bookie way, right?
• 1:09:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you have Red Skull who's like who's up disguised as McRouter projecting how Captain Rogers is either Communic reason or he's just not loyal to to Congress and and to the American nation when you know in reality It's it's McRouter disguised as Red Skull who's poisoning the American well with Nazi ideas
• 1:10:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, there's a lot of history packed in here.
• 1:10:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, if you look up the Hollywood 10, there were 10 key figures in Hollywood that got blacklisted for once having been affiliated with the Communist Party.
• 1:10:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Ruined careers, changed lives, Charlie Chaplin was like kicked out of Hollywood for years.
• 1:10:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: His films were not allowed to be seen.
• 1:10:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: McCarthy himself, the senator, was likely a closeted homosexual and his largest supporter was, again, a Roy Cohn, who is a gay man, who also later put Donald Trump in power.
• 1:10:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Roy Cohen, if you see an angel's in America, Roy Cohen's an attorney that died of AIDS, but Roy Cohen had like a young army boyfriend.
• 1:10:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: And McCarthy kept like changing all these rules to protect Roy's gay boyfriend.
• 1:10:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: While they were also going on gay witch hunts all over the country, it's just like the height of hypocrisy.
• 1:10:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we're sorry to get you.
• 1:11:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we're certainly seeing it again with Trump now.
• 1:11:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's just it's a itchie, it's a itchie parallel.
• 1:11:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't like it at all.
• 1:11:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, it's not just makes me so frustrated.
• 1:11:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I hate hypocrisy so much.
• 1:11:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, this, this, well, are you a Captain America fan?
• 1:11:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Is that a character that you followed much over the years?
• 1:11:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it, it, it, it, it passing like a, a, a casual fan here and there.
• 1:11:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: I do have a few like Jack Kirby issues with him and his early adventures with Sam Wilson as they fight Nazis and the late 1960s, early 70s.
• 1:11:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, they've been fighting Nazis for 80 years.
• 1:11:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, they're still fighting Nazis because they're just all around.
• 1:11:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, and I keep doing these little red skull stories.
• 1:11:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so often the theme is he's infiltrated the American government by filling the blank.
• 1:11:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we have to expose him by filling the blank.
• 1:11:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: And here's where we draw the line.
• 1:11:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's an uncomfortable parallel every time, but we're also living in these times, which makes it very, I don't know, on the surface.
• 1:11:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: And yeah, here we are.
• 1:11:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: Not these are still irrelevant, and you know,
• 1:11:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: pretty obvious what like there are a lot of parallels with the current administration, what what they've been doing.
• 1:12:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: You have the defense secretary of defense who has these white nationalism tattoos all over his body.
• 1:12:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: They're just committing war crimes on foreign countries and I mean we're living it.
• 1:12:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Removal of rights from the disabled and the trans the police forces going after immigrants.
• 1:12:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's just it's an itty it's an itty itty time.
• 1:12:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: How are you doing north of the border, my friend.
• 1:12:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: We will never make you the 50 first state.
• 1:12:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: I just want to promise you.
• 1:12:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I can't I guess I can't.
• 1:12:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: Fuck that noise.
• 1:12:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: But like, we, we, I've been just observing to see how prepared we should be in Canada.
• 1:12:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it's, it's so disheartening to see.
• 1:12:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, like, it's just people that that will just mind your business walking down the street and then get abducted by mass men, like, brutally beaten, and then thrown into a van and then transported to someplace, they won't even know their family is won't even know.
• 1:13:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: And this is all legal, apparently.
• 1:13:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, I mean, I, I think I told you, I witnessed an ice arrest about a month ago, and I cried for like two days.
• 1:13:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, I, I, I felt like I couldn't do anything.
• 1:13:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, I, I, I don't know.
• 1:13:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: It really challenges your sense of like humanity.
• 1:13:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: When you go through something like that, it's intense.
• 1:13:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: And this is why I, I, I'm, I'm not going to any US shows these days.
• 1:13:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: Um, um,
• 1:13:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: I wish I could have gone to your Comic Con, but I didn't want to risk walking by ice after hearing that Dave made an appearance at San Diego Comic Con.
• 1:13:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, not Sees are alive and alive.
• 1:13:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Many, many of my Canadian friends with sex.
• 1:13:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Anything, we just can't come south.
• 1:13:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, you're one of the happiest people I know.
• 1:13:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: I love your enthusiasm for everything that you do.
• 1:13:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: I probably don't think these days, well I'm gonna say keeping that sense of enthusiasm alive as another person who really enjoys being joyful I know how much work it could take sometimes, but I refuse to let them dim my joy and I think that's something I see as a quality in you Which is something I value in my friends like you you're determined to like make the world better, which I I so appreciate
• 1:14:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: We try.
• 1:14:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: We try.
• 1:14:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think the secret is to not get too wired with the news, like give yourself some break in between because, you know, sometimes these these news breaks, like it takes time to process or it takes time for it to actually become like a reality thing.
• 1:14:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like is this something that that Trump is just thinking off of his head or is it like or is it is.
• 1:14:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, you got to give it time for for other people to push back on that and and you know, it just will just turn out to be just stupid words that Yeah, it's in the area of like you got to kiss the ring or we'll be punished.
• 1:14:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's yeah, I hate it very much, but the red skull parallel.
• 1:15:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: the interesting thing here is Kappa had to rip the mask off, but I don't know, I don't even think the mask is on these days.
• 1:15:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: I am really jarred by this opening.
• 1:15:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's an interesting image, but to put red skull in the place of Abraham Lincoln on that first page, it's really jarring to me.
• 1:15:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's a weird blend to me.
• 1:15:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know.
• 1:15:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is like Trump's gonna like replace the Lincoln Memorial with his own like fucking giant statue of himself, which is gross.
• 1:15:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's a short and you just gotta get straight to the point.
• 1:15:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, what was the impression that the whole world building of this story?
• 1:15:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: So the revision of history is quite possible.
• 1:15:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: I value you and your time every time.
• 1:15:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm loving the expenditures right now.
• 1:15:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: I know the run is almost complete but just want to joy to see you.
• 1:15:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: How you doing?
• 1:15:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Do you have any final words or thoughts for our listeners today?
• 1:15:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I mean like I'm doing okay and I know generally speaking like everyone is trying their best just like me to to get through the day
• 1:16:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: All I got to say is, yeah, just make sure to take care of yourself.
• 1:16:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm brace to things that brings you joy, such as reading comics or watching your favorite anime or or Kiwi show, you know, Ted Lasso is a good show to watch these days.
• 1:16:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: Boots was a pretty good show, too.
• 1:16:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, Boots has been interesting.
• 1:16:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've been the middle of that, whether it's a bit of an interesting journey, that hyper-meshed linity every time.
• 1:16:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, we've been watching some pretty good shows.
• 1:16:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: Murgot Mysteries, which is a Toronto-based mystery show set in the 18th century, is very good comfort viewing.
• 1:16:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: He always solves the mystery.
• 1:16:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: And you know, it's funny, yeah, right north,
• 1:16:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: has a I'm actually catching up with on my marathon with his all available on CBCGM and Ryan North he he's all caught up all 19 seasons and I'm on season five right now and I'm enjoying it.
• 1:17:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's actually there's also the show over compensating that's what I was thinking of which is another show about queerness in the face of kind of hyper masculinity and how performative and extra queery it all is right but I watch like boots are over compensating
• 1:17:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's just, it's really start with it.
• 1:17:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's just like pro wrestling.
• 1:17:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's really, it's really crazy.
• 1:17:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Great to see you, my friend.
• 1:17:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for your time today.
• 1:17:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: I can't wait to hang out on the main show again, too.
• 1:17:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, likewise, thanks for having me, Chad.
• 1:17:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: Happy holidays.
• 1:17:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, this will be out in January, but I hope everyone has a happy, the best new year.
• 1:17:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I hope you have a happy new year.
• 1:17:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: Alright, everybody take care of yourselves.
• 1:17:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: Living joyfully is an act of defiance.
• 1:17:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: Make sure you are doing your best out there.
• 1:17:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: We'll see you back here next week.
• 1:17:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for listening to Grimalk and Lane.
• 1:17:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: We hope you are enjoying this podcast.
• 1:17:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Grimalk and Lane is produced and recorded in Salt Lake City, Utah with music and editing done by my husband, Michael Bell, and promo art done by the incredible Seth Martell.
• 1:18:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Look for us on Patreon, where we are releasing weekly episodes about obscure characters and facts.
• 1:18:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a great way to participate with the podcast for only just a couple of dollars a month and it helps support what we are doing here.
• 1:18:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Also, the best way you could help
• 1:18:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Grimmulkin Lane is by sharing and liking and subscribing, but also please leave us a review wherever you listen to your podcasts.
• 1:18:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: We'll see you back your next time on Grimmulkin Lane.