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Bonus Patreon Release: the Gibbon! With Theodate! · Graymalkin Lane the podcast

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: Hey everybody, welcome back to the Graeme Walken Lane Patreon channel where I get to hang out with friends and talk about characters that you don't think about very much.
• 0:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: Today we're going to be talking about one of Marvel's earliest mutants who is not in any capacity an X-Men character nor has he ever been.
• 0:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: But he is a mutant.
• 0:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: His name is Martin Blank, the Gibbon.
• 0:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: He is from early nineteen seventies in Spider-Man, created by Stanley and John Ramita, and he is an interesting character.
• 0:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: The cover of his first appearance says that's introducing Marvel's newest superstar, the birth of the Gibbon, and I don't know that he has ever quite lived up to that height.
• 0:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: But I am fond of this tri-hard character.
• 0:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm so happy to be joined by one of my friends from the show.
• 0:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: We additionally met through the Patreon.
• 0:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: Welcome back to my friend Theo Chase.
• 0:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: Theo, how are you?
• 0:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, I'm doing great.
• 0:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm excited to talk about this monkey man.
• 0:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: What are your early thoughts on the given?
• 0:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: You were so excited to join me for this one.
• 0:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is one of those characters that's been on my list forever.
• 0:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: I love the given because he kind of fits into that very rare category of super powered comic character where he's not really a hero.
• 1:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's not really a villain.
• 1:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's just a guy trying his best.
• 1:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's just fun and he gets a surprising amount of focus in some unexpected areas.
• 1:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: There is an old movie I pulled on the waterfront about an old kind of washed up boxer who has this very strong like I caught up in a contenda like energy.
• 1:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's some very coldable quotes.
• 1:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's kind of a tri-hard who means well.
• 1:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's also that old classic book of Myson Men where there's the brother Lenny who is a little bit mentally addilded means well given kind of gives that kind of tri-hard energy.
• 1:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's a character who had a bunch of shit happen in his life.
• 1:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: and he's never quite gotten where he wants to be.
• 1:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: With a rare exception of a few crazy little adventures, people don't expect along the way.
• 1:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: Given is a striking visual.
• 1:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: His look varies a lot by artist.
• 1:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's no Marlim Brando.
• 1:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's a little cave manny.
• 1:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's a little like, just kind of a hairy, lanky guy.
• 1:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: But he starts wearing a suit that makes him look like a gorilla.
• 2:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: That just kind of becomes a standard look.
• 2:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: At some points, I think they just kind of forget that originally he was wearing a suit.
• 2:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he just kind of becomes a monkey.
• 2:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, like he seems to mutate further.
• 2:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: His mutant power is basically his monkey man.
• 2:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's full height.
• 2:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: He hasn't had strength in agility.
• 2:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: He can move, like, as well as Spider-Man.
• 2:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's very flippy aroundy.
• 2:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's got some Knight-Crawler moves there, I suppose, if he has the right opportunity.
• 2:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: But he's just kind of this little bit of a sad sack of a character.
• 2:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: He has a fur shirt that he puts on.
• 2:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: I guess there's a little bit of like planet of the apes vibes with this guy which they later pick up on you know Marvel apes of course.
• 2:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is a character that reading front to back you just kind of feel sad because he doesn't ever quite get his moment.
• 2:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: What's your favorite given story?
• 2:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I'm inadvertently fond of the Marvel Apes books, which is a real surprise for me because when I first read about him, I was just like, oh, this is kind of a gimmicky story about like a world where everyone's monkeys, but then you read it.
• 2:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's actually like a Marvel horror book.
• 3:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's got vampires and zombies and like all kinds of crazy stuff going on.
• 3:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: He gets a lot of focus in that alongside some like surprising like zealous characters.
• 3:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm fond of
• 3:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Also a big fan of his Peter Parker spectacular Spider-Man appearance.
• 3:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: That one's got a lot of ideas that I appreciate about him.
• 3:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: He was part of the Legion of losers.
• 3:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's interesting to me when we bring in characters to play off our superheroes in particular ways.
• 3:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: So he first shows up an amazing Spider-Man one ten and we open on Peter Parker like feeling sorry for himself.
• 3:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: And the narrative choice for Marty Blank as the given almost seems to be like that old adage of I felt sorry I had no shoes until I met a man with no feet Peter gives this like oh I'm so like my life is so rough and then he meets the given he's like actually my life's not that bad out look at this look at this guy there's very much that kind of energy like here's this like poor loser fight he's throwing a fit on a roof he
• 3:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: punches a chimney, he tosses his camera, but then a caveman guy, and like red pants on a white button down catches him, he's flipping around like Daredevil.
• 4:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: He goes, hey, I don't know that costume anywhere.
• 4:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: Here's a real spider man, huh?
• 4:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: The name is Martin Blank, but it wouldn't mean anything to you.
• 4:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: I've been reading about you for years.
• 4:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: How about that?
• 4:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: Even a freak like me can help the high-end mighty Spider-Man.
• 4:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Freak, you're no freak, Marty, but you sure are the most nimble guy I've ever seen.
• 4:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: Big deal, that in a token will get me on the subway.
• 4:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: And Spider-Man's like, look everybody, he's got problems, trust me.
• 4:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: And Gibbons like, dude, you're Spider-Man, trust me.
• 4:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: You got it made in Spider-Man's like, actually, my life is really fucking terrible.
• 4:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then Gibbons like, Mr. If you're as ugly and as creepy looking under that mask, is I am, then I'll listen to you.
• 4:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: Otherwise, thanks for the sermon.
• 4:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: So, Spidey goes swing it off, he has to get his civilian clothes off a web dummy that he made, which is ridiculous.
• 4:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: And Marty Blank returns to living in his little flop house, which is kind of like a homeless shelter.
• 4:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: It seems like a place with very, very cheap rent.
• 4:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's feeling sorry for himself.
• 4:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: He thinks I look more like a chimp than a chump.
• 4:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: The dumps too good for me.
• 4:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: And if everybody wants me in a zoo, he looks in the mirror and catches a reflection.
• 4:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm through fighting.
• 4:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm through caring what anybody says or thinks.
• 5:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: I can't fight everybody.
• 5:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: Can't keep proven myself day after day after day.
• 5:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: And this is very twenty twenty five America for queer people.
• 5:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: And we're all feeling this energy to a certain degree like holy shit.
• 5:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: I already want to catch my own reflection sometimes.
• 5:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: You mentioned on the waterfront, which they've got that conversation on the New York rooftop thing that goes on there.
• 5:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: The movie I always think I think of a lot when reading given is actually like the talented Mr Ripley.
• 5:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Where he's got like a very kind of hero worship, but like more wants to be Spider-Man wants to have what Spider-Man has.
• 5:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like starts out wanting to be his friend, but kind of gets bitter about like what he does and doesn't have compared to Spider-Man.
• 5:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I can see that absolutely.
• 5:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I think any movie about a loser, right?
• 5:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like when we we love a loser character who gets a chance to triumph, but given never really gets that chance.
• 5:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's what's sad about this guy is he's always kind of trying to never quite there.
• 5:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: So we get a flashback to young Marty Blank.
• 5:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's at the zoo looking at the Gibbons and cages.
• 5:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: and all the kids are teasing Marty for being ugly.
• 5:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: Look at him, Ollie needs his fur and a tail.
• 6:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: But Marty's agile, he climbs walls with ease.
• 6:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: And he says, as the gears went by, I was the only kid who was never adopted from the orphanage.
• 6:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: I kept the name blank because that's all my last name was.
• 6:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: A blank.
• 6:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: So his name is Marty Blake, because he never had parents, which is so sad.
• 6:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think this kid could easily come from like the black womb project where Toad did.
• 6:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: They like fucked with his mutation and like threw him out into the world.
• 6:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: So kids are getting adopted.
• 6:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: Marty grabs the bars at the gate of the orphanage, like the given did in the previous panel.
• 6:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: And a shitty kid looks at him and says nobody'll adopt a big ape like you, Marty.
• 6:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: They couldn't afford enough nuts and bananas.
• 6:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: Marty says, finally I was too old for them to keep anymore.
• 6:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I was let out out into a world that didn't want me.
• 6:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: I was scared, afraid to face my fellow men.
• 6:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: I wanted to get away, somewhere I'd be long, but no way I never had the bread.
• 6:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: So he keeps his face in shadows, never looks at anybody, and he dreams of going to Africa to see the gorillas.
• 6:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: The way I looked, I knew better than to try for any ordinary job, so I went to the one place where I figured I might fit in.
• 7:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: And he urgently tries to get a job in the circus.
• 7:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm a good acrobat, and I'm as strong as a gorilla, just giving me a chance.
• 7:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'll do anything.
• 7:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: But they make him dress in a monkey suit in order to perform for everybody.
• 7:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: He is very hairy in the Henderson's.
• 7:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: I don't know if you've seen that all the eighties film.
• 7:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: He thought they wanted him to be an acrobat, but realizes they really want him as a cloud, entertaining children with silly antics.
• 7:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: They want someone to hop around and grant like an eight to keep kids laughing.
• 7:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: Oh, I want peanuts for the monkey man.
• 7:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: And everybody starts laughing, they're driving a mad, which is also akin to Blob's origin, as well now that I think about it.
• 7:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: You only made it at the job for a week, and after his first paycheck he quit.
• 7:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: So now he's living in a flop house.
• 7:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: His only possession is this fucking monkey suit.
• 7:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: But now he realizes maybe I could be a hero like Spider-Man.
• 7:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is a delightful origin story.
• 7:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's ties into so many characters that we love.
• 7:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: You've talked before about how many mutants end up like working for like circuses and carnivals and stuff.
• 8:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: A lot of the times they end up in like the side shows and the freak shows and things like that.
• 8:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think it's interesting.
• 8:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's maybe the first one I've seen where they make him be a clown.
• 8:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: They also make a point of showing that the actual accurate sort of like, oh no, we don't want this guy coming in and like taking our job or anything like that, which I think is an interesting thing.
• 8:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: But man, this origin is bleak.
• 8:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I mean, Blobs is very much this way too, right?
• 8:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: Everybody's making fun of him.
• 8:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: But Hawkeye has his started the circus and he has a very different trajectory because he looks normal, right?
• 8:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is a mutant trying to make it on his own.
• 8:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: We realize very quickly, Marty is a character that wants to hope a lot.
• 8:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: He wants to believe the world's better.
• 8:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: He wants to accept his place.
• 8:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: And when you've always been told you're one thing and you never get a chance.
• 8:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: He wants a friend more than anything.
• 8:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: He just wants someone to believe in him.
• 8:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's not a lot given about his mutant connections, but again, we get that same kind of idea of he's rejected for how he looks.
• 8:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: I have a lot of thoughts about his statuses and mutant that I'll get to, and when we get to the Marvel ape stuff, there's, I think something a little more interesting going on there than is originally presented.
• 9:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: He, what does the monkey suit back on?
• 9:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: And he starts hanging out on the rooftops to find Spider-Man, and if we can read their dialogue here, he'd been goes Spider-Man!
• 9:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: I figured you show up sooner or later, somewhere among the rooftops.
• 9:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: We've got some wrap-and-to-do, and Spidey says, I talk and give in, but they don't grow them that big.
• 9:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: With the kid and you know who I am, look, I'm strong, I've got guts, and I can do most anything you can.
• 9:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: I want to be your partner, and Spiderman is response is just too.
• 9:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: He just starts laughing, just like, they go like, ha ha ha ha, it just like loses it.
• 9:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: like hysterical rude laughing and Gibbons fucking piss no don't don't laugh at me I can't stand anybody laughing at me stop what I said stop laughing nobody laughs at the Gibbons nobody's gonna laugh at me ever again and Spidey responds with a lecture in Spidey's defense we did skip over the part where he just had like a lot of terrible stuff happened to him in the issue like a lot of stuff wouldn't really wrong for me
• 9:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yes, but all that's not Gibbons fault.
• 9:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, no.
• 9:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's not Gibbons fault.
• 9:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: It does give a little context of why he reacts like that.
• 10:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: He starts lecturing.
• 10:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: What do you expect when you go skipping around like a pint-sized King Kong?
• 10:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: In fact, I let you in on a secret.
• 10:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: I still feel like in not myself when I go up public and my skin tight little spidey suit.
• 10:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Telfest thing about being a superhero is getting up the nerve to wear these corny costumes.
• 10:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: And Gibbons says you're doing it again.
• 10:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: You're laughing at me mocking me.
• 10:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: I warned you.
• 10:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: You can't say I didn't warn you when he grabs Spidey by the throat.
• 10:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: All my life they left it me and I had to take it, but I don't have to take it anymore.
• 10:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Do you hear not anymore?
• 10:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now look my fuzzy friend.
• 10:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: Fun is fun, but don't get carried away with yourself.
• 10:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: You can't save money on a shrink by futiling your troubles to me.
• 10:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've got enough of my own.
• 10:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: You broke my grip like it was nothing.
• 10:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: It takes more than a monkey suit to give you super strength, Sunny.
• 10:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now go back to Sesame Street, William.
• 10:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've got things to do.
• 10:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Rude, no!
• 10:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: No, you can't just ignore me like this.
• 10:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: You can't.
• 10:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: I am strong.
• 10:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: I am powerful.
• 10:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: I was always the strongest wherever I was.
• 10:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: This time I know what I'm doing.
• 10:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: This time you won't get away by tricking me and he picks up Spidey and throws him off the roof.
• 10:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then immediately he's like, oh no, what am I doing?
• 10:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: He'll fall to his death.
• 11:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: No, no, he'll be killed.
• 11:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: But Spidey goes might be worth it to shut you up.
• 11:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then Spidey basically tells Gibbon that he isn't worth his time and just like webs away and Gibbon throws another fit you were my last chance.
• 11:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: Now it's too late.
• 11:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm alone again alone alone.
• 11:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: So it's
• 11:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: Fighting Origin is about how he did the wrong thing.
• 11:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: One time, and it had bad consequences.
• 11:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: And this is an odd example of that.
• 11:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: This guy who's just not worth his fucking time.
• 11:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: Peter Parker is at his worst when he's feeling sorry for himself.
• 11:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm just gonna want to love and end Craven the Hunter is here.
• 11:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: He has his arm in a sling.
• 11:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: He recently had a big fight with Spidey.
• 11:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: And Craven steps over to Gibbon with an offer.
• 11:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: Do you want to read Craven here?
• 11:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: You're welcome to affect a Russian accent if you want.
• 11:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, I'm no good at accents though.
• 11:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've come to offer you aid, Martin Blank.
• 11:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: The training only the talents of the world's greatest hunter can produce.
• 11:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: And Marty says, look, I don't want to hear about it, Mr. Just let me alone, huh?
• 11:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm tired of being everybody's pet freak.
• 11:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Freak?
• 11:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Is that how you see yourself given?
• 11:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Look, there are the freaks.
• 12:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: The world of fat, pamper adults.
• 12:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: Would you be one of the Martin Blank?
• 12:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Hey, go away, will you?
• 12:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: I just want to sit here a while, then maybe I'll go home.
• 12:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: Home to what?
• 12:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: I can make you a giant, you fool.
• 12:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Would you turn aside without listening?
• 12:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: Now remember this Craven connection because Marty is gonna fucking die at the hands of fucking Craven the Hunter later, which is very sad.
• 12:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: So Marty is now happy to only call himself the given and he feels like Craven the Hunter is his friend.
• 12:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: So Craven takes him back to a base in his secret base in the botanical gardens.
• 12:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: where he makes Marty drink a bunch of herbs that Raven says will change given on a cellular level.
• 12:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: Now you remember Craven drinks potions all the time to enhance his own strength.
• 12:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: So what Craven refers to is training.
• 12:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: Marty says every time you talk like that you make me feel like some kind of animal.
• 12:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like a dog you can teach tricks to.
• 12:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: Sure I've learned stuff and I'm just sick of being treated like like something that ain't human.
• 12:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: I've got feelings you know and then drinks one last potion and changes into a beastial version of himself.
• 12:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: He starts like getting more angry, more monstrous.
• 13:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: He like attacks Craveny.
• 13:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: This could be, I guess, where he starts becoming more monkey-like in appearances.
• 13:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: He becomes the animal Craven, who's trying to turn him into.
• 13:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's the berserker side, like Wolverine in the Beast of God, right?
• 13:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: You drink the potion and it releases your lizard brain, basically, or your monkey brain.
• 13:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: So a given turns on Craven grabs and by the neck grabs his fur coat slams him on the ground throws a table on him.
• 13:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: Craven's struggling, given jumps on Craven, who manages to pin given until he submits to Craven through intense eye contact.
• 13:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's like he's found his alpha now.
• 13:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Good, Martin, good.
• 13:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: It appears we've established a link, some form of telepathic bond, a mind-lock of sort, as the cobra hypnotizes the hapless bird and trances it with its own beechial energy.
• 13:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: I have taken control of you.
• 13:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: And he sends given after Spider-Man, muttering the incredible adult.
• 13:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: Never have I met a man so desperately trusting a man who's need for acceptance is so great.
• 13:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: He almost begs to be used and used he shall be in the grim hours ahead.
• 14:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I don't know.
• 14:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: I feel like there's some dialogue here that Gibbon could use on his dating profile.
• 14:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: It could go far in certain communities.
• 14:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: So Gibbon goes after Spidey.
• 14:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: Craven is in his brain.
• 14:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's it Martin.
• 14:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: Strike him again.
• 14:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: Kill him Martin.
• 14:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: Kill Kill.
• 14:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: Marty's smack Spidey.
• 14:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: Knees him in the face.
• 14:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: Gets him by the throat.
• 14:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: Now Gibbon finish him now.
• 14:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's right.
• 14:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: Kill him.
• 14:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: Kill.
• 14:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: Why do you hesitate?
• 14:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: finish him don't fail now you fool kill kill but Gibbon is able to break Craven's control nearly falls off the roof and Spider-Man saves him and Craven is so sad I wanted the taste of revenge now and all I have is the taste of ashes fuck you Sergei Craven off
• 14:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is a pretty strong beginning for the given as a character who doesn't get a lot of play time.
• 14:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: Whatever people use him, it's almost as though they have really fondly remembered this initial story, because his appearances are spread out over decades after this.
• 14:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: I feel like this is a strong start.
• 14:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think having that interaction with Craven makes sense when you have like an animal theme and me Craven is somebody who likes to find people he can use and send them out using them in his own means and like given is definitely one who was susceptible to that but but given still has that like will like given has is kind of a sad sack a lot of the time but ultimately he's not
• 15:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: a bad person and he definitely doesn't want to hurt people.
• 15:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: He just kind of has that temper since I do him.
• 15:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: Given is the protagonist of this story.
• 15:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: We have a lot of stories where Spider-Man gets used by someone and wants understanding.
• 15:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: We get a lot of stories where Spider-Man is desperate and someone pushes him or manipulates him.
• 15:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: Spider-Man is not the hero of this story.
• 15:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's given.
• 15:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: Craven for sure is not the hero.
• 15:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: So tell us about Gibbon when he shows up in Peter Parker's spectacular Spider-Man, fifty nine and sixty.
• 15:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: That is seeming a like reoccurring thing with with Marty.
• 15:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: Whenever he shows up, he kind of takes over the narrative a bit.
• 15:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like he becomes like the focal character a lot.
• 15:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: That happens a little in this one, too.
• 15:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, Peter Parker, the spectacular Spider-Man, fifty nine, is in nineteen eighty one.
• 16:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: So it's a few years nearly a decade before Gibbon's back.
• 16:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: He kind of disappears for a while.
• 16:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: Basically, we open with a documentary series on the trail of, which is very clearly a parody of in search of the host, Felix Simon.
• 16:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Felix Simon first appeared in, I can't remember what one of the monster books it was, but one of the old monster books where he, with the, the living colossus stories, which are all set in Hollywood.
• 16:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: And in that, he plays a pointy year alien cast member in a show called Star Lords.
• 16:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: And now he's the host of a show called on the trail of basically he's Leonard Nemoy.
• 16:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's like a reoccurring character who's like always like kind of a stand-in for Leonard Nemoy, which I think is very funny.
• 16:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: So Felix Simon is hosting this show and he wants to do an episode about Spider-Man.
• 16:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: So he calls in his producer and his producer and demands that they get new footage for Spider-Man.
• 16:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: His producer calls in a camera man who brings
• 16:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Jack, who brings in his trusty grip, Marty Blank.
• 16:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: I love this.
• 16:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Actually, I love that Marty went and got like a good Hollywood technical job where he's like able to use his skills and learn camera equipment and things like that.
• 17:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he and Jack have this like dynamic that's a little bit, a little bit boyfriend vibes.
• 17:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: Marty, if you give him attention, Marty will give his whole heart and soul to you.
• 17:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: We see that over and over.
• 17:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: First with Craven, he tries it with Spidey, but first with Craven, and now with this producer guy.
• 17:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: I just like that he went and got himself a job in Hollywood as in like this like good technical job.
• 17:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think that's a great place for him.
• 17:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: But the second he sees Spider-Man on screen and the producers like we need footage of Spider-Man.
• 17:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's immediately on board.
• 17:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's like, I want to do this.
• 17:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: I want to find Spider-Man.
• 17:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, he just immediately is going to give up his life in Hollywood with Jack to go and fight Spider-Man.
• 17:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: So they hop on a plane and they fly out.
• 17:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: He throws a fit in his apartment first.
• 17:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: He trashes it and finds digs out his old monkey suit.
• 17:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: He narrates a lot about how he's going to, he must get his chance against Spider-Man.
• 17:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: So they fly to New York.
• 17:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Beetles up to things, Abner Jenkins.
• 17:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's created himself a new suit.
• 17:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's got new and enhanced suction cups on his fingers now.
• 17:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: Jack and Marty are flying around.
• 17:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Jack at one point refers to him as a crazy gorilla, which Marty does not like.
• 18:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: He is a whole thing of Jack, how long have we known each other?
• 18:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: A couple months, I guess.
• 18:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Then do me a favor and then put the camera down a minute.
• 18:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sure, but why?
• 18:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because it's a very expensive and I don't want you to drop it.
• 18:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then he goes off on Jack and grabs the shakes of it.
• 18:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's like never call me a gorilla.
• 18:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Understand?
• 18:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe not the healthiest relationship between the two of them.
• 18:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: So Spider-Man is just swinging around as the Beatles looking for him for revenge and the Gibbons looking for him for revenge.
• 18:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: They spot him from a helicopter and they go after Spidey.
• 18:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Gibbons jumps out in the tax Spidey.
• 18:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: He trashes a water tower, but Spidey drops a bunch of water on him.
• 18:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: It breaks the water tower open more and dumps him manages to knock, given out with one punch which can't be great when you're on camera trying to stage a fight for your job.
• 18:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: But then the Beatles attacks and drops a wall on both Spidey and Gibbons.
• 18:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then they hang you on an x-shaped crucifix.
• 18:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: Years before Wolverine gets that treatment.
• 18:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, the beetle takes him hostage.
• 18:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: The beetle like doesn't manage to catch spider-man.
• 18:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: He attacks, but he manages to grab Marty, who's unconscious, because after Spider-man they knocked him out, and uses him as bait.
• 19:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: And because Spider-man's not going to let him, like, get, take it, kept hostage on this crucifix publicly.
• 19:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: He tries to, like, go and save him.
• 19:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: And all of this is on camera, Jack's following around in his house.
• 19:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: helicopter and Spider-Man manages to free-given.
• 19:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: You started to realize that like, this attempt to get revenge on Spider-Man is a little, it wasn't warranted if Spider-Man was going to come back and try and save him anyways.
• 19:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like he had this moment where he really thought he was feeling sorry for himself as he normally is.
• 19:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: But Spiderman, Spidey came back and saved him and manages to disable the Beatles suit.
• 19:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: But even though the Beatles was basically defeated, given flies in and punches the Beatles trying to help.
• 19:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: And Beatles collapses.
• 19:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: So the media start seeing Gibbon as being the one who knocked out the Beatles at the end.
• 19:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he gets lauded as a hero.
• 19:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: So he gets to be the hero at the end of this one.
• 19:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: And Spidey ends up going away, feeling sorry for himself for a change.
• 19:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: which is a nice turn of events for Marty Blank.
• 19:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: Even though, I don't know, you get the idea that he found a place.
• 20:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: He likes the attention, and when he gets the attention, he takes it a little too far.
• 20:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: But then he's gone for years again.
• 20:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: So given his gone until nineteen ninety seven, and this is a book I bought off the shelf, it's Jamed Amitase's Spectacular Spider-Man.
• 20:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: We're all the way up to two, four, five, and six here, where he now has like a very, very mussely appearance.
• 20:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: He looks very, very rich.
• 20:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: and still very furry.
• 20:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: You don't know if it's a suit or his body, you're not quite there.
• 20:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: Later he shows up his very scrawny and almost emaciated, but here he's super mussely.
• 20:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: And he's made friends with the grizzly, not the guy from like X-Force's six pack, but like the guy who wears a bare suit, who I totally need to do a Patreon with Christiansmiths sometimes.
• 20:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: The spot is here.
• 20:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is a game named Johnny on.
• 20:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: His name is Johnny on the spot.
• 20:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: Everyone, he is in Skintite White covered in the spot circles that he puts everywhere.
• 20:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then again, named the Kangaroo.
• 20:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's two kangaroos.
• 20:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is one of them.
• 20:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: Anyway, they're all buddies.
• 20:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: And they call themselves the Spider-Man Revenge Squad.
• 21:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: But they end up getting branded as the Legion of Losers.
• 21:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: They rob a bank.
• 21:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: They run from the cops.
• 21:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: They get in some fist fights.
• 21:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: And in the end, Grizzly and Gibbon instead decide they want to fight crime together.
• 21:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: under the tagline, the gargant, she went grizzly and his partner Gibbon, the boy monkey, and Gibbon's really embracing it.
• 21:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: Again, he just wants a friend.
• 21:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: He imprints on one person at a time.
• 21:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: But in two fifty two, we see a Gibbon is actually amazing with cars.
• 21:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: He gives grizzly station wagon a huge glow up because he decarates it like a bear, and they go for a jolly ride, but then grizzly drives his car into the river.
• 21:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: So in the next issue, it gets towed out of the water and it's like a three hundred dollar bill and they can't afford to pay it.
• 21:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: And given appears to be so in love with Grizzly, they decide to try to stop a heist so that they can get famous.
• 22:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: and we're like, no, that's not what we were doing this for.
• 22:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: And to be clear, we're intoning that Gibbon has romantic feelings for his male friends, but he is very straight.
• 22:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: And the first significant evidence of that when he considers being famous, he wonders, I wonder if Katie Corric is into Simmons, which is hilarious.
• 22:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: Okay, so then they run into the white rabbit.
• 22:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: I have a white rabbit episode out there.
• 22:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: I fucking love this character.
• 22:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: And she has her gang dressed up like tweedle bee and tweedle dumb.
• 22:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: In two fifty six, they get captured by the white rabbit.
• 22:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: But she hangs them upside down and her like little Alice in Wonderland den.
• 22:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: And she puts out a public broadcast that's like, I'm going to kill these two heroes unless I get a ransom.
• 22:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: but also she has a pitful of genetically mutated killer bunnies and given ends up winning over the bunnies like he makes friends with these rabid animals so they free him and then he doesn't want to hit a girl but he does punch white rabbit right off of her giant fucking robot rabbit and she wants to make everybody eat hot carrots and it's a whole story.
• 22:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: Anyway, shirtless spider man with a bag on his head is here, which is an infamous look for this character that's so ridiculous.
• 23:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: And Grizzly had given a write up after the end of this adventure in the daily globe, written by Pamela and her egg, which is a ridiculous name.
• 23:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: And they get an offer from Toy Biz for their own action figures.
• 23:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: And in the article, given says, you know, maybe I want to write a play someday.
• 23:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: So this is a very fun story about some hopeless losers.
• 23:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: And jam day Mateus picks up on that original given energy and gives him kind of a happy ending at the end.
• 23:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: My favorite part of this is his turn as a hero, and how he just kind of lets whatever happen to him, and he makes good choices.
• 23:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: But I also love his friendship with the Grizzly, which seems very real.
• 23:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: I love that he has that support in the Grizzly, and like that's all he really needs.
• 23:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: He just needs somebody to like, pal around with him and go along.
• 23:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: I always get the Spider-Man revenge squad confused with that group with like, towed and spider-kid.
• 23:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yeah, you're a frog man.
• 23:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: I always think of given as being part of that group, but he isn't.
• 23:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think if we ever wanted to mix him in with mutants, I think him and towed could get along.
• 23:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: Given is gone for like another decade.
• 23:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: He shows up in like one panel and a She-Hulk issue looking like a full-fucking monkey now.
• 24:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's in the underworld series where there's a whole bunch of supervillains that get weird redesigns working for underworld.
• 24:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's like one panel.
• 24:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then if you go back to the Princess Python episode we talk about this story.
• 24:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: Given shows up at the funeral for the Stilt Man in Matt Fraction's Punisher Warjournal.
• 24:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's the late twenty-autts.
• 24:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: he's at the bar with no name looking very very skinny monkey man and he's like sitting at the bar feeling like a loser and again we're picking up very much on that like the poor guy who tries hard energy and the widowed princess python sits next to him and flirts with him
• 24:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: And there's a bunch of chaos in the bar, but he ends up taking her home at the end of it after Punisher blows up the bar and Gibbons survives, but is covered in bandages.
• 24:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then Zelda gets struck blind by this.
• 24:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: So this is an iconic Princess Python story.
• 24:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: She shows up in this short skirt green dress snake wrapped around her and she's like, someone get the widow day a drink.
• 24:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: She's coming in from outside.
• 24:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: She's like, I'm all wet and all the super criminals are like, oh,
• 25:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: So she married the stilt man who died and then she married the gibbon.
• 25:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: And we get the follow-up on this story in Punisher War Journal, sixteen.
• 25:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: Again, he's covered in bandages.
• 25:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: He wants to go after the Punisher and kill him now.
• 25:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: His wife is blind and she's knitting a sweater like for her python in a tank who is dead, but Gibbons pretending the python is alive.
• 25:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's given his covered in bandages.
• 25:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's attending a support group.
• 25:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: Zelda is constantly belittling him and berating him.
• 25:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: So the Tinkerer creates the cover identity of Martin Seeming for the given who wants to buy a gun to kill the Punisher with.
• 25:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: But he ends up using his gun to protect the prostitute from a pimple who's abusing her.
• 25:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: But the pimples and knife given runs away.
• 25:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: Marty finally cuts off his bandages and he looks terrible.
• 25:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: All his fur is burned off.
• 25:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: Zelda throws his fucking gun out the window.
• 25:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: He gets that out of a dumpster.
• 25:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: He dumps her dead snake, buys her a new one.
• 25:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: Punisher kills the pip.
• 25:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: Given, coulda shot the Punisher, but he ends up turning his gun over instead.
• 26:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is a very noir story, and given just gets these two appearances kind of from his perspective in that latter one, it's actually really delightful, even though I hate what's happened to him here in a lot of ways.
• 26:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: I have lots of thoughts on Punisher wardrobe.
• 26:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is a series that I've read the whole thing.
• 26:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm not a big Punisher fan.
• 26:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know why I've read the whole thing.
• 26:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Probably because it does focus on characters like the given, but I'll never entirely forgive it for what it does to two of my favorite villains, which is still man and rampage.
• 26:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: They were real later that the part of why given and Zelda got buried is because she needed to be on his insurance.
• 26:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: So he's managed to land a job.
• 26:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: with health insurance.
• 26:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's just such a sad sack here, but he like he gets the girl and it still doesn't quite like make his life together because this like looming specter of the Punisher hangs over him and the ending where he just kind of like hands the gun over to the Punisher realizing that's not who he is and that's not what he's going to be able to do is is always kind of stuck with me.
• 26:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: It was of the times, but the casual violence from the Pimp toward the prostitute is my least favorite part of this story, but it's a political cycle princess python and given story.
• 27:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: And they were married for a minute.
• 27:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, it's a cute little story.
• 27:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: Okay, now we jump to Marvel Apes, which is an event that I don't know many people like even paid attention to, but it's a whole universe.
• 27:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like Marvel Zombies is a universe full of zombie Marvel characters.
• 27:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is a universe full of eight Marvel characters.
• 27:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's almost parallel to like that Spyderhand universe where everybody's a cartoon animal of some kind.
• 27:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Intel is about Marvel apes.
• 27:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's parallel to that in that like it is a gimmick where everybody's like a funny animal, but it's way darker than that, but it gets real dark real fast.
• 27:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's
• 27:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like I said earlier, it's kind of a horror comic.
• 27:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a series I just wasn't expecting to not really expect to like very much and then did a really loving and I think it's really great.
• 27:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's Carl Kessel, right?
• 27:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, who is also the writer of one of my favorite other favorite mini series, which is Captain America Patriot focusing on the Jeff Mace Captain America.
• 27:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, we got to talk about that in our red raven episode a little
• 27:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, and red raven comes up again here.
• 27:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Art by Raymond Box.
• 28:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: It opens with Marty trying to cash a check at a bank and ending up like stumbling on a heist by Red Ghost in his super apes.
• 28:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: Marty's really cute here.
• 28:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's drawn in like almost a kind of cartoony anime way.
• 28:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: I don't know.
• 28:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: He gives me a little monkey cheat energy, which is kind of funny.
• 28:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: He starts to try and like save the day, but the Avengers come in and steal a whole show.
• 28:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: But to be clear here, he's the full protagonist in this story.
• 28:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: Oh yeah, he's a limited series about the given.
• 28:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh yeah, he is one hundred percent the main character of this series and he has he started as this whole narration at the beginning.
• 28:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's like like they say life gives you lemons.
• 28:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: You make lemonade trouble is all I get our banana peel.
• 28:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: ever feel out of sync with this whole world that no matter how hard you try and get in the game, you always end up in the sidelines, story of my life.
• 28:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Hands up answering a ad for a research study.
• 28:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's state university by a Fiona Fitz you who he keeps calling doctor, but also refers to her as a graduate student, but she's just kind of a mad scientist type.
• 28:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: She's got glasses in right hair, just like this cute girl who's like very in the science of very like very smart.
• 29:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: She's recipient of Reed Richards Fellowship for multidisciplinary excellence.
• 29:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: which is a very Marvel thing.
• 29:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: She keeps calling them Mr. Gibbon.
• 29:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: And her whole study is basically cataloging like super humans and like figuring out how to better like have a database of it.
• 29:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: And she, this is actually, unless I miss something, this is the only non-handbook mention of Marty being a mutant.
• 29:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: And she actually mentions that something is strange about his status as a mutant because he had his powers before puberty, which isn't unheard of, we know.
• 29:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: but that there's something strange about his whole energy.
• 29:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: So she grabs him and breaks into the state university's interdimensional experimental access area, which is where they study different realms and realities.
• 29:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: And she zaps Marty with the machines to try and figure out what this energy is.
• 29:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it ends up creating a portal that sucks the two of them into a New York City covered in trees and vines that is populated by monkey people.
• 29:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: Marty immediately gets to be the hero here where he saves Fiona when she falls off a building all the monkeys react very negatively to Fiona calling her monstrosity but comment on Marty being very handsome and very like a nice young man they they immediately kind of accept Marty as like just a regular person but Fiona has to hide her humanness in this world
• 30:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: Fiona apparently it has a whole theory that Marty's like bio energy is connected to this world, which is where I think the whole mutant thing is interesting.
• 30:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is where I have thoughts about this because I feel like this provides one of two things.
• 30:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's that either Marty is an immune and instead he's like a refugee from this world who ended up in the six one six, which is why his energy is like connected to this world and why he has like no pasty ended up in the orphanage.
• 30:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: He doesn't have the last name.
• 30:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: because he is basically just one of the monkey people in this world.
• 30:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Or that his mutation isn't just being a monkey, but it's specifically being his mutation created a connection to another dimension, which is something we've seen occasionally, which I always know.
• 30:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah.
• 30:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: We see characters who have, I mean, Ilyaana with limbo, right?
• 30:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's an impact that takes place or characters that attach to a particular dimensional energy and they draw their power or connection from that place.
• 31:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think that's absolutely possible.
• 31:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: You have Knight Crawler who's like connected to the like Brimstone dimension.
• 31:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then they start meeting some of the other characters of it.
• 31:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: The monkey characters of this world, including Spider Monkey, who's fighting Doc Oook.
• 31:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot of like funny names, a lot of variations of Oook or like speedball.
• 31:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: The monkey speedball, Robbie Baldwin, not to be confused with monkey, Robbie Williams, Apex, who I'm not that I'm saying it out loud.
• 31:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: I suddenly realize that it's upon apex predator.
• 31:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: Right, but this is an original character.
• 31:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: A lot of the disparities of our characters, but a lot of the original.
• 31:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's like a big wrestler.
• 31:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's a small monkey who turns into a giant super power gorilla when he puts on a luched arm mask key and speedball and spider monkey are kind of like the new heroes in the area and they're all like friends with each other and they're
• 31:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: and Marty jumps in and actually manages to help using a bit of strategy to trick Doku into attacking him, but actually hitting speed ball, which causes his arms to back Doku's arms bounce back, and they end up capturing it.
• 32:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's the thing about this whole series is that Marty, who's always been out of place and kind of bumbling and a bit of a sad sack in his universe, despite his power is not really making him all that special in this universe, is special in this universe.
• 32:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Everything goes right for him.
• 32:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Everything he does works out.
• 32:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: He suddenly fits in in this monkey verse.
• 32:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's like he has luck powers, but also the luck keeps going bad because things keep getting worse and worse too, right?
• 32:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: The vampire show up.
• 32:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, things go real bad.
• 32:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: And despite how well everything is going for Marty, he's the one, he's like the one person recognizes things are going bad.
• 32:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's like he things start working out for him and he suddenly starts having anxiety attacks about it.
• 32:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I feel like that's very real.
• 32:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like when you're used to things always going bad.
• 32:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: And suddenly everything starts working out and lining up perfectly, you start to wonder if it's too good to be true if something's wrong.
• 32:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he ends up being kind of right about that.
• 32:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: They meet the eight vendors.
• 32:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: They decide to take Fiona to their universes read Richards to try and figure out how to get them home.
• 32:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: Speedball takes Fiona to read Richards was Spidey, Apex, and Marty go to the eight vendors to bring Doc Oook there.
• 33:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: They meet a bunch of other characters.
• 33:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Marty notices that a lot of the team members on the eight vendors are characters.
• 33:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: He would recognize as villains like the jugger monk and San monk who are monkey versions of juggernaut and San man, Moomerang for boomerang scorpion.
• 33:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: The art on this series is delightful as well.
• 33:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's very Saturday morning cartoon.
• 33:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: I really like Marvely.
• 33:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that art really like works when the twist happens and you realize like that cutesy art style and suddenly when it gets dark, you realize they they mentioned that Captain America is very proud of rehabilitation.
• 33:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: He he tries to give every super villain a chance to like earn their keep as part of the
• 33:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: Avengers.
• 33:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: They talk about how Marty should get a costume and join the thing.
• 33:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he gets invited to meet Captain America who thanks.
• 33:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thanks and for his help and gives him a pep talk about how heart is more important than powers.
• 33:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: We meet the fantastic four of this world, which in this world, the thing being a big rock monkey isn't all that shocking.
• 33:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: So the horrific monster on the team is Sue Storm.
• 33:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because her, the cosmic energy that made her into a visible woman, also made her look human.
• 34:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: And everybody talks about how hideous she is.
• 34:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: And this is why the fact she just looks like a normal human.
• 34:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: But because she's not a monkey, it turned her into not a monkey.
• 34:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they're really excited because they think maybe Fiona could like in her connection to this human world could give them a sign of how to cure Sue Storm.
• 34:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then the issue ends with Marty getting invited to witness the trial of Dr. Utavius.
• 34:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: which instead of being a actual trial turns out to be a big ceremony where Captain America, they all stand around Newtavius and Captain America demands submission from him in a very like monkey routine, kind of like what Craven does to a given in that earlier story.
• 34:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 34:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 34:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: And when Docker refuses to submit, they the Avengers terrible part.
• 34:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: They killed Docker right there.
• 34:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: They rip them.
• 34:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: We see them ripping apart.
• 34:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: We see Marty's reaction and it's just like absolute shock of what's going on there.
• 34:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: And
• 34:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: Which is very like the pack of monkeys turned on the monkey that was not part of their pack anymore, right?
• 34:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: But we learned there's a darker purpose.
• 34:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Up to this point, it's just been like cartoon monkeys hopping around and having like fun adventures.
• 35:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: Everybody's got puns for names and like it's just, Marty's having like a great time being like a he viewed as like a hero.
• 35:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Everybody likes them and then we see this and Captain America makes it very clear to Marty who recognizes immediately what's going on that he's being told.
• 35:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: you're either with us or you're against us.
• 35:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's where the first issue of Marvel Labes ends.
• 35:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a real like shocking moment for this like otherwise QC book up to that point.
• 35:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: We get a little backup story that's not related to the given, but it does, it does have a bit about two gun chimp in the raw high chimp.
• 35:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: A few unfortunate jokes, honestly.
• 35:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: I am in orderly fond of raw high kid.
• 35:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm always happy to see mentioned.
• 35:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: We get Marvel Labes too, where they actually Marty, everyone's ushered out of the room, except Captain America after the trial.
• 35:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: and Marty remarks that he thinks Duckuk is still barely alive when he leave.
• 35:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we find out that hidden in the tunnels underneath the eight vendors tower, we have Namor, Toro, Red Raven, and Bucky come out of the shadows.
• 35:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: And Mucky invaders, everybody.
• 35:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Mucky invaders are here.
• 35:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's also funny because Red Raven is clearly here so that he could be like a wizard of Oz like flying monkey style to the sign.
• 36:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: When Marty leaves, he's very clearly shaken.
• 36:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: He meets with Apex who reveals he's never actually seen the trials.
• 36:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's still too new to be invited.
• 36:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's a great honor.
• 36:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: He doesn't really know what goes on down there.
• 36:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: They go to find Fiona.
• 36:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Marty wants to get out there immediately.
• 36:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: He knows things are bad here.
• 36:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: He doesn't want to be part of here.
• 36:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's not safe for them.
• 36:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: But Fiona's too like taken by like working with read Richards even if he's a mandrel.
• 36:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: They don't bring mandrel into this.
• 36:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's like the one monkey character that doesn't end up and I'm okay with that.
• 36:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: Mandrel would fit right in in this world.
• 36:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: The vampire apes could eat him and it would be just fine.
• 36:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Captain America starts questioning Marty about like the six one six wanting information about what's going on.
• 36:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: What his world's like Marty very wisely lies to him and tells him like no real information.
• 36:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: He knows that caps not not safe to be telling him this information.
• 36:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's going to take a few days for them to get the portal up and working.
• 36:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, uh, while Fiona is working on that, Marty basically spends those days in a paranoid, barely sleeping anxiety state hanging out with speedball and apex.
• 37:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: We learned that apex is real name is Roy Rayna.
• 37:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: He
• 37:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: The likes Roy and Robbie, but his whole distrust of this world is becoming real tangible and he doesn't really know what he's supposed to do, and while they're out eating, they see monkey Wolverines swinging through the park.
• 37:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: We learn a bit more about the world.
• 37:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: We learn that the X-Apes are considered outcasts, little better than the low life they fight.
• 37:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: They immediately leap into action, trying capture.
• 37:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Wolverine, but not wanting the same thing to happen to him to somebody he knows to be a hero.
• 37:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: This might be Marty's only actual interaction with another mute as far as I know this mutant Wolverine.
• 37:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: He ends up going in to quote unquote help but ends up giving Wolverine a chance to escape instead because he doesn't want any more people getting captured by the eight vendors after he's seen what happened.
• 37:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: The they create a portal but it requires two operators one to stay behind.
• 37:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: They need Marty to go through because his like bio energy is what allowed them to open the portal to begin with and then cap appears he shows up he sees the screen viewing the six one six that they've set up with the portal and states new blood cap attacks him starts knocking them out and read mentions that he knew something wasn't quite right so he
• 38:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: opens up a portal to grab a gadget.
• 38:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you're like, you know, in re-richers, you expect some kind of fancy device.
• 38:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: But it said he just pulls out a wooden stake, which gives you another clue of what's going on, but caps turns it on him and impails read, killing the monkey re-richers.
• 38:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: And reveals that, in fact, Captain America and the rest of the monkey invaders are vampires.
• 38:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Marty and Fiona only managed to escape by Fiona pretending she has invisible force field powers do, like Sue.
• 38:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: They get out, but they have to go on the run because monkey cap puts out a statement with edited footage blaming Reed's death on Marty and Fiona making them out cast in this world.
• 38:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: They try to run, but speedball finds them knocking Marty out.
• 38:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: And when they wake up, they're in the monkey version of the sanctum sanctura with a whole bunch of other outcast heroes.
• 38:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's where the second issue ends.
• 38:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: you get Marty and Fiona captured by Speedball, and these characters we've otherwise been told are outcasts.
• 38:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: It continues in the next issue.
• 38:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: We learned that the outcasts are characters that it's basically kind of a civil war in this universe.
• 39:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's these are the underground heroes, the X-Aps are here, and various other characters you wouldn't have who aren't part of the eight vendors who are secretly working against them.
• 39:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: And Speedball is their double agent.
• 39:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Hulk is the monkey Hulk is here, the monkey Wolverine, monkey doctor druid.
• 39:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we get to learn what they've learned about Captain America, which is that they know that Captain America is a vampire, but not just any vampire.
• 39:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's some kind of Uber vampire.
• 39:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we learn that he's actually not Steve Rogers, but it's monkey bear and blood, everybody.
• 39:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's monkey bear and blood.
• 39:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: who has somehow taken the form of Steve Rogers since World War II and has been masquerading as him as the avenger.
• 39:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: They turned the rest of the evaders into vampires except for the human torch Jim Hammond, who they destroyed because he was an android and therefore couldn't be turned.
• 39:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: He has been lying to the world ever since and wants to get to the six one six so that they can have more options of people to eat.
• 39:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: They want to take the fight to him, but they don't know how to do that or how to expose Captain America as being a fake.
• 40:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Only for Marty to realize he knows something that the rest of the monkey verse doesn't know which is where the real cap would be frozen in ice.
• 40:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: If this world is anything like his, he knows where the real cap is.
• 40:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: They go and they find the real Steve Rogers frozen in ice.
• 40:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: They get attacked by the vampire invaders who have been following him after apex that didn't know speedball was a double agent.
• 40:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: He doesn't know any of the secrets.
• 40:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: So Captain America kind of buttered him up to try and find out more information to learn what was going on.
• 40:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then she get a bit of information out of a backs that he didn't even know was helping them, but they succeed stopping the vampire invaders and freeing the real Captain America, but not before the vampires capture Fiona and Marty and fly off.
• 40:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then we get the fourth issue, which is.
• 40:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Which is the big showdown.
• 40:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: They manage to come in.
• 40:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: They Marty plans on trashing the portal, trapping him and Fiona there, but to prevent them.
• 40:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now cash show up in a big fight.
• 40:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: Everyone fights everyone.
• 40:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: They reveal the truth.
• 40:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: They reveal that Captain America is a fake.
• 40:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're all vampires.
• 41:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a big fight.
• 41:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: Marty manages to get the drop on Baron blood and stabs him with a stake, but he misses.
• 41:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: and just get some through the shoulder.
• 41:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: They activate the portal.
• 41:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: In the fight, Baron blood and Apex men end up blowing up the portal with them and killing both the vampires and Apex Apex ends up sacrificing himself to save the day.
• 41:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: But it traps monkey's feeball in the six one six and that's where the story ends.
• 41:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: For a monkey universe, this is a delightful read.
• 41:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: I would genuinely recommend it.
• 41:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: It also got sput off into a couple of one shots.
• 41:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: The Marvel Abe's brand was kind of a thing for just a minute.
• 41:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, focus is a little less on Marty in the future issues and more on the other characters we've met.
• 41:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: First, the first special is the speedball special where we find out what happened to monkey speedball.
• 41:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: He decided he didn't want to go back because as he points out, his world is very tribal and even though he was part of the winning team, he was the one who fought them.
• 41:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: He still viewed as a trader.
• 41:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the outcast characters would, they wanted to be on top, but it's not that they particularly had a problem with what the vampires were doing.
• 41:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: They just wanted to be the ones in charge.
• 41:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he would be viewed as a traitor to his people because of it.
• 42:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: So he ends up deciding to say in the six, one six, he joins the initiative, which is going on at the time.
• 42:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: I love it.
• 42:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: The fifty states.
• 42:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
• 42:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
• 42:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: I was on the handbook stirring this time.
• 42:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: I love this era.
• 42:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: You're great.
• 42:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: And like heroic age, this whole section of Marvel history makes me happy.
• 42:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: He gets bullied by Erica, Grady, Ant-Man, and basic training.
• 42:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Basically, he makes friends with Femblea Eddie, aka Griligirl, who's a character I've always really liked.
• 42:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
• 42:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Griligirl becomes a big player in this.
• 42:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: Nothing specific related to the given happens here, except that we find out that Marty and Fiona are now dating, and that Marty has a job basically acting as like a marketing person to find practical purposes for Fiona's.
• 42:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: When Apex, Roy Renna died in the monkey verse, the monkey Apex has mask ended up in the six one six.
• 42:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: was found by the human version of Roy Reda and it gives them the same powers.
• 42:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: He turns into a super curl.
• 42:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: They end up encountering the red ghost and there's a big mess with the red ghost.
• 42:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: Some like dimensional stuff happens and they get spotted on their dimensional like not by some mysterious figures will get more focus on later.
• 43:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: It ends with a backskating capture by Norman Osborne's hammer organization.
• 43:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: We get the second special which focuses on spider munk.
• 43:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: We get a flashback with two time when spider monkey and Marty were patroling around munk hat.
• 43:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: And spider man was telling his origin to given and mentions that in this universe, spider monkey is not opposed to killing because it's the monkey verse and everything's a little more violent here.
• 43:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: In this universe, he actually killed the man who killed his uncle.
• 43:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: And this freaks Marty out who, as we know from the monkey,
• 43:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Marvel ape stories was kind of going through a whole thing at the time and he's got this like hero worship with spider man and he's like spider man would never actually kill somebody.
• 43:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is not right and he like gets angry at spider monkey and it really kind of shakes spider monkey and his like sense of what the hero is this idea because Marty getting upset with him about the fact that he's willing to kill in his view of like who spider man is and who spider man should be.
• 43:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the rest of the issue is spider monkey kind of dealing with this like sudden crisis of contents, where he's like, maybe I don't want to kill people.
• 43:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe I want to be a hero like this one that Marty like idolizes there is one more marvellous special, which is the grunt line special, which kind of focuses more
• 44:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: on Apex, the new Apex from the Six One Six version.
• 44:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: But we did learn in the end of the Spider Monkeys Special, who the mysterious figures who spotted Red Ghost and Speedball hopping through dimensions were.
• 44:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it is the Marvel zombies.
• 44:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: They have picked their world clean and are looking to end up go to the monkeyverse and start eating there.
• 44:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they're going to use the trace left behind by Speedball and Red Ghost to try and get
• 44:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Red Ghost meanwhile is obsessed with the idea of getting to the monkeyverse because he thinks he can like take it over because he's like the master of the super ape so Marty starts trying to find help when he so he goes to basically anybody can but the only person who listens to him is an intern at the newspaper front line which is intern Jane Potter comes to it is dismissed by Robbie because he mentions that given is an unreliable source Marty Blake has been fired from every fast food chain in the city base that
• 44:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: But Jane decides to take things into her own hands and they end up meeting Gorilla Girl who knows its be balls gone missing and she was friends with its be balls.
• 45:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: So they'd end the three of them end up teaming up to go rescue apex from Hammer.
• 45:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: They find them in a black side that Gorilla Girl knew about because she's smart and put together that this white Hammer would own this like energy study site is suspicious.
• 45:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: Gorilla Girl, everybody really quickly, is a woman of color.
• 45:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: She first shows up in Marvel team up, ninety-one, and then she gets yanked into a few other stories before being recruited into the initiative.
• 45:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: Her real name is Funbula Eddie, which is amazing.
• 45:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: The name Funbula is incredible.
• 45:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: I love Gorilla Girl.
• 45:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: She's, she's so funny.
• 45:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sure, parents is in the initiative, but in the initiative books are just usually her, like, kind of snarking.
• 45:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: She has this one moment where she agrees to go skinny, dipping with another character, gets really excited, because she's like a very attractive woman, normally.
• 45:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: He like starts stripping and he turns around and she's in guerrilla form.
• 45:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he's like, wait, this isn't fair.
• 45:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: And she's like, I assure you, I'm completely naked in this guerrilla form.
• 45:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: And she's just always very funny.
• 45:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I really like her.
• 45:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: And her appearance, you mentioned in Marvel team up, she's in a replay book.
• 45:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: She appears as like a poster in the background of a carnival at one point.
• 46:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then when they reprint that book later, they need to fill some space that they had like a little like backup story.
• 46:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: where she and a handful of the other like freaks from that carnival have formed their own team and are like wandering around trying to be superheroes.
• 46:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's the only time we ever see that team until or any of them until girl girl appears in the initiative.
• 46:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: And she's always just really great.
• 46:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like she comments a lot on like how bad her images as a black women who turns into an ape, but like is very aware of it and is very like critical of it and like the way people like interact with it.
• 46:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: But she's just very cool.
• 46:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like she is also very competent as a hero.
• 46:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: They managed to rescue Roy out of the from hammer.
• 46:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: They revealed that hammer has uktron, the ultron of the monkeyverse.
• 46:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: They managed to, with uktron's help, they managed to escape.
• 46:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: But it turns out that uktron was a fake built by hammer to try and like access the monkeyverse.
• 46:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: They end up apex destroys the robot, but not before something goes wrong, and they get sucked into a portal.
• 46:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: But instead of ending up in the monkeyverse, like originally planned, because of red ghosts meddling, they end up in the zombieverse.
• 47:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Marvel zombies evolution is like the last book in the series.
• 47:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm always a little annoyed because when they collect the Marvel apes stuff, they always leave this issue out.
• 47:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm always disappointed because like this is the last issue in the story.
• 47:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like it's a necessary thing.
• 47:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: So this is where they end up as a huge mess.
• 47:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: The zombies and the Marvel apes world and in the characters from the six one six, including Marty and the intern Jane and gorilla girl.
• 47:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: APACs are all now in this one big fight between the dimensions.
• 47:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: Both the monkey verse and the zombie verse want to take over each other's worlds.
• 47:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: The rencher, who is the ape, the ape versus version of the racker, because instead of having a crowbar, he is a monkey wrench, of course.
• 47:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: He ends up dying in the fight and a girl a girl picks up his magic monkey wrench.
• 47:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: So girl a girl gets an upgrade here.
• 47:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Monkey speedball gets captured by zombie doom, but Marty saves him.
• 47:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: They end up beating him, peatore of the monkey.
• 47:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: of the super apes is helping them.
• 47:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: Suddenly the hero is going to all get pulled down into the street below where they meet Magneto.
• 47:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: And if you've ever read the Marvel zombie ones, Magneto is kind of the leader of the human resistance.
• 48:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's kind of the one non zombie who's like leading the way.
• 48:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm not actually a big fan of the original Marvel zombie stories.
• 48:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: It is that kind of gimmicky thing, but I really love the like subsequent ones, which are like machine man going into other dimensions.
• 48:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Those those stories I've always really liked.
• 48:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Marvel zombie world Magneto is there, and he joins them.
• 48:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: He ends up monkey captain America ends up getting bitten by zombie captain America.
• 48:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: They decapitate zombie read Richards, but his head manages to like, stay alive on its own.
• 48:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he ends up actually joining the heroes because he wants to kind of fix things.
• 48:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: He doesn't like how this is going.
• 48:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's kind of a jerk the whole time.
• 48:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: He threatens Jane Potter a lot.
• 48:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Red Ghosts in the super apes end up pulling a heroic sacrifice and like holding off the zombies while read Richards and Magneto and Marty and Jane and
• 48:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: really girl apex all of them end up like heading to the backs are building.
• 48:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're attacked by squirrel girl and this is actually where you realize things are not going well because feed ball and Marty died to give it the given and people get turned and Magneto just immediately like kills them both to prevent them from like becoming dangerous.
• 49:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: So now, given his out of the picture for the rest of the series, he's straight up dead as well as speedball who we were like spending time with throughout all of this.
• 49:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's, but they set up a plan.
• 49:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Regretards has this whole plan that he's going to create a portal that actually sends them back in time to prevent this invasion from ever happening, saving every preventing everything that just happened, but not before he kills me.
• 49:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: He tricks Jane Potter into activating a security device, which kills Magneto.
• 49:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: So like we're losing, we're losing members of this group like left and right.
• 49:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: It comes down to just
• 49:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: Apex, Jane, and Gorilla Girl, but they find out that one person has to stay behind to destroy the portal afterwards, or won't take effect, and Apex volunteers.
• 49:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, first he blows up reads head out of revenge, as soon as they know that they don't need zombie reading.
• 49:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: They blow, he blows up and volunteers to stay.
• 49:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: But girl, a girl tricks Apex into taking off his mask so that they can kiss as humans, a big romantic moment.
• 49:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: But it's all a trick.
• 49:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: She knocks out Apex and takes his place as the one to destroy the portal instead.
• 49:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: So Jane and Apex end up going through the portal and girl a girl destroys it, creating like a stable time loop, I guess.
• 50:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Basically, she sacrifices herself erasing herself entirely from existence.
• 50:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: And she's never been seen again.
• 50:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, this is her last appearance.
• 50:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: She sacrifices herself a racist, this entire event basically from ever having happened.
• 50:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Everybody ends up back in their own universes before everything happened.
• 50:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: The only people who remember any of this happening were the surviving people who had gone through the portal, which is Jane Potter, Apex, and Spider Monkey.
• 50:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they're the only ones who remember everything that happened and remember Gorilla Girl sacrifice and everything that's going on that everything that happened in the story.
• 50:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: The only thing you missed here is the cover of Marvel zombies evil evolution, which is the the rabid vampire monkeys facing off against the zombies and the movie poster qualities says they live they feast they fling
• 50:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: Marvel apes is actually a really delightful ride, and it's given's biggest story seeing him as the protagonist, not as the sidekick, but like a featured character for basically what is an eight-issue run kind of spread out.
• 51:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's delightful, brilliantly written by Carl Castle, and it's a pretty tight plotline all the way through.
• 51:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's so dense, like my notes are so long for that.
• 51:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: I really enjoyed rereading it for this.
• 51:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: I hadn't read it since it came out, and you know, there's X-Men versions of these monkey characters out there, which are usable, and then zombie,
• 51:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: versions of monkey x and characters that they want them there.
• 51:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Spider monkey comes back as part of the whole spider verse event years later.
• 51:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: He unfortunately dies in that event.
• 51:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: He gets eaten by more linen than they inherited.
• 51:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, they dreamed his life.
• 51:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think everybody else who read is like, oh, monkey spider man gets eaten.
• 51:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: or whatever, but me having red marvellaves, I'm like, oh no!
• 51:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: For a series built on puns, again, we play on the planet of the ape's franchise here a bit.
• 51:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's really genuinely delightful, well worth the read.
• 51:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's seen given very briefly in one appearance in Marble Knight Spider-Man, again, just a kind of a cameo, and then we have the big Craven, the Hunter story that concludes the Craven nonsense.
• 51:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: We've given Craven plenty of time on my show, so I'll cover this very quickly.
• 52:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: In the famous story by Jamdematus, the Craven Hunter last hunt of Craven.
• 52:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: Craven becomes Spider-Man and kills himself at the end.
• 52:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: Later, they bring him back because his family cast like a ritual spell where he comes back from the dead and he can only die if Spider-Man kills him now.
• 52:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: So he's got a bunch of shit kids.
• 52:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: He wants to leave a legacy behind.
• 52:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: And there's a big epic story by Nick Spencer in Amazing Spider-Man Volume Five.
• 52:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: Where Craven first has the high evolutionary clone of him, Sergei Craven off like forty seven times.
• 52:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then he makes all of his clones like fight to the death.
• 52:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: The surviving clone is the current crave in the hunter that's running around the Marvel universe because Sergei gets killed at the end of this story, which is where he should be.
• 52:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: He died and he died well.
• 52:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: Let's leave it there for him and we get the cloned younger crave and running around now.
• 52:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: But part of his big plot line is he wants to wrap everything up.
• 52:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: So he works with Arcade to create a giant arena in central park that's underneath the force field and he rounds up every animal themed supervillain or hero that you can think of.
• 53:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: Toad is here, Gibbon is here, Frogman.
• 53:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is a story that Alkraven had in a different Punisher story earlier.
• 53:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: Go see my Alkraven episode with some friends on the Patreon if you want more on that.
• 53:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: But basically we've set up a giant murder world in Central Park.
• 53:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: So Craven gets to get rid of like a bunch of villains who are bastardizing animal names.
• 53:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then he gets a bunch of white billionaires to like upload their minds into these tech suits.
• 53:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: And they get to go hunt down these villains.
• 53:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: So there's a bunch of people running around by like billionaires piloting mechsuits.
• 53:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: But the billionaires minds are also going to die as a result of participating in all this.
• 53:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: So Craven is getting rid of a bunch of animal themed villains.
• 53:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: cloning himself and reading the world of a bunch of like white billionaire poachers as his like giant last act.
• 53:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: So given his part of this vultures here, rhinos here, lizard boys here, there's a whole bunch of characters running around and given gets kind of a featured role in this very briefly.
• 54:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's running away, he's being hunted, he gets shot.
• 54:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: And in an issue that's kind of a breakout in between issues, eighteen and nineteen, we get an issue called eighteen dot each you, which is like the thing Marvel was doing for a minute when they were like singling out issues for events.
• 54:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: And this is where we get given us the focus and then he's dead again.
• 54:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: So we don't know quite how he came back.
• 54:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's he survived the Marvel Apes world by materializing back here, I guess.
• 54:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then he gets killed horribly by these white billionaires as kind of the sacrifice that pushes Spidey forward into becoming more of the protagonist of this story.
• 54:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: Do you want to talk a little bit about the given flashback issue or the focus issue here?
• 54:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and he came back from the Marvel zombie thing.
• 54:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, the whole time loop thing.
• 54:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's also worth noting out in between this.
• 54:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: There was another guy that was running around in a given suit who got like killed in the deadpool book.
• 54:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's the one who kind of like did all the criminal stuff.
• 54:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: He was kind of the criminal version of the given, but he got killed by Deadpool at some point.
• 55:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we don't need to worry about him.
• 55:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, no, he's in this world.
• 55:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: He ends up getting saved by Spider-Man, because Spider-Man is trapped in here too.
• 55:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Vulture comes in and goes, goes, you need, you're gonna go with him.
• 55:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's gonna end up putting us all in jail again.
• 55:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yada, yada, yada, which doesn't make a lot of sense because as far as I know, Marty's never committed a crime on panel aside from maybe a Celtic Spider-Man or maybe accessory.
• 55:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, Spider-Man, Marty isn't a criminal.
• 55:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, he's just the guy who happens to have a monkey.
• 55:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: But he ends up going with Vulture anyways, his argument works for him.
• 55:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then we get the flashback issue, which gives us a lot more reason explanation about why.
• 55:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's a really good issue, because we get a lot of insight.
• 55:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: They remember a lot of information about what his life was like.
• 55:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: He recounts his childhood.
• 55:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: As we saw earlier, where he gets mocked for being like a monkey gets said, oh, no one's going to adopt you because they can't afford the peanuts is meeting his being used by Craven, his connection to Craven.
• 55:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: They mentioned his befriending grizzly and trying to be a hero is marriage princess python he reveals that the reasoning with a vulture wasn't because he was scared spider ran was going to like arrest him or anything but because he wanted to go with the villains because maybe he could find grizzly and princess python again two people cared about
• 56:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: wants a friend, yeah.
• 56:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: His friends or his wife, but vulture, of course, betrays him and uses him as a distraction.
• 56:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Basically, the classic, I don't need to be faster than them.
• 56:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: I just need to be faster than you.
• 56:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Giving gets ambush, but he manages to put up quite a fight against some of these hunter bots, which is pretty
• 56:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: impressive.
• 56:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: He survives because of a chance encounter with the rhino charging through, but he's bleeding out.
• 56:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's in rough shape.
• 56:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: We get right in his dying.
• 56:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: He talks about his time more time in his past with Grizzly, how his life with Princess Python, she became bored and eventually left him.
• 56:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: He gets found by a couple more of the hunter bots who in pathetic shape and they decide to put him out of his misery.
• 56:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: But right before they do that, they mention the Marvel ape's experience where she talks about feeling like a dream because it was him being in a world where everybody else was just like him.
• 56:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: It gets kind of a brief mention, despite it being one of his biggest stories.
• 56:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: As he's dying, he's found by Spider-Man and holds him as he dies and his last thought is at least no one's laughing.
• 57:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's such a sad ending, but like a very effective death for this character that pushes the story forward.
• 57:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: We get one additional appearance very quickly in Marvel Comics presents volume three, number four.
• 57:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: Where weirdly Spider-Man is going to see Star Wars for the first time, and he briefly fights the Gibbon and the Gibbon's brother-in-law, who's a black guy who's also a mugger.
• 57:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's truly not very consequential, but it implies that Gibbon has a brother-in-law, which gives him a family, which we've never really seen.
• 57:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: Now the interesting thing, the thought experiment for this character for me is where he would fit into the X-Men franchise.
• 57:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: And if he's one of Marvel's earlier mutants, if he's existing in the silver age, this guy could be a prime candidate for Charles Xavier to recruit if he saw him having any sort of value because he could give this character a home.
• 57:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: He would imprint on the X-Men cause in such a deep way because he's looking for that belonging, but this character could also have been recruited by Magneto.
• 58:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's got a lot of that toad energy.
• 58:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: where he could be the character who is the bouncy monkey guy but is often made fun of as well.
• 58:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: It given could also fit among the more locks or uncreco or where he's just happy to have a home.
• 58:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think there's a mutant story that could be told about him that he's never been involved and I think introducing him in any kind of big way would be putting him on some sort of villain team where he gets a little bit of focus and then you know makes a decision to turn good at the end.
• 58:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: I don't know they'll ever get up
• 58:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: prominent place in the X-Men.
• 58:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: But I think we could also easily tie him into the Black Woman project.
• 58:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's all these old characters that were mutated and then released into the world by the Black Woman's sinister.
• 58:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I think given could fit there.
• 58:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like idea during the Krakow era that I really wanted to see, which is like a Krakow front line style story.
• 58:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like we had those like event front line stories with Sally Floyd and all that.
• 58:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 58:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the idea that like Sally Floyd would move to Krakawa and like because many Floyd could be resurrected and things like that there's always that saying that like a community isn't really a community until it has a newspaper and like the idea that Krakawa needs like an investigative journalist kind of story and like the idea of like Sally Floyd and another like my idea of course
• 59:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: because he's my favorite character would be like maggot being like a new reporter with Sally Floyd and be like a film noir like partner thing.
• 59:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: But given could also really work there.
• 59:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: We know that he has that talent.
• 59:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: He has like experience with the technical aspect of like camera operation because of his time as a grab.
• 59:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: He could be I think the idea of him becoming like a photo journalist or like some kind of newspaper journalist after in the same way that like Peter Parker is would be like a really interesting parallel for a character like him.
• 59:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's kind of
• 59:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's kind of where like my brain went to when I thought about like where where he could fit is he's got this kind of like working man technical guy thing going for him.
• 59:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: I have a silly float episode out there with Paul Jenkins.
• 59:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: Sally since I made that episode has been featured by Alex Pacnatal in an infinity comic where Xavier's kind of messing with her brain while she's looking for Intel on Xavier post curricula.
• 1:00:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think Gibbon could also very feasely fit into a sidekick role.
• 1:00:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, we have like Wolverine with reluctant side clicks.
• 1:00:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's usually a teenage girl, but I could see Wolverine with Gibbon.
• 1:00:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: I could see Beast with Gibbon as a lab assistant.
• 1:00:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm also okay with the fact that he died.
• 1:00:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'd love to hear any final thoughts, Theo, and then as we're wrapping up, where can people find you online?
• 1:00:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: And is there anything you want to plug?
• 1:00:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: I loved exploring this old-seventy character with you.
• 1:00:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's an odd choice, but he's immune as revealed by the handbooks.
• 1:00:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I think there's a lot to explore with him if people chose to.
• 1:00:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe he's just in the white hot room now.
• 1:00:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: I really like to give it.
• 1:00:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: I like these characters kind of fit into these weird spaces and get focused in areas.
• 1:00:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: You want to expect like the Marvel ape stories.
• 1:00:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: his ending is fittingly sad, but like very focused on him and still gives him that agency throughout it of him fighting his way through and is kind of there to motivate Spider-Man to like get through this, but because he gets the respect in the end and he manages to get it in a lot of these stories.
• 1:00:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: He manages to come out a little better than he started at the end of each of these stories, even if he's kind of back to basics.
• 1:01:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: And there's that exit through line.
• 1:01:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: We love the misunderstood nerd that like if you just give him a chance to shine, they have so much potential
• 1:01:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: far as where to find me.
• 1:01:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm on most things as rock throwing man.
• 1:01:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm not really using a lot of social media these days.
• 1:01:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: I could still be found, but I've kind of with how things have been going.
• 1:01:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've kind of curtailed a lot of that, you know.
• 1:01:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: Um, lastly, I'm Chad Anderson.
• 1:01:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: I keep my social media private because I got kiddos, but you can follow the show at Graham Walken, underscore lane, continuing to love putting this together.
• 1:01:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: I love that we got to feature the given today.
• 1:01:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: It makes me have a huge smile.
• 1:01:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: We're taking you all over the place, uh, over the next few months on the Patreon, the next two episodes.
• 1:01:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: Whoa, all announced three.
• 1:01:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: The next three episodes coming out on the Patreon after this.
• 1:01:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: We're going to do psycho man.
• 1:01:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: You fantastic four villain with my friends, Molly Laser and Darrell Lawrence, then we're taking one of my favorite X-Men characters of all time, little already Maddox from X-Factor, a little pink kid with the emoji powers.
• 1:01:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: I Kevin Canary and Michael Anderson are joining me on that.
• 1:01:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then another all-time favorite supporting cast member, Steady Hunter.
• 1:02:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: with no-one cosplay and Carrie Harris.
• 1:02:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then we're going all over the place at the next few months.
• 1:02:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I hope everybody's enjoying the ride.
• 1:02:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: Alright everybody, thank you so much for listening.
• 1:02:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: I hope you had a great time today.
• 1:02:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: Thank you to you for hanging out.
• 1:02:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: And we'll see you all back here next time on the Grimalk and Lane Patreon channel.
• 1:02:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: And now stay tuned for some thoughts on fascism as a special guest and I talked about a red skull story and its modern applications.
• 1:02:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: For today's Red Skull story, we're going to get a little bit intense in serious for a minute.
• 1:02:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I'm opening this one with a little bit of a content warning.
• 1:02:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: We will get very silly and have a lot of fun with this conversation.
• 1:02:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: We're going to be talking about Arnhem Zola today, but I'm going to open with the real world applications.
• 1:02:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: So please pause or fast forward if you don't want to hear the heavy stuff.
• 1:02:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: Let me introduce you to Joseph Mangala.
• 1:02:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I'm going to give you this content warning.
• 1:02:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'll handle this sensitively, but this is a deeply painful and disturbing history.
• 1:02:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I'm going to keep it a little bit broad based so that we won't get into the specifics.
• 1:03:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: But if you look this guy up, it's rough.
• 1:03:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: Mangalob is a high ranking
• 1:03:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: Nazi officer who had doctorates in anthropology and medicine and who studied under the eugenicist Osmard von Verscure.
• 1:03:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: This mentor von Verscure directed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and eugenics.
• 1:03:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: And he promoted many policies that were later picked up by the Nazi party.
• 1:03:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: For example, he helped shape the law for the prevention of hereditarily diseased offspring.
• 1:03:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: which led to the forced sterilization of nearly half a million people, and that was before the war.
• 1:03:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: As the trains containing unfortunate innocence were sent to Auschwitz and Birkenau, the concentration camp, Mangala would take a look at
• 1:03:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: that the people arriving and make decisions about who would be sent immediately to the gas chambers and who would be sent into the camps and be forced to do labor or submit to experiments.
• 1:03:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: He would do this with a simple point of a finger.
• 1:03:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: He was not who had been charming and almost theatrical in the way that he spoke and presented himself.
• 1:04:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: But Megal frequently used inmates as human guinea pigs for his very sick experiments.
• 1:04:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: Mr. Sinister is put in the comics at this point in this time, so there's another kind of reference in our comic reading.
• 1:04:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: He, uh, Mangala was obsessed primarily with twins, with little people, and especially with people he saw having disabilities and deformities.
• 1:04:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: He was very menown to target Roma and Jewish people, especially children.
• 1:04:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: Mangala personally killed over fifteen hundred pairs of twins in grotesque experiments, doing things like injecting dyes into their eyes to see if he could make them look more Aryan or turn their eyes blue, which of course killed people.
• 1:04:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: He also sterilized, amputated, vidsected, mutilated people without any anesthesia.
• 1:04:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: In the case with twins, he would inject one of the disease and then the other with a different disease and see how they developed differently as they all died really horribly.
• 1:04:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then of course, there were just thousands and thousands of people children included, sent directly to the gas chambers or the firing squads.
• 1:04:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I'm keeping this relatively light, but if you have ever been to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., or visited the memorials of the concentration camps, you've seen some of this man's handiwork.
• 1:05:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: You've seen some of the images of the skeletons, you've been in the room where the sheer numbers of victims are remembered, and it kind of sits with you in a really unpleasant way that you carry with you.
• 1:05:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: But I don't know that we can have these conversations without capturing a little bit of that energy.
• 1:05:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: During the war, Mangala would frequently send his mentor, Vaughan Varskyur, the skeletons of murdered prisoners.
• 1:05:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like, look what I found, look at this interesting thing.
• 1:05:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: I don't want to get too detailed, but again, it would be very horrible.
• 1:05:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: And one simple fact that I will share that's documented, sometimes he would so children and or their organs together.
• 1:05:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: to see if they could survive as, quote, Siamese twins.
• 1:05:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: And of course, every child died.
• 1:05:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: So, just rough.
• 1:05:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: And here's the worst part, somehow.
• 1:05:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: When the war ended, in Mangala escaped Germany using a fake name, and Nazi supporters helped him relocate to Argentina and other countries in South America.
• 1:05:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: He lived as a fugitive for over thirty years, evading most investigations while others were captured and killed, he evaded.
• 1:06:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: So he died decades later from drowning.
• 1:06:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: He had a stroke while he was swimming in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in,
• 1:06:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: So this is a very sobering discussion and one of the more serious ones.
• 1:06:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: But you're about to meet Arnhem Zola.
• 1:06:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: So let's trip to Captain America to a nine through two, twelve.
• 1:06:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is nineteen seventy seven.
• 1:06:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is Jack Kirby going unhinged and doing some insane Captain America stuff that has never been done before.
• 1:06:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: Captain America and his friend Donna Maria Pentes made a new super villain named Arnhem Zola, the biophonatic and he is difficult to describe.
• 1:06:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: Picture television view screen almost like magic mirror on the wall energy.
• 1:06:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: Full of one man's mad face framed and purple, but then make that the torso of this man's body surrounded by a purple tunic and then give him muscular arms and legs that extend from there.
• 1:07:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's dressed in orange purple and yellow over the crotch.
• 1:07:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's a symbol that kind of looks like multiple man's symbol.
• 1:07:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's like the cellular division into five.
• 1:07:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: And in place of where his head would be, there's a little remote device that looks like a camera.
• 1:07:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: Jack Kirby has gone crazy as he shows us an ever changing landscape made of skin and cells and folds and flaps.
• 1:07:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: Zola is like the Willy Wonka and his weird skin castle, having designed a full land where everything responds to his touch and his thought.
• 1:07:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: He flies around on his most known creation, a guy he named Doboy.
• 1:07:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: And Doboy is just this big skin thing that floats around and changes shape.
• 1:07:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's kind of cute.
• 1:07:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: Here's his origin story in his own words.
• 1:07:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: Before I became what you now see before you I was quite an ordinary little man, a rather modest and withdrawn little man.
• 1:07:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: I spent my days in the stone tower of the castle built by my ancestors centuries ago.
• 1:07:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: It still stands in the mountains of Switzerland.
• 1:07:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: My name was Arnhem Zoller.
• 1:07:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: My world was the laboratory, the world of biochemistry.
• 1:08:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: From my window I could see the flames of war, turn the skies red over Germany.
• 1:08:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: But what other men did concerned me little for I owned, what all humanity thirsted for,
• 1:08:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: The secret of life hidden beneath the stone floor in the cast iron box.
• 1:08:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: Time, and again, I would pull through the epidural papers that contained.
• 1:08:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: They would brought back by from the Near East during the Crusades, and I decoded the ancient notes long before the discovery of DNA.
• 1:08:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: I suppose I became the first genetic engineer in modern times.
• 1:08:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: I devised experiments to produce man-made life, and he starts experimenting with all kinds of dangerous life forms, many of which have to be destroyed.
• 1:08:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: With careful deliberation, I structured a new body for myself, a stronger body, which housed its brain in a more protected position.
• 1:08:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: I took heroic effort to construct an instrument that would transfer my own personality to the brain and not other body, but I did that too.
• 1:08:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: One night, the old arms-old and died.
• 1:08:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: The new one lived to continue his work.
• 1:08:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: he was able to deal with whatever his experiments produced.
• 1:08:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: This new brain within his body was so potent that he could control them by thought alone.
• 1:09:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: And so Zola creates again imprimous who is his own version of the Master Race, a pliable super subject, who has to trap the heroes.
• 1:09:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: Primus wants Donamaria pointess for himself.
• 1:09:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: Zola is struggling to keep his subjects under control, saying things like biotechnology is the answer to all the cumbersome noisy dirty and faulty machines of modern man.
• 1:09:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: With genetic engineering, I shall point the way to new creations.
• 1:09:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: The cover of Captain America, two-ten, features the Red Skull's face melting into tendrils, wrapping around the faces of his enemies like his head as the hydrosimble itself.
• 1:09:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: Meanwhile, Agent Thirteen, or Sharon Carter, has been sent to find the evil Cyrus Fenton, a white old man with a beard who's funding all kinds of criminal ventures, including those of Artem Zola, and surprise, we rip the mask off and Fenton is the Red Skull in stage makeup.
• 1:09:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: He killed the real, even though his face is a mask.
• 1:09:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: I saw his makeup over his mask over his face.
• 1:09:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: He killed the real fenton and then took all of his money.
• 1:09:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: And when he meets Sharon, he says, I often regret that the Nazi philosophy excludes the strength of women.
• 1:10:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, Zola ends up making a new creation called Nazi X. A golden man in pink pants and a pink mask and inside that an actual human brain that Zola has a transplanted and is controlling.
• 1:10:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: Also, Zola can upload his mind into his
• 1:10:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: entire creepy castle controlling the very walls and floors.
• 1:10:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: Okay, we eventually get some more truths about Zola.
• 1:10:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's the one that kept Hitler alive after the war, cloning him, turning him into the hate monger.
• 1:10:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: He also keeps bringing the red skull back.
• 1:10:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: So he's formed these deals with these evil Nazis and he's the Mr. Sinister of the Fourth Reich, if you will.
• 1:10:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: And now he wants to clone Captain America and put the
• 1:10:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: Brain of Adolf Hitler into this like very super soldier Aryan body.
• 1:10:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: In the end, and I'm skipping over some shit, the base blows up and the Nazis escape.
• 1:10:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: But now Zola has Steve Rogers DNA.
• 1:10:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: So don't forget that because that becomes a huge plot point later.
• 1:10:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: That was a lot of introduction.
• 1:10:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: Let me welcome my dear friend Matt Perry to talk about this crazy fucking story with me.
• 1:10:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: Matt, are you a red skull fan?
• 1:10:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: No, I'm not a red skull fan.
• 1:10:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: I am the X-Men fandoms resident Saber Tooth Defender.
• 1:11:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm not going to defend the red skull.
• 1:11:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: Oh my god.
• 1:11:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: No, are you an Artem Zola fan?
• 1:11:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
• 1:11:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: Here's what I will say.
• 1:11:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think Jack Kirby draws the shit out of Artem Zola in this comic book.
• 1:11:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: I can't help but like a guy who's like, I'm so smart.
• 1:11:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'll put my head in my chest.
• 1:11:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's a safer place for my brain.
• 1:11:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: But no, of course, I mean, I don't like Artem's.
• 1:11:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: I like Artem Zola as an antagonist.
• 1:11:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think I found him very prescient antagonist when I was reading this.
• 1:11:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is the first time I've read this story.
• 1:11:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I was just going to ask, what was it like for you to jump into this crazy Jack Kirby world?
• 1:11:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is him kind of just doing his own thing.
• 1:11:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's writing and drawing and just having a fucking great time taking all the Captain America stories and flipping them on their head and going crazy with super sides.
• 1:11:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's a moment in here that really spoke to me about the money man that the Cyrus Fenton
• 1:11:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: that red skull disguises himself as, Mussolini is quoted saying that fascism should more properly be called corporatism, because it is the merger of state and corporate power.
• 1:12:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I found it really interesting that the red skulls like deal in the real world in this comic is like, I'm gonna be the money man that like, that money is the like, the tendrils of the hydra, right?
• 1:12:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like that it is that that's his way of sort of having that soft power.
• 1:12:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: No, I think that's a brilliant observation.
• 1:12:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: So let's talk about the the fun beats first of all over the pieces of the story that you were delighted by because it's really fun.
• 1:12:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's a gen lead time.
• 1:12:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: It is.
• 1:12:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: I loved primus and dough boys like dynamic.
• 1:12:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: I liked the primus sort of vaulted by double because he kind of is double way.
• 1:12:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then when Arnam is like, oh, double, I will do whatever I say.
• 1:12:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: Primus is like, yeah, because you prod him and make him do whatever you say.
• 1:12:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then he's like sort of absorbed it.
• 1:12:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's this really like premises and it grieves like kind of insell, but he's also just born.
• 1:12:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: So there is this like real sad dark thing that's happening between the two of them.
• 1:13:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: I thought that was that was wild.
• 1:13:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: The obsession with the master race is fascinating.
• 1:13:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: I've got some really interesting lovecraft content coming up on my show this fall in lovecraft who created a lot of these like supernatural monstrous mythos was very much a racist eugenicist kind of Aryan idea the monsters represent people of color
• 1:13:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: people that are genetically inferior, etc.
• 1:13:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: This obsession with, if we can't promote it, we have to wipe it out or create our own, is this kind of a weird theme that we see with the red skull and his compatriots very frequently, Arnhem Zola being a very bizarre example of that, because Arnhem Zola is both obsessed with Aryanism, but he's also obsessed with the potential of genetics unhinged, which is very Mr. Cittister as well.
• 1:13:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, he's a tech fascist, right?
• 1:13:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like he is he in in some way obviously there's the Mengala comparison and that's what Kirby is drawing on.
• 1:13:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: I found him very much sort of like a peer teal who very wouldn't this is being interviewed, but this is being recorded.
• 1:14:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: Recently said he couldn't say that he wanted the human race to continue.
• 1:14:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like there is like this mindset when you get obsessed enough with like the advancement and technology.
• 1:14:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: that like you do alone can save us, right?
• 1:14:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like that you alone can make us the people we're supposed to be.
• 1:14:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like fascism seeks to control and dominate and tech is a really great tool for that, isn't it?
• 1:14:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: The comparison between Zola and Mangala is deeply uncomfortable because body horror when we're reading comics is really fun.
• 1:14:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's so many fun things.
• 1:14:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: Onto mutate your heroes into a halt or to turn them into an old man or to mask from the moral ox touches your face and you become this melted flesh version of yourself.
• 1:14:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's something delightful about that.
• 1:14:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: We see that unhinged in the comics all the time, but the real world comparison, the experimentation and extermination of children seen as genetically inferior and innocence being murdered is a rough comparison that I think we have to have that conversation when we're looking at this book.
• 1:15:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: Arnhem is a great tool for Jack Kirby to use to talk about those things without having to make Zola explicitly responsible for the crimes of the Holocaust, which like, he probably has some hand in that, but like, we don't have to see it on page, right?
• 1:15:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: We can instead see it's just as grotesque, it's like, it's like sympathy for the audience a little bit that you don't have to witness bear witness to the actual crimes of the Holocaust.
• 1:15:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, and the red skull, disguising himself with, you know, the white face in the beard, whereas Arnhem Zola is not even trying to disguise himself at all.
• 1:15:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: But we have a number of creations, Doboy, which is kind of the experiments unhinged primus, which is what he's trying to create.
• 1:15:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then we've got Nazi X, which is the brain transplanted in the genetic body
• 1:15:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: with the goal of putting Hitler's brain in Steve Rogers, more Aryan body, which means Hitler's was an inferior in the first place.
• 1:15:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: And that's the crazy thing about fascism that makes me so fucking mad.
• 1:16:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's so many things, but Hitler and Trump are both these terrible, awful inferior people promoting the pretty people that they want to be surrounded by.
• 1:16:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: It makes me crazy, I hate it.
• 1:16:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: aesthetics are such an important part of fascism, right?
• 1:16:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: The uniformity and the design and what makes Captain America a great character is that he is an Aryan-looking man who rejects all of those things.
• 1:16:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's similar with Superman.
• 1:16:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: Captain America I think kind of does it a little better or at least little more like clearly because he is also a buff blonde American like soldier, right?
• 1:16:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: That he is he is the stated ideal of what Hitler is going for despite the fact that interior like his interior is the opposite where he comes from is the opposite who he was and who he will be is the opposite.
• 1:16:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's it's like a direct rejection just in an image.
• 1:16:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: What are your thoughts on the Nazi ex piece of the story?
• 1:17:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: Brains being transplanted into other people's bodies is such a deep, dark, scary idea.
• 1:17:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, especially the promises we get out, right?
• 1:17:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: It is, it's very get out.
• 1:17:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's very like we will take, we will push you down and we will put this thing in your body.
• 1:17:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's like, and that was actually very interesting thing at the beginning of this comic, Arnhem Zola describes Captain America as a living legend.
• 1:17:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's very complimentary to Captain America because aesthetically,
• 1:17:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: He loves Captain America.
• 1:17:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's a big buff blonde guy.
• 1:17:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: So let's put Hitler in there.
• 1:17:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's a very scary thought.
• 1:17:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: Okay, we'd like to play this game in my show a lot.
• 1:17:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: A fuck Mary Kill, the hate manga, red skull and arms old.
• 1:17:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm just kidding.
• 1:17:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: Don't answer that.
• 1:17:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm gonna kill all of them if that's all right with you.
• 1:17:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's been a really fun opening YouTube.
• 1:17:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: These conversations with are you a red skull fan and everyone's like, wait what?
• 1:17:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think he serves a great purpose narratively.
• 1:17:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like, you know, but no, no, I'm not a red skull fan.
• 1:18:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: So we can draw the X-Men comparison here as well, right?
• 1:18:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: When we have characters like the Dark Beast, Mr. Sinister, we go over to like the Spider-Man universe and we've got the Jackal, we've got characters that are like play with this like genetic soup and they're all kind of the mangola
• 1:18:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: vision of a character if you will.
• 1:18:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: The survival of the fittest that let's mess with the DNA and create the perfect thing.
• 1:18:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: The sinister comparison is obviously the most direct one where dark beast is often like a more unhinged version of that, especially in the age of apocalypse.
• 1:18:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: The fact that we put people like this in power, that we say let's create policies that treat people as something to be experimented on,
• 1:18:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: is not something just in fascism.
• 1:18:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's something we've seen across American history with slaves, with black people, with Native Americans, with immigrants far too frequently, where black and brown people become fodder for someone to experiment on.
• 1:18:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's deeply painful, and it's a part of every diverse person's history
• 1:19:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: disabled people have a really strong part of this conversation as well.
• 1:19:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: Again, the Holocaust Museum, there's images that will never leave my brain of people who were disabled that were horribly treated and they have photos and their stories being told in that place.
• 1:19:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: I don't know.
• 1:19:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: Have you ever been to the Holocaust Museum?
• 1:19:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: I have.
• 1:19:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: I lived in DC for a long time.
• 1:19:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm native, and I'm Jewish, and so the fascism is a pernicious little thing that your family has to, my family was very specific about taking me and instilling, and you can't accept these things when you see them.
• 1:19:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: I've been to the Dallas one, I've been to the DC one, I went to the Boston one on my honeymoon.
• 1:19:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: How romantic.
• 1:19:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: Allison's a history teacher.
• 1:19:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like if there's more, there's more to it than that, I guess.
• 1:19:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: Let's stay at a better breakfast than then go back after for a little fun.
• 1:19:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: Kind of.
• 1:19:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
• 1:19:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: Oh no, I hear you.
• 1:19:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm out of here for it.
• 1:20:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: The thing the Xman bring to the table and and especially like dark beast or like Percy's beast even when when they say Percy's beast we're talking about what beast be called.
• 1:20:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yes, who and that beast is not a separate alternate beast.
• 1:20:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's beast that's our beast who turns into that.
• 1:20:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: But what I what I do like about the dark beast and the Henry McCoy character that
• 1:20:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: that becomes evil is that, like, it reminds us that these things can happen again.
• 1:20:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: It reminds us that those are future versions of Mangala, where Artum Zola is like rooted in the past, even his journal is from this ancient history of like, geneticists, right?
• 1:20:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: And, and since history is from the past too, so a lot of that, like, that Victorian era is where he's sort of like positioned in then he's part of the Nazi party.
• 1:20:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: Evil Hank McCoy tells us you have to continue to watch out for it.
• 1:20:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like that this, this is
• 1:20:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: something that's still on the table if things go bad enough.
• 1:20:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: Other thoughts on this storyline?
• 1:20:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: Um, generally, I thought Jack Kirby draws a crazy fucking face when he needs to.
• 1:21:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like, the Artem Zola and Captain America have like just the like the Kirby eyes.
• 1:21:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: Several several times and it's you feel it.
• 1:21:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's just like great emotionality here.
• 1:21:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: Sam Wilson is in this comp, Sam, I love Sam, Sam's might, maybe my very favorite comic book character.
• 1:21:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: And he kind of is just dodging rocks through a lot of it, but I was glad to see him.
• 1:21:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's a crazy, it's a crazy story.
• 1:21:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: Watching these stories from the risk perspective, the red school wanted to time deeply uncomfortable, deeply resonant to modern America.
• 1:21:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: where we are seeing people rounded up and sent to places and imprisoned and framed.
• 1:21:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's such a deep part of our history, but we're not trying to veil it as anything but fascism right now.
• 1:21:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, it's kind of rough.
• 1:21:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: The real world applications of this as you and I as a people who support our communities going through it in real time.
• 1:21:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: I don't know if you have any thoughts on the twenty twilight five comparison.
• 1:21:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's hard to keep these light.
• 1:21:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like we're trying to find the joy at all of this, but I think these conversations are important and it like,
• 1:22:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think the twenty twenty five comparison, the point I made about Peter Teele is that like they're still buffoons, right?
• 1:22:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: The thing they want is still buffoonish, right?
• 1:22:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: Your point about Trump not being Aryan or not being the thing that his aesthetics asked for
• 1:22:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: is I think the more that we laugh at these people, the more that we stand and point out these hypocrisy is the better, is probably what I would say about the twenty twenty-five comparison.
• 1:22:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like Artem Zola certainly is not an Aryan.
• 1:22:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: He doesn't even see himself as that, but he would love to turn the world a certain way.
• 1:22:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: Thank you, Matt, parent.
• 1:22:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's always delightful to see you.
• 1:22:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I always appreciate a special speaker.
• 1:22:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: This was a serious one.
• 1:22:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: And the idea of, well, I guess the last thing we haven't really pushed here is the Nazi escaping justice.
• 1:22:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: Mr. the Jackal, the Red School, Artem Zola, the hate manga.
• 1:22:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: These are all characters that come back again and again and again and again.
• 1:23:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: We got to celebrate because it's something for the villains to fight against, but good lord.
• 1:23:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: And we haven't, I don't know, we haven't even discussed like Baron Zemo and Baron Strucker and these conversations at all.
• 1:23:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: They're so many versions of this.
• 1:23:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: Masterman and warrior woman are characters that we will bring up, probably.
• 1:23:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: Some of it's that comic books are for, they have a certain morality to them.
• 1:23:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that Captain America can't be seen just like cutting the red skulls head off, right?
• 1:23:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like, we want him to succeed and defeat him and be put in jail.
• 1:23:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that generally is the morality of the book.
• 1:23:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: But there does, at a certain point, the kind of violence I do think needs to
• 1:23:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: is the very least like inviting different answers.
• 1:23:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think we've seen that, though, in more modern comics.
• 1:23:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know.
• 1:23:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: Here we're so far away from, you know, Hitler, at least that like, you don't need to do anything with the dead skull of Hitler.
• 1:23:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: You don't need to do it.
• 1:23:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: We want the red skull to show up in more comics, too, right?
• 1:24:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: We've got enough versions of the proud boys in real life are orcas in the comics to make it, but it's it's uncomfortable.
• 1:24:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: Let me ask you one more question about before we wrap up.
• 1:24:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: What are your thoughts on this kind of narrative of fascism as the baseline evil in our comics?
• 1:24:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's always the great thing that our heroes have to rise against.
• 1:24:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think it should be the basis of what we fight against.
• 1:24:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think like it is the fight against fascism is the fight of the of the twentieth and the twenty first century.
• 1:24:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's an important thing to continuously come back as much as like people don't love repetition in comics.
• 1:24:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: You do have to continue to state that this attitude, that this behavior, that these lack of humanity and this disregard for people's bodies is evil.
• 1:24:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't always enjoy it, but I do think it's important.
• 1:24:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, thank you, my friend.
• 1:24:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: You are smart and charismatic and wonderful.
• 1:24:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: I appreciate you coming on the show.
• 1:24:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: Thank you so much for having me.
• 1:24:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: And thanks everyone for listening.
• 1:24:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: We'll see you back here next time.
• 1:24:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: My friend, Erica Schultz joins me for the next story.