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Bonus Patreon Release: Azazel! With Chuck Austen and Ruthanne Price! · Graymalkin Lane the podcast

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: 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.
• 0:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is Nightcrawler Month on Grey Malkin Lane Nightcrawler is one of my all-time favorite X-Men and we get to jump into some of the deep X-Men continuity and retcons involved with this character's origins.
• 0:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: My dear friend Ruth Anne Price is with me.
• 0:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: And one of my favorite people that I've ever had on this show, the incredible Chuck Austin is back with us, the creator of Azazel himself.
• 0:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: Welcome to Ruth and welcome to Chuck.
• 0:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: What are your initial thoughts on Azazel?
• 0:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: Let me just begin there with you both.
• 0:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: A Chuck, welcome back to Graham Wilkins Lane.
• 0:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: Thanks, Jeff.
• 0:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: I was thought he was a potentially very interesting character.
• 0:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: I was really kind of excited to get involved with them.
• 0:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: We had a much bigger plans for him than ultimately came about, but I thought he was really fun.
• 0:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't remember if he was, he wasn't, I don't think he was so much a group idea as I came to Mike Martts and Mike Rage with the idea.
• 0:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then we sort of fleshed it out a little bit.
• 0:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Mike Martts is actually the one who came up with the name.
• 0:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was subject matter that we were all really fascinated by, the sort of the fallen angel stuff from the Bible, and we were just looking at it from the point of view of historically have there been, you know, like with so many other things that we discover later on that there are, you know, the anti-Cathera mechanism and things like that that we find out that there were things that existed re-historically that we were unaware of and is it possible that there have been mutants throughout the history of the world.
• 1:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: and that they were possibly recorded differently or seen differently at the time.
• 1:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we thought maybe let's say that's I have some fun with the idea that biblical references are actually talking about not so much demons and angels as they are talking about mutants.
• 1:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: And a battle between the demons and the angels was specifically sort of where we were going with it with Azazil and Ep1.Emix reference to angel wearing that has to do with the angels of the Bible.
• 1:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: you took Angel full Angel for a while.
• 1:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I really did.
• 1:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, healing blood and yeah, like let me also welcome Ruth and back to the show.
• 2:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: Hi, Ruth, that I know that this is a brand new character for you.
• 2:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: What are your initial thoughts on a zazel?
• 2:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: I like, like, I...
• 2:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: encountered as a little sort of tangentially because I also actually really like my crawler and mystique and destiny and so I had been following sort of like that retconic like the history there and so I had in fact actually read as a zalcomics before you asked me to do this episode so this might be the most prepared I've ever been.
• 2:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: I kind of like him, he is smart me and like very, very bad, but he's very charming, you know, there's just like he's kind of like a really appealing sleaze bag.
• 2:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: So he's kind of like my favorite villain at this point right now.
• 2:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: Chuck, she's talking about a zazel not you, although you're also a very appealing sleaze bag.
• 2:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: I just like, I don't know.
• 2:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: And a zazel was largely based on me, but you know,
• 2:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: I grew up in a very religious household, and the devil was a very real presence for me growing up.
• 2:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's been interesting for me as an ex-morman running this show because it requires me to unpack a lot of my early origins because there's so much Christian influence in the books that I was reading growing up.
• 3:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, Zazil, these are comics I read right off the shelf.
• 3:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, when I was in college, that's when this issue was coming out.
• 3:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: There was a lot happening in the X-Men at the time.
• 3:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is when Grant Morrison was writing their epic run.
• 3:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: Chuck and I've talked about their, his run on on on Kenny, which kind of existed in the margins.
• 3:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: There was a lot of big things happening in the other books and Chuck not a cast of characters that weren't really going other places.
• 3:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: And Chuck, one of the things I love most about your run is that you were willing to kind of poke in the trenches
• 3:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: These characters have been around for a long time and you did a lot of new things with them.
• 3:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: That crawler's origins up to this point just as a quick recap.
• 3:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: That crawler first showed up in 1975 and giant size X-Men number one.
• 3:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's running around Bavaria being chased by the mob.
• 3:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's an issue in the early 1980s where he meets Mystique for the first time and there's kind of a comment where Mystique's like, oh we look like each other and she's like, we'll go talk to your mother Magali shout-outs then she can give you the answers.
• 4:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that crawler just kind of never follows up on that.
• 4:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: Fibi Nisiasa in the mid-1990s, then gives us an X-Men unlimited number four, which is the story that tells us that Mistique did give birth to Nightcrawler with a German countename Christian Wagner, and when discovered, she threw the baby off a cloth or a waterfoil, and that's where Margale found the baby.
• 4:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the parentage or the true parentage or the heritage of this character had kind of remained in the trenches a little bit.
• 4:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: So Chuck is coming into this story in the early 2000s with Uncanny X-Men 428.
• 4:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the infamous Drake go arc.
• 4:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: We're going to talk about this in just a moment.
• 4:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: We kind of have our first major redcon.
• 4:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: So Nightcrawler has the mother Margali, mother Mistique, and it's believed that his father's Christian Wagner up to this point.
• 4:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: But Claire Mott had always intended for Mistique and destiny
• 4:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: And we just never really wanted him to go there because that's a lesbian relationship and they weren't really comfortable with that And Mistique would have had this shape shift to become a man, which means she had a penis and they didn't like that either So there was a lot of kind of mixed mixed heritage with all of this
• 5:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now, one of the things that also makes Nat Crawler really interesting is he's Christian, he's been a priest at this point, but he's also been kind of the monstrous version of the X-Men, right?
• 5:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like, he looks a little bit like a demon.
• 5:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: He bumps in, he's got pointed ears in a curly forked tail, and he's got yellow glowing eyes, and he hides in the shadows.
• 5:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: He literally calls himself the Knight Crawler, which sounds a little bit demonic, but it's also a kind of worm, which is something we'll talk about in the big epic Nat Crawler episode later this month.
• 5:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: Chuck, what was your familiarity with the Knight Crowler character when you kind of came on board and he was now on your roster?
• 5:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I guess the thing about the X-Men is that that was probably the comic that I was most familiar with when I came to start writing for Marvel because I'd been a fan all through the Claremont burn era all through like Paul Smith and Beyond like way, you know, so I was there with Dave Cockburn when I bought giant size X-Men number one I remember reading it on the lawn outside my high school.
• 6:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: I was waiting for my mom to come pick me up from school
• 6:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: it goes way back up to the very beginning.
• 6:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I don't at that point I wasn't as steeped in the lore of it all and I'd never spoken to Chris at that point about the X-Men.
• 6:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean he and I had crossed paths at conventions and whatnot.
• 6:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I didn't know what he had in mind or what he had planned.
• 6:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: So the Azazel stuff, that was just us talking internally about, well here's a question I always had
• 6:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: Mike or Mike, it was like March and like my rage.
• 6:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: Mike or Mike would have a...
• 6:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: I've gotten to know Mike, Mark's great guy.
• 6:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's an awesome guy, both of them are.
• 6:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: Mike Rage is a fantastic guy.
• 6:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's just a schoolteacher up in northern New York now.
• 6:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I love them both.
• 6:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think they're fantastic.
• 6:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: They were great to work with.
• 6:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: And but it was the best part of it was us just like batting ideas around, like I didn't know as much about current mythology and history and so they would throw stuff out there.
• 6:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, there are reasons that I used husk in the first place because my club tusk so he wanted.
• 6:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: He says, you might he, how do you feel by using page?
• 7:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I said, yeah, sure, I know that's the right.
• 7:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, but as far as night crawler went as far as we knew, it had never really been resolved about night crawlers parentage and we really needed villains in the uncanny X-Men book because Grant had all the good ones.
• 7:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we thought we got to create some stuff on our own and we got going through the roster of old villains.
• 7:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: And this is a this is we go back to check it out as Maximus Lobo episode.
• 7:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
• 7:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and you didn't even know that Lobo was was Lobo.
• 7:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you can hear me learning some things live during that recording.
• 7:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so that I mean, we're talking, we had to go obscure, we had to go deep and find stuff.
• 7:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I told Mike, I had seen this interview with a geneticist.
• 7:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: I can't even remember his name now, but I got so deep into this stuff in research.
• 7:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: I love research.
• 7:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: So that was part of the big part of what I got into.
• 7:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: He was talking about this thing called punctulated equilibrium, Stephen Gold, who's an archiogeneticist, and so I believe that's what he was.
• 8:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: He would talk about punctulated equilibrium, which is at certain periods during the course of human history.
• 8:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: The human genome spits out variance, and those variance, vie for supremacy, and whichever one survives is the one that
• 8:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: level and it's not just humans, it was all animal forms.
• 8:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: They all spit out variations of themselves to see which ones and that's how they explained a lot of the stuff that happened on that island.
• 8:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: Galapagos.
• 8:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: Galapagos, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 8:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I started thinking, well, what if this had happened all through?
• 8:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: So Mike and I started batting it around.
• 8:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: We really liked it.
• 8:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: We thought, oh, this could be a way to really bring in not only a potentially really big villain, but one with a connection to the X men in a more visceral emotional way because he's actually night crawlers father, but he doesn't
• 8:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: We had been talking about how this would be a great way to create a villain that was specific to uncanny and to help to make an emotional connection to the X-Men because if it was Nightcrawler's father and it was somebody that had never cared about Nightcrawler, not even, you know, he was basically along with all of these other children that he had created throughout the world.
• 9:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: They were just to exist to create a portal so that he could come back from this hell that he had been consigned to.
• 9:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah and this idea of punctuated the equilibrium something we talked about a little bit in the Maximus logo episode and this is something that has been played with by many writers, many different writers in the X-Men franchise and other franchises, but that these groups of like winged mutants or ferrole kind of wolf-like or lupine mutants,
• 9:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: Having this kind of demon or devil themed one makes sense.
• 9:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now Azazal is one of those characters that is thousands of years old and we also have many mutants that fall into that category.
• 9:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: These kind of ancient masterminds go to the externals, slene and githyan and apocalypse and all of these other characters.
• 9:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: and it's just part of his mutant power to live a really long time.
• 9:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's some interesting things about this character that I find, I really enjoy.
• 9:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now, I'm gonna say this with affection because I really love this arc, but I think the Drakeo is one of the arcs in X-Men history, and you and I talk about this in my very first interview with you, Chuck, that's kind of reviled.
• 10:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's fans that really dislike this arc.
• 10:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think if I'm really tapping into Y,
• 10:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think that Nightcrawler represents a certain amount of hope and like making him like the demon guy.
• 10:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think was really a struggle for some people.
• 10:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now, you introduce a ton of new characters and it's a great story and I think a lot of people just assumed that Azazel was like the literal devil when they first read him.
• 10:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think that's where some of that feeling of revulsion comes from, but he's not.
• 10:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's a long-lived mutant.
• 10:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: And ultimately, if you guys know this phrase, he's kind of a cuck.
• 10:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's kind of there to get cocked by the sneak this whole time, and when we get to future retcons about this character, people pick up on that, because he's the guy who thinks he's all that, but wow, he's just kind of not really in charge at the end of the day.
• 10:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: He re-reading the Draco for this episode specifically was really interesting to me.
• 11:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: I really enjoyed it.
• 11:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: So we're going to dive into the deep end here, and just have a good time, Ruth, and do you have my notes pulled up?
• 11:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: I do.
• 11:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, I have them printed out.
• 11:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, will you read the Christian Wagner dialogue?
• 11:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: We're gonna open with uncanny X-Men 428 by Chuck Austin and Sean Phillips, and Chuck had literally hear your thoughts on working with Sean in just a moment.
• 11:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: We go back to this scene in Germany where Mystique is married to Christian Wagner, and she's posing as a maid, and she fucks a stable hand so that when he flirts with the maid again later, the real maid, she's horrified and gets fired and Mystique's like, bah, she just loves to mess with people which is really fun.
• 11:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: Raven is married to Christian Wagner,
• 11:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: who's so worried that he might be barren that they end up starting in vitro fertilization.
• 11:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: But Raven is also fucking other people.
• 11:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: She's posing as other women, and she's sleeping with other men.
• 11:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: And in time, Wagner introduces her to a very distinguished looking gentleman at a party.
• 11:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now, his also has red skin, but here he's using whatever, you know, an image inducer or whatever technology to make himself look Caucasian.
• 11:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: Christian Wagner says,
• 11:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Over here, my darling, her asasel, I'd like to present my wife, Raven Wagner, isn't she lovely?
• 12:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: Lovely as a wolfly inadequate word, my dear Baron.
• 12:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Her asasel is the ruler of an island nation off the coast of Vermuda, La Isla des Dimonis.
• 12:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: We were just discussing some potentially beneficial.
• 12:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, please, Baron, do you really think Raven is really interested in a business transaction that barely maintains my attention?
• 12:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, Raven is quite interested in the machinations of all kinds of business.
• 12:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: I assure you, this is a woman who will constantly surprise you.
• 12:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, we are trying to have a child here as Hazel.
• 12:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: We have been for some time.
• 12:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: It won't happen for you.
• 12:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, but, but a cruel thing to say.
• 12:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: The truth is often cruel, Raven, which is why so many lies are told to keep it hidden.
• 12:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: The Baron cannot get you a child.
• 12:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: The Baron is the past.
• 12:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: You are the future.
• 12:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: You're so sweet.
• 12:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Speak about me as though I were, I don't know.
• 13:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: Something never before seen on this world.
• 13:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: You have that air about you, Raven.
• 13:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: A magnificent and power and beauty beyond anything I've ever seen before, such as your mystique.
• 13:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: In fact, you personify the term, you are mystique.
• 13:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: In every sense of the word.
• 13:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I like the disease.
• 13:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, maybe he's given her the idea for this name, but she also chose it like 80 years before this is gone.
• 13:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: But I go she's good at like putting putting things there later.
• 13:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: We see our Raven entering a church at the side of a graveyard And Azazal is waiting.
• 13:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm glad you came.
• 13:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: He says I I couldn't stay away.
• 13:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: I tried why because you frightened me I never felt so much you want to be with me so much that I Wake where shall we go?
• 13:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't want to wait.
• 13:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: Then don't undress.
• 13:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: Oh sexy
• 13:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: No, even I could not be that bold.
• 13:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: But you already are that bold, Raven.
• 13:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know that this world's sanctimonious morals and religious hypocrisies of beneath you?
• 14:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: You're a space traveler among monkeys, a winged angel among pigs.
• 14:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: You're a mind and spirit and body, are more magnificent than any totemic icon in this gold-plated idol-incrusted room.
• 14:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: They're in a church, remember?
• 14:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: Remove your clothes and let me wash a few.
• 14:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: And she does, she strips naked, and he smiles and takes her in his arms and he says, Now, remove the other garment, the false you.
• 14:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: What are you talking about?
• 14:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: I have no idea.
• 14:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: I can almost see it, a haze around this less real, less attractive facade you wear, stand naked before me, Raven, now in all ways.
• 14:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: And she changes into her blue form, and he compliments her before kissing her, unique.
• 14:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: un-equalled, extraordinary, magnificent, and then-day fucking a church.
• 14:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: Sometimes, sometimes, and Mystique is now on the cliff screaming, and this is be back to the, uh, baby, and you see, as a story, she's screaming into the wind.
• 15:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: I am in love.
• 15:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: And she hears a BAMP, and she turns around to see Azazel in the shadows, but now he's red with white eyes, and he has a fort demon tail.
• 15:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, Azazel, you startled me.
• 15:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: Fortunately, you didn't fall.
• 15:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: No, I...the...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...a...
• 15:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: I say, why are you being so cold?
• 15:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: I thought, I hoped you'd be pleased.
• 15:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: Please, of course I am pleased, although enough for the reason you might want me to be, it is after all a simple science, and it worked as I had hoped, but it's hardly caused for an outpouring of emotion.
• 15:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: But all the things you said to me, I thought you, I thought you loved me.
• 15:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: Never confused physical passion for a condition of the heart, my dear.
• 15:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: Since the dawn of mankind, the two have rarely gone hand in hand.
• 16:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now, I'll go back to the Baron, stay safe and warm in the cozy, comfortable, protected little world you've married into, and raise our child, my child, as his.
• 16:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, a month later, Air Wagner has grown suspicious, so misty murders him and disposes of the body, but then the baby's born blue and then,
• 16:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: grieving Azazil and her losses.
• 16:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: She throws the baby over the waterfall and the baby also goes bam and survives.
• 16:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, so check.
• 16:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'd love to hear your thoughts on what it's like to hear this revisited.
• 16:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: Tell us a little about working with Shawn Phillips and crafting this world for Mystique.
• 16:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh my god, I loved Sean Phillips.
• 16:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's so talented.
• 16:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: He did everything that I could have wanted for that story and more.
• 16:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: He was not particularly appreciated by the X-Men fans, because his style was so realistic, but there I'm a trained illustrator.
• 16:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I looked at the draftsmanship and his work and the beautiful spotting of Blacks and Lights.
• 16:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I just could not have been happier.
• 17:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: And...
• 17:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: a funny story, just a complete funny side story.
• 17:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: I was sitting having lunch with that convention with Eddie Briganzo when I was, because I was working on Superman at the same time.
• 17:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's right.
• 17:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think it was Dennis that came up and sat with us.
• 17:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: He came up and sat with us and he starts talking about, God, I just ran this comic.
• 17:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was so great.
• 17:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was this X-Men comic where mystique is like in the past when she gets pregnant and Eddie just looks at me out of the corner
• 17:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sorry, and Ed was like, wow, I really, very impressive.
• 17:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, so happy with it.
• 17:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: The, I couldn't, I don't think Sean could have done a better job.
• 17:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: I listen to you guys reread it.
• 17:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm like, did I write this?
• 17:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, that's actually, it's pretty good.
• 17:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and in your right it was as as a little charming.
• 17:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: How did I feel about it?
• 17:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: I felt great.
• 17:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean it was we we wanted to kind of Because as contrary to what the fans may have thought we wanted to stay very tight within continuity We didn't want to really disrupt continuity.
• 17:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: So if we had known that there were these other ideas out there We would have tried to take them into account in some way, but this was based on all that we knew at the time when I was writing this story
• 18:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: about how it'd go and we were trying to think of, okay, how does, how does mystique?
• 18:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: How do we show mystique finding sort of who she really is?
• 18:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: You read her as like very bored, right?
• 18:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: She's the bored housewife, toying with the servants and taking joy where she can.
• 18:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: But then she falls in love and gets her heartbroken, which adds a layer to this character that is shown sometimes.
• 18:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now, she's got layers within layers.
• 18:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is a complicated character, and more and more writers will add more.
• 18:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: She had like a full solo series a few years after this, right?
• 18:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: Where she gets it, bored and in a lot more depth.
• 18:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: But the mistake that existed at the time, I think this exactly fits her.
• 18:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's funny that you mentioned the other series.
• 18:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: That was Brian Vaughn series, right?
• 18:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: I was actually based on a short that I had done for one of their other books that was the mystique story where Nick Fury uses her as an assassin.
• 18:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Brian and Mike started talking about that and said we should turn this whole thing into a series.
• 19:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: We have a lot more mystique thoughts.
• 19:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: We'll do a whole mystique month at some point.
• 19:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: We have you moving into working with Philip Tan right after this.
• 19:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: Do you want to talk about working with Philip?
• 19:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Philip was a great kid, but he was, I don't want to lay any blame on him for anything.
• 19:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: He did, I think, as great a job as he possibly could, but he was new.
• 19:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: He had never worked in comics before.
• 19:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: And one of the things that they would do is they would give me these sort of hot, young artists because I had worked in animation for so long.
• 19:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I could, my scripts often describe this isn't all over the shoulder shot.
• 19:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is a wide shot.
• 19:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is, you know, explained how I would break it down as a storyboard artist.
• 19:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so they sort of used that to help to kind of train young talent really talented kids who had no experience drawing comics before doing storytelling and so Philip storytelling was was was a bit of a struggle at that point but he was he tried so hard and he worked so hard and there was no way at that point because they were getting paid so little that you were going to send stuff back and say please redraw this it's not telling the story the way that the script was written so you just kind of kind of go forward with it as best you can.
• 20:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: But there were some liberties taken.
• 20:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't want to say liberties.
• 20:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think he was really sincerely trying to make stuff the best that he could.
• 20:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he made a lot of choices that were aside from the script that were better than mine were.
• 20:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: But there were a lot of times where things were really unclear or some of the story telling was a little hard to follow.
• 20:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it was great.
• 20:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: I liked him personally.
• 20:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think he in immense talent.
• 20:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: I hope he went far.
• 20:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know.
• 20:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: I got out of comics not long after this.
• 20:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: So.
• 20:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: Let me review the Draco storyline really quickly.
• 20:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: For 29, Nightcrawler steals a blackbird and heads to Isla Dysthomonas.
• 20:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's not feeling quite himself.
• 20:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: The Isla Dysthomonas has been recently found to contain evidence of an ancient mutant civilization.
• 20:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: Certainly not the first and certainly not the last of ancient mutant civilizations by the way.
• 20:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: The X-Men are messy.
• 20:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: They are falling to pieces.
• 20:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: There is shit happening with Lorna and Alex and Annie and Iceman.
• 20:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's hilarious.
• 20:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's a husk and angel.
• 20:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's a really fun soap opera read at this book.
• 20:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's you do some really bold things.
• 20:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: You read a scene where Iceman has been blown apart and have ex-pisted Iceman because he's been flirting with both Lorna and Annie.
• 21:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: No, and have ex-like.
• 21:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: I could just pee.
• 21:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: You could remake your body out of that.
• 21:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's something really fun that we can bizarre moments in this era.
• 21:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I love working with Mike and Mike because they were open to that stuff.
• 21:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, let's go there.
• 21:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Why not?
• 21:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: The X-Men are messy and they pursue Kurt and then we find as Azzles walking out around a bonfire flanked by a group of mutants who look a lot like him.
• 21:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: And for 30 Carter Gazzicanian has snuck with the X-Men to the island, he's stowed away.
• 21:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: The group has disrupted a group, a circle of demonic-looking mutants who all seem to be kind of melding together.
• 21:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: The demons all vanish, which opens a massive portal to the ground and the X-Men passed through it.
• 21:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: In 431, Azazal admits that he should have expected the X-Men, and he notes that Angel is under 30 years old here.
• 21:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm not one of the ancient angels of the Chiarafim, if I'm saying that correctly.
• 21:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then we meet a bunch of aziles children and they're all thus night crawlers half siblings.
• 22:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: These are the neofem, who are the alternates of the angels, and we're going to learn that there's been ancient wars between the angels, mutants and the demon mutants along the way, right?
• 22:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: Which again, we have these races and mutants that have been established.
• 22:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: In this group of characters, we've really never seen again.
• 22:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: And there's some characters here that have some great potential.
• 22:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yidraezel, a Y-Y-I-D-R-A-Z-I-L, who has pink skin and eye patch on the eye at a big old axe.
• 22:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: We don't know exactly what his powers are.
• 22:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: We meet Jillian, who looks kind of like neck crawler except she's got boobs and also blue wings and a black mask on.
• 22:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: And she carries a massive blade at halberd.
• 22:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think she has the visual on Jillian, and especially is excellent.
• 22:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Uh, we meet you know credit.
• 22:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's where I would give credit to Philip because I don't remember describing these all of these characters.
• 22:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: We meet a nil stager, a stiger, or a biss, who's a previously established character here, who opens a swirly portal and sucks things into it.
• 22:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: He was one of the horsemen of apocalypse in the age of apocalypse for those that remember a biss.
• 23:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: Uh, we meet Gita, G-I-I-N-I-Y-E-H, who's a bald woman with a red eye on her head, carrying double sword.
• 23:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: She wears a blindfold, her eyes have been sewn shut.
• 23:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: And if you chop a limb off, it takes she can regrow limbs out of other parts of her body.
• 23:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then we have Kiwi Black, who's a Mayore man, one of the few Mayore characters in comics, who has a bunch of black markings on his face.
• 23:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then finally, Ophys, OPHIS, who has a big guy with energy fists, and he has a big old sphere around him.
• 23:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: These are cool characters, and this is like Nightcrawler's extended family that we haven't spent a lot of time with.
• 23:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're all just really cool right and then there's like little tiny things where you're like, okay, I can see a little bit of that crawler there and then you're just like, wow, what a family reunion that would be everyone bring your buttons.
• 23:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: So for 31 that there's a big battle, Mistique shows up from a business portal.
• 23:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: This has this kind of odd like he has a portal inside of him and he like unwrap around it.
• 23:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's almost like he extends himself into tentacles.
• 23:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's a really interesting visual.
• 24:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: For 32, as Azel breaks up the fight and he holds a summit and he reveals that he's the father of all these characters that he's summoned.
• 24:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: So the truth is starting to play out.
• 24:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: He claims that he was the one to get Margoli Shardos to take in Kurt.
• 24:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: He lists his aliases as semi-haza, Duma, Cario, Mastema, Belliar, Gaudrill, Biezelbub, and most commonly called Satan.
• 24:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: So even though he's a really old mutant, he's claimed or has made claims during his lifespan that he's like the biblical Satan, and whatever religion he's a part of in those areas.
• 24:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: When the archaeologist professor,
• 24:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: In 433, when Angel yells about the dead man, Azazlo replies, the Earth is my angel, every rock plant and human on it, or it was before your kind took it away from me, and that gives me every right.
• 24:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: The X-Men, who have had their powers removed, or trapped in a dungeon, high-smann as a severed head.
• 24:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is where I have a quest to pee on him.
• 24:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: Jillian float flirts so hard with Nightcrawler, which is uncomfortable because there's a familial relation here, and Nightcrawler deduces that Azazlo isn't mutant
• 25:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: Mutation is the core of evolution, my boy.
• 25:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's as old as necessary for life as life itself.
• 25:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: It occurs throughout time as nature requires at exploding with variation at points where rapid change and environment changed often brought on by human civilization becomes dangerous to the planet upon which it resides and something new is required for survival.
• 25:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Have you ever seen satellite photos of Earth from SpaceCurt?
• 25:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: My Earth from Space?
• 25:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: He calls it my Earth.
• 25:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: Particularly large cities on coastal waters, gray, dead, diseased against the colorful brilliance against the planet of the planet.
• 25:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: Anyone can see what is a blight?
• 25:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: What a cancer humanity has become to the very planet which supports it, eating with concrete steel and asphalt into the green and vibrancy of the world around it.
• 25:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: I am an advanced human.
• 25:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: I challenged God by imposing rule in Dominion and enslaving or removing the toxicity of humans.
• 26:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: By those acts, I fell from grace, and was cast out of the Kingdom of Heaven, the remnants of the archeological site you call Isla de Desdemona, cast out by angels.
• 26:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: Another group of mutated humans into this dead, desolate burning dimension, so far apart from my world, apart from all worlds.
• 26:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's all there in the historical record if you know where to look and how to interpret it, along with, hopefully, the means to return.
• 26:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: So at some point after he fathered Knight Crawler, he got stuck in another realm, and now he's summoning all of his children to form a portal for him to come back to Earth and seize control.
• 26:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's the very simple quick origin.
• 26:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: As Zazel ordered Angel to be tortured, he orders Wolverine's arms severed, and then for Wolverine to be skinned, it turns out they're in the brimstone dimension, where Kurt and Abyss teleport to when they pass through something else, and as Zazel didn't have been trapped there for a long time.
• 26:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: He'll kill everyone and start over if no one can open a portal back to Earth.
• 27:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's mind control all of his kids, but the X-Men fuck it up.
• 27:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: This place connects to all points on my earth and a few others as well.
• 27:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: It is our divine mutant gift that our thoughts can manipulate the energies, which form this unique juncture in space time.
• 27:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: So he's been stranded here by angels.
• 27:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: He shares how he once opened a portal to earth at the same time that Margali was opening one to the brimstone dimension.
• 27:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: We did it by accident the first time and she believed she had summoned the demon.
• 27:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: I encourage that belief by offering her help with her magic and we became allies.
• 27:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: allies and eventually much more.
• 27:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: We've never seen that played up on.
• 27:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: Stay tuned for the Margali Shardos episode coming out later this month.
• 27:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then Polaris back on Earth opens a portal through a business stomach.
• 27:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: She pops her head through in a really funny panel.
• 27:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: Her head's just coming out of a business.
• 27:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: In 434, Knight-Crawler Abyss and Kiwi Black are all working together to a foil is Azel's plans.
• 27:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: The X-Men are escaping.
• 27:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: Azel has a sword in each hand and approaches Knight-Crawler.
• 27:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: I always liked you best, Kurt, of all my children.
• 27:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: All over my world, there was something special about you.
• 28:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's a fight, Knight-Crawler says, you're not my father.
• 28:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: You're just a Lothario with regrets, which is a great, he should put that on his business cards.
• 28:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's saddens me to know I share genetics with a man who's hard as so black that he sees no other options.
• 28:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's no possibility for either love or companionship.
• 28:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: Azale replies, how could I have birth to son who looks like me yet harbors foolish notions of angels?
• 28:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: And Azale laughs as he goes spinning off into the drift as the castle collapses around him.
• 28:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's a really quick and oversimplified summary of the drako.
• 28:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's got some interesting layers to his powers.
• 28:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: We've got the BAMP thing, we've got the long life thing.
• 28:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: He seems to have some very powerful and potent genetic material because his kids all come out looking a certain way.
• 28:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: And he's able to mind control his children.
• 28:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's a certain level of kind of mysticism and his like relationship with the Brimstone dimension.
• 28:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: It self seems kind of rife with possibility.
• 28:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think the most interesting thing about him is that he's stuck there, right?
• 28:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is that someone has managed somehow to figure out how to short-circuit all of those other things you mentioned to keep him in that place, right?
• 29:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so that he has to rely on the powers of his children coming back to open a portal to go.
• 29:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the portal thing is really continuous, like through all the stories that I've read with a zazel in them, like that's so key to figuring out how to get him from place to place.
• 29:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: Chuck, let me hear your thoughts on revisiting the Drakeo.
• 29:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Uh, you know, it's actually, it's, it's interesting.
• 29:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it, uh, it's just from what you're reminding me of.
• 29:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm, I'm, I'm actually happier.
• 29:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: I haven't thought about it in a long time.
• 29:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: I know that a lot of people hate it and I just, I tend to not think about my time and comics during that period.
• 29:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: Uh, I actually think, uh,
• 29:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's sort of achieved what we were attempting to achieve.
• 29:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, we were looking to create.
• 29:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I call her as a very ease.
• 29:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's on the side of the angels.
• 29:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: No question.
• 29:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: How would it be to introduce an antagonist for him that is the representation of evil honor?
• 29:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: How does that raise the stakes?
• 29:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: How does that increase the story potential and the relationship between the two of them?
• 30:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think it was pretty successful.
• 30:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: And you were building this.
• 30:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: We talked about this in Maximus Lobo as well.
• 30:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: You were building these kind of escalating stories almost like there was a big war coming between these different races of mutants.
• 30:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: I know it never quite played out.
• 30:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah.
• 30:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, that's the thing is that you you have all these grand plans for the X members.
• 30:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: You got a plan on being around like Chris for 20 years.
• 30:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: to achieve them all because there's so many characters and so much stuff and you feel like okay I'm doing a really good job and then somebody comes up and goes, well I can't believe that Angel was only in one panel and the last issue, it's like okay I'm sorry I'll do an Angel story next time and then you wind up doing an Angel story but it doesn't have Angel and it's still because it's the you know the she lies with Angel story so there's really no winning but I think on the whole I think it was that it was what we intended to do I mean we broke down you know what makes
• 30:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: what makes potentially a great villain and a great story, and we built one that we thought would work really well.
• 30:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: I understand that people don't like the idea that Kurt is the son of Satan in a sense, but that's to me that just makes him, I don't know, I'm going to defer to the fans and let them decide what they think about this.
• 31:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: But if you come from those kinds of circumstances and you still want to be a good person, I mean that just makes the journey that much greater.
• 31:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, his mother, Mistique, is a sociopath.
• 31:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I mean, and his foster mother is a crazy witch lady.
• 31:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think that's all, yeah.
• 31:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: So this is just another variation on this character.
• 31:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: As someone who didn't have a relationship to these characters, before I read all of this stuff, right?
• 31:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was nothing for me to be disappointed by.
• 31:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: And at the risk of sounding like a total weirdo, maybe a little bit of an idiot.
• 31:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Feels like this story was a little bit ahead of its time, because it runs parallel to,
• 31:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hear me out, a lot of what's happening in K-pop demon hunters, right?
• 31:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Where you have this person was raised to be a hunter of demons who then finds out spoiler alert if you haven't watched it, you showed it's good that her father was a demon, right?
• 32:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so like her life up to that point had been like conquering that part of her only to realize that that attempt was what was in fact undoing all of the good work that they were doing.
• 32:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: So maybe you were just 20 years ahead of your time.
• 32:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: you know, I have heard that many times that I am always ahead of my time.
• 32:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'll take it.
• 32:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's a good story.
• 32:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: And these are playable characters.
• 32:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I don't know that I quite understand why people dislike it so much.
• 32:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: Is asles unforgettable.
• 32:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: You're bringing in a new, you're bringing in a new villain that has a lot of connection.
• 32:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know.
• 32:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: The X-Men have
• 32:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: held demons and I'm thinking of the Ungarai and all these things, you know, this is another realm and it's inherently tied to Nightcrawler who's a beloved character.
• 32:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think this is a banger of a story and these little gets defeated is dad, you know, and that crawler stands against him.
• 32:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now, as Jesus gone for a really long time, but then Jason Aeron comes aboard and a check of you over at Jason Aeron, a great guy.
• 32:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't think I have no.
• 32:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: So he's writing Wolverine in the X-Men.
• 33:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's a whole new era of X-Men books.
• 33:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's a lot happening.
• 33:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's a new school under the name, the Jean Grey School for Higher Learning.
• 33:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: Wolverine is the headmaster.
• 33:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's an excellent kind of all ages book from the few years back, from like the 2010s.
• 33:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh cool.
• 33:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: In Wolverine in the X-Men 23, the X-Men are fighting a witch named Calcabrina.
• 33:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: We don't need to go deep into that character, but she has developed power by making bargains with other entities like you do when you're a magic character in the Marvel universe.
• 33:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: And her master is Azazel.
• 33:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: So there's a moment where she tells her where she summons him.
• 33:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: He tells reports in.
• 33:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's wearing a black suit.
• 33:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: And this time he's surrounded by red bands.
• 33:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now I'll take a quick journey but stay tuned for a separate bands episode.
• 33:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: Kitty once told a fairy tale where there were some little blue, kind of smurfy guys who they called BAMPS.
• 33:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then Dave Cockram gave us a net-crawler-limited series where he explored the BAMPS in greater detail.
• 33:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: Then we have that infamous image of like, net-crawler laying on the couch with a BAMPS doll in front of his penis as he like, like, a great, like, greets a man to scepton when she walks in and he's like, hey, I want a BAMPS, like, he's in this.
• 34:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: kind of odd energy with these like little night crawler plushies.
• 34:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now Jason Aaron has given us blue bamps like hopping all over the mansion and there's a lot happening and night crawler is dead at this point in the comics.
• 34:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: Fast-gen kills night crawler who's saving hope summer so night crawlers have been out of the books for a little while and now we see Azazel wearing the black suit and surrounded by red bamps.
• 34:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: They're not blue ones, they're red but some blue ones have been hanging around all over the mansion so keep that all that in mind for a moment from now.
• 34:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: So she's been apparently claiming souls for Azale, who still stuck in the other dimension and gathering power and he's being summoned here by a witch.
• 34:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: In issue 30, we get an odd image of Azale feeding some of the red vamps, his blood, and then sending out sending them out on emissions.
• 34:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: And we're going to learn more about that in Jason Earron's new series which gets launched at the end here called Amazing X-Men.
• 34:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: Ruthan, let me turn it over to you to tell us about Nightcrawlers' journey here.
• 35:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Alright, I, first of all, it was, so this, we're covering amazing X-Men 1 through 6.
• 35:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: I lumped this story, I had so much fun reading this, I read it like 3 times.
• 35:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so as Chad mentioned, when we begin, Nikreler is dead, I don't pretend to know why, because I have not read X-Men Messiah complex, which should surprise nobody.
• 35:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: What I do know is that you cannot keep a good blue skin 6 fingered 6-toed pre-hensile tailed pointy
• 35:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, amazing X-Men number one, it opens on Kurt, who is moping in heaven, sitting on the edge of a cliff with his back paradise.
• 35:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some woman approaches him, tries to talk him off the literal edge.
• 35:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Might have succeeded, but then Kurt smells something very familiar, which turns out to be Brimstone and some demon pirates attack.
• 35:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: the poor woman.
• 35:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're after souls, which is why they're in heaven.
• 35:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: A series of vamps and Kurt has defeated them.
• 35:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's very excited.
• 35:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: He has shed his heavenly cloak and claims pair of swords.
• 35:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then, none too soon, because the band of brimstone swashbufflers are kept in by his own father, the Skipper of Sulphur himself, the sazeal.
• 36:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Put it in appearance.
• 36:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: The Skipper of Sulphur?
• 36:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was having a good time.
• 36:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was saying, you know, I can write times and I can write captions for it.
• 36:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to interrupt very briefly.
• 36:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: Rainbow Rail just did a brand new issue that just came out called the Spider-Man Holiday Spectacular.
• 36:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: Where Spider-Man goes to the X-Men's house and he gives everyone a gift.
• 36:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: And Nightcrawler opens a gift and it's just one of those little tree air fresheners that you hang in a car and Spider-Man says, you know, for all your bamps in Nightcrawler's like,
• 36:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: an air freshener to counter this little for smell.
• 36:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: It made me really happy.
• 36:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, please proceed.
• 36:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: From that's amazing.
• 36:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: What an appearance.
• 36:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: One big bump there he is.
• 36:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: He is armed to his pointy teeth.
• 36:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: And showing off his evil red eight pack inside an open pirate's cap and coat.
• 36:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wearing a very fancy hat.
• 36:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Trichhorn pointed.
• 36:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're evenly matched in a teleporting bamf battle.
• 36:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Herk does does get one good whack on Azale's chin, as Azale shares some choice words about mystique, the blue-faced witch, and then Azale Bams away leaving one of his little red bumps behind, and then the real story begins.
• 37:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's literally just like the introduction.
• 37:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: to the series.
• 37:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Go to the gene race school, fire stars starting her first day, known will help her.
• 37:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: She runs across beast in the hallway who's listening at the wall.
• 37:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Has a gun that looks like if some sort and is like, oh good, you shoot microwaves.
• 37:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: I need some help with a rodent problem, blow us down the wall, and then there's a whole bunch of little blue bumps living inside the wall who have built
• 37:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: giant portal to somewhere it's very fancy it's glowing beast is angry because they stole his coffee maker and then they get everyone in the portal starts to glow much to everyone's just may a whole bunch of the xman gets sucked into it.
• 37:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: The first person you land with is Wolverine and north star so they find themselves in an unknown but otherwise pleasant place where a sulfurous pirate ship emerges from a fiery red cloud.
• 37:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: A voice upon it declaring the new lords of heaven, it invites them to surrender their souls or stand with their precious blue elf, and Wolverine has a surge of improbable hope, because of course his friend is dead, but who is who is this precious blue elf?
• 38:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Who else could it be?
• 38:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Exodus number two, that opens on storm, iceman and fire star, who have been sucked into some place not nearly as pleasant.
• 38:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's hot.
• 38:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: There are endless screams.
• 38:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's a river of blood.
• 38:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Storm can't.
• 38:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: make any wind because there's no weather and Bobby is melting.
• 38:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is another pirate ship full of vampires.
• 38:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're facing off against the demons of hell.
• 38:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: So we have like demon pirates and then demon demons and they're mad at each other and fighting.
• 38:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's very confusing.
• 38:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then at Storm's command, this party of X-Men, but just fights everybody.
• 38:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, they're like, who should we be fighting in Storm's like?
• 38:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're the X-Men.
• 38:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: We fight everyone.
• 38:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that's what they do.
• 38:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: So Bobby melts Storm's captured.
• 38:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then in the final frame of this one night crawler and some of his blue bands
• 38:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: a ship.
• 38:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: And Azale isn't really in this one other than by name.
• 38:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: People talk about him.
• 38:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, and also dead Professor X shows up to give Wolverine the low down on what's going on, which is like, there's a lot going on, guys.
• 39:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's a weird story.
• 39:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Charles Xavier, the ultimate cheat code, even in death.
• 39:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's, there is no time to show much less tell, so we'll rely on Professor X.
• 39:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: So,
• 39:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Issue three, did you miss a nasal because here he is he bumps the beast into the frigid waters of the great frozen sea of oblivion, which is confusing because you can't splash into a frozen sea because it's frozen, but whatever, then beast climbs back up the ship and there's big fight.
• 39:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is this is the unifying feature of all of these books is there just full of giant fights.
• 39:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: Um giant pirate adventure in heaven.
• 39:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
• 39:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's really great fun.
• 39:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it's heaven versus hell, which is the Azale thing again, right?
• 39:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 39:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 39:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: So basically the whole premise is that Azale is going, they're trying to get souls.
• 39:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: So he's trying to raid both hell and heaven to get all of the souls because not entirely certain why they just want them.
• 39:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Whatever.
• 39:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Storm keeps escaping on her ship.
• 39:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're on the other pirate ship.
• 39:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: It got really confusing because there are three different pirate ships.
• 39:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: So Storm kept escaping
• 39:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: So they're going to cut her hands off and then actually curt shows up.
• 39:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: They have it in her moment.
• 39:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's a flashback, then there's some more fighting.
• 40:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then another ship plides with their ship.
• 40:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's the one being driven by a feral panic boy.
• 40:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: So why is he feral?
• 40:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's feral because Azazel stabbed him in the back and left his sword there and then bamped away.
• 40:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: So soul man, what's that?
• 40:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it's soul magic.
• 40:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: Azazel's gathering souls to a crew power because he wants a way back to earth.
• 40:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 40:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: So number four, Wolverine and North Star have now fallen out of the pleasant place that they originally fell into, which we now know of course was heaven.
• 40:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they have fallen to a frozen wasteland, which should be familiar to both of them as Canadians, but apparently neither one of them was prepared to deal with it.
• 40:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: So this is apparently purgatory.
• 40:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: So they're just walking.
• 40:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is nothing but they gotta keep moving.
• 40:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Firestone is still in hell with ice man who is quickly becoming slush man.
• 40:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: The beast is reunited with Kurt and Storm, but he still feral still got the sword in his back.
• 40:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Firestar burns hell to nothing.
• 40:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: because freezing hell wasn't working, although there was a brief moment where Bobby froze hello for, and that was kind of fun.
• 40:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then there's more fighting.
• 41:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then Beast comes back to himself, thanks to another flashback, and we get the tail of the bounce, and where they came from, both red and blue, in short summary.
• 41:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: As a result, rescues the starving offspring of a giant maggot and a changeling in the shape of a face eating lampray by feeding them his own blood.
• 41:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: which is where the feeding them his own blood thing comes from.
• 41:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: So he even shows off his apec to these forgotten worms.
• 41:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's very important to him.
• 41:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: So is it stuck in a hell dimension and finds a demon that by feeding it is blood, it creates a series of bumps that serve him.
• 41:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: So it's kind of like he made it with this demon and created this new little race of like bouncy, bamping, red, damp demon guys.
• 41:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like he's he's holding true to his mission statement, right?
• 41:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yep, it's, it's very true.
• 41:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: So check your keep it up, I can tell.
• 41:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: 100.
• 41:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's a very black bag.
• 41:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Let's fascinating.
• 41:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yep, one of the little blue bands shows up next to Wolverine's head.
• 41:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then Kurt rescues Logan just before death claims and for good.
• 42:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: And now all the X-Men stand ready, a board kept in the Crowley's vessel.
• 42:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: So they have all assembled now to go to the final battle, which is in number five, so much fighting.
• 42:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Vamp fighting, blue on red.
• 42:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Angel, Warbird, and the Rachel Summers are fighting BAMPS back at the school, and they're trying to keep the portal open because it's the red BAMPS who are trying to close it.
• 42:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think it gets a little confusing.
• 42:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: In case you couldn't know the X-Men are fighting demon pirates, and then a Zazel is back coming to cut perch ribbons and send them back heaven.
• 42:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: So night crawler is having none of it.
• 42:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Besting is a nasal and an epic two-page spread banful battle.
• 42:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: When a nasal comes back, he says, it's really too bad that you're such a disappointment, my boy.
• 42:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the two-page spread is just them like moving from place to place and curtsing, I am not your boy, which I found very charming as well.
• 42:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: Is that a banful tactic?
• 42:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm sorry for that joke.
• 42:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, of course, hurt beats him, but of course, it's only temporary.
• 42:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Moral fighting, setting fires, and then Professor X comes back, goes back into Kurt's mind through all of this chaos and tells him, don't do what you're planning to do, don't do it, come back to have a new earned your rest, and then Kurt says, now, do it now.
• 43:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: and his bluebamps form into one giant sort of bulbous squishy thing inside the school on the other side of the portal, and then Kurt manages to bring his hazel through the portal back to earth, but uses his own blood to bind his hazel to the earth.
• 43:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: So he's separated his hazel from his armies and bound him to the earth.
• 43:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Basically where Kurt thinks he can keep an eye on him.
• 43:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: We all know that that's not going to go very well.
• 43:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so the real story for a nightcroller, he gets resurrected here, but he has to trade his soul in order to get the power to do it.
• 43:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's the currency of soul.
• 43:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: So exasal makes it back to earth, but loses a lot of his power along the way.
• 43:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: Kurt takes all the bamps away, and some of them make up the substance of his body for a period of time.
• 43:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's since been resurrected, he's got his soul back its fight, but it's a really intense story.
• 43:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it takes everything that Chuck was doing in the drake, and kind of amplifies it to a higher degree if I'm honest.
• 44:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it sounds really fun, and you know, it doesn't really matter.
• 44:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's Ruth Ann loves it, you know.
• 44:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: The Ed McGinnis art is gorgeous in this.
• 44:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's really pretty.
• 44:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a beautiful and it's super fun.
• 44:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Ed McGinnis was the guy who sat with us at breakfast at lunch that day.
• 44:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, okay.
• 44:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, he's a fantastic artist, and I think that I'm sure it sounds like it was a super, super fun book.
• 44:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: But really, I mean, what we're in it for is to appeal to people like Ruth Anne.
• 44:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, that was my our entire mandate during the time that I was at Marvel in DC back in the day.
• 44:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: They were trying to reach out outside the comic shops and to new readers to people who hadn't read comics before.
• 44:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: So score.
• 44:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm glad you're happy.
• 44:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's all I really matters.
• 44:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: So as a Zazel 1000's year old mutant who has a lot of influences been trapped in this other dimension for a long period of time, he's now back on earth but weakened.
• 44:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: And we next see him in the weapon X series, which we're not going to give you a lot of setup.
• 44:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's a lot going on in this book too, but Rudeau, do you want to tell us about the next three part or four as a Zazel?
• 45:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: I had four and a half pages of amazing X men.
• 45:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: I have half a page.
• 45:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was so much going on that I like I couldn't even do it.
• 45:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm like, no, there's a lot going on.
• 45:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's a lot happening.
• 45:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 45:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: So this is webinar next 25 through 27, which is by Greg Greg Pack and Fred Van Lintay.
• 45:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: Again, Fred Van Lintay.
• 45:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
• 45:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 45:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then the arts by Luca Pazzari.
• 45:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: So save her tooth and his weapon X-force need to get into hell to finish off William Strikker and Anthony Newton Reverend
• 45:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: uh, it seems outlandish, but anymore, not enough, not anymore, honestly.
• 45:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Apparently, mystique has an end with someone who can get them to hell, who is, of course, a zazel.
• 45:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: He is now a leader of the naith and which, at the time, I didn't know who they were, but now, of course, reading through your notes from previously, they are that group of his children.
• 45:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nice, both.
• 45:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Mm-hmm.
• 45:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he is also now a king, a case street king maker in Washington, D.C. We catch him in a meeting with a congressman who is hiring him to do something, gives him a suitcase full of money.
• 46:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's like, I don't understand, why does your kind mean money anyway?
• 46:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he was like, well, because everyone must make a sacrifice and then burn someone to ash, call the man, grovels on the floor saying, but the money didn't do anything, which I thought was very funny.
• 46:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then after much debate, Azale agrees to help superkate Sabertooth get to help.
• 46:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he achieves that by cutting off Sabertooth's head.
• 46:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: He then proceeds to kill the rest of weapon X4, but use his teleporting to suspend them so that he can finish the teleport and they'll be revived and their powers will be back.
• 46:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think I'm understanding that correctly.
• 46:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: So everyone is in hell.
• 46:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: The devil, the devil, the actual devil is annoyed at his asal, but the loophole holds.
• 46:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's not really in the second issue.
• 46:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: his best appearance there in issue 26 is on the cover where he has shown jumping through a Saber 2 Stinglass window, which is amazing.
• 46:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then issue 27, weapon x-force, use a zazil as a waste station, basically all issue long.
• 46:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're in hell, they need to be in Colorado, so they get him to transfer them from one place to another.
• 47:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's all he does.
• 47:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: and I'm not really sure what he gets out of it, but there we are.
• 47:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had a good time.
• 47:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: They managed to defeat William Streccher.
• 47:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Saber tooth is in hell, but he did something noble that ended up with him there, so the devil's like, ah, it doesn't give me any pleasure to punish you for this, because you're noble, so he sets him loose in Saskatchewan.
• 47:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: Which is a great place to be set loose.
• 47:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm just going to keep us going.
• 47:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: We jump to now the cracone era.
• 47:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: The X-Men have established their own nation on the island of cracoda.
• 47:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is the Jonathan Hickman era of books.
• 47:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: And in house of X-Number 5, we get kind of a single panel where the X-Men have invited all of the mutants to live on cracola, including their villains.
• 47:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: And Azazal is seen among the villains moving to cracola in that.
• 47:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: We don't see him again for a while and then we're fast forwarding a little bit.
• 47:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: Chuck, do you know the character Madeleine prior?
• 47:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh yeah.
• 47:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: She gets resurrected on Cricola and gets some major storylines and becomes like a very, very playable kind of protagonist character in this era.
• 47:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: And D. Fox gets to write an incredible book called Dark X-Men.
• 48:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: We're Madeline Prior, who is now the queen of limbo in the way that magic used to be, so she rules the demon dimension.
• 48:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: She forms a base on Earth where kind of the darker versions of mutants can come live and she's doing her own version of like evil X-Men if you will.
• 48:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's a lot of setup here.
• 48:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: Azazel moves into the limbo embassy, Madeline Pryor is ruling, and we have a one-line mention in the Weapon X series which was just talking about, where Azazel says something to the character Monet saying Quad that the St. Quad family owes him an old debt.
• 48:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: They made a deal with him at some point.
• 48:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: So her brother M. Plate, who's the vampire guy from Generation X, is here in this book, and he's basically acting as a Zazil's servant, like I own your soul kind of energy.
• 48:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like you got to work your dead off for your family.
• 48:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's banting all over the place.
• 48:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's helping to kill some workers agents who've kidnapped mutants.
• 48:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: And in a backup story, we see him petition Madeline prior for a place on her team.
• 48:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: He says, sometime ago, my blue bastard saw two it that I was barred from entering any of the illustrious hell realms that burn at the edges of this reality.
• 49:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: He like took my power away.
• 49:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: As some of those dimensions were want to change hands fairly often, I take it upon myself to petition new regimes for clemency.
• 49:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: Island Paradise may suit many of my mutant brethren, like pityable emplate here, but I long for much, much warmer climbs.
• 49:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: Madeleine prior replies, I'm inclined to be sympathetic to Craco's unfaithered first and last of the neofem, but what can you offer me?
• 49:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: return.
• 49:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: He says you've clearly studied your forbidden tombs, my petrifying beauty, so you already know few who walk this land share my mastery over souls.
• 49:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: In the next issue, gambits here and Azale tells him, my motivations are as simple as a cockroaches, survive, and I've got a fondness for cruel, driven redheads and skin-bearing outfits.
• 49:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: Our angel attacks and gets killed and turned into a weapon.
• 49:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: Again, there's a ton happening.
• 49:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: And an issue for Azazal sees Abyss.
• 49:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: His son, right?
• 49:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: Do you guys remember Abyss?
• 49:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: Abyss is here and he's been turned into a weapon by Orcas.
• 50:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: It is news, isn't it?
• 50:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: You'll forgive me if my progeny have begun to blur over the centuries.
• 50:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: I've been a poor parent to you, Nils.
• 50:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: Fatherhood has never been my forte, just a means to an end, really.
• 50:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: But what a privilege it is to be here for you when it truly counts.
• 50:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then he breaks a business neck to save his allies.
• 50:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: Finally an issue five, Azale kills the bigoted agent valence, who has gotten some demon powers, don't worry about it.
• 50:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: He teleports her full into a wall and leaves her there, which is horrifying, right?
• 50:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's the big that could always happen tonight, crawler.
• 50:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: You sold your soul to the first minor devil who crossed your path, didn't you?
• 50:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: Every hell has a hierarchy child, and there is always a bigger, batter wolf, but there's also an evil, Madeline prior running around, and she's writing a dragon who is the nightcrawler of her world.
• 50:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: Don't worry about it, it's called the BAMF Dragon.
• 50:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: And Azazel gets his head eaten by the Banff Dragon.
• 50:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: So he kills his son, kills an agent, and then gets killed in turn by an alternate version of Nightcrawler from another world.
• 51:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: Check out, I know we are throwing you deep into X-Men continuity here, but how you do it?
• 51:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, I'm sort of, sort of treading water, but I'm holding my own.
• 51:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: Keeping this book is not a zazel, he's trapped on earth, he's making bids for power for more demonic spaces.
• 51:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: He gets a main playing part on a team but it gets killed in the end.
• 51:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's cut away over at.
• 51:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then we finally have the zazel appearance everyone's been waiting for.
• 51:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now this issue is very special to me.
• 51:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: X-Men Blue Origins, this is a size barrier with Wilton Santos book and it's the definitive night crawler story.
• 51:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: They get to go back and tell the story that Claremont wanted to tell all along, but in a very unique way because there's a lot of unique continuity mixed in here.
• 51:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is a special one particularly for a lot of my transgender loved ones because Mystique as kind of a trans woman who's like a shapeshifting icon is like really special to the trans community in particular.
• 51:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: We also have Destiny as Mystique's wife, which has, you know, been a more recent retcon where we know that they've been married for a very, very long time.
• 52:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: Before I get into the meat of this book, Chuck, I set you this one.
• 52:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: What was it like reading X-Men Blue Origins?
• 52:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm sorry, Chad.
• 52:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: I was just lost.
• 52:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: I couldn't read it.
• 52:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was just there was so many continuity references.
• 52:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: Obviously things that have happened since I've been reading comics.
• 52:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: I literally stopped after I left comics 20 some years ago.
• 52:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I couldn't follow it at all.
• 52:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's sort of two types of
• 52:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: storytelling that you can do and there's fan storytelling and then there's just storytelling.
• 52:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: Fan storytelling is very specific and it's become much more what the general the general audiences for comics these days.
• 52:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's continuity, heavy reference to other comic books and issues.
• 52:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm it as an example.
• 52:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: the movies when when people come up to me and they ask me about the movies.
• 52:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's like, I don't know anything about the movies.
• 52:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: I worked at a Marvel 20 years ago.
• 52:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: I have no idea what they're doing with those movies.
• 52:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they said, well, what's the blip?
• 52:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Is the blip a real thing?
• 52:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't understand the blip.
• 52:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's how they feel about one thing in continuity throughout all the Marvel movies since of endgame.
• 53:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: Imagine me trying to read this issue and going, every panel.
• 53:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: What?
• 53:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then the next panel.
• 53:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm sorry.
• 53:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: What?
• 53:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I did not try to explain it to you in this series or in this issue, Legion, the son of Charles Xavier is living inside of Nightcrawler's mind in the form of a vamp.
• 53:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's already a lot to process.
• 53:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: That is a lot to process right there, yeah.
• 53:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: Basically, there's been a lot of layered stuff put into mistaken destinies relationship here.
• 53:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: During Krakowah, both of them are part of the ruling council.
• 53:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: They get a ton of attention in a mortal Xmen and there's been a lot happening.
• 53:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: The story that's basically told here, these two have been married for a really long time.
• 53:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: Their relationship is built on intrigue.
• 53:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: Destiny can see certain types of futures that she tries to avoid, particularly ones in relation to their relationship.
• 53:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: So Destiny has predicted a certain future where unless Mystique has a child by Azazel,
• 53:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: as Asyl's going to rise to a place where he could destroy the world.
• 54:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: And by doing this, they're creating, they're also creating Kurt who's a very unique child who is going to go on to save the world as well.
• 54:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: So I've been to get into the meat of this story, but at the end of it we learn that destiny and mystique go to a Charles Xavier and he alters their memories at their request seemingly.
• 54:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: And now the big truth that's being told here is that mystique and destiny are getting their actual memories back about night crawlers through parentage.
• 54:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: So we go back to Christian Wagner once again.
• 54:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: Destiny is working as Raven's maid during this time, and they are married, but she's just kind of having fun.
• 54:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: They meet Azazel, and here's Mistique's words about him now.
• 54:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: Azazel of the Diaballet, Azazel commander of the hellish legions.
• 54:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: Azazel who'd set his sights on the highest powers.
• 54:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: Azazel, a ledgerous old narcissist, caused playing as a demon, which is a really great...
• 54:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: I grew bored of him even faster than my unciped flat scan of a husband.
• 54:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: So Irene has pushed her toward the affair at a certain point.
• 55:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: Misty kind of uses a Zazel's genetic code and then Irene gets pregnant.
• 55:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: and then Mistique fakes her own pregnancy.
• 55:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: So Destin is actually the one that gives birth to night crawler.
• 55:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: The rest of this is all kind of the same.
• 55:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: Mistique murders, Christian, Kurt Wagner gets born, the mob forms, and Raven has to abandon him.
• 55:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: She doesn't throw him off a waterfall in this version.
• 55:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: But she abandons him and when she comes back, he's gone.
• 55:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: And this is the Margali takes the baby thing, right?
• 55:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: Then they end up raising rogue together.
• 55:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: Kurt gets raised by Margali with the blessing of Irene.
• 55:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then we've avoided this future where Azale took over.
• 55:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's kind of the big red con here.
• 55:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it's kind of a beautiful fit, but it is very continuity that's because they had to sort out a lot of stuff.
• 55:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: Chuck's just shaking because he had like well.
• 55:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: But for the queer community in particular, this is a pretty special issue.
• 55:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: This one matters, especially to my trans love ones.
• 55:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: Ben, great.
• 55:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, that's really, I mean, you know, it's the reason we put North Star in the X-Men.
• 56:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: When I was writing it, you have to give something to the underserved communities.
• 56:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it's just important.
• 56:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's necessary.
• 56:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
• 56:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: I have a former niece who is trans and was she came to me and just thanked me profusely for having anything to do with the two of the cartoons that I worked on in DreamWorks.
• 56:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: Healing, feeling seen in that way matters.
• 56:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: The last and final part of the story is the story of the story of the story of the
• 56:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: One of the time we've seen Azale is that the end of Cricola, all of the mutants, basically, that we've ever seen, drawn beautifully by my friend Luciano Veccio, form the Phoenix Force together, basically.
• 56:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: They all project their minds up, and there's a big giant space cosmic battle in the mutants win in the end, even though Cricola's lost.
• 56:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm way over simplifying.
• 56:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: So if we're simplifying his asasal down into just a few terms, he is its character with a ton of potential, thousands of years, particular types of obsession, some really powerful powers, a ton of progeny, all these years trapped in other dimensions, and then back to Earth kind of stripped down to his essence, fighting for power before he gets killed by the big bamf dragon.
• 57:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: I would love to see him back, especially in some flashback stories, but I would almost more interested in seeing some of the characters check that you created in the Draco, like Jillian and Kiwi Black and of this.
• 57:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think there's some really fun characters in that mix that have not been used very much.
• 57:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is where we get to the continuity in X-Men.
• 57:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: We go like, okay, that was a lot.
• 57:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: But we look at the character potential in the middle of all of this.
• 57:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: But then how are you feeling about a Zazel?
• 57:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: I still really like it.
• 57:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: I find them really, really interesting.
• 57:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I agree that there's a lot there to just to work with.
• 57:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I too, I too would like to see him back in some way.
• 57:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'd be fine if he didn't come back.
• 57:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: But I think the legacy of this character is really interesting.
• 57:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think there's some stories that can be told in flashbacks that make him very relevant.
• 57:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, this guy has for sure made some deals with Dormamu along the way.
• 57:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: Right?
• 57:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like this.
• 57:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's some connections with him and Nightcrawler.
• 58:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's some inherent connections between he and existing characters that I think are really fascinating.
• 58:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then I go back to my Mormon upbringing and like the devil that existed, right?
• 58:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's always watching.
• 58:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's a writing attempt at any time.
• 58:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: The Fausty and bargain of it all with the Zazel is right around the corner because he's ultimately a very self-serving character.
• 58:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: Chuck, how are you feeling?
• 58:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: One of the stories I was most looking forward to telling when I was at Marvel was the actual fall in the angel's story, you know, the story that the original biblical story of what happened during, between those warring mutant groups pretty much back at, you know, at the dawn of time, kind of thing.
• 58:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: the things that led to the story.
• 58:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I would love, if you want to talk about flashbacks, that's to me.
• 58:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: That would be the best flashback.
• 58:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's a story that was rolling around in my head for years, even after I worked on that Marvel.
• 58:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: I had you have Charlie left.
• 58:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: So do you want to talk a little about how it would have played out?
• 58:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: Had you been able to see it through?
• 58:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, no, oh god, no, Marvel wouldn't touch you with the 10th floor.
• 59:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: But that's okay, I got plenty to keep me busy and I'm happy in my life for the way it is right now.
• 59:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: As far as it goes, I haven't thought about it since then, but the original idea was to take some of those biblical stories and look at them through a sort of a lens of, what if this actually, I guess the way they looked at the stories, they used to think that the stories of,
• 59:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Troy, ancient Troy, and the Trojan horse and the Peloponnesian wars.
• 59:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: They think they used to think a lot of those things were myth that they, and it wasn't until they started digging into the historical record that they started finding that a lot of that stuff was real, and then it actually happened that there really was a Trojan horse and that there really was a city, and that there really was a battle between Achilles and Agamemnon and
• 59:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: So being able to tell that's take the historical information that's there and look at it through a lens of how would it be if this was all mutants battling with each other.
• 59:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's basically what I was looking at and that's what I would jump into the deep end of continuity and giving this kind of conversation from this lens.
• 1:00:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's really fascinating.
• 1:00:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: I've done a bunch of these episodes at this point.
• 1:00:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's fascinating reading a character journey through the eyes of the character.
• 1:00:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: And Azazil is delightful to read in that way.
• 1:00:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: He has a big spirit.
• 1:00:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: You describe him and we describe him when one panel is low-tharigo, right?
• 1:00:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: Do you want to talk about that comparison?
• 1:00:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, I think it's pretty accurate.
• 1:00:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: And in a lot of ways, I was sort of writing sort of this administration before this administration, I guess, you know.
• 1:00:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it was really, because there was this idea that nobody could be so selfish as to just want everything for themselves and not really give a shit about anybody else.
• 1:00:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's what I wanted to create.
• 1:00:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was that sort of Satan character.
• 1:00:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: It really could.
• 1:00:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: And you also read this a few years later, and he's ranting about how like humans are ruining the earth, and you're kind of like, yeah, so he's like, got it a little bit.
• 1:00:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's funny when you were reading that I was thinking, wow, I forgot I wrote that.
• 1:00:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: I really liked that, and it actually it applies much more now, particularly with my son, who's raging against these AI data centers that are just sucking up power.
• 1:01:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a complete different world.
• 1:01:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: I read your right with that.
• 1:01:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: I was just way ahead of my time.
• 1:01:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: for sure.
• 1:01:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And as Jesus such an interesting like devil, right?
• 1:01:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like like Chad, I wasn't raised Mormon, but I was raised in a fundamentalist evangelical home.
• 1:01:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like our devil, like we were really scared of him, but he wasn't very interesting, right?
• 1:01:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Our devil existed to pull us off the path into thumb as knows it God, basically.
• 1:01:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: And like as Jesus thumbed as knows it God, but also like he's in it for himself, which is a slightly different motivation,
• 1:01:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: The Mormons have this weird origin story about like a war in heaven between the sides and like so many followed, you know, one side and so many followed the other and this kind of war in heaven I think exists in a lot of theology there's a lot of like the early origins of earth or the origins of man that really followed.
• 1:01:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: Azazel represents an interesting piece in that.
• 1:01:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: I really, I don't know, he's a fun character.
• 1:02:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's a really fun and dark ex-men if you want to go read that one, but go read the, go read the Draco everybody.
• 1:02:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: Given a chance after all this time, and think of the potential of the Knight-Crawler family tree expanding, right?
• 1:02:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: Rogues is foster sister, but there's all these other characters who have different visuals and different versions of the powers that are unique.
• 1:02:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think Chuck and Phil have tended a really beautiful job on this arc.
• 1:02:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: When I tell people, like, oh, I'm doing a zazil and they're like, oh, and then I'm like, I'm doing it with Chuck Austin and they're like, oh, and Chuck's amazing.
• 1:02:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: You're like, you're so fun to hang out with every time, I really appreciate it.
• 1:02:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: Chuck, I also wanted to tell you, Squidboy has been fully resurrected on Cracoa and is an existing character in the Marvel Universe.
• 1:02:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: We've seen him hanging out with Juggernaut.
• 1:02:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: He was in a really arctic Avengers Academy by Anthony Olavara.
• 1:02:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: So he is back alive and well on the earth and we are happy for it.
• 1:02:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, it's awesome.
• 1:02:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm glad, but Max and Miss Lobo just ate him, and I'm just kidding.
• 1:02:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, any final thoughts for my other view, and anything you want to plug for January, where can people find you?
• 1:03:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: Let's go chuck in the roof.
• 1:03:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, I'm retired.
• 1:03:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: You can't get in touch with me, or find me anywhere.
• 1:03:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: Say hi to me and I'll ask Chuck a question for you.
• 1:03:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: We're friends.
• 1:03:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, if you have any questions asked, Chad, I, I, I am unreachable, and it's nice.
• 1:03:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's very cool.
• 1:03:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was very cool to do this.
• 1:03:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was very, very interesting to be on this with both of you.
• 1:03:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I appreciate the opportunity.
• 1:03:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't have anything to plug because I'm just a librarian and I don't do much other than hang out and chat with people.
• 1:03:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: So you can find me always on Instagram.
• 1:03:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm at head of dabble or like head of Gabler, but who dabbles.
• 1:03:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: So look for me there.
• 1:03:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
• 1:03:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: I've been posting random things recently.
• 1:03:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: You never know what it's going to be always a surprise.
• 1:03:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: Probably the showbrainmuckin' underscore land on Instagram most prominently, and it's my collar monster.
• 1:03:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's been such a joy to hang out with you both today.
• 1:03:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: I really adore both of your company, and I had a great time.
• 1:03:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: So thanks everyone for listening.
• 1:03:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you to Chuck and to Ruth Ed for taking this journey with me today.
• 1:03:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: We will see you next time back on the Grimmuckin Lane Patreon channel.