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X-Men Liberators! With Joe Harris and Jason Liebig! · Graymalkin Lane the podcast

0:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Hey everybody, welcome back to The Grey Malkin' Lane podcast, where queer friends and allies gather to review and discuss the original X-Men comics in continuity order.
0:17
[SPEAKER_00]: It is Colossus Month on Grey Malkin' Lane, we're gonna be celebrating the Order of Rasputin' all month, and I'm super excited to be taking some side tangents into this character that I didn't love before.
0:27
[SPEAKER_00]: I've always been fond of, but now that I understand this complexity, I'm an enormous fan.
0:31
[SPEAKER_00]: We're taking the, we're breaking the rules just a little bit too.
0:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Normally we keep stuff set in the past.
0:36
[SPEAKER_00]: We are jumping up to the mid nineties for a couple of these conversations.
0:40
[SPEAKER_00]: So we have the chance to talk all about Colossus Bloodline, a limited series.
0:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Very focused on this character.
0:46
[SPEAKER_00]: And now we get to talk all about Xman liberators, which is a series that you may or may not have read.
0:53
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a bang and limited series from the late nineteen nineties.
0:56
[SPEAKER_00]: written by the incredible Joe Harris and Joe Harris is here with us today, along with a former X-Men editor and candy mogul Jason Liebiggs can go on your business cards.
1:06
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a yeah.
1:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me have you both introduce yourselves a little bit about your history if you'd be willing to share and I'd love to hear some of your preliminary thoughts about what you love about the character of Colossus.
1:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me welcome Joe Harris to the main show of Great Balkan Lane Joe was with us for the Bishop the last X man conversation over on the Patreon.
1:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Hi Joe, it's great to see you again.
1:27
[SPEAKER_02]: Good to see you again, too, Chad.
1:28
[SPEAKER_02]: I've been writing comics for I don't even twenty five years at this point, maybe.
1:33
[SPEAKER_02]: And I started that career.
1:36
[SPEAKER_02]: Marvel comics mostly in the X office.
1:38
[SPEAKER_02]: I was twenty-five years old and I was afforded some incredible opportunities to write on these books that I'd loved to read and collect when I was young.
1:47
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's still a part I take with me, you know, it was a long time ago, my time at Marvel, but I'm still very fond of it.
1:52
[SPEAKER_02]: Pure of heart and heart.
1:55
[SPEAKER_02]: I always loved his relationship both Wolverine and with Kitty Bride, the quintessential big guy on a team.
2:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
2:02
[SPEAKER_00]: And let me also welcome Jason Levy back to the show.
2:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Jason, what a joy.
2:06
[SPEAKER_03]: How's it going?
2:07
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm a look I'm always excited to sit down and hang out with you guys Of course, I've known Joe Joe's been you know like we were working together God even more than twenty five years ago Maybe like twenty seven years ago something like that you got some crazy stuff happening in the candy world right now
2:21
[SPEAKER_03]: Candy and food and just everything.
2:24
[SPEAKER_03]: Like I've been sort of pulled out a food a little bit here and there.
2:26
[SPEAKER_03]: I feel like I'm doing a ton of work for history channel right now.
2:30
[SPEAKER_03]: Next weekend for like two months.
2:32
[SPEAKER_03]: I will have two show news shows airing that are not my shows, but they are shows that I'm a part of and I pure own the mega brands that built America season three and I'm on the inaugural season of hazardous histories with Henry Winkler.
2:46
[SPEAKER_03]: So I get to be on a show with the funds which I'm super fucking.
2:52
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, like I think the first time I ever cried watching an episode of television might have been an episode of happy days So you remember it was fun.
3:00
[SPEAKER_03]: I know exactly what it was it was Christmas episode Oh, oh, I did fancy yeah cuz he's in Rocky Oleg up in his god damn Yes, where he like lived above the garage and Richie County him goes to see and he looks through the window and it was the saddest most like I was just such an expression of loneliness and this sort of like inner
3:21
[SPEAKER_03]: God, yeah, and I don't think I'd ever been as a child moved, but that's so struck this idea of loneliness in my childhood, you know, that I, in my child brain, not just further off into the weeds, but hopefully, yes.
3:36
[SPEAKER_02]: We did all we got, baby.
3:38
[SPEAKER_02]: But when it comes to that episode, how would be in the run was it?
3:43
[SPEAKER_02]: Because is that really the curse time where Fanzi is allowed?
3:46
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, not that he's like a stray.
3:48
[SPEAKER_02]: He's allowed in the house, finally.
3:50
[SPEAKER_02]: That one episode of that.
3:51
[SPEAKER_03]: You might be right.
3:52
[SPEAKER_03]: That could be like a first season episode.
3:54
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
3:55
[SPEAKER_03]: It could very likely be.
3:56
[SPEAKER_00]: I grew up watching rerun.
3:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Huge cross-front chauchy, although he maybe did not turn into a super-quality person.
4:03
[SPEAKER_03]: No, but like, no, he was, you know, he was an appealing person.
4:06
[SPEAKER_00]: He was an interesting heartthrob.
4:07
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, he was an appealing teen heartthrob.
4:10
[SPEAKER_03]: He did the work.
4:10
[SPEAKER_02]: He was an innocent man.
4:12
[SPEAKER_00]: We can have all our happy days jumping all the sharks we want.
4:15
[SPEAKER_00]: That's all there.
4:16
[SPEAKER_00]: That's how I had it.
4:18
[SPEAKER_00]: How many references?
4:20
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I'm super happy to see your star rising my friend.
4:22
[SPEAKER_00]: So Joe, this is your time on the main show for our listening audience.
4:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Tell people a little bit about where they might know you from.
4:29
[SPEAKER_00]: You have had your hands in a number of X-Men books over the years.
4:32
[SPEAKER_00]: It might kind of late nineties early, two thousand's era.
4:34
[SPEAKER_00]: This is true.
4:35
[SPEAKER_02]: I wrote a bunch of X-Projects back then and off the top of my head.
4:40
[SPEAKER_02]: There's X-Men liberators, which we're going to be talking about today.
4:43
[SPEAKER_02]: There was the search for Cyclops.
4:46
[SPEAKER_02]: I wrote that.
4:46
[SPEAKER_02]: I wrote a bunch of annuals a time, like the Generation X Dracula annual fish of the last X-Men.
4:52
[SPEAKER_02]: I wrote Generation X Holiday Special at one point.
4:56
[SPEAKER_02]: where we learn that Santa Claus doesn't just exist in the Marvel Universe, he's also mutant.
5:00
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a true, yeah, that's a real Marvel fact.
5:02
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm the handbook guy, Santa Claus is a mutant.
5:04
[SPEAKER_00]: What recently begins that Jesus himself was a mutant as well, which is hilarious.
5:09
[SPEAKER_00]: You also have a bunch of isolated issues of various titles.
5:12
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the slingers title, of course, might be what you're best known for Marvel.
5:16
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll talk sliggers another time as well.
5:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you want to talk to people a little bit about your rise from kind of fan to professional working in the X-Men?
5:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Were you an X-Men fan?
5:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, yeah, totally.
5:27
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, ever since I was maybe fourteen or fifteen and I was, I really got introduced to collecting monthly comics and buying back issues.
5:36
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, the X-Men were the center of all the universes that we read and enjoyed.
5:41
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean,
5:42
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I grew up in an era where the Avengers were second tier and you could really say that back then before the movies.
5:48
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, yeah, but then there was, you know, between this time and when the X-Men rule, there was a lot of work on Marvel's in to kind of re-establish those Avengers heroes as predominant.
5:59
[SPEAKER_02]: Where they belong, no, but it was cool when the X-Men rule everything.
6:03
[SPEAKER_02]: Chris Claremont doesn't get enough
6:05
[SPEAKER_00]: The X-Men are indelible.
6:07
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to kind of jump around your X-Men career just a little bit as we ask some questions.
6:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Talk to me about getting the initial design back for Cyclopselips.
6:17
[SPEAKER_00]: The Cyclops is dead.
6:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Apocalypse inhabits his form.
6:21
[SPEAKER_00]: And we get this crazy image of Cyclops ellipse, which is what I choose to call him.
6:26
[SPEAKER_02]: If there's one really weird cover that had impolina drew, there are like three awesome covers, all the red variants.
6:33
[SPEAKER_02]: And then there's this one where Jean Gray and Cyclops, I can't pronounce it, you're going to have to say it.
6:38
[SPEAKER_02]: Cyclops ellipse.
6:39
[SPEAKER_02]: They're embracing one another on the cover and it just looks so weird.
6:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you want to talk about the narrative decision to bring Cyclops back with Apocalypse in his body?
6:49
[SPEAKER_00]: That was a wild choice.
6:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Even as a reader at the time, I was like, wow.
6:53
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't remember to be honest with you where that came from.
6:55
[SPEAKER_02]: If I pitched that, I mean, they were bound together.
6:58
[SPEAKER_02]: That was sort of, we knew that going into that.
7:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Apocalypse after the twelve Apocalypse went on to live in Cyclops's form.
7:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
7:06
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know what my opinion was other than we were going to restore them by the end.
7:10
[SPEAKER_02]: Narratively speaking, you know, a lot of things in those days and I think they probably still are were top down, you know, something gets sort of thought up by editorial and then it's sort of, and then it's, you know, they cast for creatives on it.
7:23
[SPEAKER_02]: So I don't really know, and you had Tom Rainy on the book.
7:26
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
7:27
[SPEAKER_02]: I know my, you know, my contributions to it in terms of just idea, where, uh, and I used the, the devotee who wants, who would rather host the apocalypse, and she sort of leading Scott on a, on a bit of a wild goose chase, because she wants his power for herself.
7:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Then let's talk about, yes, Jubilee.
7:43
[SPEAKER_00]: There is a Santa Claus.
7:44
[SPEAKER_00]: The generation, especially with Adam Polita, I've had about Adam on the show.
7:48
[SPEAKER_00]: You mentioned Santa Claus being a mutant already, but I would love to hear how that happened.
7:53
[SPEAKER_02]: a wild dirty and you also got to use nanny in the orphan maker two of my all-time favorite ex-men villains in this story they actually appear in slingers as well I love them so much and you know in fairness I didn't scottle a delder really fun bit with with nanny and orphan maker early in the gen X run
8:10
[SPEAKER_02]: And I always liked those Claremont issues where they were they were just so ridiculous and yet there's something so compelling.
8:16
[SPEAKER_02]: It's so dark that she wants to free mutants like that by making the morpons.
8:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Is that Wells used these characters indelibly in the recent Helions run from a couple of you know, it's it's a crazy ride.
8:28
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a really fun for both of them.
8:30
[SPEAKER_00]: And do you want to talk about the Santa Claus mutant decision?
8:33
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that was that was my idea.
8:34
[SPEAKER_00]: I had to imagine there was push back about kind of tongue-in-cheek, right?
8:38
[SPEAKER_02]: So he doesn't come out and say it.
8:39
[SPEAKER_02]: He kind of tells Julie not to say the word and like makes a shush gesture.
8:44
[SPEAKER_02]: So there's some plausible deniability.
8:46
[SPEAKER_03]: Just want to interject, I think when you assume push back, I think the trick would be that who's office does Santa Claus is a character falling there.
8:54
[SPEAKER_03]: Just keep it long to the Spider-Man offices.
8:57
[SPEAKER_03]: You might as well be a turf war over.
8:59
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
9:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Santa appears in that like Chris Claremont Marvel holiday special where the brotherhood of evil mutants get turned into toys at the end.
9:11
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a wild journey.
9:12
[SPEAKER_00]: This character has a whole Marvel history.
9:13
[SPEAKER_00]: You can jump to the Marvel appendix, by the way, everyone for a full right up on the Santa Claus in the Marvel universe.
9:19
[SPEAKER_00]: My friends over at the appendix have done the work for you.
9:23
[SPEAKER_00]: I believe that could have that we can call that a shameless self promotion, Chad.
9:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that one wasn't mine, but it's the team I was on for sure, absolutely.
9:33
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, Joe, do you want to tell everybody a little about how slingers came to happen as well?
9:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Spider-Man when period where he launched a bunch of different identities and these different identities got to form as new characters in a new team with crazy art.
9:47
[SPEAKER_00]: This was a fun one to pick up off the shelves, I remember.
9:50
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, they actually suspended publication of the spiderbooks at that.
9:53
[SPEAKER_02]: I think there was a month with no core spider manditals and slingers launch that month.
9:58
[SPEAKER_02]: And it lies did over a hundred thousand copies of memory serves.
10:01
[SPEAKER_02]: Now granted, there was a this really stupid gimmick in the home to where some of the interiors were different and four different fire and four different variants.
10:09
[SPEAKER_03]: But for people who didn't read it though, what's the setup?
10:12
[SPEAKER_03]: Like it was a pretty fun setup, right?
10:14
[SPEAKER_02]: The repeater Parker had had, like he said earlier, had taken on these four identities, Ricochet, Lorna, prodigy, and dusk.
10:21
[SPEAKER_02]: As a result of the identity crisis storyline, where Spider-Man was wanted for murder, I guess.
10:27
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know, but he had to go incognito with still had to save New York, you know, so he adopted these four.
10:32
[SPEAKER_02]: Personas and they all had their origins, but then identity crisis ended.
10:37
[SPEAKER_02]: It turned out they wanted a launch a new series with those four characters.
10:41
[SPEAKER_02]: So I came up with a castle and habit them in a bit of a mythology to explore.
10:45
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know, we had fun for like a year.
10:47
[SPEAKER_00]: The character dusk was my favorite, but Hornet and prodigy have gone on to have some odd life in the comics a little bit in there.
10:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I know.
10:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Especially during Civil War.
10:56
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, Ricochet too.
10:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Ricochet too, absolutely.
10:59
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to invite you back for a Ricochet character episode in the future, Joe.
11:03
[SPEAKER_00]: I've got you out by list.
11:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Ricochet being a mutant, of course.
11:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you want to talk about Ricochet's mutant status or powers a little bit?
11:09
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know.
11:10
[SPEAKER_02]: What was the last thing Ricochet did?
11:11
[SPEAKER_02]: I know he was in the Brian Vaughn series.
11:13
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, he was in the Loaners.
11:16
[SPEAKER_02]: Ricochet had like a variation on the spider sense.
11:19
[SPEAKER_02]: He has mutant power was a kind of danger sense, like a fight or flight reaction that was in hand.
11:24
[SPEAKER_02]: And he also had pretty good Amy at those discs on his on his sleeves that he could throw.
11:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Chuck and discs of people's heads.
11:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Ricochet and the loners appeared in War of Kings Dark Hawk and then in Christus gauges Avengers Academy.
11:37
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think twenty twelve was the last time we've seen this guy.
11:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Would he make a good X-Men character?
11:42
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't I don't know.
11:43
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, the X-Men are done with Croco with these days, right?
11:46
[SPEAKER_02]: So they're back on Grey Malkin Lane.
11:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, they're spread all over the country at this point.
11:51
[SPEAKER_00]: They're all in different spots around the globe now.
11:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Very fractured.
11:54
[SPEAKER_02]: Different animal species.
11:56
[SPEAKER_02]: I love to.
11:57
[SPEAKER_02]: Which one?
11:58
[SPEAKER_02]: Gales first issue of the game.
11:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
12:00
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll deal with you in Gales doing great work on on on on Kenny.
12:03
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, we've got some in Louisiana, some in Chicago, some in Alaska.
12:06
[SPEAKER_00]: They're all over the place now.
12:08
[SPEAKER_00]: which is just fun.
12:09
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I wanted to talk gen X versus Dracula as well, writing Dracula, fighting these teens, given his own history with Storm and the X men is a crazy journey.
12:18
[SPEAKER_00]: And kind of a looting to Jubilee later becoming of Empire.
12:23
[SPEAKER_02]: anywhere near the car that, you know, that was not in the car.
12:26
[SPEAKER_02]: When I heard about that, I did laugh that she later becomes a vampire, but I had no inkling.
12:31
[SPEAKER_00]: She later becomes a vampire and then a single mother while still a vampire.
12:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Who's the father?
12:35
[SPEAKER_00]: She adopted a child.
12:38
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a little baby that now lives in other world, like the Captain Britain realm.
12:42
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a whole tinny Howard did a bunch of these characters a few years ago.
12:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Because, you know, babies can never age up in the comics.
12:49
[SPEAKER_00]: But do you want to talk about writing Dracula?
12:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Your specials really fond.
12:53
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I like Dracula's appearance in the X-Men that famous appearance will return storm.
12:58
[SPEAKER_02]: And I wanted to do something reminiscent of that.
13:00
[SPEAKER_02]: And I loved at the time one of the core precepts in Generation X was John O. And this unrequited love for Paige Guthrie that he couldn't really act on because of his deformity.
13:11
[SPEAKER_02]: And so it kind of wanted to play with that sort of irreconcilable situation for John O. As juxtaposed against
13:18
[SPEAKER_02]: being a teenager and growing up and dealing with different pressures and sex and secrets and all of that.
13:25
[SPEAKER_02]: So I thought that was fertile ground for for Dracula to appear and Dracula and for, in fact, makes Jono a deal.
13:31
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, despite, you, I mean, you have a pretty extensive run on X-Men, but just for a few years, but you did a lot of crazy stuff, man.
13:37
[SPEAKER_00]: You did some really original things as well.
13:39
[SPEAKER_00]: I see sometimes writers who will come in and make their mark, but it kind of feels like a Claremont Beatred a little bit if that's a very good phrase.
13:46
[SPEAKER_02]: But you've only, I've been given the opportunity.
13:48
[SPEAKER_02]: You'd get one hell of a Claremont Retreat Trust.
13:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Not that that's a bad thing, but you really hit some things from some very unique angles.
13:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you remember having to do a lot of deep research during your time?
13:59
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, it was not none that couldn't have been done and usually with back issues that were in the office.
14:04
[SPEAKER_02]: I suspend a lot of time in the office as Jason will remember.
14:07
[SPEAKER_02]: Back in those days, it was easy for creators to kind of drop in.
14:10
[SPEAKER_02]: It was a lot of fun to do and there was there were resources that I might not have.
14:14
[SPEAKER_02]: But it was also fairly recent that I had been reading the X-Men as a fan.
14:18
[SPEAKER_02]: So I did have a lot of knowledge to go back on at the time.
14:21
[SPEAKER_02]: My brain is a little at-for-feed since then.
14:25
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, to your point, there was a period, I sometimes will, I check in on the books and to your point, it does seem like there are these really iconic things being done, but they're a bit trapped into the, you know, they're in the trappings of the sort of iconic, you know, burn Claremont, you know, Claremont Cochrane things.
14:43
[SPEAKER_03]: And I do remember in the nineties, when I look back, it does seem like there was a desire to push forward a little bit, push out and not be retreading things, you know,
14:53
[SPEAKER_03]: Rather than relaunching new mutants, there was a generation.
14:57
[SPEAKER_02]: It was like it was still the stage of the X men that I think postage of apocalypse post.
15:02
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't remember if bastion was before was after that or operations zero tolerance was right around the same era.
15:09
[SPEAKER_02]: So basically all the guys went to image and you ended up with Scott and Fabian writing the books and I think that was the sort of energy that we inherited.
15:18
[SPEAKER_00]: I went on my Mormon mission at the very end of nineteen ninety seven after graduating high school.
15:22
[SPEAKER_00]: I referenced this in our Bishop the last X-Men episode.
15:24
[SPEAKER_00]: So during that two years, no television, no phone, really, no internet.
15:29
[SPEAKER_00]: I would sneak into like the grocery store, spinner acts and hide comics under my shirt like they were playboys and like tuck them under my mattress.
15:35
[SPEAKER_00]: So no one could fight.
15:36
[SPEAKER_00]: So X-Men liberators is at a series I read till I got home.
15:38
[SPEAKER_00]: But I read slingers.
15:39
[SPEAKER_00]: I read some of the other books.
15:41
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd keep them hidden and I'd like mail them home in boxes.
15:44
[SPEAKER_00]: But he could find out, of course, some people didn't think it was that big of a deal.
15:47
[SPEAKER_00]: But Operation Zero Tolerance was happening in ninety-five ninety-six when I was working at a comic shop at school.
15:52
[SPEAKER_00]: And all the propaganda posters, I went home and hung over all my walls, like they were in my bedroom.
15:57
[SPEAKER_00]: I remember the onslaught event, there was this like... It was like caution tape, but it said onslaught was here, and you could just roll it off.
16:05
[SPEAKER_00]: My friends all had like onslaught was here, caution tape all over their trapper keepers in high school because they had so much to give out.
16:11
[SPEAKER_02]: Remember how you guys teased on slot the first time who stopped the juggernaut?
16:16
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, yeah.
16:17
[SPEAKER_02]: Remember that moment?
16:18
[SPEAKER_03]: Look, I remember, I mean, I came in just after that first issue, I think, and maybe it had been adequately a couple of issues.
16:25
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's talking about onslaught.
16:27
[SPEAKER_03]: It's how I got my job in the office sort of that was one of the initial conversations I had with Bob.
16:31
[SPEAKER_03]: But I mean, and then learning from Scott that when we see juggernaut and the only word out of his mouth is onslaught, it was a big education to learn.
16:39
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, man, did you all that planning?
16:40
[SPEAKER_03]: I had no idea who that was.
16:42
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
16:42
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
16:43
[SPEAKER_02]: They had no idea.
16:44
[SPEAKER_02]: But on social media.
16:45
[SPEAKER_02]: I think they took different pitches and ideas on what he should.
16:48
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
16:48
[SPEAKER_02]: So we exist all on.
16:50
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
16:51
[SPEAKER_00]: I have the trial of juggernaut out there.
16:53
[SPEAKER_00]: I also have a recent episode of Terry Cappinaw where we talk about juggernaut as part of the ultraverse and when he lands back on the main earth, that's when onslaught kicks his ass.
17:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Crazy Jerry's Jason, did you have to do a lot of deep research to keep your kind of jobs as an editor?
17:09
[SPEAKER_00]: You guys were launching big events that were pretty continuity deep.
17:12
[SPEAKER_03]: Um, it like look I like Joe said I felt like at the time there it was fairly easy to keep up, you know, I don't recall it's funny when I try to think back sometimes I just don't remember what I was doing and I look over I'll find an old notebook and I was like
17:27
[SPEAKER_03]: Wow, I don't remember any of this at all.
17:29
[SPEAKER_03]: So, but in my, in my remembrance, there was so much new material we were doing.
17:36
[SPEAKER_03]: And again, this is just how I remember it.
17:38
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't remember having to do a lot of deep diving.
17:40
[SPEAKER_03]: And when there was a question, you know, like someone would bring up something about master mold that I wasn't aware of or something now.
17:46
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like,
17:47
[SPEAKER_03]: I just, like, threw the mark powers and I was like, oh, look at Bob.
17:50
[SPEAKER_03]: What do we need to do?
17:51
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, our Bob, you know, it's like, what do we need to know about master mold?
17:54
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know that, but that's fine, you know, because it's what I didn't read at Neil Adams issue that.
17:58
[SPEAKER_03]: So no, honestly, you know, for me, it was, it was expired.
18:03
[SPEAKER_03]: I remember exploring a lot of new territory when we were there.
18:06
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, like there was when you introduced, uh, was it maggot and Sicilia Reyes and, uh, mayoral could pull and marrow.
18:13
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
18:14
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, you know, these characters didn't require a lot of research, right?
18:17
[SPEAKER_00]: They were all here's in the last panel of X-Men liberators.
18:19
[SPEAKER_00]: I just re-read at this morning.
18:21
[SPEAKER_02]: to him that I wish I had.
18:25
[SPEAKER_02]: I just re-read it too.
18:27
[SPEAKER_00]: So let's get the time.
18:29
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, yeah, sorry.
18:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, excuse me, let's jump here.
18:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's jump to October, Nineteen, Nineteen, which is when this series is launching.
18:36
[SPEAKER_00]: I know you would have written it earlier in the United States.
18:38
[SPEAKER_02]: I just say the greatest baseball team in all of creation, the Nineteen, Nineteen, Nineteen, Nineteen, Nineteen Yankees were making this guy incredibly happy back that summer.
18:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Operation, show your tolerance.
18:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, operations are of tolerances just ended.
18:51
[SPEAKER_00]: The hunt for Xavier and the post on slot stuff is happening in the main books.
18:55
[SPEAKER_00]: This is that crazy like cerebral going sentient story happening.
18:59
[SPEAKER_00]: The books have been reassembled and there's like a big switch up in the creative teams.
19:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Mutant X has just started, which I know Jason was had a huge hand in and Excalibur has just been canceled.
19:09
[SPEAKER_00]: So Colossus has been through it in the last few years.
19:12
[SPEAKER_00]: My Kyle Rasputin has come back and gone crazy and apparently committed suicide.
19:16
[SPEAKER_00]: It's nuts.
19:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Illiana Rasputin is dead of the legacy virus.
19:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Piotr's parents have been gunned down by the KGB in Russia.
19:22
[SPEAKER_00]: He had like brain damage.
19:23
[SPEAKER_00]: He joined the acolyte.
19:24
[SPEAKER_00]: He comes back and joins Excalibur.
19:27
[SPEAKER_00]: We're Ben Rab.
19:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Ben Rab is like rehabilitating Colossus and like making him a happy character again.
19:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And then they bring Nightcrawler Kitty and Colossus back to the main X-Men for the first time in the years, because they especially kitty and Nightcrawler have been part of Excalibur for a really long time.
19:41
[SPEAKER_00]: It was an exciting time to be an X-Men fan, and that's kind of where this book was created.
19:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Where were both of you in your lives in the fall of nineteen ninety-eight?
19:50
[SPEAKER_00]: I know this is a couple years before the big bankruptcy nonsense.
19:52
[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of things happen in corporate at this point, I know.
19:55
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I think I was at E at this in nineteen ninety eight nineteen ninety.
19:59
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I think I think nineteen ninety eight was my breakout here there.
20:03
[SPEAKER_02]: And like I said, a lot of it was spent celebrating the Yankees World Series championship that fall.
20:08
[SPEAKER_03]: Like from I'm trying to think it wasn't where we all was.
20:11
[SPEAKER_03]: Why don't come see everything was in front of us.
20:13
[SPEAKER_03]: That's true.
20:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Happening in real time, perhaps.
20:16
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, because I'm trying to remember, I feel like the bankruptcy happened around ninety-eight ninety-nine.
20:20
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, we were out of it by the company was in bankruptcy.
20:24
[SPEAKER_00]: It was going to get worse too.
20:25
[SPEAKER_00]: bankruptcy was declared in June, nineteen ninety-eight.
20:28
[SPEAKER_00]: So it went right around the time you were putting this series.
20:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
20:30
[SPEAKER_00]: And when did they emerge?
20:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Like two thousand one.
20:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, I know.
20:34
[SPEAKER_03]: I think they emerge.
20:36
[SPEAKER_02]: Have they emerged?
20:38
[SPEAKER_03]: No, they emerged.
20:39
[SPEAKER_03]: I feel like they emerged in two thousand.
20:43
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
20:43
[SPEAKER_03]: So they emerged before I left because I left in November.
20:46
[SPEAKER_02]: I remember the announcement that the Spider-Man movie was going to be developed.
20:50
[SPEAKER_02]: They used a page from players to make that announcement.
20:53
[SPEAKER_02]: Wow.
20:54
[SPEAKER_02]: Randomly across cross page.
20:56
[SPEAKER_03]: So, but yeah, I guess for myself in that period, it was, yeah, like Joe said, it was full speed ahead.
21:02
[SPEAKER_03]: I think I was still in a system on the core box.
21:06
[SPEAKER_03]: Who was the editor of liberators?
21:08
[SPEAKER_03]: Was that anything come out of the club?
21:09
[SPEAKER_03]: That was Frank.
21:11
[SPEAKER_03]: That was Frank.
21:11
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, yeah.
21:12
[SPEAKER_03]: That makes it great.
21:13
[SPEAKER_00]: I have met Frank.
21:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Nice to meet you.
21:14
[SPEAKER_03]: That's Frank.
21:15
[SPEAKER_03]: No, yeah.
21:15
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm still, still friends of Frank.
21:18
[SPEAKER_03]: But I'm trying to remember so yeah, we hadn't so there were still I think like three offices that had X-Men titles that were working on X-Men books.
21:25
[SPEAKER_03]: There was Kelly's office.
21:26
[SPEAKER_03]: I think there was Mark and his office and there's Frank's office.
21:29
[SPEAKER_03]: I think there was split and maybe Jay now I'm deep in the woods of like
21:33
[SPEAKER_03]: like the young and the restless of Marvel of the nineties.
21:37
[SPEAKER_03]: I think Jay was laid off and Lisa Hawkins was his assistant.
21:41
[SPEAKER_03]: I think Jay hired him.
21:43
[SPEAKER_03]: I saw Jay for the first time in like twenty-five years after New York Comic-Con.
21:47
[SPEAKER_03]: Ninety-eight X-Men titles were being edited across there were
21:51
[SPEAKER_03]: different titles were being placed in different offices so it was I think it was across like I think at least four different offices the limited series were being managed on going series and when I became a full editor that's when we brought them all in after this course this was like in ninety nine I think when I became a full editor then all these diverse Xman books were all brought under the umbrella of just Mark Powers on myself
22:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's talk about the origins of X-Men liberators just a little bit, Joe.
22:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Studying the character of Colossus has been fascinating for me as a reader, giving an analytical lens from kind of this social justice perspective that I use in my modern life now that I've been by forties.
22:26
[SPEAKER_00]: The character of Colossus represents a lot of different things.
22:29
[SPEAKER_00]: He's the PDF your heart, right?
22:30
[SPEAKER_00]: He's the soft boy who grows hard for a living.
22:33
[SPEAKER_00]: He's the artist and the social researcher.
22:36
[SPEAKER_00]: He's the big brother and there's a lot of archetypes when you look at kind of the Russian mentality.
22:40
[SPEAKER_00]: He's the proletariat where his movement, the cosmonaut and his sisters, the witch, right?
22:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Like there's these different ideals about him that I think are really interesting.
22:48
[SPEAKER_00]: But smart storytellers and Claremont starts this with this character.
22:51
[SPEAKER_00]: realized that this character is escaped Russia.
22:54
[SPEAKER_00]: And there is a lot of really complex origins about mutants in Russia.
22:57
[SPEAKER_00]: There's bits of bodies that are dumped places.
23:00
[SPEAKER_00]: There's genetic experiments and secret prisons.
23:03
[SPEAKER_00]: And then there's certain ones, the special ones that get kind of recruited as child soldiers for various military programs.
23:09
[SPEAKER_00]: These are characters like Dark Star and Ursa Major, right?
23:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but a country full of rebels.
23:14
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the nineties, there's a wild history with Russian mutants.
23:17
[SPEAKER_00]: But Colossus Claremont does a story with this character in the eighties in classic X-Men.
23:21
[SPEAKER_00]: We're shortly after joining the team, he goes back home and very quickly realizes the people are not happy to see him.
23:29
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't belong here anymore.
23:30
[SPEAKER_00]: You're basically a defector.
23:32
[SPEAKER_00]: You owe everything to the state and you're the one that left.
23:34
[SPEAKER_00]: So he like surrenders himself.
23:36
[SPEAKER_00]: to prison and the KGB guy, Alexey Boshin has to sneak him out of the country and be like, you're calling as as a hero, you know, get out of here, you're not, you're not supposed to be here anymore.
23:45
[SPEAKER_00]: We parallel that with a character like a mega red who gets turned into a crazy, deadly weapon, right?
23:50
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's other versions of this serial killer.
23:55
[SPEAKER_00]: He's definitely still a serial killer, but also they turned to a mutant weapon for the country, right?
24:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Where they're like constantly holding off the carbonating to make him do things.
24:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you remember how this series came to be?
24:06
[SPEAKER_00]: And how you decided what kind of story you wanted to tell with Piotr returning to Russia again?
24:11
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, there was a with them all returning.
24:13
[SPEAKER_02]: If I remember correctly, I was offered this book and the only thing we knew about it is that it was going to start Wolverine, Colossus and I crawler.
24:22
[SPEAKER_02]: So I wanted to come up with an adventure that the three of them can take and
24:27
[SPEAKER_02]: I've always been interested in Russia, especially that period between like post cold war and today, where it seemed like there was progress.
24:35
[SPEAKER_02]: And this book very much represents his representative of that time.
24:39
[SPEAKER_02]: There's they make mention of how this isn't the Russia that Peter left.
24:43
[SPEAKER_02]: What is this place here does he have one?
24:45
[SPEAKER_00]: The Berlin Wall fell in nineteen eighty nine there's a lot of street-tied here and this is the late nineties right so the country has been stricken by a lot of poverty the states kind of cracked apart in some ways.
24:56
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the early Putin era which is uncomfortable to realize as well because we have seen how things play out in the last thirty years or so.
25:03
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's it's kind of a crazy story to watch Piotr go home and try to figure out who he is.
25:08
[SPEAKER_02]: I always liked the way Russia was depicted in the X-Men.
25:12
[SPEAKER_02]: In fact, a lot of the kind of tropey things that Chris would do.
25:17
[SPEAKER_02]: I tried to do like where he exclaims things like bogey and what.
25:20
[SPEAKER_02]: Like like Russians don't say things like that as I understand it.
25:24
[SPEAKER_02]: But Claremont's Russian had its own, had its own gloss.
25:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and there's a lot of complexity.
25:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Jason, do you remember interfacing with Russia as an editor at Marvel?
25:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Marvel's Russia is a crazy place.
25:35
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know that I ever did.
25:37
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm trying, you know, I'm trying to think back.
25:39
[SPEAKER_03]: No, I don't really remember that.
25:40
[SPEAKER_03]: But no, it was just strange time to do that.
25:43
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't remember us really playing.
25:44
[SPEAKER_03]: My was truly myself as an editor playing with Russia, but I certainly remember thinking a hell of a lot about Russia.
25:49
[SPEAKER_03]: You know what I'm going to call the war.
25:51
[SPEAKER_03]: I, for myself, it was a, it was just a deeply optimistic time to be alive.
25:56
[SPEAKER_00]: As an American student in the nineties, where we had current events, like the Iraq conversation and the Russia conversation were two of the largest conversations happening.
26:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Certainly the two countries I was probably most aware of, although I didn't know the details of anything.
26:10
[SPEAKER_00]: So you handled this pretty well.
26:12
[SPEAKER_00]: You frame a place called a province thirteen in your book, which is kind of an old gulag, a little bit, like a rushing testing station for mutants.
26:22
[SPEAKER_00]: It's almost got kind of a weapon X vibe where mutants have been taken away from their parents and put in this place for pretty much harsh experimentation.
26:29
[SPEAKER_00]: It's all like dark and austere and gray and very like, very, it looks like an old prison, but there's one room inside that's like painted with rainbows where all the little mutant kids are kept.
26:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Like that part alone is
26:40
[SPEAKER_00]: is already like, oh, that's so sad.
26:42
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, you would remember the kind of story you were trying to tell.
26:45
[SPEAKER_00]: What was it like for you to revisit this before I start recapping the series?
26:49
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, the biggest thing that jumped out at me is that so many of the themes and situations
26:56
[SPEAKER_02]: expand on in my creator-owned book Ghost Project and I had no memory of that.
27:01
[SPEAKER_02]: So there's a clear evolution between characters from America sort of interfacing with the Russia of today that later on I would explore in more detail in a creator-owned book of mine.
27:12
[SPEAKER_02]: As far as I thought I had a lot to say when I was twenty-five, twenty-six years old.
27:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's okay.
27:18
[SPEAKER_02]: You're a storyteller, right?
27:19
[SPEAKER_02]: I didn't disappoint.
27:20
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, no.
27:21
[SPEAKER_02]: I reread it.
27:22
[SPEAKER_02]: I didn't dislike it.
27:23
[SPEAKER_02]: Usually I hate things that I wrote back then, but I thought it went for some interesting stuff.
27:28
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a nice self-contained story and so let's recap X-Men liberators.
27:33
[SPEAKER_00]: This is, again, late nineteen ninety-eight early ninety-nine.
27:36
[SPEAKER_00]: The artist on this book is FilThemenez, who had met Fil's a queer icon and a queer
27:40
[SPEAKER_00]: incredible penciler who really pushes hard for gay rights, especially in representation in comics, a huge film in his fan.
27:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Keep taking on Inc.
27:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Shannon Blanchard on Colors, Richard Starkings of Comic Craft on Colors with Frank Pitterese on edits.
27:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Joe, do you have fun memories of working with Phil?
27:55
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a beautiful book.
27:56
[SPEAKER_02]: I do.
27:57
[SPEAKER_02]: I only met Phil for the first time when this when we were putting this together.
28:01
[SPEAKER_02]: And it was a very exciting.
28:03
[SPEAKER_02]: I remember telling people about it.
28:04
[SPEAKER_02]: And I don't think I appreciated the gravity of how good he was even then.
28:07
[SPEAKER_02]: Because people were quite excited.
28:09
[SPEAKER_02]: He had a John burn, ask quality to what he did, right?
28:12
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was a lot of Adam.
28:14
[SPEAKER_00]: He had to draw a lot of stuff here for sure.
28:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Philip feels a great guy.
28:18
[SPEAKER_00]: I think he's really fantastic.
28:20
[SPEAKER_00]: So the premise of this series is Colossus Wolverine and Knight Crawler.
28:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, these are characters that haven't interacted on the page in a really long time, at least in a direct story in this way, who are quite fighting for mutant freedom in a place where Colossus comes from, of course.
28:33
[SPEAKER_00]: The logo on this book is really interesting.
28:35
[SPEAKER_00]: The word liberators kind of shows up almost like it's a yellow stamp like a like a dossier kind of energy over the end logo.
28:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you remember coming up with the title liberators?
28:44
[SPEAKER_00]: The international mutants liberating the mutants of Russia, right?
28:50
[SPEAKER_02]: right, fighting from mutant freedom or whatever was on the cover of one of them.
28:53
[SPEAKER_02]: I didn't come up with the title, I think.
28:56
[SPEAKER_02]: I came up with this with everything you just described in terms of story and setting.
29:00
[SPEAKER_02]: And the title liberators, I think editorial fix that to it after they approved what it is I was going to do.
29:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Opening this book, we get a lot of flashbacks, which is really fun as well.
29:11
[SPEAKER_00]: By the way, right after this is when Colossus is getting ready to sacrifice his life to save the world from the legacy virus, that's a story that takes place.
29:19
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, just we didn't later, get to this character and bring them back with all the brave girls a few years later.
29:24
[SPEAKER_00]: The book one is called Old Friends.
29:25
[SPEAKER_00]: We open on an old training room, exercise with Wolverine Colossus and Knight Crawler.
29:29
[SPEAKER_00]: We jump to a plane where Wolverine's telling a stewardess that Colossus shouldn't drink.
29:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Better make that a root beer, darling.
29:35
[SPEAKER_00]: He's one of the good guys.
29:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Peer up your mind and spirit.
29:38
[SPEAKER_00]: So I keep him company.
29:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Me, I'll be having the real thing, though.
29:41
[SPEAKER_00]: And he grabs some beers off the car.
29:43
[SPEAKER_00]: And the way Wolverine climbs over Peotr to his seat.
29:46
[SPEAKER_00]: He's stepping in between his legs.
29:49
[SPEAKER_00]: You're like, okay, these two are close friends.
29:53
[SPEAKER_00]: They give Peotr the middle seat with Wolverine on the window, carry it in the aisle, which is hilarious because he's the big guy.
29:59
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's really funny to me.
30:00
[SPEAKER_00]: We also see Kurt exiting the bathroom.
30:02
[SPEAKER_00]: He's forgotten to activate his image inducer and a little girl's legs.
30:06
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's a blue fur guy in here.
30:09
[SPEAKER_00]: They jump to Siberia where they get to hang out in kind of a small town bar.
30:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Wolverine always wants to look for the local frozen bar.
30:17
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, they're trying to drink vodka and have a good time.
30:20
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's some big hits and thieves that try to swindle them.
30:23
[SPEAKER_00]: But, you know, there's some closet pop demand turns into metal.
30:25
[SPEAKER_00]: And that crawler can teleport.
30:27
[SPEAKER_00]: So they end up getting the best of the locals for sure.
30:30
[SPEAKER_00]: And then we jump over to a very austere building that I described before in Siberia the quote here from the military guy they call my camp province thirteen and they laugh not realizing that I can hear once this was a vital operation outfitted for the glory honor and service of mother Russia I was am no doubt faded to always be its director
30:50
[SPEAKER_00]: I am called Sergei, and I can hear them laugh.
30:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Look at them playing, jumping, laughing without a care in the world.
30:56
[SPEAKER_00]: These children are my responsibility.
30:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Once my ambition and I hate them also very, very much.
31:01
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, we get the gray walls of the prison and there's some kids playing inside, but outside it's all barbed wire and soldiers who are fighting a battle
31:09
[SPEAKER_00]: This gives me, if you guys have seen the most recent seasons of Stranger Things, they go to the kind of the abandoned Russian military plant, right?
31:17
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, sure.
31:18
[SPEAKER_00]: This gives you those kind of vibes.
31:19
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is something I think we see in post Cold War stories in Russia.
31:22
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the old military unit that's still kind of up and running, even though it's kind of running out of steam.
31:27
[SPEAKER_00]: We also get the direct quote from Pewter in this, I feel like a foreigner.
31:31
[SPEAKER_00]: I am a foreigner, come home to a Russia.
31:33
[SPEAKER_00]: I do not recognize.
31:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you have comments on this first issue, Joe?
31:37
[SPEAKER_02]: No, I don't think so.
31:38
[SPEAKER_02]: I liked it when I read through it.
31:40
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't really have it.
31:40
[SPEAKER_02]: No notes.
31:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Just a rank in order of favorite to least favorite Wolverine Colossus and I probably.
31:47
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, I mean, like, depends on how old I am, but nightcrawler was always a favorite growing up.
31:53
[SPEAKER_03]: He was probably my favorite growing up hard to not love Wolverine in the, you know, back then as an adult probably Wolverine nightcrawler Colossus as far as it's favorite to least favorite.
32:02
[SPEAKER_03]: So, but as a kid, as a kid, I would almost say nightcrawler Wolverine Colossus.
32:06
[SPEAKER_03]: Colossus was third in both, and it's not because I don't know, Colossus is reliable, state, you know, safe.
32:12
[SPEAKER_02]: You take those men from Brandon.
32:15
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I think that's true.
32:16
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
32:16
[SPEAKER_00]: I feel like I would be best friends with, out of those three, the best friends with Kurt, of course, because he is delightful with playful, but Colossus would be my buddy.
32:25
[SPEAKER_00]: He'd be the one I'd want to hang out with the most.
32:27
[SPEAKER_00]: He's, he's fun, we have a similar vibes.
32:30
[SPEAKER_00]: I think I think way too much all the time.
32:33
[SPEAKER_00]: When we jumped to issue two, we get a view of this kind of creature that has been held in this Gulag for a long time.
32:39
[SPEAKER_00]: And the origin story, this creature's name is Nicholas.
32:42
[SPEAKER_00]: And when he was born, he had a death touch.
32:45
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll get more on that in just a minute.
32:46
[SPEAKER_00]: But his mother seems to be the only person who is immune.
32:49
[SPEAKER_00]: So now he's turned into this monstrous creature.
32:52
[SPEAKER_00]: It looks like one of those, I don't know, like a human blob that just kind of absorbs other humans into it.
32:58
[SPEAKER_00]: And they all become kind of part of this giant
33:00
[SPEAKER_00]: flesh sculpture, he's this kind of longering mass that once he gets out of his cage, anything he touches will die unless it has a healing factor.
33:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And the only two people that are key here that he touches are Wolverine and Omega Reddury, the story, and both of them survive because they have the ability to do so.
33:16
[SPEAKER_00]: But the design on this character is pure like Stephen King horror.
33:19
[SPEAKER_00]: It's really horrifying.
33:21
[SPEAKER_02]: Don't, I don't know.
33:22
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, Phil would have done it.
33:24
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't recall how that came about to be honest with you.
33:27
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't remember if there were revisions or if we took notes, it's a mystery to me.
33:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's a creeping kind of lungering mass.
33:35
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a bit of a body horror, right?
33:37
[SPEAKER_03]: Post John Carpenter's the thing where you can just start, you know, merging bodies together.
33:42
[SPEAKER_03]: And yeah, it's like basket casey.
33:46
[SPEAKER_03]: Aspen.
33:47
[SPEAKER_03]: If you remember basket case.
33:49
[SPEAKER_03]: It's sort of that idea of, you know, look, it's also when you, if you've ever seen, I feel like the marvel has done this a few times, they did it with, they did it with like some else world's things or however they did it.
33:59
[SPEAKER_03]: We're like, if the Hulk was real, he would just be this amorphous, you know, cancerous thing that was just growing, forming body parts, you know, instead of this nice clean muscular thing, he would be more like this.
34:10
[SPEAKER_03]: And this is sort of, this is sort of if mutants were real, this is probably what we'd end up having, you know, if they had these sort of, you know, hypergrowth spurred.
34:17
[SPEAKER_03]: It wouldn't be clean.
34:17
[SPEAKER_03]: It wouldn't be nice.
34:18
[SPEAKER_03]: It wouldn't be painless.
34:19
[SPEAKER_03]: It would be this, you know, this is a fairly horrible, but probably fairly realistic.
34:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, we get, we get comments on how night crawlers the one that doesn't quite fit, right?
34:27
[SPEAKER_00]: But what, and this is, this is what's so sad about this story is what a chance to this creature Nicholas ever have, right?
34:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course.
34:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Had his mother been able to raise him, maybe, but the Russians take him, they lock him in a room.
34:38
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is basically a brain dead child who hasn't been educated or treated with any kind of affection.
34:46
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just grown into this kind of lumbering mass of stuff.
34:50
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's heartbreaking, right?
34:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Like there's a certain element of just
34:53
[SPEAKER_00]: tragedy to the big villain in this story who ultimately has to die because it will kill anything that it touches.
35:00
[SPEAKER_00]: We see this kind of explored in different ideas of comics like what happens when you're not allowed to thrive?
35:05
[SPEAKER_00]: What happens when you are never given the opportunity?
35:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is a really sad story in that way because this character doesn't have really any will.
35:13
[SPEAKER_00]: When it gets out of the prison, it's only touching to defend itself.
35:16
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the only thing it wants to do is go back to its mother.
35:19
[SPEAKER_00]: It starts crossing the frozen planes of Siberia, this naked lumbering creature, and it's only goal is to go back to its mother.
35:28
[SPEAKER_00]: There are most of the mutants in the world.
35:30
[SPEAKER_00]: There's millions, right?
35:31
[SPEAKER_00]: But most of them have kind of passive powers.
35:33
[SPEAKER_00]: It may be someone who has an extra finger who can change the color of something with a touch, right?
35:38
[SPEAKER_00]: These are not combat ready mutants.
35:40
[SPEAKER_00]: And a lot of the kids that are being experimented on here who must have been gathered because you know there's been a lot that are killed here, too, of course.
35:47
[SPEAKER_00]: But they have kind of passive power sets.
35:49
[SPEAKER_00]: The only one we really get to know is a young girl named Nanya.
35:52
[SPEAKER_00]: N-A-N-Y-A, who has kind of mild telepathic powers and the other kids don't really have any sort of will, but they are here to be rescued.
36:00
[SPEAKER_00]: And we see them more sympathetically because they look more humanoid, right?
36:04
[SPEAKER_00]: So, issue two opens with the flashback to giant size X-X-Men number one era, where Piotr's trying on his costume for the first time.
36:10
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you go back to our reading about that, we get the phrase where he's like, never in Siberia, but I have a way across like this, so he's so big.
36:19
[SPEAKER_00]: a little tightly, it's art or whatever it is.
36:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Wolverine wants to prove his strength jumps on his backpops his claws and you know, colossus slams him into the crowd.
36:26
[SPEAKER_00]: So they've earned each other's respect right from the very beginning.
36:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Issue two, we also see Peotr visiting the grave of his parents in a crowded church cemetery in the winter.
36:34
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is where he meets a little old woman who is visiting another grave.
36:39
[SPEAKER_00]: It turns out this old woman is the mother of Nicholas, the child that was taken away.
36:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Her name is Ariana and she basically is like you have no right to exist here.
36:47
[SPEAKER_00]: So put a bit of that for just a minute.
36:49
[SPEAKER_00]: We also see a project, a province, thirteen sending soldiers out to find Nicholas, and they end up confronting night crawler and Wolverine, and Wolverine gets apprehended.
37:01
[SPEAKER_00]: The Nicholas creature runs out of the woods and touches him, so his healing factors kind of disabled, and the soldiers grab him and are able to take him back to province, thirteen to be experimented on, because that's what they do when they get immune.
37:13
[SPEAKER_00]: They're gonna cut him open and find out what makes him work.
37:16
[SPEAKER_02]: I do have a pension for writing helicopters in their situations.
37:21
[SPEAKER_02]: I noticed that's a theme in a few things I've done.
37:23
[SPEAKER_02]: No, there's some really fun pencils in here though, aren't they?
37:26
[SPEAKER_02]: Or like that shot in the beginning of Wolverine on Colossus shoulders?
37:29
[SPEAKER_00]: I love that you jump back in time to the different areas of their friendship.
37:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Jason, do you want to talk about the sympathetic storytelling, this kind of creature that's mindless and innocent, being kind of the catalyst of all this death and destruction?
37:40
[SPEAKER_03]: No, I mean, I think look, I think in the twenty five or twenty seven years since this thing's been written.
37:44
[SPEAKER_03]: I've seen this idea expressed in various forms of science fiction, right?
37:49
[SPEAKER_03]: And with the twist that, well, either the character is truly, you know, sweet underneath all the horror, right?
37:57
[SPEAKER_03]: Or then you sort of then you then you twist it even further where the characters sort of like a fucker underneath all that.
38:02
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, you even see this to a degree in, uh, in strange things, right?
38:06
[SPEAKER_03]: Um, that sort of, you know, uses some of the similar setups here, government experimenting on mutants and trying to max out their powers.
38:13
[SPEAKER_03]: Um, was that the demagorgon, right?
38:14
[SPEAKER_03]: He's sort of just a regular dude although he ends up being so bad.
38:17
[SPEAKER_00]: But I love it as a great example of this, right?
38:19
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the secret facility who were training the mutants and it doesn't end well.
38:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's, yeah.
38:23
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, there was the thing in the doctor who's been off torchwood, I think they did a similar thing with kids who were just like horrendously grotesquely modified and, you know, and so there's covered with all these fleshy layers and so on.
38:35
[SPEAKER_03]: And, you know, at that point, they are, they are not the children, but there's just a little, there's a little bit of them in there, but there's, it's nothing but tragic, right?
38:44
[SPEAKER_03]: And they represent a very similar thing.
38:45
[SPEAKER_03]: This came, you know, obviously, after this,
38:47
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a great thing we used to call, you know, there's a scenario in the comics that was educated to me when I was working in the comics.
38:54
[SPEAKER_03]: This sort of can't must, right?
38:56
[SPEAKER_03]: Where you have, you know, like you sort of must kill this being, right?
39:00
[SPEAKER_03]: But in a way, you could sort of can't because they are an innocent essential.
39:04
[SPEAKER_03]: Ultimately, you're going to have to do the thing you're going to have to do, right?
39:06
[SPEAKER_03]: You are going to stop them or else they're going to kill these other people.
39:08
[SPEAKER_03]: But it is, it's a much more interesting problem to put your heroes up against than just a villainous villain.
39:15
[SPEAKER_03]: And, you know, it's something that someone said recently to me, I think they're a playwright, where, you know, when you have two people arguing, you know, you want both sides, you want both sides of the argument to be right, which is tricky way of saying you want everyone to have a very strong point of view.
39:28
[SPEAKER_03]: But in this case, this is just a very tragic situation to put your heroes in, but it's also one that is, it is interesting.
39:35
[SPEAKER_03]: It should what it should do if you have time to do it.
39:38
[SPEAKER_03]: And a better editor than I was, twenty-five years ago, you know, it gives you an opportunity to reveal more about the characters, you know, that you are following.
39:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Issue three is called a game of hide and seek.
39:46
[SPEAKER_00]: We have another flashback to them training.
39:48
[SPEAKER_00]: This is from the back when Storm had a mohawk Xavier could walk.
39:51
[SPEAKER_00]: And we get a cool moment of colossus slamming a whole tree out of the ground.
39:55
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a sign outside of province thirteen here, Joe, that reads the words, Niyasa prahadit, and I could not figure out if that is a drink or anything.
40:03
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't even think that myself.
40:05
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm sure I mean something like Gibao.
40:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Sure, sure, yeah, or even the name of the place.
40:10
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't know for sure.
40:11
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I didn't know memory of that.
40:13
[SPEAKER_00]: We get an editorial quote that the purpose of province thirteen is to quote study mutant kind in any opportunity presented in whatever guys it was found.
40:22
[SPEAKER_00]: But it is an old purpose and ideal purpose.
40:25
[SPEAKER_00]: One who sympathizers our few and whose time is running out.
40:28
[SPEAKER_00]: The scientists are cutting Wolverine open.
40:30
[SPEAKER_00]: They find they add a mantle in his bones.
40:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And then they basically dump them in a grave.
40:34
[SPEAKER_02]: We doesn't have that madmanteam in his bones at this point.
40:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Or the striations of the adamantium.
40:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
40:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, it's hard to be.
40:41
[SPEAKER_00]: And then we get to see Nightcrawler hopping around from grave to grave, trying to find Wolverine because he knows his friend has been buried alive, which is a crazy use of his powers.
40:49
[SPEAKER_00]: This guy, you tell reports into a place he hasn't seen and can solidify it to some things.
40:53
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is a tremendous active bravery.
40:55
[SPEAKER_00]: But the real interest here for me is where we see Colossus interacting with Ariana, this old woman, who basically says, you know, my child was taken away when he was a baby.
41:03
[SPEAKER_00]: And your mom got to keep all her babies.
41:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And we even see a flashback of Colossus's mom helping Ariana deliver the child.
41:10
[SPEAKER_00]: So we're in this kind of poverty-stricken collective, but this woman lost her child, where the rest of the students had a special deal basically because Xavier telepathically made that so for them.
41:20
[SPEAKER_00]: which is a crazy thing to see.
41:21
[SPEAKER_00]: So she's been missing her child for all these years, and then she ends up getting captured and taken back to Providence, Thirteen, because Omega Redd has been recruited.
41:29
[SPEAKER_00]: My understanding was by the Russian military, because they want to shut this place down.
41:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
41:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Working as an operative, and they want to get rid of this place.
41:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Like the orr is kill everyone there.
41:39
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I don't know what he was doing in a savage land where they went victim up.
41:44
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm not sure.
41:44
[SPEAKER_02]: I have no memory of what he was doing.
41:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, he was snacking on some dinosaurs with his tentacles of vibe.
41:51
[SPEAKER_00]: And then issue fours with the pathos, the title gifted youngsters, Colossus and Mike Crawler, Barry, a fine Wolverine, having been buried at the, everything hits the head here, right?
42:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Limuten kids are escaping, a mega reds here in threatens to kill the kids.
42:05
[SPEAKER_00]: The soldiers are dying, Nicholas is running around, touching everything, and killing everything, because it doesn't know any better.
42:12
[SPEAKER_00]: And Ariana, the mother has to take a glass.
42:15
[SPEAKER_00]: She's the only person immune to her child's powers.
42:18
[SPEAKER_00]: And she has to murder her child with a sharp kind of blade to the heart, which is very, very heartbreaking.
42:23
[SPEAKER_00]: The general, General Sergei, who runs this place ends up destroying all the government files and then killing himself, rather than having the discovery made.
42:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And then province, thirteen is shut down for good.
42:34
[SPEAKER_00]: And we get this kind of moment for Colossus, who has to leave everything behind.
42:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, by the way,
42:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Arianna the mother gets to kind of adopt Nanya the little girl at the end, which is very cute.
42:44
[SPEAKER_00]: We've never seen them again, but she went on to raise this mutant child because she never got to raise her own.
42:51
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a whole there's a whole database out there.
42:56
[SPEAKER_00]: But Colossus goes home to his family.
42:58
[SPEAKER_00]: He leaves behind Siberia the lesson once again learned that I can't really go back there.
43:03
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not a place that I belong.
43:04
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't fit.
43:05
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm a defector.
43:06
[SPEAKER_00]: He returns to Grimalkin Lane where we see the modern team at the time of Gambit, Maro, Professor X Rogue, and Storm, all waiting to greet him.
43:14
[SPEAKER_00]: The title of this gifted youngsters, of course, is a reference to the school, but we have this idea of children who are special, who are utilized as assets, denied rights, cast aside.
43:25
[SPEAKER_00]: The innocence of Nicholas based balance by the opportunity of Colossus, but still the country took everything from Piotr, right?
43:34
[SPEAKER_00]: His whole family has gone at this point in his history.
43:36
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's some really touching pathos for this character who's kind of the focal point for me in this series.
43:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Nightcrawler represents the hope, you know, Colossus, the heart, Wolverine, the weapon always for me.
43:46
[SPEAKER_00]: And the three of them, being honest, adventure together, we get to start out with drinking buddies and then, you know, they, they say, suffer this great tragedy at the end as the relics of the Cold War kind of wash away in one particular place.
43:59
[SPEAKER_03]: given the set pieces and stuff, I think it'd be fun to go back and play those things again.
44:06
[SPEAKER_03]: I think I often think that in the nineties we were limited a little bit by what we couldn't do, but I think it's
44:16
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it's a great, I think it's a great set up, I think it's fascinating to me how much these ideas and these images of like post-Cold War things have been repeated, you know, a sense, right?
44:27
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, and they've become tropey almost, you know, and sort of like the post-Cold War military base, you know, has become a thing we now revisit fairly often.
44:36
[SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, it shows you, I think, how great these characters are.
44:40
[SPEAKER_03]: What great, you know, when you can, you can play with them and you can mix them up around and there's always going to be stories to be told there.
44:46
[SPEAKER_03]: If you're, if you're deaf enough of a storyteller, yeah, that you just stories in the ninety set a lot of bombers.
44:52
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know how much of this was intentional.
44:55
[SPEAKER_00]: I know you've progressed a lot as a writer, but you open with this story of Colossus facing his grief and then having to leave it all behind.
45:03
[SPEAKER_00]: But the real heartbreaking story here, I mean, he has his loss, of course, Russia's changing and his family's gone.
45:09
[SPEAKER_00]: But this moment for this mother, Ariana, who has to kill her child who was taken.
45:14
[SPEAKER_00]: It's heartbreaking and it's a really sad reflection of the mother losing the child as we are looking at the child who's lost the parents.
45:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, this state has taken everything from every one over and over again.
45:24
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the message being delivered here.
45:25
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I think this was all of the theme that I wanted to explore.
45:29
[SPEAKER_02]: So it fits from to my recollection anyway.
45:32
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
45:32
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it's a good moment.
45:33
[SPEAKER_02]: I think I came up with the idea that she was going to have to kill her son early on in the pitch for this.
45:39
[SPEAKER_00]: I was surprised she survived this series.
45:40
[SPEAKER_00]: I really was.
45:41
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I needed her to kill.
45:43
[SPEAKER_02]: I needed her to take it out.
45:45
[SPEAKER_00]: So.
45:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Because nothing else.
45:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Kill him.
45:48
[SPEAKER_02]: So I would do whatever I had to do to keep her alive.
45:51
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a couple of things in here that I'm really, you know, it's funny.
45:53
[SPEAKER_02]: I just I want to go back to something Jason said earlier about how we were limited by what we couldn't show.
45:59
[SPEAKER_02]: We couldn't show blood pretty much.
46:01
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, there's a there's an image in Bishop the last X man where there's an eyeball with a fly on it and they made his color mono chromatically so it didn't play
46:09
[SPEAKER_02]: So there were things like that.
46:10
[SPEAKER_02]: And but I don't think this book in particular suffered for that because we did some cool stuff as I read it thinking about we have Wolverine autopsy.
46:20
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know if that had been done before.
46:21
[SPEAKER_02]: We couldn't show it the actual incision and the pulling back of his chest and stuff.
46:26
[SPEAKER_02]: But we see his arms sort of well the narration tells us what's going on.
46:30
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm proud about that came about.
46:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
46:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
46:33
[SPEAKER_00]: I think there's a lot of imagery in this that's really beautiful.
46:36
[SPEAKER_00]: The backdrop of Siberia.
46:37
[SPEAKER_00]: there's the hill where Piotr goes with with the old woman where it's how when he was a kid and he felt misunderstood by others he'd come up here to kind of search his soul and and think through where he's looking at and surveying the land there's the painted wall with the rainbows for the little kids in this like gulag of a place you know that the theme of mutants and the exploitation I approached the show as a queer person mutant nature is a parallel of
47:00
[SPEAKER_00]: queerness in a lot of ways, queer kids are not allowed to develop, they're not allowed to be who they are.
47:05
[SPEAKER_00]: They're so often denied, who they are able to be, they grow up in rough situations, where abuse is almost expected, denial is almost expected, and that mutant allegory is always deeply painful in its way, right?
47:16
[SPEAKER_00]: But this was a mother who loved her kid, even though he had something that people saw as monstrous, this death touch, then being turned into a weapon, and these other kids all yanked away from their parents, too, right?
47:26
[SPEAKER_00]: How many untold stories are there in the margins?
47:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, it's what America's doing right now.
47:34
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the rough thing too.
47:37
[SPEAKER_00]: It's in its own way.
47:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, well, yeah, but it's a rough parallel always.
47:42
[SPEAKER_00]: I think this is a banger of a series.
47:44
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's really good and Colossus again as the backdrop for this.
47:47
[SPEAKER_00]: I think is really powerful.
47:49
[SPEAKER_00]: The soft boy who grows hard, right?
47:50
[SPEAKER_00]: I know that sounds sexual when I say it that way, but
47:53
[SPEAKER_00]: We have to put up this like really tough exterior and only show our strength in a space where we're forced to.
48:00
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's an allegory on this character as well.
48:03
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a special one.
48:04
[SPEAKER_00]: I was really happy to jump into this place with you and it's really fun to introduce the main audience to Joe and your voice here.
48:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Do I have you have kind of concluding thoughts?
48:12
[SPEAKER_00]: on Xman liberators.
48:13
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, one thing that strikes me in this with our super-deformed mutant, you know, child here is just grotesque and tragic.
48:20
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, it brings this idea.
48:22
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think it's an idea that the Xman had been faced with a different times.
48:26
[SPEAKER_03]: And certainly, like, you know, Kurt has brought up with other people within the scope of the, of the pretty Xman, right, that they are, right, that they're all ostensibly very good-looking generally.
48:36
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, they're all tragic in their own way.
48:39
[SPEAKER_03]: They all have their own tragic lives.
48:40
[SPEAKER_03]: And then they see this person, which is like truly, truly tragic, right?
48:44
[SPEAKER_03]: This person is almost no opportunity for redemption, opportunity for peace, no opportunity for happiness.
48:50
[SPEAKER_03]: It's just to me, it's just an interesting existential consideration.
48:54
[SPEAKER_03]: in the fact that look and it plays out it's something you think about in life, you know.
49:00
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like you can have very, very bad days and just have just to be very, very unhappy and yet sometimes I do think seeing people that have nothing in their life.
49:10
[SPEAKER_03]: that are really in such tragic lives.
49:12
[SPEAKER_03]: They do give you an opportunity to maybe gain some level of perspective and try to find some measure of hope because what you have is so much more.
49:19
[SPEAKER_03]: Your life is so much richer than their life.
49:22
[SPEAKER_03]: And you have an opportunity to do things that that person who has, who has been given nothing.
49:26
[SPEAKER_03]: It's an opportunity to, I don't know if this is the right way to phrase it, but to sort of check your privilege.
49:31
[SPEAKER_03]: And even when you feel like there's moments when you might feel like you have nothing but you actually have a tremendous amount compared to other people I mean.
49:37
[SPEAKER_03]: And not to say that your own depressions and sadduces and tragedies are not valid, right?
49:43
[SPEAKER_03]: But on your Peter Rasputin, you are not this globular, you know, a mess of pain, right?
49:48
[SPEAKER_03]: Only exists to kill.
49:50
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
49:52
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, life is pretty good as Peter Rasputin in that, in relative terms.
49:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I'm a therapist of my day job.
49:59
[SPEAKER_00]: We call this trauma.
50:00
[SPEAKER_00]: There's not a lot of value in saying my pain is more or less than yours.
50:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Although that's a real part of every conversation.
50:07
[SPEAKER_00]: What's it called?
50:07
[SPEAKER_00]: It's trauma.
50:08
[SPEAKER_00]: What?
50:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Trauma stacking?
50:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
50:09
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a thing people.
50:10
[SPEAKER_00]: It's that old outage of like, you know, I used to feel bad for having no shoes to let met a man with no feet, right?
50:15
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's a way of kind of framing our struggle.
50:18
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think there's value in that to a certain degree, because as we can feel grateful for what we have.
50:22
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think often use that to diminish our pain in some ways as well.
50:26
[SPEAKER_00]: So my mantra for therapy is what I call compassion, meaning accountability.
50:30
[SPEAKER_00]: I work a lot with the trans community who have been for extraordinarily painful things.
50:34
[SPEAKER_00]: I work a lot with disabled people, even with people who are immigrants.
50:38
[SPEAKER_00]: And when I'm working with this in franchise folks, it's a lot of validation.
50:41
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a lot of like, let's own your story.
50:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's grieve.
50:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's heal.
50:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's be open and honest.
50:46
[SPEAKER_00]: But there always has to be an element of what are you going to do with your paid now?
50:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
50:49
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't want to use my pain to inflict it on others.
50:51
[SPEAKER_00]: My queerness or my disability does not make me a bad person.
50:56
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't make me a burden.
50:58
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, it makes me pretty fucking special.
50:59
[SPEAKER_00]: And the stuff that I've been through can chart me onto a particular path that makes me more powerful, more unique, more necessary to the world around me, which is an odd thing because we have to carry that with the grief, right?
51:10
[SPEAKER_00]: And the mutant stories always that for every character, whether you're Jean Grey or a Roman, who have very different journeys, right?
51:17
[SPEAKER_02]: As I look through the whole thing, particularly the first couple of issues, I love how classic it looks.
51:22
[SPEAKER_02]: Everything, the sound effects, you know, it looks modern in that it's Richard Starkings and Comic Craft, but and they look great, but I really does give that genre verb that genre burn vibe.
51:33
[SPEAKER_02]: That's cool.
51:34
[SPEAKER_02]: I must add a great time doing this.
51:35
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't remember.
51:36
[SPEAKER_00]: It all stacks up, you know, good.
51:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, beautiful job.
51:38
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a strong story and filled it a great job.
51:40
[SPEAKER_00]: It's well done.
51:41
[SPEAKER_00]: The innocent, grotesque, that is Nicholas, you know, it's a sad story in its way.
51:46
[SPEAKER_00]: I had a great time.
51:47
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd love to hear any final thoughts from either of you, but thanks for taking this kind of deep dive with me.
51:52
[SPEAKER_00]: This shows both silly and serious, so we got to go both places today.
51:55
[SPEAKER_00]: For those that'd like to follow the show, Grandma can underscore land on Instagram, is where you can find it, and we're celebrating Colossus all month in July.
52:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Watch for the trial of Pewter Rasputin, where we get to have an incredible academic discussion about what makes this character extremely special.
52:09
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm really excited about the content, and then we're exploring characters related or tangential to pewter over on the Patreon show.
52:16
[SPEAKER_03]: My final thoughts are it's always a delight to come on here and talk about this stuff Some of which I have some very clear memories on it and much of it zero memories on whatsoever So it's like fast and likely people like five hours later like oh that editor's name last name was this
52:32
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, no, it's true.
52:34
[SPEAKER_03]: This is the time of AOL chats, you know, I mean the show that's where our memories going back to right and like it was the that was I was there for the birth of the AOL chat like I came up with the only Marvel AOL account the official account and I was I was the only one willing to do the chats because everybody else looked at it like why are we wasting our time with this?
52:53
[SPEAKER_03]: Now when I named, I even came up with the name for the AOL account for the X-Men office, which was hilarious.
53:00
[SPEAKER_03]: It was X-Men masters.
53:04
[SPEAKER_03]: I was very, I was very silly, twenty-five-year-old.
53:07
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it's a delight to talk about this stuff.
53:09
[SPEAKER_03]: It's always a delight to talk with Joe of course, and with YouTube.
53:12
[SPEAKER_03]: And yeah, simply, I can be found.
53:14
[SPEAKER_03]: My most active social media is Instagram, and I can be found at collecting candy, and then that's it.
53:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
53:20
[SPEAKER_00]: And you got to talk about your shows earlier, but you got some really close to coming out, man.
53:23
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm so excited.
53:24
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, every Sunday on history channel, I'm on basic cable, nationally, almost all day Sunday, every Sunday.
53:30
[SPEAKER_03]: It's pretty fun.
53:31
[SPEAKER_03]: So yeah, I've been very lucky lately.
53:33
[SPEAKER_03]: So it is Joe.
53:35
[SPEAKER_02]: You can find me on Instagram that's Joe Harris and YC and Facebook and Blue Sky.
53:41
[SPEAKER_02]: I am Joe Harris, which is my preferred handle if I could get it.
53:45
[SPEAKER_02]: The penultimate issue of my Matt Cave series past time will be out around then about vampires that play baseball in the nineteen twenties.
53:53
[SPEAKER_02]: So good.
53:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Excellent.
53:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Excellent.
53:55
[SPEAKER_00]: This is going to sound like a really odd compliment, but thank you for being the right kind of straight people.
54:00
[SPEAKER_00]: It's crazy.
54:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Like as a show host as a queer man, when I'm in the minority, you have to always just make sure people are just right, right?
54:08
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not often, you know, most of my friends circle, it's not straight people, especially straight guys, because they're assholes.
54:15
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't realize it.
54:16
[SPEAKER_00]: It's always just a joy when I am recording with guys who are just cool and chill and fun and accepting, and that's a big deal.
54:23
[SPEAKER_00]: So we're recording this in Pride Month, twenty twenty five, and thank you for being the type of people who are just cool people.
54:28
[SPEAKER_00]: I really appreciate that.
54:30
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, so that's a weird compliment, but thanks for being the right kind of straight people guys.
54:36
[SPEAKER_03]: That's a very sweet compliment.
54:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, much appreciated and thanks for being a safe space.
54:40
[SPEAKER_00]: I look forward to having you both back on the show in the near to not too far future and thanks everybody for listening.
54:46
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll be back next week.
54:47
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll see you then.
54:48
[SPEAKER_00]: and now stay tuned for some thoughts on fascism, as a special guest tonight talked about a red skull story, and it's modern applications.
54:58
[SPEAKER_00]: In Captain America, one-on-one through one-on-four.
55:01
[SPEAKER_00]: It's nineteen-sixty-eight, and Stanley, and Jack Kirby, are back with more red skull.
55:05
[SPEAKER_00]: He has a new gang called the Exiles, and it's a bunch of elderly, terrible Nazis, and Nazi allies, literally withering old men,
55:14
[SPEAKER_00]: who've all survived on a remote Nazi island together over the decades while the Red School was in suspended animation.
55:20
[SPEAKER_00]: All of these characters seem to be based on stereotypes and aren't really related to anyone specific, but they all kind of represent a certain real world comparison from the World War II Axis Powers.
55:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm going to give you a quick intro to each of these with kind of a brief real world comparison.
55:37
[SPEAKER_00]: So in the comics, we meet a guy named Angela Baldini, who is portrayed as kind of a violent, Italian fascist.
55:43
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm comparing him to the real person Roberto Ferranacci, who was a brutal torture and enforcer in Mussolini's kind of fascist regime.
55:52
[SPEAKER_00]: In the comics, we meet Eric Groening, the lavish Nazi commander.
55:56
[SPEAKER_00]: And in real life, we had Herman Goring, the frivolous war criminal who stood by Hitler's side, ordering and authorizing every death.
56:03
[SPEAKER_00]: He died by the way, suicide by cyanide, the night before he was supposed to be executed.
56:08
[SPEAKER_00]: In the comics, we meet Franz Kottavus, who is the medical war criminal.
56:12
[SPEAKER_00]: And you compare him to Joseph Mangella, the guy who they called the Angel of Death, who conducted experiments in the concentration camps.
56:20
[SPEAKER_00]: More on him in a future episode.
56:21
[SPEAKER_00]: That guy, by the way, survived in South America until nineteen seventy nine and he's personally responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
56:29
[SPEAKER_00]: In the comics, we meet Jurgen Ironhand Houtman, the SS commander with the literal Iron fist.
56:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Compare him to the real-life Heinrich Kimler, the brutal enforcer of the Nazi ideologies, the single-central figure behind industrialized genocide.
56:43
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the comics, we also meet Ivan Krishky, the KGB criminal,
56:47
[SPEAKER_00]: who could be represented by a Laurenti Barrier, Stalin's secret police chief, who was known for his psychological brutality and the murder of literally hundreds of thousands while deporting and imprisoning the same amount of each.
56:59
[SPEAKER_00]: He was also, by the way, a sexual sadist.
57:01
[SPEAKER_00]: In the comics, we also meet General Jun Qing, a Chinese war ally, and I don't
57:05
[SPEAKER_00]: I think they really recognize the difference between Chinese and Japanese names and with these creators.
57:09
[SPEAKER_00]: But we could compare him to the Japanese Warcriminal Hideki Toshio, the Prime Minister of Japan during the war, who ordered the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and also ordered Pearl Harbor.
57:19
[SPEAKER_00]: The last exile we meet simply has the name Goldfreed.
57:22
[SPEAKER_00]: And he can be easily compared to Alfred Rosenberg, the author of the primary book on Nazi racial theory related to Aryan supremacy, known for pillaging the wealth of deported and executed Jews.
57:33
[SPEAKER_00]: So in the comics, we see the red skull escaping his exploding ship, and now he plans to awaken the fourth sleeper.
57:38
[SPEAKER_00]: A weird robot dude with a weird face who can face underneath things and attack from below, democracy killed by unseen threats.
57:45
[SPEAKER_00]: And no joke.
57:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Cap defeats this sleeper because Agent Thirteen or Sharon Carter's whoreiness for Cap makes the key to the sleeper disintegrate, but seems to be the story.
57:54
[SPEAKER_00]: So hearty white people defeat the Aryan super weaponry.
57:57
[SPEAKER_00]: But Agent XIII ends up getting super kidnapped and then some nuclear tape is put on Captain America's neck, which again puts him under the control of the red skull.
58:04
[SPEAKER_00]: And Captain America also gets pistol-wipped twice in this story.
58:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Consider the excels themselves though.
58:09
[SPEAKER_00]: We see these old leisurely men laughing as they force two men to fight to the death in tight red shorts.
58:16
[SPEAKER_00]: There's this group of withered despoes and murderers who drove six million people to the death
58:21
[SPEAKER_00]: camps, and they were just kind of laughing at their silliness.
58:23
[SPEAKER_00]: They have control of cap through the Red Skull's Neurorod, and they want the pleasure of taking turns beating cap to death.
58:30
[SPEAKER_00]: We get a point where the Red Skull says, where it'll hit Lefel, the Red Skull shall succeed, even as he thinks about his allies.
58:36
[SPEAKER_00]: He looks around how they despise each other, how filled with treachery and deceit are all their hearts.
58:41
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is exactly as I wish it, united by a bond of mutual hatred of stock, non-distrust, they follow me blindly.
58:48
[SPEAKER_00]: And we continued to do so into all the day when I should have disposed of them all.
58:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Katavis, who calls himself the monarch of the murder chair, is first up in fire's chair lasers at Captain America.
58:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Then it's groaning who has an electrified whip, then helped men, helped men, uh, Captain Captain, who punches, cap with his iron fist.
59:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Krishki rips his shirt off like Putin on the bear and man rasses cap.
59:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Before Baldini, the most ridiculous one has a soggy white scarf that he whips around like a locker room towel and he beats cap up a bit with it.
59:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Ching just watches, and then cap beats them all back as the military arises, and the red skull and the exiles are on the run once more.
59:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me welcome my dear friend, Trang Linien, to talk about this crazy story with the drug I'm going to assume this was your first time reading this set of comics.
59:33
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, this is, I'm pretty sure my very first time reading a Captain America comic in general, and I'm so thrilled that it was this one.
59:42
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm asking everyone this.
59:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Are you a red skull fan trunk?
59:45
[SPEAKER_01]: You know what?
59:45
[SPEAKER_01]: I am super not familiar with the red skull.
59:47
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't even know the red skull for the MCU, which I think is how most people have encountered him.
59:51
[SPEAKER_01]: I've never seen those movies.
59:52
[SPEAKER_01]: So I have almost no context for the red skull.
59:55
[SPEAKER_01]: I know rudimentarily like what he's about, but I'm not familiar with the character.
1:00:00
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not deeply invested in him.
1:00:01
[SPEAKER_00]: What was it like for you to delve into this world of the red skull and his Nazi exiles?
1:00:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Just it's a really silly story, but it's also so dark.
1:00:10
[SPEAKER_01]: It's incredibly dark, but yeah, no, the juxtaposition between the very dark subject matter and then a lot of like just misapprehensions about the I guess financial structure of fashion in Europe is very interesting too, just for plot reasons.
1:00:25
[SPEAKER_01]: The character designs are
1:00:26
[SPEAKER_01]: So so goofy and the resolution of the conflict in this particular, some stories is also very, very silly.
1:00:32
[SPEAKER_01]: I do, I love the design of the sleeper who kind of strikes me as like, he's sort of like an ermo doc kind of character.
1:00:39
[SPEAKER_01]: He's kind of like, like, what if an Easter Island head like spraying limbs suddenly from the rest of his ears?
1:00:44
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like a really scary Mr. Potato Head.
1:00:46
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I am kind of delighted at all of the aesthetic choices that were made in this confused by some of the action.
1:00:52
[SPEAKER_01]: A little disturbed by the fact that I, I did not know that the blonde lady wandering around was agent thirteen slash share and Carter, because I'm pretty sure they don't say her name at all.
1:01:01
[SPEAKER_01]: She's referred repeatedly from both Captain America and Nick here, fury as as lady and as kid.
1:01:07
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, just like several times.
1:01:09
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I did not know who this was.
1:01:10
[SPEAKER_01]: I had to look up the comics on some Marvel wiki to like, and like, look in the under the appearances section.
1:01:16
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was like, who is this character that I don't see named?
1:01:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, it's Sharon Carter.
1:01:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Now I know her name.
1:01:20
[SPEAKER_01]: I did not get it from the pages of this comic.
1:01:22
[SPEAKER_00]: The sleeper, we have about four ideas we could talk about.
1:01:25
[SPEAKER_00]: The sleeper one is interesting because it's the Nazi super weapon buried under the soil, just waiting to be discovered, right?
1:01:31
[SPEAKER_00]: It's almost like in Indiana Jones plot.
1:01:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Like we got to look up this ancient weapon weapon weapon weapons only twenty years old at this point.
1:01:37
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's a very face thing that can hit us from below and destroy every year.
1:01:41
[SPEAKER_01]: No, that's super confused me too because like the one thing where like I knew that I could ground myself in the narrative was the fact that this is happening contemporaneously and so this was published I think in nineteen sixty eight and so I assumed that the readers were reading this as the as the today times right and so when they talked about these ancient weapons and they were like oh I made this twenty years ago I was like
1:02:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, okay.
1:02:00
[SPEAKER_01]: So, dear, okay.
1:02:01
[SPEAKER_01]: I see.
1:02:02
[SPEAKER_01]: I see what you're doing.
1:02:03
[SPEAKER_01]: But I was really confused about them being sort of regarded as these sort of like ancient Titanic-looking weapons, but they'd truly just a couple of decades old could probably could buy alcohol now technically, but like not really.
1:02:17
[SPEAKER_00]: The control of Captain America, so the Nazi idea of taking over the symbol of patriotism is a theme that we see over and over.
1:02:23
[SPEAKER_00]: The red skull is obsessed with the controlling this man or taking his form.
1:02:27
[SPEAKER_00]: And then we have these exiles, who are all new characters here.
1:02:31
[SPEAKER_00]: I have to draw in my mind the comparison of, I don't know, we put Trump and all of his weird, weird fucking cabinet members out on the island somewhere.
1:02:38
[SPEAKER_00]: And they're all these odd caricatures.
1:02:40
[SPEAKER_00]: They're these weird billionaires, Putin and Trump and I don't know, Musk and
1:02:45
[SPEAKER_00]: whoever else, right?
1:02:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, this is a weird pool of people who also just like larger than life cartoon supervillains.
1:02:52
[SPEAKER_00]: But these are all mass murderers, right?
1:02:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, that's the idea.
1:02:55
[SPEAKER_00]: These are the orchestrated concentration camps and they escape justice.
1:02:59
[SPEAKER_00]: And now they're living on this island arguing together.
1:03:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, it's a Scooby-Doo cartoon.
1:03:02
[SPEAKER_00]: It's so weird.
1:03:03
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just like the biggest bummer of us leap over.
1:03:06
[SPEAKER_01]: They all decided to have.
1:03:07
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like just the worst femoscara you could possibly imagine.
1:03:11
[SPEAKER_01]: The hemoscara of like the worst men.
1:03:14
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to tend to be take up Captain America.
1:03:16
[SPEAKER_00]: No, it's my turn.
1:03:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Like they're they're all still learning for him.
1:03:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Did you have a favorite?
1:03:21
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean the murder chair is pretty amazing.
1:03:23
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think that I had a favorite.
1:03:24
[SPEAKER_01]: I was I realized partway for reading that all of these men were like very distinct.
1:03:29
[SPEAKER_01]: I was like, oh, they all seemed to have
1:03:30
[SPEAKER_01]: have personalities and their phases are all very different.
1:03:33
[SPEAKER_01]: Very racist, like different stereotypes of all these different powers.
1:03:36
[SPEAKER_01]: But like, they're just, they're, they were so distinct.
1:03:39
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was like, well, I'm not getting a strong sense of who they are, like, from the narrative in the text.
1:03:43
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I had to let them up as well.
1:03:45
[SPEAKER_01]: And they were just, this long list of like all the named characters that you talked about at the top of the podcast.
1:03:50
[SPEAKER_01]: I was like, oh, okay.
1:03:51
[SPEAKER_01]: So these are all guys with their own histories.
1:03:53
[SPEAKER_01]: And I don't think I got a strong sense of that just from reading this.
1:03:56
[SPEAKER_00]: They've never had much, honestly.
1:03:58
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot of story about these.
1:04:01
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, well, I can't very well choose a favorite just because I don't know them very well Yeah, they're like kind of generically evil, but the the guy with the wet towel or the scarf is the the most silly he comes back and uses this scarf again We'll talk about it in a future episode.
1:04:17
[SPEAKER_00]: He likes to with people with his wet scarf It's his specialty.
1:04:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh my god.
1:04:21
[SPEAKER_01]: That's beautiful.
1:04:22
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, that's essentially like how middle schoolers believe each other at summer camp and that is his super villain
1:04:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And then we have kind of this theme of it's the love of these two characters that are the thing that defeats the great evil.
1:04:38
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, even though cap gets controlled, you and I are queer people with different backstories living in America in twenty twenty five where fascism has been kind of embraced at the top levels and we are kind of just expected to live with it and it understands it exists.
1:04:51
[SPEAKER_00]: When we're reading this story almost six years later, the themes, again, they're silly back then, but they're still pretty
1:04:58
[SPEAKER_00]: What stood out for you as a queer man living in, uh, twenty twenty five America.
1:05:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Cheers.
1:05:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I mean one of the things that really struck me about this is that like I was reading this the other day and a friend of mine happened to the present while I was reading these issues and I was
1:05:13
[SPEAKER_01]: I was like, they look so beautiful, but the story is absolute nonsense.
1:05:16
[SPEAKER_01]: And there are so many things about the characterization of fascism that makes absolutely no sense.
1:05:21
[SPEAKER_01]: And my friend was like, well, that's actually pretty interesting what you said.
1:05:24
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was like, what do you mean?
1:05:25
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I went on to explain all of my frustrations about it, which included the fact that like, oh, well, like all of the
1:05:31
[SPEAKER_01]: nods at fascism kind of seem fictionalized.
1:05:34
[SPEAKER_01]: They sort of seem like even though these people lived through fascism on a global scale and they could recognize the specific eagles that were sort of being enacted against people.
1:05:43
[SPEAKER_01]: There's still this like cartoonish narrativeized version of fascism that exists alongside the actual fascism that's like being presented on the pages.
1:05:53
[SPEAKER_01]: And so it's so interesting to me because this is the thing that happens today too where like you have the material reality of all of the things that we're expected to sort of weather through and live through and suffer through.
1:06:03
[SPEAKER_01]: But then there is also this like extent narrative about it where it's like both like two cartoonish to take seriously and also like two outlandish to like really make any headway in any major newspaper headline.
1:06:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's kind of the sense that I'm getting.
1:06:20
[SPEAKER_00]: As we're recording this, one of the newest headlines I saw where this is, you know, early June was Trump claiming that Biden had been killed and replaced by a clone.
1:06:30
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, the pizza gate shit, like there's so much that's just over the top insane, the QAnon crazy from a few years back.
1:06:38
[SPEAKER_00]: But you know, when you see it where these crazy people get power in their hands, and then use it to hate and kill, it becomes quite scary.
1:06:47
[SPEAKER_00]: But Marvel Comics number one, back in the early forties, one of the very first things we see on the cover, the will be first thing is Captain America punching Hitler in the face.
1:06:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Naziism has always been the backdrop
1:06:59
[SPEAKER_00]: of every evil organization that we fight against in the comics, whether it's X-Men with the Friends of Humanity or the Secret Empire or Hydra, it's always this kind of like great evil that has its basis in masked insane men call them shots with a secret organization of kind of mindless followers.
1:07:17
[SPEAKER_00]: It's an uncomfortable thing to see and then maybe it's survival of these old ancient men who still have power but only on their island because that's where we tossed them.
1:07:25
[SPEAKER_00]: But the second we put them back in power no matter if they're eighty five in a murder chair, they're still going to do what they do, you know, right?
1:07:31
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think honestly the silliness strengthens the parallels that you can show us in real life because so many of the things that are happening kind of in the news today you read about your like hmm
1:07:40
[SPEAKER_01]: If this were a comic book and I were an editor, I would be like, we got to dial that back.
1:07:44
[SPEAKER_01]: That seems a little too on the nose.
1:07:45
[SPEAKER_01]: And so the incredible silliness of these comics really just heightens the connection that we can make to real life because everything is a little too over the top.
1:07:54
[SPEAKER_01]: Everything is just a little bit too much now.
1:07:56
[SPEAKER_01]: And exactly the way that a comic book is, like minus the superpowers, everybody is behaving in the exact same head of mean cocktail fueled sort of way.
1:08:04
[SPEAKER_01]: It's animal levels.
1:08:05
[SPEAKER_00]: We have a couple more silly stories ahead, but as we enter the seventies, the themes get serious.
1:08:10
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is growing in the comics over time, even to modern era, because the Red Stone is still playable character.
1:08:16
[SPEAKER_00]: It all of this madness, you know.
1:08:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I mean, I guess I love the drawings are really incredible.
1:08:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Also, the like
1:08:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Stanley and Jack Kirby combination with like St.
1:08:26
[SPEAKER_01]: Shores on Inks and Ari Simic on lettering.
1:08:29
[SPEAKER_01]: It just is aesthetically so iconic and so just incredibly well done.
1:08:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Like I think I also like love that the red skull.
1:08:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Like I've never really observed him before with any level of seriousness, but like his appearances in here remind me like his his face shape is exactly like the thing which throws me off.
1:08:48
[SPEAKER_01]: And that has nothing to do with anything.
1:08:49
[SPEAKER_01]: But like, sixties risk will give me like Donald Duck Energy, which is a creep.
1:08:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
1:08:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
1:08:53
[SPEAKER_01]: He absolutely does.
1:08:54
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's just, it's very freaky the way that he's very expressive.
1:08:58
[SPEAKER_01]: So like this comic, it was quite an experience.
1:09:00
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was something that like, I was prepared to
1:09:04
[SPEAKER_01]: sort of kind of feel dismissively about because I'm like oh this is infield coming from mistakes to use and like what does it have to do with today's politics and it turns out quite a lot even aesthetically and it's just all so like I am both delighted and also real bummed out at the same time.
1:09:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks Chad.
1:09:19
[SPEAKER_00]: The last thing I'll say about the exiles before we wrap up, there's a, you know, famously Hitler would surround himself with people who would praise him and like reinforce his agenda and then he would turn on them.
1:09:28
[SPEAKER_00]: He'd have his own people killed the reinforcements power or the second they turned.
1:09:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And we're watching this play out in real time.
1:09:33
[SPEAKER_00]: As we're recording this, it's in the middle of all of the Trump musk.
1:09:37
[SPEAKER_00]: kind of fall out crazy.
1:09:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Over and over we see that story.
1:09:40
[SPEAKER_00]: The Trump cabinet with people who are one minute on board and then the next kind of being cut out repeatedly over and over.
1:09:47
[SPEAKER_00]: You see that with Putin.
1:09:48
[SPEAKER_00]: You see that with most dictators.
1:09:49
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a very common thread.
1:09:50
[SPEAKER_00]: So even as a red school rejoins with his allies, it's ahaha.
1:09:53
[SPEAKER_00]: I can't wait until I can turn on them.
1:09:55
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's that kind of thing, maniacal supervillain energy.
1:09:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, thank you strongly, and it's great to see you.
1:10:00
[SPEAKER_00]: I appreciate it.
1:10:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
1:10:02
[SPEAKER_00]: It's always delightful to chat with you about comics, Chad.
1:10:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Looking forward to having you back on the show.
1:10:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Stay tuned, everybody.
1:10:07
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to jump to nineteen sixty nine and that time that the Red Skull conquered Liberia.
1:10:12
[SPEAKER_00]: So we'll go there next.
1:10:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for listening to Grimalk and Lane.
1:10:17
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1:10:19
[SPEAKER_00]: 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.
1:10:29
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1:10:35
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1:10:41
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1:10:51
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