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Bonus Patreon Release: the Lightning Squad! With Andrew Deman! · Graymalkin Lane the podcast

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: Hey everybody, welcome back to the Great Mulk and Lane podcast, Patreon channel, as mentioned before, we're going to be delving deep into fascism in pop culture, this month on the character channel.
• 0:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: We're going to get some serious content today again, but I promise we'll balance it out with a lot of fun, because these are super hero comics, and what's more fun than early Excalibur in the late 1980s, but then we get to the kitty pride of it also,
• 0:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: We're gonna leave it into both sides.
• 0:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm thrilled to welcome the incredible Andrew Demand back to the show today to talk all about lightning force, which is an early Claremont cross time-caper alternate reality story that features a very different version of our familiar heroes.
• 0:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: Andrew, welcome back to the show.
• 0:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: Tell everybody a little about yourself, your pronouns, and I'd love to hear you share some of your thoughts on early Excalibur with folks.
• 0:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: I know you're one of the resident experts
• 0:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for having me.
• 0:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm Dr. Janet and I'm a common scholar at the University of Waterloo.
• 0:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've been working on Chris Clare once worked for a very, very long time.
• 1:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: My personal opinion is that his early run on his caliber is one of his best if not his best empowered greatly by Alan Davis.
• 1:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's delightful.
• 1:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's something that he's never really done before or since in terms of its own.
• 1:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's occasionally, I'm quite capable of producing insight and a pot media format.
• 1:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's very like disarming.
• 1:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: I kind of love it for that.
• 1:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: This set up for this, now for listeners of the show, we've recently introduced Captain Britain to the show for the first time.
• 1:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: We've also gotten to Claremont, so my show's firmly dwelling in around 1976 on the main show right now.
• 1:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: So Claremont's been writing a lot of horror stuff.
• 1:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: We've been featuring his work from different places, ranging from the son of Satan and Satan to some of his work in titles, kind of adjacent to the X-Men, as well as of course, his early X-Men work.
• 1:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: He was very intagrely involved in the creation of Brian Radik in the 1970s and those early adventures, Arzani and Crazy.
• 1:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now we're in, we're very early on in those in the show and this is kind of my first time reading a lot of Brian's stuff but at a certain point it goes very doctor who we start jumping around reality is we start adding a lot of James Bond's super science, a lot of crazy mythology along the way and then of course the X-Men are going through a ton in the 80s which we'll get to as well
• 2:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: how did you first Andrew become that familiar with the Claremont work and how did you first attach to early Excalibur if you will?
• 2:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: So the Claremont work was a broad dumb luck.
• 2:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think the thing was one of the first comms I ever bought actually was an uncanny experiment like Claremont, because I said before kind of skewed my opinion of what comics are, because I was like, wow, this is great, and the writing is, and I assumed it was everywhere like that, and I was convinced that that like reworm hole led me to Excalibur, which I don't think I had much interest in,
• 2:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: like British X-Men.
• 2:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think for a lot of people it was a low on the checklist, right?
• 2:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: But then you discover it and at first you're a little like I'm cognitive dissonance in terms of like this is revered.
• 2:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: Why is it so different like that stuff?
• 2:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: The more you read it, the more you kind of appreciate it, the more it is.
• 2:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: You see the subtleties.
• 2:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: the nuance.
• 2:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then again, like the glee to it, which is something Claremont is not associated with.
• 3:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you think of Scalibur, I've described it to Claremont, actually.
• 3:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: I describe it to him as group therapy, meets sex bars, trauma therapy, specifically.
• 3:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he said, yeah, I agree.
• 3:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he didn't agree with anything.
• 3:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's very, very verbose.
• 3:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think it's something kind of
• 3:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: kind of special.
• 3:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think for those who love this, they know there's nothing like it.
• 3:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: And my my colleagues Christopher Maverick and I have a part and I come to an issue by issue podcast on a scale of recall to gosh call you wow for like three years that was our big pandemic project.
• 3:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it'll always have a special place.
• 3:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's a lot of really zany fun stuff that's being tossed around from the crazy gang to widget to get pressure in the technet.
• 3:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: It goes very high concept, but it's very balanced in like very rooted character.
• 3:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: Early Excalibur feels like a sitcom to me almost.
• 3:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: I want to cue a laugh track a lot of time.
• 3:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: Brian Braddock, you know, his clothes are ripping when he's trying to save civilians and everyone's staring at it.
• 3:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's so many really funny, delicious moments happening for these characters.
• 4:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: I love when we take a book rooted in character, and then we build story and mythology around that.
• 4:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: And Lightning Force, which we'll get to admit it, is a very clear direct parallel on all of the characters' stories that are being told in the main book.
• 4:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: Obviously, there's a lot of moving pieces from the weird happenings organization to whatever the warpies are.
• 4:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: a lot of shit going around the war wolves they're flying around and there's a lot of deep characters from Alistane Stewart to Dytomas and others that are kind of moving in and out of these books.
• 4:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think that's one of the greatest strengths of Excelibre and in terms of Claremont's choice, like as you said, he created Captain Britain and what he created was pretty Marvel fair at the time, right?
• 4:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: It wasn't the wacky thing.
• 4:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: that we can talk in a boat, but then I got really, really complicated by writers like Jamie Delano and Alan Moore, who came in in the each brought their own very unique creative visions.
• 4:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: And instead of throwing that out when Claire Montgomery explained the character, he just took it in random.
• 4:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I mean, I think there's a really good, like, I don't know, let's call it an allegory for why you should collaborate as a writer.
• 5:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: In terms of what you can do with that.
• 5:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because I don't, I don't think Claire Montgomery could have gotten cats in Britain to wear this alone, but what he's able to do with that, I think
• 5:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, there's a, there's a, there's a lot of history to this character.
• 5:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: And again, we'll be slowly dubbing through as we get on the show early Captain Britain's pretty simple and almost almost the now a little bit.
• 5:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's it's fun.
• 5:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: We've been doing live script readings with it of a fully Britain.
• 5:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: So if you really want to enjoy it, I have a I have three gay men in London and two Scottish transgender drag queens.
• 5:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: all reading all of the characters in live recordings, and it's quite delightful when you hear these early characters.
• 5:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like the very first guy that he faces is Joshua Strag the Reaver.
• 5:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: My friend Giza Gobble, who is Scottish, has been reading that character.
• 5:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: But listen to, so yeah, for those that have not heard, I would actively encourage.
• 5:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: Andrew, tell everybody a little about your book, your research, your academic pursuits.
• 6:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I've been working on this, um, Firemont Studies project for five years now.
• 6:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: First book came out two years ago, and won the Eisner Award for, um, public publication, the second one, which is a biography of Claire Monk, more like a biography of his living work.
• 6:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: Came out last week.
• 6:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't have a copy yet, just fun.
• 6:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: I hadn't even heard about this release yet.
• 6:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: Please when we're done sending me a link, I would love to order it.
• 6:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh yeah, it's just focused fair amount for the University of Mississippi Press.
• 6:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, okay.
• 6:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, my graphic series.
• 6:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: I got one more that I'm writing, and I think that'll be it for my Claremont Projects.
• 6:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then other than that, I run a social media public facing comic scholarship project called Sequential Scholars with my colleague Annable Park again, post a podcast on representations of sexuality and gender in manga.
• 6:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: My partner in.
• 6:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: And what's that called?
• 6:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: the section in chapter and manga.
• 6:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes it's good to be real literal.
• 6:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yes, sometimes you just got to say what it is, right?
• 6:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then you want to tell everybody a little bit about Augusto Gallio Wow, which it claims a really special place in my heart as far as a comics podcasting goes.
• 7:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think it's delicious.
• 7:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, thank you.
• 7:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 7:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I'm glad.
• 7:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: All credit and glory Dan that was that was largely her creation Maven.
• 7:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: I would kind of just show up so it was an issue by issue break down We would bring another common scholars when we conduct scholarly analysis on this mix calibre issue by issue, which sometimes it merits it and then sometimes Sort of pulling this sort of a pop culture references
• 7:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: of it in a way that it's not necessarily approaching as literature, but as I don't represent it with a culture.
• 7:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: Sometimes we're reading an analyzing writers like Opus, and other times we're like really trying hard to find truth in something that they just bambed out in a couple days because they had a script do.
• 7:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and he's gallop is that right like when it's created when it's being given the space it's got maybe the best writer going Marvel comics Well, I would maybe the best illustrator going you Marvel comics like it's a prestige piece it costs the little extra It has fans your paper and then once that ends Excalibur becomes an afterthought for from Marvel and for the X-Men line it becomes a jumping
• 7:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: around.
• 7:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that doesn't mean there's not good stuff in it.
• 8:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's actually some really good particularly young creators that came out of it later on, but it certainly wasn't anyone's favorite book after a while.
• 8:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is kind of sad to see that progression.
• 8:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now Claremont and we won't have time for a super deep dive here.
• 8:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: Claremont has grown a lot as a writer by 1988, right?
• 8:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's been in the company for a long time.
• 8:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: Marvel's been through a ton of changes.
• 8:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: The culture has been through a ton of changes.
• 8:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: Consider 1976, kind of this post-Vietnam protest, kind of hippy civil rights era, and then go to 1988, where in America, at least, it's like very ergonomics, right?
• 8:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: Claire Mont, six years before the launch of Excalibur, in 1982, gave us God Loves Man kills, which is one of those transformative moments for the X-Men, where far right Christian leaf systems exercised their prejudice by crucifying killing mutants on the page.
• 8:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's some really interesting things done with Kitty Pride's character through this era as she tries to compare kind of what being a mutant is to being a black person as for example.
• 8:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: And some of it doesn't look great, but you can definitely see what they were trying to do at the time as he's trying to draw those as well.
• 9:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: We've seen Claremont explore the characters of Magneto and Professor X through the lens of Minochembegan and David Ben Duryan, which we've talked about on the show a bunch of times.
• 9:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: We've also recently in the comics at this point seen the more lock massacre.
• 9:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's a kind of the genocide of mutants by armed mercenaries.
• 9:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: We've seen days of future past where there is concentration camp, era kind of stuff in the future.
• 9:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: Version of Kitty Pride, with very short hair who has survived the camps, gets sent back to the past to try to change the future.
• 9:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: We've also seen the character Rachel Summers join the group.
• 9:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: Rachel is a character who has escaped this kind of dystopian future, who was turned into a hound to hunt down her own people.
• 9:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: So she's representative of what that possible future could be if things just went wrong.
• 9:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's a real-life parallel for Rachel in Nazi Germany, which we talked about a little on the show, where the Nazis would capture Jewish women, particularly who look more Aryan, and they would promise like, oh, we're going to put you in the cities.
• 10:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: I want you to look for Jews in hiding and turn them over to us, and we will eventually maybe grant you Aryan status and save your family.
• 10:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: it's own way.
• 10:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then we have the character Megan, who is kind of her own version of all this.
• 10:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: As we're building the team, Captain Britain has come across Megan, do you want to tell everyone a little about the introduction of Megan?
• 10:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so Megan starts in the work of more I believe as a very sheltered Romani child who is raised on to essentially.
• 10:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: What makes you really interesting from a super power perspective is she
• 10:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: which her emotions drive her body transfigurations to some extent and she does it largely subconsciously for the sake of pleasing people.
• 10:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: So whatever you want her to be, she sort of becomes and she's conscious of that but doesn't love herself for that.
• 10:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: So this really cool kind of relationship dynamics that I'm urging that metaphorically, I would argue play nicely off of this A.U.
• 11:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Story that we're telling.
• 11:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: So now we're going to jump to early or mid-1980s, Excalibur is being launched, and each of the characters is kind of on their own journey.
• 11:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's a lot of comedy, there's a lot of sci-fi, there's a lot of really fun zany superhero dynamics, but there's kind of an element of horror in the background as well.
• 11:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: The war wolves is a perfect example.
• 11:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: And go listen to early episodes of Ogashul, we'll go all the way out that kind of talk about a lot of this stuff.
• 11:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's really fun to break it apart.
• 11:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: We'll eventually get there on the show.
• 11:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: But that launches us into Excalibur numbers 9 through 11, which is where we're gonna spend the bulk of our time.
• 11:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: Because the lightning force who we're here to talk about, we don't have to delve, well, there's just not a lot of appearances.
• 11:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: I suppose it's an easy way to say it.
• 11:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like they've only shown up a few times.
• 11:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: We are telling a story about a world alternate world where things went differently.
• 11:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I want to kind of launch into very quickly the book, the man in the high castle for those that may or may not have seen it.
• 11:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's an incredible, uh, Philodic book.
• 11:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's very widely respected for a lot of reasons.
• 12:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's an odd kind of,
• 12:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: Buddhist track of like thinking styles as we explore alternate reality and like what identity means.
• 12:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's a very deep dive.
• 12:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now there is a more modern television show on Amazon Prime for those that might like to see it.
• 12:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think it's three seasons long.
• 12:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, it might be four seasons.
• 12:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: where it takes a lot of the concepts of the book and kind of expands upon them.
• 12:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's quite well made if not always careful with certain themes.
• 12:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm so tired by the way of the trope of people getting like beat on camera during television shows.
• 12:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like that, that somebody punches someone in the head 14 times.
• 12:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm like, oh, I'm so passed out.
• 12:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's no concussions.
• 12:42
  [UNKNOWN]: Wait, wait.
• 12:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: That show has a lot of deep violence in it.
• 12:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: But the theme in the man in the high castle is what if the Nazis had won, basically?
• 12:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: America in this book is divided between the Japan and Germany in the way that Germany got divided after the war by the allies in Russia, basically.
• 13:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: The country is kind of west and east with like a neutral zone in the middle.
• 13:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: And there's a lot of political intrigue and a lot of perspective shown.
• 13:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: This book, these characters lightning force that we're about to read seem to be Claremont's kind of take on the man in the high castle, particularly in the graphic novel that we'll get to at the end.
• 13:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's where it really leans hard into it.
• 13:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Man in the high castle is Philip K. Dick says he said it was kind of I would argue his and few a into more series literary consideration, not that he got that before he passed one fortunately.
• 13:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think being
• 13:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know, it presented itself as more respectful, even though it's by no means Philip K. Dick diluted or restrained.
• 13:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's very PKD for 1962, Claremont, Claremont's a big PKD fan.
• 13:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Which I think most writers in this era are, because PKD was an imagination machine.
• 13:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: He could come up with so many good ideas, and since he was large out of the radar, a lot of other writers kind of ate them, and each other mainstream formats, Claremont, no exception.
• 14:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: So what he presents
• 14:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: is his version in which, um, Excalibur has this, this alternate Nazi team that comes into the main 616 universe and wants to take it over because they're Nazis.
• 14:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, uh, and then you want to tell everyone a little about cross-time paper because that's the, this story that's been building over some time in Excalibur.
• 14:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's a fun backdrop, but it gets busy.
• 14:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: But it gets real busy.
• 14:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think we should note that lightning forces actually the entryway into the cross time paper before they really go on the cross time.
• 14:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: Paper, lightning force comes to them.
• 14:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's a very famous kind of, I don't even know how to describe it.
• 14:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like it's standard arc maybe, in which a caliber goes bouncing around from different alternate universes for a course of roughly two and a half years.
• 14:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: And mostly it's not even a tour of universes.
• 14:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a tour of literary constructs everywhere they go.
• 14:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're going to encounter the ones that hang
• 14:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: counter, man, that castle as we're talking about.
• 14:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's just, it's books.
• 14:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's Claremont giving us a tour of his reading shelf by having a super rare character's, um, wander through each of those universes, then learn a little more about themselves each time, right?
• 15:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't think they learned anything about themselves with the entire crust that I paid for to be honest with you.
• 15:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've been kidney prior experience as a sexual awakening pack.
• 15:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think that's more or less
• 15:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's a, there's a lot of character stuff thrown in and I think that's kind of where I want to spend some of our conversation today is like If you've seen everything everywhere all at once, there's this other world where a little choice that I made differently, it's the what if concept, the little choice I made differently, and I and I turn out very different.
• 15:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: So if we take the man in the high castle question,
• 15:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: What if the Nazis won and the world goes a different way?
• 15:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: What does that mean for mutants?
• 15:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: What does that mean for each of our key characters?
• 15:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to ask you one more big one.
• 15:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: Tell everybody Andrew, what's a widget?
• 15:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: So a widget is more or less a trans-dimensional vessel that has achieved consciousness.
• 15:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it can work you to alter the universe as it's created at random.
• 16:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like the opening or ending of an early caliber comic by a superpower being lumping some garbage together.
• 16:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the garbage achieves consciousness and has the power to transmit people to everyone who is simple.
• 16:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so we go to some high concepts stuff very quickly as we introduce all of this.
• 16:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: So we're going to focus a lot of this on character, but I think part of the thought and I want to I'm going to ask this question now and then let's reflect again at the end.
• 16:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: Who am I if my circumstances are different in a divided America as a gay man?
• 16:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: I am one kind of person as a father that identity becomes challenged in a different way as a
• 16:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: as a therapist, as a former Mormon, there's these different pieces of my identity that become challenged.
• 16:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: If I had not grown up in Mormonism, and had been in a household where queerness was embraced, how different would my life be?
• 16:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: But it could also be the reverse question, right?
• 16:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: I remember watching the mighty ducks when I was a kid, and this is the what if concept for me.
• 16:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: And at the end of the mighty ducks, the if you guys recall spoilers for this old movie, the puck in the final shot like bounces off the goal and the team loses
• 17:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the kids like, man, if it had just gone a quarter inch in the other direction, we would have won and the coaches like, yeah, but it could have gone a quarter inch in the other direction and missed completely.
• 17:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think there's a lot of times we look at the world around us and who would I be if things had gone slightly different.
• 17:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: If I'm living in a fascist regime and I have to try to get by, what does that do to my psychology?
• 17:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: If I'm raised in that as a kid versus if it turns that way when I'm an adult, what happens?
• 17:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: So I want to talk a lot about what happens to some of our key characters as part of this journey because I think that's the most interesting part of this story.
• 17:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: I want to throw out there.
• 17:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is one that when I mention to people we're going to do lightning force, they're like, oh no.
• 17:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's like one of the extra topics they're like, you don't want to talk about that when like anything else feels safe, just not that.
• 17:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: Andrew, when I invited you, you were quite willing.
• 17:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, delicate concept and delicate times, but I like it, I think maybe the initial strength coming back to your discussion character is just that, you're not full on embrace is the newness, the idea of the butterfly effect does decide.
• 18:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: He means hard to concept of nurture over nature.
• 18:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we we see that with really wonderful characters who have embraced this Nazi philosophy and become more well, but when I was reading reading this for
• 18:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: I was again thinking of my favorite line from maybe the entire MCU in Captain America the first Avenger where if you're dead his neck the German doctor who's teaching I'm Captain America played by Stanley Tucci.
• 18:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: He said that people tend to forget that the first country the Nazis invaded was their own and again that distinction between clinical ideology and nationalism way we were not good
• 18:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, in America right now, the rest of the world is like America is this terrible place with all these thoughts, and no, there's a whole lot of people who are super not happy and put what's happening in America.
• 18:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now, in America, so I think Claremont going all the way into this idea that we are what our environment allows us to be.
• 19:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: I find it really darkly tragic in a book that presents itself in a really kind of silly way.
• 19:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, uh, sociologically one of the ways I'm framing this if you look at far right versus far left almost at any point in history where these divides show up the far right tends to be the conservative side where we look at what I call entrenched belief systems I want to hold on to my rights and values, uh, which gives me thus and I know this is not the way they would phrase it but it gives me the right to discriminate against others because of my entrenched belief systems.
• 19:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: But the people on the far left who tend to be more liberal thinking tend to be made up by primarily minority groups who have a shared experience of discrimination and those are the groups that are having their civil rights kind of strict way.
• 19:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: When we look at that in Nazi Germany under the Swastikets, easy to recognize 100 years later, but when we're looking at that in modern America, under the sign of the cross or the Bible or whatever, it becomes more difficult, but it's the same kind of system.
• 19:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: So we're going to jump from like silver facility to academic to serious as we go through all of this.
• 20:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: But these are our comic books.
• 20:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is what we're reading and it shapes so much.
• 20:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: So Excalibur numbers 9 through 11 is where we first meet these characters.
• 20:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's 1989, Chris Claremont, Allen Davis, Paul Neary, all at the top of their game.
• 20:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: These are incredible times in the X-Men books.
• 20:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: They're exploring big concepts.
• 20:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: Lockheed the purple dragon is guarding the lighthouse, which is the Excalibur base that has some connections to other realities in mythology, because Captain Britain's very steeped in Arthurian magic and other worlds, etc.
• 20:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's waiting for Excalibur's return, Kitty Pride shows up and then strangles him into unconsciousness, which is a crazy beginning.
• 20:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: We jump to page two and we get the big reveal.
• 20:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's an Excalibur from another world that is hardly our team at all.
• 20:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: This story is called the two-edged sword.
• 20:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: This group is from Earth 597 and you're about to learn way more about them than you want to.
• 20:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: But let's jump back a couple of issues.
• 20:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: At Excalibur number six, we see diatomas of Scott Linyard, who we have introduced on the show and they're really kept and written stuff.
• 20:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: Dytomus is taken by Alice and Stuart of the WHO group to a railway line where an item from another world has manifested into our world again, very the man in the high castle gear and it's a Nazi train It has a red eagle a modified swastika on it and it bears the words right rail England.
• 21:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: Dytomus says out loud.
• 21:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: Fah!
• 21:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: Probably Kevin Flip and Brown, though, filming a sequel to It Happened Here, a movie prop is what it is, or some millionaires toy.
• 21:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, so our first dive into pop culture in story.
• 21:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: Kevin Brown, though, is a real British director who wrote a story for years called It Happened Here, exploring an alternate world where the Nazis won the war.
• 21:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the film didn't do great.
• 21:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was released in 1966.
• 21:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: It is available out there.
• 21:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I like it.
• 21:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: I like it as a tease.
• 21:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: I like it's pretty ominous effect.
• 21:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: And Clairemont trading on the swastika as a symbol that creates cultural anxiety.
• 21:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think it's good storytelling in that sense.
• 21:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: And again, as you mentioned, little details of the spelling of England and stuff like that.
• 21:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's giving you a little piece of art.
• 22:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: of his university come with reissues to go before he does it.
• 22:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: So he knows what he's doing.
• 22:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: I would say.
• 22:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: Have you ever seen it happen here?
• 22:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: No, I've not.
• 22:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, it's an interesting watch.
• 22:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: Let's take a little trip back through time even farther.
• 22:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's 1937 and this is when Hitler's on the rise.
• 22:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: Hitler became Chancellor in 1933.
• 22:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: A Katherine Burtiken wrote a book called Swastik and Night, which imagines a world that has suffered 700 years of Nazi rule.
• 22:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: And this is before the public knowledge of concentration camps at
• 22:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: The great dictator by Charlie Chaplin, 1940, before Pearl Harbor, before the public revelation, again, of concentration camps.
• 22:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: But in swastika night, there's a story in the far future, which is very handmaid's tale.
• 22:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: Women have been enslaved, hitlers, been worshiped as a god.
• 22:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: In 1962, again, we've got the man in the high castle.
• 22:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: So there's these kind of ideas of what the world looks like under Nazi rule, and it's almost always going to be the perspective of the oppressed, because that's again what we explore in Days of Future Past, which I think is Claremont's original version of this world, right?
• 23:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: we have Rachel and other mutants hunting down.
• 23:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: So this story about lightning forces just kind of a jarring version very specifically of what we see in days of future paths where we're watching characters die in gas chambers and posters of all of our heroes murdered on the wall, etc.
• 23:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Just an important piece of context that may have come up elsewhere.
• 23:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Claremont's mom is Jewish.
• 23:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Claremont's spend some time in Israel working at a kibbits.
• 23:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is family for him.
• 23:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is blood distorted and he's felt like.
• 23:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: Claremont also spent a lot of time in England.
• 23:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Do you want to celebrate what it kibbits is?
• 23:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: If I recall correctly, a kibbits is a hospital for healing psychologically for people who went to the Holocaust developed in Israel.
• 23:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: So we have those magneto Xavier stories that we're Gabrielle Holler's introduced a Dr. Phillips myth, and I have a Gabrielle Holler episode out there for those of you that might like to go back and listen, there's some interesting context there as well.
• 23:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, so jumping back to the Reichsrail, we're in Excalibur number six, Alistair Stewart arrives, and they look at this Nazi train from another world, and on board they find two passengers, both of whom have a swastika arm man's on.
• 24:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: One is Moira Nick Taggart,
• 24:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: who has this little Kanti bullcat, but I kind of am fed of it into it.
• 24:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's giving Blom and I tricks.
• 24:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: She says, how dare you place me under God?
• 24:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: Release me at once.
• 24:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm going German, not Scottish, on purpose, for this character.
• 24:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: Release me at once or you will answer to the show of himself.
• 24:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: She's wearing a cobalt blue suit and jacket with an inlay of leopard for plus a choker.
• 24:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: And her bodyguard is colisto, who is in a slate grade tunic and boots with spikes on the heels, black and red choker.
• 24:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: Her hair nearly shaved except for one long side ponytail.
• 24:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: and a red sash.
• 24:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's giving very lesbian.
• 24:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's giving very lost boys, very punk.
• 24:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: Both of them have iron cross jewelry on.
• 24:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is a startling revelation and the choice of Calisto here is already jarg.
• 24:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: So Moira, I think you're getting someone who was a tour believer in Xavier's dream and therefore someone who you wouldn't expect to be indoctrinated, we would again initially establish
• 25:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then Calisto, I don't know like there's ways in which I really like it because as you said, she is heavily queer coded in her presentation here at least visually, but that kind of creates some contradiction with what we know with the Nazi ideology and I feel like if at best it implies sort of other stories to be told.
• 25:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: a complex back story that's worth considering.
• 25:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, crystal, a lot of like counter culture too, right?
• 25:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: Polista when the more locks are we we're going to succeed from society and make our own.
• 25:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: So seeing her here kind of implies that she belongs at the table because she's gone along with the ideology.
• 25:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: The Moira read is interesting, though, because in the 80s, it's the scientist, you know, Nazis famously denies science.
• 25:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: And here we have the scientist or the geneticist, kind of becoming one of the lead people in the Nazi party.
• 25:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: But when you give it the crick-o-a-read, and you know about Moira being a mutant who goes with like, she like allied with the populips in one reality, and she like becomes an assassin, and another, and here's her Nazi journey.
• 26:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's kind of a great take on the character from that perspective character.
• 26:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: So so some of the people who read X-Men afforded out that the character of Moira kind of falls apart in the Chicago era a little bit and becomes hard to reconcile.
• 26:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: This one for me is maybe a little bit of foreshadow We give that I can't make it work.
• 26:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: You have to you have to like read her as a very devious person in order for for it to Yeah, together
• 26:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, let's talk about the roster of the Excalibur that exists in Earth 597.
• 26:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: They're called the Lightning Force, which is its own, I don't know, Nazis have this kind of obsession with organism and even Norse mythology, right?
• 26:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like there's a...
• 26:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's that program where they were paying like blonde, beautiful women to carry the children of Nazi soldiers in scientists so they could raise the array of like Aryan superpeople.
• 26:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's like a real thing in our world that happens.
• 26:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: Brian Braddock in our world is a character of privilege.
• 26:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: He is a student and a scientist and he has like a family castle that's hundreds of years old and he has a ton of privilege and he becomes a Captain Britain.
• 27:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: But in this world he's helped him in England.
• 27:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: and he becomes kind of the poster child for organism in a way.
• 27:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's the beautiful blond strong boy that's like leading the hero force.
• 27:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's the human in charge of the mutant team that has been conscripted to go on these kinds of missions.
• 27:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now the next episode coming out after this listeners will be with some friends.
• 27:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: We're going to talk all about masterman and warrior woman.
• 27:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: who are two cannon marble characters that represent that kind of ideology.
• 27:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's going to be a hilarious episode.
• 27:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: But in this world, Brian Radik is kind of the masterman guy.
• 27:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's got a blonde crew cut.
• 27:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's got a headband with a swastika on it.
• 27:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: The German eagle is inlaid over his chest and bloom instead of the lion of avalan that we know from his original appearance.
• 27:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it partitions off into an entire like white swastika.
• 27:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: His costume is blue green, white purple.
• 28:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: I really like it.
• 28:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think it's one of the more subtle juxtapositions you get between the the Excalibur characters and the lighting force characters.
• 28:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: As you mentioned, like it is foregrounds from Brian is Brian is in a position of privilege in this Anglo-Saxon society.
• 28:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: And as a symbol of, I don't know, about England, Britain,
• 28:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: Western year, like all of those things.
• 28:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: So the idea that that the Nazis did take over Brian would actually be pretty set up right he would be in a good spot Again occupying that privilege in a way that I think brings that to the forefront of its character, which is a major key in the Claireman ends up exploring in a really interesting way.
• 28:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: So nature versus nurture being this guy never had to question his privilege and, you know, he's one of the living.
• 28:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's totally how I read it.
• 28:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: I also like really get tuned in as a result of that to like the character nuances, how how come it is different from captain, you know, and I mean in terms of how they react.
• 28:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's clearly more vicious as all the lightning force characters are.
• 28:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: But in some ways, he's less conflicted and I think that's a relief.
• 28:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, I'm
• 29:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: he's a he's a very like hitler special boy kind of energy which is unconfirmed more from a character read you watch what could have happened for this guy he could have turned full see the right lens you know I think there's that piece of like oh Brian's in a better place and then you're like wait a minute
• 29:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is really uncomfortable to consider that, but I think having a Nazi story that doesn't explore the concept of privilege through Ingrid's in Ocrubs would be really an effected.
• 29:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: In the Ocrubs are coming because they got like an elf and a Romani and a Jewish character.
• 29:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: So like, I don't know, I think having Brian represent that the person who is really well set up if the Nazi regime takes over is important.
• 29:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, spoilers for the man in the high castle, the show at least.
• 29:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: There is, I have to look up this actress's name, but in the series finale, the woman who plays the wife of the Reichsmaster.
• 29:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: She's an American woman who, like, her husband is the leader of the Nazis, basically.
• 29:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: And her daughter confronts her toward the end of the series and is like, I'm so ashamed of what you did.
• 30:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: She's asking her mom like, how could this sort of happen?
• 30:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the mom's like, at a certain point, we made a choice that it had to happen to preserve ourselves.
• 30:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then we believed it.
• 30:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: We turned the blind eye to the world around us until it came for us.
• 30:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: Because the story in this series, they have their oldest child is not well.
• 30:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: He has a genetic condition that thus prescribes him toward death.
• 30:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's an interesting thought.
• 30:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: So Brian having to challenge his privilege.
• 30:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's at peace, but at what cost?
• 30:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: Then we jump over to Megan.
• 30:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: Megan is also very much a voking organism.
• 30:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: Her costumes are very feminized version of Brian's.
• 30:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's almost as though she's the female kind of attache to him.
• 30:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: She's more powerful than him.
• 30:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: I would argue, but in this world, you know, she's a little subservient.
• 30:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: She's exposing her shoulders.
• 30:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: We again see the eagle emblem like hugging her cleavage.
• 30:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: She's got the headband.
• 30:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: She has so much hair.
• 30:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: This wig for drag queens would weigh like 60 patterns, I swear.
• 30:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: But Megan, you know, Hitler's Hitler's philosophy toward women, he would publish like kitchen children church.
• 31:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like that's the only place you belong.
• 31:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: What are your thoughts on Megan's in this world?
• 31:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: She's the empathic character who will match the energy right?
• 31:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and again, I think it represents fulfillment of her broader character arc, which is
• 31:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: again, this person who is dealing with the loss of their self, you know what I mean?
• 31:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm not having as a proof she is innately because she's always capable of changing into whatever other you need.
• 31:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: So having her be in the system with Houtman, England, where she can be the wife, but there's a way in which again her life seems easier, not better necessarily, but easier.
• 31:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think again, there's that temptation there that cats and Britain and Megan would be the ideal couple.
• 31:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: Underline that, of course, is the tension that Megan is
• 31:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Vermont and what that would mean for her to be successful within an Aussie regime.
• 31:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's again what I really like that kind of like iceberg mentality at storytelling like that there's a lot of other stories being influenced under the surface that were never going.
• 31:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah.
• 31:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now we have night crawler and Kurt Wagner is going to get a lot of attention on my show next January everybody.
• 32:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: We're doing a whole night crawler theme month.
• 32:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm exploring this character in a way I never have.
• 32:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: I love him.
• 32:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: Kurt is the non-passing mutant.
• 32:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: He wants to be joyful, but because he has a ton of abuse and trauma in his childhood, he really in our world throws himself over to the church and faith and never wants to lose his light.
• 32:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: He is the circus performer, he's the showman, he's Earl Flynn, he's all of these things kind of mixed together.
• 32:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now in our world, he is the child of destiny and mystique, but made to
• 32:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: like the, you know, they're kill the beast.
• 32:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: They're the crowds chasing him down with the torches.
• 32:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then he becomes a hero in the X-Men.
• 32:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: Claremont captures a story in classic X-Men with Knight Crawler and Wolverine hanging out at Harry's Hideaway.
• 32:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: We did a library to give this on my show recently where, you know, Kurt is walking down the street without his image inducer and like seeing how the world perceives him.
• 32:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: So in this world, in the Nazi version, and that crawler looks like kind of like a character dressed up for the Hunger Games.
• 33:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's like white goggles red tunic.
• 33:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's similar to his real look in our world, but it's covered in like buttons and sashes.
• 33:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: He looks like some sort of band leader a little bit.
• 33:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: And Kurt in this character is still the showman.
• 33:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's still the demon looking mutant who is a German character embracing these philosophies
• 33:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: for his appearance and for his status as a mutant.
• 33:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: To me, this one's heartbreaking.
• 33:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think the big one is the scene where not only does the night crawler of lightning force reveal himself to be kind of a rapist, Kurt in our world predicted it called a he knew that in the right circumstances all the sort of positive sexual energy that he otherwise brings table when empowered or aligned with this sort of
• 33:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: of Nazi philosophy.
• 33:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: He would become the worst possible thing for him.
• 33:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's such a darn.
• 33:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Again, not just that the character does that, because we always do that in comics, where like the alternate universe character is just evil, but per very specifically called
• 34:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: as it's in terms of, again, that nurture philosophy that other wrong circumstances.
• 34:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: For all the characters we've discussed so far, in order to become these characters that are at peace with themselves, that are quote-unquote embracing their power, it's almost as though they have to go with the philosophy of, in order for me to be happy, I have to make others suffer, right?
• 34:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like, I have to give up my influence, I have to give up science, I have to give up kindness and for curate, that becomes kind of a sexual predator energy.
• 34:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now it's interesting to know and we won't spend time here today, but there's a there's a trilogy of books called X-Men the Chaos Engine written by Stephen Roman and in the third book the Red Skull gets the cosmic cube and rewrites the world and he brings the characters lightning force into that universe that's he practically comes kind of the focal point character and there's a turn for this version of night crawler the Nazi night crawler who ends up turning against his allies in the end and helping to save the day.
• 35:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: So we most spend time on that here because it's officially not Marvel canon, but for those of you that have been listening, the show in November opens on the main show with an interview with Steven Roman.
• 35:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: So the writer of those books is going to be on my channel talking about that journey a little bit.
• 35:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: But that leads us to the final, and this is the rough one for people.
• 35:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is where we see Kate Pride, Rashadocat introduced here.
• 35:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: And did you want to talk about her appearance, or would you like me to approach that?
• 35:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: Um, I'll take it and then you can comment on it.
• 35:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now, Kitty in the comics has always been Jewish.
• 35:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: Claremont has written her from a Jewish perspective.
• 35:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: In the trial of Magneto, in X-Men 200, we see, you know, Kitty addressing the fact that her grandparents were in the concentration camps at the Jewish Memorial, which is where the freedom or the brotherhood of people mutants attacks and captures Magneto, right?
• 35:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's also Kitty from Days of Future Past, which is the first time we see this version of the character.
• 35:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's very heartbreaking, but in this, she is a 15-year-old girl who looks like she's about 65.
• 36:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: She's amaciated, she's skeletal, she looks like the images of people that we see surviving the concentration camps.
• 36:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: For those of you that have done book reports or even gone to the Holocaust Museum in DC, you've seen these images.
• 36:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: She looks kind of like a walking corpse.
• 36:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: She's marked with the star of David, which is, you know, the Germans would mark Jewish people by painting their doors or tattooing things and shaving their heads, her head is shaved.
• 36:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: She's wearing a blue kind of version of her main costume, but it kind of just drowns her out, right?
• 36:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: She is, uh, she has a hood that covers her head and she just is kind of constantly phased out of existence.
• 36:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's almost as though the character
• 36:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: has permanently dissociated from reality, and then there's a button that they trigger where she suddenly becomes like their deadly superweapon.
• 36:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's very much a Rachel Summers conversation.
• 36:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: When Rachel is activated as the Hound, this is how she acts and behaves.
• 36:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: By Ahab, you know, that this is that kind of version of Kitty as a teen girl.
• 37:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's it's rough.
• 37:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: She's uh, she's literally got this hard David tattooed on her forehead here.
• 37:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: And this is the painful part, but it's not the first time Claremont has done this story with this character.
• 37:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, a kitty in our world, seeing the kitty from this world is heartbreaking on its own, you know?
• 37:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think Kitty is Marvel's first canonical Jewish character.
• 37:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like, by no means, so I'm textually, like, like, even the thing was not revealed to be Jewish at the point of my life, yeah.
• 37:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Which is funny, it's based on some of the, yeah, in the language you employed.
• 37:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um, yeah, Kitty introduced and started, um, uh, in her first ever common experience by John Burke,
• 37:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: like before represents almost like a personification of the role of the Jewish people within the Nazi regime, which is this specter, this ghost to accomplish their own.
• 37:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think Kitty sees that, and I think what's really interesting about how she reacts with Skellever, is she becomes murderous.
• 37:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, Kitty pride this innocent character.
• 37:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: She wants to kill.
• 37:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: She has to be talked out of it several times that that's again kind of a dark resolution.
• 38:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's not one of those hero stories where like galvanizes her belief
• 38:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: gender way or anything like that.
• 38:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: No, no, I want to murder her.
• 38:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: She's not turning on her oppressors.
• 38:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: She's turning on the people she's been weaponized against because it's draining.
• 38:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's cultivated.
• 38:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is how you must behave.
• 38:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: So rough versions of our heroes.
• 38:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's heartbreaking to see I'm going to read a little dialogue out loud here.
• 38:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: How many England as we meet them?
• 38:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: Remember Shadowcat just a strangled lucky, right?
• 38:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: So now they've passed through to the world because Moira's right rail train has been derailed and they're trying to get their Nazi property back.
• 38:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the men in the high castle, the film at least, in the book, there's this other world.
• 38:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like the people in this Nazi controlled world can kind of look into our world where there's films being made about a different society in a different place, right?
• 38:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: The grasshopper lies heavy, is the quote used a lot.
• 38:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: In the television show version, there's a literal guy who can look into another world.
• 38:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's people who can pass between the worlds.
• 38:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then when the Nazis learn about this gateway, they want to pass through it and conquer everything.
• 39:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: So for whatever reason, their trade has landed in our reality and now lightning forces here to get it back.
• 39:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: So Haptman England says, you did by a shadow cat.
• 39:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: Let us hope the rest of our mission goes as smoothly.
• 39:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: Nightcrawler says, for shame, I did a haptmining lint, I'm just going to, I'm not going to do German accents for all of this.
• 39:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: Where is your zest for battle?
• 39:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: Here we are the Reich's foremost band of warriors with a whole new world to conquer.
• 39:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: Hi, for one, I'm overjoyed.
• 39:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: Brian says, you can afford to be a nightcrawler, but I am in command.
• 39:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: Our primary duty is the rescue of the Reich's Minister of Genetics, Lady Moira McTaggart.
• 39:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: afterward perhaps we may indulge ourselves.
• 39:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: So later the evil Brian poses as our Brian and he gets some key intel and then he brings it back to his team.
• 39:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: Megan says, Heil Hitler helped him in England.
• 39:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: He replies, Heil Hitler, Kameraden.
• 39:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: Your task is to liberate a Dr. McTaggart and her bodyguard while I endeavor to discover how they came to be transported to this world.
• 39:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: Remember, we are in the enemy camp.
• 40:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: Our watchwords must be secrecy and stealth.
• 40:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: That crawler says, you're too kind, Halptoman.
• 40:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: We are the viewers lightning squad.
• 40:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: Come what may we shall prevail.
• 40:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: Whether speaking, Shadowcat is huddled on the ground.
• 40:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: Her eyes are hollow.
• 40:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: She's just kind of a dog on a leash in front of them, which is heartbreaking.
• 40:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: But inside the jail, Moira is lounging, while Calisto is exercising, and the tiniest little panties to you've ever seen.
• 40:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: Moira says, these accommodations are adequate Brigadier for a jail.
• 40:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: I am Rex Minister of Genetics, responsible to the fear of himself.
• 40:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: My goal is to purify the breed and thereby enable Oregon humanity to achieve its ultimate potential.
• 40:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: Ooh.
• 40:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: Would you read the Krikoa Moira read?
• 40:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's a rough laugh.
• 40:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: Shadowcat bursts in kills a black guard and Calisto comments.
• 40:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: Act irony, one wrong girl dealing with another.
• 40:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: We're celebrating this.
• 40:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is clear I'm not calling it horrible, but it's still rough to read.
• 40:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: Alistain Stewart gets taken hostage, the real Excalibur attacks, and Phoenix, Rachel Summers, who knows what this kind of world looks like, is able to hold up an England back and read his mind and learn to truth about him.
• 41:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: Shadowcat sees her alternate self-archity, and our kitty easily gets defeated by this other version, because our kitty's so overwhelmed.
• 41:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: Hupedman England says, as leader of the Lightning Squad, I demand you yield, or I'll bring this tower down.
• 41:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: He calls Nick Crawler, an infernal jack rabbit, the Nazi Nick Crawler defeats our current.
• 41:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: This nightcrawler is nowhere near as resilient as I he says about what one would expect from this week decadent dimension.
• 41:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: Shall I do the gene pool of service and eliminate him from it?
• 41:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: Are Captain Britain attacks?
• 41:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's back in his original costume.
• 41:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, just for context, again, the nightcrawler thing.
• 41:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: Nightcrawler suffered a catastrophic injury at the start of his caliber or just before his caliber, the meat master.
• 41:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, like, I think the implication is that the Nazi nightcrawler is
• 41:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: decadent.
• 41:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I think my most kind of waking it there lack of self-awareness there.
• 41:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: So issue 10, Brian Brownick is bursting out of his uniform.
• 41:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's too small.
• 42:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's lots of sexy Bryant and early Excalibur, very beef cakey.
• 42:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: And now he has to fight himself.
• 42:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: And while they're fighting, night crawler and Megan, the evil versions, bet on the fight.
• 42:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: We see evil Moira and evil
• 42:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: A helpedman England says, why prolong the inevitable captain at the cost of considerable pain?
• 42:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: There is no shame and surrender to superior force.
• 42:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: And Captain Britain says, if our resemblance is even slightly more than skin-deep, hopped men, you know my answer.
• 42:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's an old failing among your kind, helpedman, celebrating your triumph before the battles truly over, which is channeling England and World War II.
• 42:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: England held out, they were never taken over.
• 42:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: They were held out against massive, massive bombings, spy entry, etc.
• 42:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: So it's a kid's giving a little Winston Churchill energy here which is fun soon shadow cat passes through Brian the shadow cat You know poor captain disrupts the electricity of machines when she faves is through them.
• 42:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: I disrupt the electricity of life So this is a really scary like secondary mutation version of kitty
• 43:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: Later after all the others are defeated, our 15-year-old Kitty is talking to the alternate version of herself.
• 43:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: She looks like an old woman and her eyes, what has she seen?
• 43:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the other kitty speaks up death.
• 43:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: Have I seen?
• 43:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: Have I caused?
• 43:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: Have I suffered?
• 43:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: We are the same, death and I basically.
• 43:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: Kitty yells, what have you done to me to which Moira responds?
• 43:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: It is to the child's honor and that of her mongrural race that her a bit special abilities have singled her out for service to the fatherland.
• 43:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: You made her a demon, and Moira says that it seems to me you two are not so different.
• 43:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, let's pause and talk about that scene for a moment, it thoughts Andrew.
• 43:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Can I do one mention of the Captain Britain scene from earlier?
• 43:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
• 43:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I think highly significant, as you mentioned, Brian's costume gets destroyed, which isn't just a vehicle for beef cake imagery.
• 43:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's also, um, he has to go into a setback to the museum according to the cover and get his old captain.
• 43:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: So there's this idea of him
• 44:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: or re-britinizing himself, I guess, so I think that's important symbolic in what's happening.
• 44:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: In terms of the kitty scene, the idea of having this conversation with the sort of ruin version of yourself, of being shown what people would do to you if they had the opportunity to based on the beliefs that are in transmissions.
• 44:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: in the culture.
• 44:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's something very, I don't know, anxiety inducing both that particular encounter.
• 44:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think it makes sense that today's response to that would be rage.
• 44:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's heartbreaking, really.
• 44:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the word mongrel being tossed around so frequently when you look in America and the way they're referring to immigrants and like dehumanizing the trans community, like it's it's very similar kind of branding.
• 44:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: Later in the issue, we see Rachel pulling
• 44:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the romantic pairing of these two is only a really fun read.
• 44:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: Rachel says, it didn't mean to be so preemptory, but things were getting a bit tense.
• 44:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: Kitty says, I think I finally understand about Wolverine's berserker rages.
• 44:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: I could have killed her that Nazi Moira still want to.
• 45:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: Ray, how could they?
• 45:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: How could anyone human commit such atrocities, which is a question we're all asking ourselves these days?
• 45:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like, where is decency?
• 45:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: Rachel says, we're a talented species.
• 45:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: I was a hell, how I'd remember.
• 45:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: In my world, I was conditioned to hunt down mutants.
• 45:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: The lucky ones didn't get taken alive.
• 45:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: The rest went into concentration camps.
• 45:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: You'd be amazed how easily after a while horror becomes your natural state of being and butchery the norm.
• 45:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to repeat that last section.
• 45:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: The lucky ones didn't get taken alive.
• 45:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: The rest went into camps.
• 45:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: You'd be amazed how easily after a while horror becomes your natural state of being and butchery the norm.
• 45:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: Kitty says, I want to free her release her spirit and let her finally truly die and then go after the world that enslaved her.
• 45:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: And Rachel says, sometimes, the choices aren't clear-cut or easy.
• 45:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the victories aren't absolute.
• 45:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: Andrew thoughts.
• 45:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yep, that's a good one.
• 45:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a really, really good one.
• 45:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Dark is help.
• 45:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: And again, speaking to this idea of how
• 46:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: and ideology, culture, your fundamental core, you know, I mean that that I'm every superhero problem, every fucking superhero problem, every every shown in the same message over and over, again, a whole frontier values and you'll prevail.
• 46:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that kind of perception, that there's almost a child's perception, runs very contrary to our modern understanding of the Holocaust.
• 46:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I don't know, I'm any ideological theory.
• 46:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: So Claire months pushing hard on that,
• 46:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's having this, as you said, Rachel, this voice of experience, say, you'd be amazed what we could become at.
• 46:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: And this is where my show becomes kind of fun.
• 46:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: It'll fuck with your head a bit.
• 46:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: But we're doing a 20, 25 read of a 1988 story based on a 1962 book about 1940, for all of that stuff.
• 46:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: things look a little different now than when they originally intended.
• 46:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, I think we set up all the major pieces here.
• 46:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think 11's going to introduce the idea of actually Essence.
• 46:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: What did I really want to talk about?
• 46:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, in 11, we see the Nazi Nightcrawler trying to rape Palestine Stewart, but he realizes it's Meghan in disguise, which is another really odd version, because Nightcrawler and Meghan have been flirting back and forth through the whole series, and Brian's right there.
• 47:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: The hero's soon learned that a Nazi engine from the other planet is being powered by that world's version of Lockheed, who in that world is a huge purple dragon.
• 47:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's been enslaved and trapped inside the engine chamber, so I got a beloved character and look what happened to Lockheed in the other world.
• 47:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: In the end, I'm skipping over a bunch, but the Nazis are sent back home, but Excalibur keeps the big Lockheed on this world, and I don't think we've ever seen this Lockheed again.
• 47:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know.
• 47:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: Maybe he moved the other world.
• 47:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: Maybe he's playing with Shogo right now and they're little dragon forms, but they do end up sending the other shadow cat back.
• 47:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, fuck that part of the story.
• 47:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: The fact that they kept Lockheed, but then sent the other kitty back with them.
• 47:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: Just fucking pisses me off.
• 47:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's the more I hate the most.
• 47:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: Moira from our world and her allies.
• 48:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, we never mentioned that.
• 48:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: Our Moira was trapped in the other world.
• 48:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like the trapped in the Nazi world.
• 48:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: So they had to do a prisoner exchange, basically.
• 48:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: Evil Moira tries to fire a big bomb through the opening as the portal closes.
• 48:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, Shalber 11, I think introduces this notion that you can't, you can't just kill them, you know what I mean?
• 48:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he uses Kitty at the main vehicle.
• 48:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: But then it has Kitty function as this character who has to serve as like the reader surrogate for what it's like to watch atrocities be tolerated to some level.
• 48:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: And again, they adopt a policy of appeasement, which is the politically correct move, but Kitty has to, as he said, like, watch other kitty, just go back, they just do an exchange, there's not a lot of accountability in this, to go to story, there's not a lot of resolution, there's not a lot of, and I think in many ways it's really important to give things and send those we're dealing with, or that to be how the story ends and not just, we beat the policies.
• 48:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know what I mean?
• 48:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: The back cover of issue 10 is like a really lovely full page shot of this alternate team and the back cover of issue 11 is Moira keeping giant Lockheed on a leash while Calisto shovels bragging child
• 49:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: I love the Matt Covers, and for our heroes, imagine seeing this darker version of yourself, which is a theme that Claremont loves to play on, the good version versus the dark version.
• 49:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: What happens when the shadow king gets in your brain, right?
• 49:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: But we see this in this other reality.
• 49:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know, one of the themes that we're going to be hitting on the show multiple times this month is when is violence okay, I just read a story where the watcher shows Captain America an earth devastated by the red skull like everyone is dead, everything's in ruins and then the watcher says to cap and this is from the early 2000s, you have to kill the red skull and caps like
• 49:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: No, I won't lose side of my values.
• 49:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: And like at what point is violence all right, is one of the things that we're exploring here a little bit.
• 49:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: Because we like the Punisher for certain reasons.
• 49:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's times when it seems okay.
• 50:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, no, I think it's a frequent Claremont go to.
• 50:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think the other side of it is the Claremont story is largely about the power of an idea.
• 50:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: You see this in X-Men most directly.
• 50:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Shortly, actually would be about concurrent to what's happening.
• 50:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: The X-Men all die essentially in all the mutants.
• 50:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: And there's no X-Men, and the X-Men are carried by, look, look, there's an X-Men comic with no X-Men.
• 50:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think he's aware.
• 50:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then Ford, who was this guy who had this one encounter with Storm, and through Storm, got the sort of perspective on Xavier's dream, and the courage to fulfill it.
• 50:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he's like, I'm going to put it back together.
• 50:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he does.
• 50:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: I love that, the idea that an idea can injure just a little tiny spec of a thing.
• 50:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: So Claremont's not without idealism, right?
• 50:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, this is not a cynical, right?
• 50:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is not a nihilistic writer.
• 50:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: hopefully, choosing the better way.
• 50:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: So the darkness of the scale over here, I think is counterbounds with that in the broader context of the overall X-Men metaphor, the climax movement.
• 50:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that's really really you talk about this sort of a hopeless it seems ending of this sort.
• 51:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: Hey, we're going to jump over to Excalibur Weird War 3.
• 51:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is the Marvel graphic novel from 1990.
• 51:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's a weird read.
• 51:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's one that I read once I think in like 1992.
• 51:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: I've never touched it again before now.
• 51:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's Michael Higgins, the artists on this are Tom Morgan, Justin Time, which is just a drag name, frankly.
• 51:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: Justin Time, THYME, Justin Time, it's so funny.
• 51:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then Chris Wozniak, the art is blocky, it's very 90s, big poppy mussely, like full-page splash art.
• 51:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: And Terry Kavanaugh, Kelly Corbese, are both the editors of this book, both of them are friends of mine.
• 51:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: The letter around this book is Janice Chang, who I've also befriended.
• 51:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: I became aware of this book through GGW.
• 51:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: I was assigned it essentially.
• 51:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: I had never read it before.
• 51:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: I didn't consider it an anonymous caliber.
• 51:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: For me, this was, um, I wasn't aware of them and I used, this was sort of like, um, tertiary, not not central to the main story at all.
• 52:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was just, uh, we wanted to produce an annual or special editions just riff on something and scale up or did.
• 52:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I don't have much regard to it.
• 52:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and a lot of the, a lot of the themes that we've discussed are introduced and followed up on here, but it's a jarring story.
• 52:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: So I'll be doing kind of a quick synopsis and we'll talk about some of the character shifts.
• 52:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: This book opens on extremely, extremely graphic images of amaciated figures being burned in our live in the gas chambers.
• 52:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's jarring.
• 52:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's no warning on the cover.
• 52:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: The fact that this was just allowed in books where your painting swastik is right in left is rough.
• 52:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then we see the body's turn to dust.
• 52:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: Just wow.
• 52:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: Wow.
• 52:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: Wow.
• 52:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: Rachel Summers, the Phoenix, absorbs all of their psychic life essences and a weeks in distress.
• 52:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: So Excalibur finds her, then they see an alternate version of Alistair Stewart show up at the door with orders for them to register and a high Hitler afterward.
• 53:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's giving very fritz from the sound of music, just it's the evil version of our good boy Alistair.
• 53:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: We change scenes to find a man named Air Xavier.
• 53:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: So in this world, Charles Xavier becomes one of the main enforcers of the Nazi propaganda.
• 53:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: So Air Xavier, who as a man that is cruelly ordering psychic sacrifices of his victims, while also planning to make an ubermensch or a masterman.
• 53:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: Again, my next character episode is all about masterman, so I'll save my thoughts there.
• 53:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: Xavier is also struggling with psychic pain with an himself.
• 53:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's experimented on cyclops.
• 53:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's killed Angel.
• 53:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's burned Wolverine into a charred parkus.
• 53:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's forced Iceman to cut open the brain of Lorna Dane.
• 53:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: Gene Gray, who he wants found attractive.
• 53:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: he's now keeping in stasis.
• 53:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: Xavier is called before Hitler himself, who has a large picture of himself against a swastika backdrop.
• 53:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: Let me hear your thoughts Andrew on air Xavier.
• 53:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is this is taking all this stuff we saw in the other story and just like, oh god damn, it's so much more, but I would argue
• 54:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: only eyes at the fan base, right?
• 54:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: The idea of the true believer, the originator of the dream being the one who is corrupted this time around.
• 54:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: So if it's a full material, a long material of the values that that's sort of defined this entire thing.
• 54:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: Claremont loves.
• 54:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: Evelyn Xavier.
• 54:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's played on this version of the character in Xman Micronauts.
• 54:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's played on it in the darkest one that Xavier taking form.
• 54:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: This later becomes the onslaught story, but if you take the most powerful telepath on the world and make them subservient to Hitler, what happens?
• 54:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's a deeply unpleasant question to reckon with.
• 54:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: The torture scenes with the original X-Men, particularly Lorna, would like the open brain cap.
• 54:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: Do you want to talk about any of those, uh, that imagery at all?
• 54:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think the imagery is supposed to invoke the idea of Nazi medical experiments, um, and putting the mutants in that category.
• 54:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think it was kind of maybe a little bit inferred and clear about it's work.
• 54:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: caliber, right with the idea of cutie pride, and then the idea of moyers speech about how being immune is like being a tool and honor to the cause itself.
• 55:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you can make yourself to the ideology, you can give yourself over to the state, yeah.
• 55:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think it's quite a amount of exploring the political implications of being immune, which is just to say it was very powerful.
• 55:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: or would very much be an asset within any kind of political conflict.
• 55:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, we then jump to Excalibur finds that Britain has been completely taken over by the Nazis and everyone hates mutants.
• 55:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: A very elderly Adolf Hitler, which is a premise in the man in the high castle as well, right?
• 55:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
• 55:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's become elderly and infirm.
• 55:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: meets with the red school and wants to know what to do about Xavier.
• 55:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: Megan who's a shape-shifting empath finds herself struggling to keep out all of the hatred with everyone around her and worries what this world could make her become.
• 55:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: We've already seen that reflected in the character she met.
• 55:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then we soon see the group Excalibur taking before the evil Moira in this world.
• 55:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: Kitty hits Moira across the face remembering some things I suppose.
• 56:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then we meet the Reichsmen, which is like this world's version of the X-Men.
• 56:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's evil versions of havoc, rogue, siloq, banshee, and storm.
• 56:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't find it as nuanced as, like, in terms of the capacity to comment on the original characters.
• 56:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I do think that that poor mirroring effect, the idea of, you know, which characters become important.
• 56:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Obviously, storms stands out in that context for a racial identity.
• 56:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's what I'm giving the appearance of, like, facial scarring and being amaciated.
• 56:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: Once again, Steven Roman plays that up in his book, like, it storms world in the red skulls vision of reality.
• 56:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: So you get the idea that she's conscripted where the others are more willing participants haven't gets to be the good boy.
• 56:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: Rogue has won in hair.
• 56:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, have a get a position of authority is in this era also very commonly explored.
• 56:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: This suggestion being that this character is one headpad away from becoming a tool of just about anything.
• 56:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: I kind of like that.
• 56:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: I really like I really
• 56:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: really like havoc as a character who struggles to maintain their independence.
• 57:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: Storm looks truly monstrous in this.
• 57:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: So as we play out the fight between everyone, Megan gets a little bit unhinged.
• 57:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: They have to really fight hard to like stand up against these like very brutal versions.
• 57:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: But Storm almost looks like like a crypt keeper version and Kitty's like really struggling with the idea of her friend and mentor being in this kind of space or shape.
• 57:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's it's sad to see that.
• 57:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: So there's a fight and then we learned that this reality is trying to kind of superimpose itself over our reality.
• 57:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like the two worlds are kind of mixing together a little bit.
• 57:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: So the will and intellect of the evil Moira becomes kind of overtaken by the Moira from our world.
• 57:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's this kind of almost cosmic QV kind of effect happening around them as they are mixing together.
• 57:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: And because the Nazi Moira is weaker than ours is the message kind of delivered.
• 57:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: But that leaves Excalibur able to pose as the lightning squad and then they're able to infiltrate the world of or the layer of evil Xavier Xavier, of course, as a telepathic quickly realizes the deception and takes them over.
• 58:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: Meanwhile, we see the red skull putting Hitler through a redjuvenation process.
• 58:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: Hitler is desperate to latch on to his youth.
• 58:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now that he's old.
• 58:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: The real Hitler, by the way, was getting methamphetamines and uppers and getting injected with bullseemin by a weird like Michael Jackson drug doctor.
• 58:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like that's a real story.
• 58:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: It told by show recently, very uncomfortable.
• 58:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's a formidable moment where the so the Red School put Hitler in this rejuvenation device.
• 58:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then uses his knowledge on to take mental control of Excalibur.
• 58:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: But the Phoenix, of course, is there to kind of help them win the day.
• 58:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: So together there's there's a weird kind of onslaught thing that happens here.
• 58:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's like an evolved party this where Xavier's mutant victims all joined together with the Phoenix and attack Xavier.
• 58:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: But meanwhile Xavier and the red skull like form a weird like psychic entity from their hatred.
• 59:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's like called the X man basically.
• 59:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: which leaves Hitler alone invulnerable, a strapped into his machine, and he quickly gets deaged into infancy, and then like vanishes into the primorial void somewhere.
• 59:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's aged regressed out of existence, which shows always the people we charge are very fallible at the end of the day.
• 59:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: The more it's merged worlds end up separated, and things go back to normal.
• 59:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: So there's a few interesting moments.
• 59:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: Do you want to talk about the psychic battle here and this kind of entity that forms?
• 59:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I like the idea of having this sort of, I mean, personification, I guess it's true, but I like the idea of having the final battle be the psychic battle because I think you've got the idea of the two worlds colliding, as you mentioned, that sort of like one ideology,
• 59:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: kind of how life works sometimes.
• 59:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the idea that the real battle is it'll, I think works kind of well for what we're talking about here as well.
• 59:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: In terms of just making it very clear, the states are not necessarily that this is a battle for hearts and minds.
• 1:00:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, if we take the Xavier of it all, it's hard to define what an onslaught is.
• 1:00:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: We'll have that conversation another time.
• 1:00:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: But
• 1:00:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: A lot of people will focus it as like Magneto and Xavier's rage baby, but I think exactly.
• 1:00:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: I always had a dark side.
• 1:00:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: I would love to write a little series from Marvel about early Xavier.
• 1:00:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: I have a thousand thousand story ideas, but I think Xavier's got this kind of untapped dark side.
• 1:00:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: We also have that story from the axis event.
• 1:00:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: where the red skull cuts open Xavier's head and takes his brain out.
• 1:00:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: And like, starts using it as a telepathic weapon.
• 1:00:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is a Rick Rebender story from like, that really goes on the red skull's rage with Xavier, then becomes the red on slot.
• 1:00:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: Which is another...
• 1:00:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: this like psychic entity.
• 1:00:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: Here we have Xavier and Red Skull forming this own kind of super man, ubermensch psychic being.
• 1:00:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: By the way, Xavier's eyebrows in this story are the bushyest, they like extend off the side of his head almost like he's an owl and in the psychic version of this, he's like a naked man wearing like blue capes in the astral plane surrounded by flames that cover his genitals, but those fucking eyebrows still extend two feet off the side of his head.
• 1:01:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know, I agree.
• 1:01:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: I like the idea of exploring these aviors, sort of lingering aid that's it.
• 1:01:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Especially in your story that's a meditation on power, like understanding that Xavier has a child art, which we should explore in the ways in which Xavier is kind of a mirror for a terrain.
• 1:01:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: ideology and his own, right?
• 1:01:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: I also really like the inclusion of red skull.
• 1:01:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: I just really like the idea of connecting to and surfacing Marvel's historical representation of Nazi Germany and Marvel's role within that complicated history in a weird way.
• 1:01:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: So there's a lot of happening here.
• 1:01:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Again, I don't have like any strong takeaways in terms of
• 1:01:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: of them, some ball of value, but there's pieces of inflate that I find fascinating.
• 1:01:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: So Rachel, when they get back to the real world, explains events this way.
• 1:01:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: In his attempt to create the X-Man Xavier released untold mental energies, energies which combined evolved.
• 1:02:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: Inevitably, they metamorphosed into an individual consciousness, an ultimate intelligence,
• 1:02:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: next man.
• 1:02:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: After all is said and done, Xavier succeeded far beyond his wildest dreams.
• 1:02:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: And we end, they all kind of are just laughing together, but we end with this idea of this alternate world being watched over by this X man projected consciousness version of Xavier.
• 1:02:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: But like they make it sound like it's a good thing, like they found their senior, like what I don't not quite sure what they mean by that.
• 1:02:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like did Xavier turn good?
• 1:02:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: Where is it just the ultimate form of what Nazis want?
• 1:02:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: This like Aryan space astral god that's watching over their planet.
• 1:02:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: I have no idea.
• 1:02:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's such a weird way to end the book.
• 1:02:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Do you know the ritual number on Elm Street movie?
• 1:02:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, where they're just like at the end.
• 1:03:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: What if Freddy's in the car?
• 1:03:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then sucks the mom to do it.
• 1:03:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you're like, can you explain that?
• 1:03:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're like no.
• 1:03:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's how I reacted to it.
• 1:03:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is so fascinating to me for a number of reasons.
• 1:03:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: I've reviewed a couple of early what if stories are recently.
• 1:03:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's one.
• 1:03:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's a what if Hulk comic.
• 1:03:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: where Xavier Bruce Banner and Tony Stark use a machine to project themselves into an elevated being called the X-Man, who's like capable of like changing the world around him, basically, and then they devolve later.
• 1:03:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's another world where Xavier gets the Crimson Gem of Citerac, it becomes the Juggernaut, and then I'm not going the entire planet.
• 1:03:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: And now we have this evil Xavier that's the Nazi red skull projected mind
• 1:03:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's all these evil executives.
• 1:03:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: I want to write a story where they just all work together.
• 1:03:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: Ed, it would be crazy.
• 1:03:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: We lastly and finally see Excalibur at the end of Excalibur in 125, my friend Ben Rob is writing.
• 1:04:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it's the big wedding between Captain Britain and Meghan.
• 1:04:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: And he's just pulling everything in from everywhere because he wants to give that final.
• 1:04:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's like the final episode.
• 1:04:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: And you want to see every character referenced.
• 1:04:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's all the Easter eggs.
• 1:04:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: This group is weirdly seen some of the lightning squad members or weirdly seen at the wedding, but there's no context given.
• 1:04:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's a wild show.
• 1:04:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Most bizarre, non-comfortable thing ever.
• 1:04:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like, let's invite them to the wedding.
• 1:04:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't understand.
• 1:04:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: What are your resident thoughts on exploring these stories?
• 1:04:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's very deeply character driven.
• 1:04:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's also very much like, look how dark the world can go if we don't pay attention.
• 1:04:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, it's a storytelling vessel.
• 1:04:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like one, you've got a ton of faith that was baked into it.
• 1:04:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like we have strong getings about Nazis, particularly in the 1980s, when it was pretty universally anti-Nazi, right?
• 1:04:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: So you've got that, that was well.
• 1:04:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: You've got the alternate university or alternate university of position, which is
• 1:04:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: paper there, but for the grace of God, go I kind of mentality, you've got the abilities for characters to be positioned to directly reflect on who they are because of that contrast, right?
• 1:05:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: So again, as a storytelling vessel, there's a kind of stuff you can do here with it.
• 1:05:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think even just in the history of lighting, of course, we can see kind of the good and the bad, the shallow and the deep and the ways in which the shallow can accentuate the deep by being kind of disarming through seeming like it's just a punching people story when it's not.
• 1:05:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I think this is really cool representation.
• 1:05:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Obviously, I'm going to land with my, well, my author, Claire, but I think he does some really cool stuff.
• 1:05:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: I want to focus a little on the idea of dissociation.
• 1:05:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: We talked about characters who have to just end.
• 1:05:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: We divide our reality out to create reality around us in order to keep us comfortable and that's deeply painful to realize.
• 1:05:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then I'm going to go back to the question I asked at the beginning.
• 1:05:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: Let's look at 2025 in the world and like how surprised we are at what's happening around us and how deeply painful confronting these ideas can be.
• 1:05:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: So like, when I announced this episode, people were like, oh, no way.
• 1:05:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I do think there's a ton of value in looking at what these stories represent.
• 1:06:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: How are you doing my friend as an academic, as a civilian in 2020, 25 world?
• 1:06:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm Canadian.
• 1:06:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've been Canada.
• 1:06:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: We actually had a politician sort of staged the Trump like thing and actually would cost him the election.
• 1:06:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: He said his own voice down to meet with Trump and they specifically told Trump that we need the Trump needs a strong ally in the Canadian government and when Canadians heard that we were like, oh we're not going back at it.
• 1:06:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: We don't we don't want that.
• 1:06:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: So that was kind of bullying actually.
• 1:06:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: how long that maintains I have no idea, but I think if someone has kind of watched the rise of Trumpism slowly but surely on a universe.
• 1:06:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: deeply concerned about it going back a decade at this point more than that.
• 1:06:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think I've always assured, nice to us.
• 1:06:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: This isn't real.
• 1:06:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is a clown.
• 1:06:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: This isn't a real politician.
• 1:06:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: You'll never get elected or you'll never be able to do the things that he says he's going to do.
• 1:06:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I feel, I don't know, when I read something like this is a caliber thing.
• 1:07:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: I always feel like the more nuanced brought to it, the better and the more
• 1:07:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: acknowledgement of the sort of temptation to believe in these kind of philosophies.
• 1:07:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: I would like to see more of that in the superhero comics rather than the blunt assumption that there is nothing appealing about the Nazi ideology to the averaging being and how easily these can become entrenched in and webbed into our culture.
• 1:07:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Again, like I regret telling students don't worry about coming
• 1:07:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, really, like that.
• 1:07:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: Why would we ever do the soon that would tip that far in that direction?
• 1:07:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: I didn't know.
• 1:07:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: I was stressed about it, but you'd never could have seen it erode this quickly.
• 1:07:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: Even, you know, we're recording this in early October, so even in the five weeks before I release this on the show, I have no idea what the fuck is going to happen.
• 1:07:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: In Nazi Germany times, I've been exploring these themes and in the red school conversations on the show.
• 1:07:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: Certain countries were tricked into just signing a treaty that allowed Nazi Germany to take over.
• 1:07:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: The Allies would make deals.
• 1:07:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: OK, Hitler, you can take over that country, but that means you have to be a good boy after that.
• 1:07:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: We see the consequences and then we see England who like never got invited because they fought back, you know, the projected consciousness of Xavier and the Red Skull was won, but the victims of Xavier also got to project their consciousness through the Phoenix in that last story as well.
• 1:08:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: So there's these ideas of elevated consciousness.
• 1:08:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: We don't have to let those concepts like overrule us.
• 1:08:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: We can also elevate our consciousness in the other direction, which we do in small and big ways.
• 1:08:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: I was in Canada.
• 1:08:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, and in modern times, we've seen, I talked to Patricia Oliver on the show about like Argentina had the other thing happen.
• 1:08:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: The guy that made the Trump choices won.
• 1:08:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: And in England, there was some of the Boris Johnson stuff more recently in Brexit, like types of ideologies.
• 1:08:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: What I was recently visiting Canada and everyone was so kind when they learned I was American, but I got this kind of like, Chad, what happened?
• 1:08:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like, we don't understand what happened.
• 1:08:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: And my answer as I talked to people informed bonds was just overwhelmingly like, we can analyze how, but right now we just have to accept that it did, because it doesn't make any fucking sense.
• 1:09:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: It just, it just happened.
• 1:09:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's just what it is.
• 1:09:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know how America is looking from the Canadian perspective these days, but it feels like a sinking ship in so many ways to those of us here.
• 1:09:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, especially for academics, like we're being told not to bring our laptops if we have to go to conference in the states because we don't want her work searched for in any of our material in which we
• 1:09:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: speak to, you know, critical race theory or we're right.
• 1:09:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's it's a nice.
• 1:09:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Honestly.
• 1:09:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, and the gun violence alone is so embarrassing.
• 1:09:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's been huge shootings.
• 1:09:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was like 20 miles of my house in both directions in the last couple of months, you know.
• 1:09:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I live about I live 20 minutes from where Charlie Kirk was killed, you know.
• 1:09:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
• 1:09:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: it sucks.
• 1:09:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, you're, yeah, you're in this thing.
• 1:09:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yeah, yeah.
• 1:09:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: When I work as a crisis, I work as a crisis in trauma responder.
• 1:09:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: So I was at the University for a full week after that murder, like working with everyone who was impacted by the violence.
• 1:10:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's crazy.
• 1:10:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: I have some stories to tell.
• 1:10:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: That is unreal.
• 1:10:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, intense, man.
• 1:10:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: Any concluding thoughts on the lightning squad, lightning force, lightning squad.
• 1:10:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think they're
• 1:10:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 1:10:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Honestly, it's so weird to be considering this text, which is about mutants and shape shifters and where we're trying to deal with this sort of a ideology at the same time that, that, again, you're 20 minutes away from melting coins.
• 1:10:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um, I like what it's doing for a comic book.
• 1:10:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think it's trying to explore a lot of relevant concepts that I think we could use right now.
• 1:10:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's not, it's not nearly enough.
• 1:10:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know what I mean?
• 1:10:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well my friend, I value this conversation and your friendship.
• 1:10:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: Thank you for spending this time with me.
• 1:10:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm always grateful when people are willing to share their voices, perspectives, and talents.
• 1:10:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think you want to plug for another number 2025.
• 1:10:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: And where can people find you online?
• 1:10:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: My book, it just came out on Christmas, we talked a lot about Scalber.
• 1:11:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you can hear that that's available wherever books or so.
• 1:11:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, we still have books being sold.
• 1:11:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, my hate these jokes, but I smile every time.
• 1:11:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's good, that was your work.
• 1:11:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you just look up Jandred Manly.
• 1:11:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: My stuff is published all over the place in different formats, and a lot of my work is published basically, which means it's accessible and free, which is really important to me.
• 1:11:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: So yeah.
• 1:11:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's excellent to see you.
• 1:11:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: Please tell Anna.
• 1:11:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: Hello.
• 1:11:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: I am very fond of you both.
• 1:11:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I hope this finds you both doing well.
• 1:11:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: Everybody can follow the show at Graham Auckland Underscorlan on Instagram, Primarily.
• 1:11:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I've already kind of played what's coming out.
• 1:11:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: So watch for some fun conversations.
• 1:11:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think the next show out on the main show after this is Marvel zombies Destroy, which is a tangent.
• 1:11:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: But
• 1:11:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's Howard the Duck leading a group of weird World War II heroes to fighting the Nazi contagion, which is zombies in another reality.
• 1:11:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so it's a very fun ride.
• 1:11:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then we'll follow up this episode with a conversation about the Friends of Humanity with Philip Kennedy Johnson and then another about a Masterman and Warrior One, which is how we'll close out the month on the Patreon.
• 1:12:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: Thanks everybody for listening.
• 1:12:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: Thank you Andrew.
• 1:12:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: We'll see you all back here next week on the
• 1:12:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: 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.
• 1:12:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: In early 1938, Adolf Hitler moved to Titan his grip on Germany's military leadership through what became known as the Blomberg Fritch affair.
• 1:12:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: At the time, the German Armed Forces were still led by senior officers who, while not openly opposed to the regime,
• 1:12:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: Two of the most prominent figures were warmness to the Werner von Blomberg, and Army Commander Werner von Friech, both were respected within the military establishment, and their positions represented the potential check on Hitler's growing authority.
• 1:12:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: The crisis began with Blomberg, shortly after marrying a much younger woman in January 1938, it was revealed through police records that his new wife had a past involving prostitution and criminal activity, the scandal of it all.
• 1:13:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: The information was quickly brought to Hitler's attention, what might have remained a private scandal instead then became a political opportunity, under pressure, and facing public embarrassment, Blomberg was forced to resign his position, leaving the role of warm minister suddenly vacant.
• 1:13:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: Attention then turned to Vaughn Frisch.
• 1:13:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: He was accused of homosexual conduct, which at the time was both illegal and politically damaging under Nazi law.
• 1:13:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: The accusation was based on mistake and identity, and later proven false, but the damage was immediate.
• 1:13:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: Fritch denied the charges yet he was forced to step aside while the matter was investigated, although he was eventually cleared, at least publicly, he was not restored to his previous position.
• 1:13:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: The episode effectively removed him from power at a critical moment.
• 1:13:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: So with both men gone, Hitler seized the opportunity to restructure the military command.
• 1:13:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: He abolished the war ministry, created the high command of the armed forces or the OKW, and placed himself directly
• 1:14:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: The affair driven by scandal and manipulation rather than open confrontation, marked a turning point.
• 1:14:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: It eliminated key figures who may have resisted Hitler's strategic ambitions, and brought the military more firmly under his personal authority, consolidating power just as Germany moved closer to war.
• 1:14:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: Another example of, let's use propaganda and scandal to house some people will get power and then you have to ignore all of our propaganda and
• 1:14:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: We're now going to jump over to the world of Captain America.
• 1:14:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think this is volume four, number 15.
• 1:14:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: Things are growing increasingly more complicated in the world with civil war two and the Chittari invasion and more.
• 1:14:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: And now the rewritten Captain America.
• 1:14:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: So if you recall, the cosmic cube knocked our Steve Rogers into like a dream state and then rebuilt a new Steve Rogers, often called Grant Rogers,
• 1:14:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: Or sometimes just called Steeval Rogers as though he's the evil version, right?
• 1:14:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: So they've made him loyal to Hydra in this rewritten history, according to the cosmic cube, which effectively creates a divergent timeline.
• 1:15:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: Captain America meets the red skull in Germany, but the during during World War II, but the cosmic cube has again programmed him to be specifically loyal not to the right or the red skull, but to Hydra, the organization that supports all of this.
• 1:15:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so the Red Skull takes Hydra apart, turns them against each other, kills their leaders.
• 1:15:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: And now wielding his own power, he forces Captain America to yield to him to swear, feel, tee on his knees, and Steve Rogers does.
• 1:15:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: We now move to the present where the Red Skull has returned from his plans, playing out in the military conflict in Sykovia, while we can from his battle with the uncanny Avengers, this is still by the way, the Red Skull that has Charles Xavier's brain and powers in his mind, so he's telepathic still.
• 1:15:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: And he has broadcast a message to shield,
• 1:15:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: I come to you today as the newly appointed sovereign leader of the Republic of Sikovia.
• 1:15:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: No need to congratulate me.
• 1:15:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: In fact, there's little time for pleasantries of any kind.
• 1:15:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: We have so much work to do.
• 1:16:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: You see now that we control this nation, we are old recognition and are right for seated the table.
• 1:16:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: As a global peacekeeping organization, you have our responsibility to engage us as partners.
• 1:16:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now I understand you may have some hesitation on this point, shield and hydra do not often see eye to eye, but we will have to make the best of it.
• 1:16:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: After all, we are a nuclear power these days.
• 1:16:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: We possess seven armed and operational warheads.
• 1:16:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: Each now aimed at a different and populace European city.
• 1:16:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: It is a heavy burden no doubt, but one we wield carefully.
• 1:16:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: We would never consider actually launching such terrible weapons unless we found ourselves isolated from the international community or unless the sanctions against us were not lifted immediately.
• 1:16:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: Rest assured, we want only peace in our time dear friends.
• 1:16:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: We look forward to your immediate statement of resignation, you have 24 hours.
• 1:16:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: but as shield prepares for war, Captain America turns on the red skull.
• 1:16:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is a good evil cap, and like basically beats him to death and throws him out of window.
• 1:16:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: So the red skull with Xavier's brain murdered by evil, he's a captain of America.
• 1:17:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: So evil cap is now in charge in Hydra, and a couple of little issues later, he delivers the head of the red skull to Gorget as a peace offering.
• 1:17:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, let me welcome my friend, James Lee Campbell, who you may know is the voice of Brian Braddock on Grey Molkin Lane.
• 1:17:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: James, welcome back to the show.
• 1:17:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: Are you a red skull fan, my friend?
• 1:17:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: I am a red skull fan in the fact that he is a traditional monologueing villain who is too smart for his own scheme.
• 1:17:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is kind of where I kind of resonate with the red skull absolutely.
• 1:17:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now, you and I know each other through script reads, I don't know a lot about your Marvel or comics history.
• 1:17:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Are you a person who follows Captain America comics?
• 1:17:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: I am more a person who follows Avengers comics and X-Men comics.
• 1:17:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I know Cap through that, and obviously I have a long-standing law of X-Men more than anything.
• 1:17:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: So being thrown into this timeline was a kind of a bit of a shock to the system.
• 1:17:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, you know, Cap as this,
• 1:17:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: American loyalists who work for the great good of the country.
• 1:18:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: So seeing him working for the great good of Hydra was quite off-putting.
• 1:18:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: Once Steve Rogers comes back, this character stays around.
• 1:18:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: He has the cool idea of history.
• 1:18:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: He even appeared in some ex-man titles.
• 1:18:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: So during for Coa, if you read the uncanny Avengers, let me know.
• 1:18:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: Uh-huh.
• 1:18:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: They fought the, uh, you know,
• 1:18:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was the evil cap, he becomes a state day, yes, and this was the same cap, and now I see now Now I have the history for that cap, which is really really because when you said me this episode when you sent me this Comic my brain when well I need to read more so I kind of read a good half of this run
• 1:18:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Just comics only 10, 10 and 11 years old and it hits home in an uncomfortable way.
• 1:18:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: I can imagine how it hit home in a comfortable way 10 years ago, reading it today in this political climate.
• 1:18:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wow!
• 1:18:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: The correlations are ridiculously close.
• 1:18:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is scary really close when you think about the radicalisation that the red skull has done to Hydra.
• 1:19:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, when I think one of the most important things of this episode
• 1:19:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: So this issue is Steve's justification for killing the red skull.
• 1:19:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think that is the biggest thing where you know he produces its leadership to radicalise and control hydra because the leader at the moment it has gone crazy.
• 1:19:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: So I opened with the concept of like Hitler turning on some of his own.
• 1:19:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think scandal and then having, you know, basically having them out out out out stood.
• 1:19:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: And if they had refused the the the pressure, we talked about Lomburgan Fritch, if they'd refused the pressure to step out, Hitler also did this other people and when they refused, he had them killed instead.
• 1:19:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: So we go to this issue where we look at the past where Red Skull has turned on the Hydro Officers and now we come to the present where you know Evil Cap is turned on the Red Skull But this like this idea of like loyalty and like personal power when the party is an interesting one I really enjoy I really enjoyed Cap's turning point.
• 1:20:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's why I enjoyed the most of all What the usual Cap that we used to to him listening to the villain monologue to then turning and not just
• 1:20:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: handing out justice, but giving a villain monologue of his own before he kills the red skull.
• 1:20:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think that for me was my favourite moment because then you actually go, oh Steve has a villain monologue.
• 1:20:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh he is really the villain in this series, and that for me gave me chills, because thinking about Captain America, like I know seeing that the villain in Kukowa, it's different though, because it's different because you're seeing a power fight against him.
• 1:20:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is the evil twin trope, right?
• 1:20:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: Do you remember when you remember when dark beast replace tank McCoy?
• 1:20:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and this is that this is no one knows this is evil cap until he turns evil you know exactly and so the moment he does that in front of the red skull
• 1:20:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's great because there's this mirror, he mirrors the red skull in his monologue and his exposition, but not just that.
• 1:21:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: He kind of mirrors the recurring political, logical authoritarian claiming to restore something pure rather than seize power.
• 1:21:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because that's what he's doing it for.
• 1:21:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's there to reinstate hydro as this pure entity as after the corruption of the red skull.
• 1:21:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: So the comics, it's been a jarring thing for me to realize.
• 1:21:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: And if you listen to the show you've heard me on this show for a journey for a while, how much fascism, fascism really is the like evil that are constantly fighting against, right?
• 1:21:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's redefining whatever that means, but like fascism is really the underlying current of it all, which is uncomfortable.
• 1:21:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: I know that there's been some odd parallels between British and American politics with the American you're going in a very dark direction, but you know when you when you read things about Brexit and others like there's some similar trends happening in places around the world.
• 1:21:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: How are you doing these days, my friend?
• 1:21:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: 2026 America versus 2026 London across the pond.
• 1:21:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: I know as queer friends we're both going through in our own way.
• 1:22:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh yeah, I am on 10 to hit right now.
• 1:22:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: I
• 1:22:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: I feel like I walk on eggshells daily with my political views.
• 1:22:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: I am rather left with my views, and with this rise in a particle reform UK, which is basically extreme right.
• 1:22:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is very tough, especially having a Spanish partner.
• 1:22:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is very much like, oh, if that party gets into power, it might be a good bite to the UK from us.
• 1:22:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's it's uncomfortable and you know queer rights in the erosion and immigration rights and everything else it it it's crazy making these conversations has been really healing for me.
• 1:22:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's been on to turn from history and like see parallels in my fiction in an odd way it's like a way of speaking to Ruth and gathering with friends.
• 1:22:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: Do you like your red skull with with Charles Xavier's brain?
• 1:22:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: I found it very interesting that twist, but again, it was the appropriation of I always see the X-Men as the established queer narrative within Marvel and so
• 1:23:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: when he appropriated Charles's brain, I was like, that is just the right appropriating queer culture to get under the skin of everyone else.
• 1:23:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I thought, and I was like, okay, there's definitely some symbols there.
• 1:23:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: I found it very jarring, giving the red school that power.
• 1:23:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm really glad that before this point in the narrative, they've removed that.
• 1:23:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's really, it's really very evil.
• 1:23:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: When I think about, like, if this was a television show, that's the season finale, like, oh, yeah.
• 1:23:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, the heroes defeat the threat, and then the red skull carves out the braid, and you're like, oh, please.
• 1:23:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then it has that kind of finishing shot of, like, just zooming into his face.
• 1:23:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he just gives the, he just gives that kind of downward, downward face, look, one upward eye stare to the camera, as his eyes just kind of glow slightly, because you now know
• 1:23:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: This issue though is the death of the red skull with Xavier's brain.
• 1:24:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know that people often realize that.
• 1:24:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: He had it for a while, though.
• 1:24:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's completely dead.
• 1:24:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, they removed it before this issue because Steve couldn't get close to them to him without with the true, without him detecting it.
• 1:24:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: So he's the red skull has just had the operation having it removed.
• 1:24:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Or I couldn't, I couldn't work out which one it was.
• 1:24:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah, what I mean is this is the death of that version.
• 1:24:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 1:24:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:24:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, he and the in the in the year kind of a couple years leading up to this has gone.
• 1:24:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's gotten really annoyed with the telepathy.
• 1:24:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's like, oh, it's exhausting and I'll like having this it takes too much focus.
• 1:24:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm busy hearing it.
• 1:24:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: How can I hear my own voice when I'm busy hearing everyone else's voice?
• 1:24:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, my friend, it's wonderful to see you.
• 1:24:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's fun to hang out every time.
• 1:24:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: Do you have any final thoughts for our listeners?
• 1:24:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Read this read this this timeline read this narrative read everything about it because it's actually really wonderful.
• 1:24:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is uncomfortable.
• 1:24:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was reading a review of this series and the review said that Spencer wanted it to disturb you and it does it's it's effective storytelling, but yeah, it's a little bit of a rough read in that way
• 1:25:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, effective storytelling for all the times.
• 1:25:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: 10 years ago today, 40 years ago, 70 years ago, to see a recurring fascist narrative, especially in the times that we live in today, is a little bit disturbing, but enjoy it.
• 1:25:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's a coming.
• 1:25:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, everybody, stay tuned.
• 1:25:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: Living joyfully remains an active defiance in this crazy world to care of yourselves out there.
• 1:25:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: And James will be back with me for the next Captain America.
• 1:25:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, yeah.
• 1:25:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: What Captain America, Captain Britain team up, actually?
• 1:25:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, yes.
• 1:25:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: Looking forward to seeing it.
• 1:25:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: Oh my god, Adam doing, like, Leslie Jordan, Captain America as well.
• 1:25:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: I was just typing, I was just typing the script, and there's a moment where Captain America bursts in on the red skull, and the actual dialogue, and I could only hear it in Adam's Leslie Jordan voice, was, Alright, it's time to face the truth, Crud.
• 1:26:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like, I'm like, what the hell is that?
• 1:26:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: What is going on?
• 1:26:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: No, I think it's just passing the word Crud around as an insult now.
• 1:26:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:26:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's just throwing it, just throwing it around as fine.
• 1:26:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: Alright, my friend, thank you very much.
• 1:26:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: Thanks everybody for listening.
• 1:26:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: We'll see you back here next week on very Malkin' Day.
• 1:26:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: Thank you.