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Bonus Patreon Release: Tusk! With Lodro Rinzler! · Graymalkin Lane the podcast

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: Everybody, welcome back to The Great Mulk and Lean Patreon channel.
• 0:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: We are going to be recording an episode for release in mid-February, but we are recording this at the end of January, twenty twenty five.
• 0:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: It is a fucking dark time in America, but I am determined to create joy and optimism through comic book analysis with a queer perspective with my fantastic friends on this show as a way to escape this nightmare we are living in.
• 0:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: from the wonderful X-Men panels daily account on Instagram, also from the X-Men horoscopes show.
• 0:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: I had a delightful time appearing on Laudro show recently, and I'm so happy to be welcoming him for the first of hopefully many times to Grey Malkin' by Ed.
• 0:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: I love for you to give everyone a little of your origin story if you will.
• 1:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's not what I would give to a child at this point, but it was just out of flea market.
• 1:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I was like, these look cool.
• 1:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: I didn't know what they were and went all in.
• 1:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I was like, OK, so I've ever read the most.
• 1:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like a cosmic visual perspective.
• 1:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's just beautiful.
• 1:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think it teaches you about the cosmos and sci-fi on a way that nothing else does.
• 1:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: They're beautiful.
• 1:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: I agree.
• 1:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, you're absolutely right.
• 1:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, like I'm talking maybe like eight years old, seven, eight years old.
• 1:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm like, this is very cool.
• 1:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the art was beautiful.
• 1:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I was like, I'm because, you know, at that point, because at home, y'all, like, we didn't have Marvel only.
• 1:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: We didn't have ability to just like read the previous or next issue.
• 1:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was just, you get a random issue and then you had to figure out what the fuck is going on.
• 1:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Can we swear on this?
• 1:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yes, you can.
• 1:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, fuck yes, you can.
• 1:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and that was it.
• 1:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I love that because so many of us that stuck around with comics, we're all secretly detectives because we're like, I need to figure out who are these people, what are their deals?
• 2:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: So from there, I bounced into, on Kenny X-Men, mercifully, I found, sorry, inferno stuff.
• 2:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I was like, this is insane and awesome.
• 2:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I love all of these characters.
• 2:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I have the image of like Madeline Prior in her goblin queen outfit on the cover, like that classic cover.
• 2:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: That was like the first one I ever picked
• 2:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then got really hooked once we hit like the adjectiveless x-men and then you know, blooped team gold team over at uncanny x-men and I remember once I picked off all things the ghost ride across over where it's like gambit takes everyone to New Orleans ghost riders there
• 2:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's also fighting the brew that are like me no sense and I was like I love this shit.
• 2:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is the this is all I want to do and went all in at that point and I've been a lifelong nerd ever since I was gonna play football college football GoPro, but then I found these comics and you know
• 2:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's basically what we call it.
• 3:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: We mentioned silver surfer in Cosmic.
• 3:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's a line of books coming out right now.
• 3:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: What if blank inherited the powers of Galactics or became the Avatar and in a sentient just released an issue of rogue becoming the silver surfer, which was so interesting.
• 3:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: And my friend Joshua Heo just did one of Gambit.
• 3:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: We love Cosmic shit in our X-Men too, right?
• 3:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's where the brood and the Shiar and the M-Cron crystal and all that stuff fall into.
• 3:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: As a white guy with a podcast.
• 3:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm sure you're realizing the longer you go.
• 3:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's this beautiful sub-community of queer-friendly X-Men podcasts that exist out there in the world.
• 3:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: And we kind of connect with the same creators and we meet mutual friends.
• 3:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: I know you just had demand on your show.
• 3:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like some of my dear friends and closest friends I've made through this show.
• 3:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it's really fun.
• 3:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: I literally just recorded with me.
• 3:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: I know you're close with Phillip.
• 3:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: Philip CV and their partner Christy Porter are coming to my house this evening for a talk to cocktails and hottubs like they're really they're really close personal friends of mine and we met through the show.
• 3:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: I love Philip, but it's really fun to see new voices.
• 4:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm seeing you and like escape the mojo verse and like there's some new shows that are kind of showing up on the lead scape, but it's fun to make friends with those folks.
• 4:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: tell everybody a little about your show and why you chose to launch your show when you did yeah great question particularly the second part because I don't think I've ever talked about that so the show I know that that's a T-piece like mine mine was a pandemic project like you know like yeah yeah I totally understand and you're like I was I was late to the game I think a lot of people you know
• 4:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: We have the classics like Jan Miles explaining the X-Men that have been around for bazillion years and then we have the sort of like second wave of all like you and Arthur like cerebral cast and like other podcasts like that on that really came out X-Wife and as you said, I love all these people like I've started to get to know them through the show.
• 4:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Really wonderful to connect and to now be a part of this community.
• 4:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: But so for me, X-Men Horsecopes is a show that is just fucking wonky.
• 4:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's it's very people that like, oh, I don't really buy into the whole astrology.
• 4:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think great.
• 4:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Don't worry.
• 4:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: The more skeptical person is the better.
• 4:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: I remember Jordan D. White was on the show and he was like, this isn't horoscopes.
• 5:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is therapy.
• 5:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he was Jordan so much.
• 5:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's a good guy.
• 5:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: I had so much fun with him.
• 5:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we'll use him as an example.
• 5:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: He came on.
• 5:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: We chose his birth month and year issue, which off the time I had was uncanny X-Men, one, forty-one.
• 5:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it was like, what the hell does that actually go through it?
• 5:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we say, what is this, what are the common themes here?
• 5:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: What do we see?
• 5:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then what could this possibly mean for your life and your future?
• 5:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, you know,
• 5:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: use another mutual friend over like Christopher Riley is one of my favorite examples.
• 5:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Christopher chose an issue that course by now with his birth month in year but with the first time he did gender-bending cosplay.
• 5:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: He went to Zemba Frost and it was this very powerful issue that you know it was not that long ago is during this era where you know
• 5:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Cyclops and his Ragtag team of X-Men were sort of hiding out because he had just killed Xavier and they were recruiting new students but it's a little bit of like wow you're getting bullied and harassed and even shot by the police in this case in this issue for being who you are and for Christopher who you know and not to spoil anything in the episode he's very open about it.
• 6:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: He had a
• 6:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: really rough time as a kid, as a queer kid, within his small town, and to then get an issue about coming home to who you are and just how powerful that can be and how you can manifest your true self as a result, in syncing up with him rediscovering
• 6:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: his love for X-Men through this gender-bending cosplay experience.
• 6:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was like, wow, this is a powerful synchronization of there's something just we all know X-Men come and speak to us but what does an individual issue that corresponds to a significant date in our life actually mean for us as humans?
• 6:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: So the birth month in years often the common one, but sometimes we'll do, say, other significant ones, you know, sometimes someone's face comic book or their wedding data, whatever it might be.
• 6:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think that's a really powerful way to look at where we came from and the themes that really speak to us, but specifically, how can we interpret them for our current use?
• 6:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's sort of, again, a wonky show where it's a lot of creators, a lot of friends.
• 6:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes it's someone who is maybe not as knowledgeable as X-Men, we get to unpack sort of the history behind it.
• 7:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: And looking at the birth month and year in particular, our significant month and year, what does this mean for who you are and how you want to move into the world?
• 7:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: So that's what it is and then what it is when it is is I had a baby which I don't think you can hear screaming in the background like she she's a delight she's screaming in joy She's sort of my mother's over so she's like showing off for grandma But there is this moment and I imagine many people who have kids feel this where it's like Wow, I do nothing but work and take care of this child like these two things I have taken over my life
• 7:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: So to reconnect with and to hopefully inspire other people's love of the X-Men, I took on this show and I was like, I'm just gonna do a couple episodes to see if anyone is at all interested in this.
• 7:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's something here.
• 7:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's something really significant about people seeing themselves in the X-Men to a T and being able to connect to these issues in that way.
• 7:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's been so much fun ever since.
• 7:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's sort of so pandemic hobby became a baby hobby and we are coming up in a year.
• 7:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we're still very fresh.
• 8:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: We being I say we it's technically we it's really me doing everything but there's a company that approached me a million years ago to do a podcast and I was like they wanted in my other day everyday life.
• 8:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm a Buddhist author and teacher.
• 8:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're like, let's do something on Buddhism.
• 8:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I was like, how about I do something on X man?
• 8:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're like, fine, we'll take it.
• 8:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I think you're similar to me.
• 8:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: You have an analytical mind.
• 8:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm a therapist.
• 8:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm an empath.
• 8:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm a trauma survivor.
• 8:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm a queer person.
• 8:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm a writer.
• 8:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: All the different parts of me activate when I read X-Men comics.
• 8:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: But there's something so joyful about rediscovering the books I love as a kid and lining up childhood and history and building community, right?
• 8:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: But you have a, you need to put your creative energy somewhere.
• 8:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think you and I understand each other in that way.
• 8:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: And you've got a lovely format.
• 8:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: I had a delightful time on your show.
• 8:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: What was about to plug it?
• 8:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that was such a fun episode to do, which I believe we entitled the spit roast of Soron.
• 8:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: So if you have a sense of are we taking ourselves very seriously the answers?
• 8:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, there's always the balance, right?
• 8:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's these very serious themes balanced by melodrama and soap and everything else.
• 9:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: Okay, so I've been doing this Patreon channel for a long time and I have accumulated a list of characters that I say like, oh, I need to do an episode on this person.
• 9:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: It happens all the time.
• 9:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'll research one characters, start talking about them and then want to go in a different direction.
• 9:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: I don't know exactly when Tusk made my list.
• 9:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think Tusk appeals to me for a few different reasons.
• 9:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: I like taking a character from an odd perspective and the dark
• 9:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: writers certainly represent a very odd perspective in the Marvel Universe.
• 9:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: Tusk is a character of color and of some size.
• 9:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: Tusk is a character I remember from the cartoon.
• 9:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: He also had a very unique toy in the toy line.
• 9:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: And outside of the other dark writers, the only other one that really visually stands out to me is a gauntlet, who's got that very like warhammer, you know, work, energy.
• 9:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: But Tusk is a unique character until you research him.
• 9:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then he's just fucking weird.
• 9:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: So it was, hey, Loder, let's talk about Tusk and you're like, fuck yeah, let's go.
• 10:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: What are your preliminary thoughts on Tusk prior to doing any of the research?
• 10:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like, when I suggested this character, you went, yeah, for what reasons?
• 10:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, great question.
• 10:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: So first of all, everyone's tripping because we're about to do five hours on Tusk.
• 10:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, we're not.
• 10:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: He will edit it down maybe to like a little under an hour, but you know, I love a long conversation, but there is not five hours to be had on tusk.
• 10:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I So tusk, I here's why I love it because what you do and is this very frequently something that you do and I love the show for it is you shine a flashlight on wait, what about that thing over there?
• 10:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right, like we understand what's in the foreground of the panel, but what about them that and you get really curious.
• 10:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's this like infectious curiosity that you have about the comics that I think is very inspiring.
• 10:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I'm like, I'm happy to go for a ride on that.
• 10:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, I mean, I used to tusk and I was like, everyone's favorite fourth string dark.
• 10:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think people could name two other dark writers, which is already obscure reference, before they would get to Tusk.
• 10:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I was like, yeah, because as you said, I have a similar analytical mind.
• 11:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: I was like, not just, I want to study up on everything he's done, but I also want to contemplate who he is.
• 11:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: And part of what inspired me to join you is that I think there's been this really interesting redemption of villain thing that we have done, particularly in the Krakow era, where we get more of like, well, Apocalypse isn't such a bad guy.
• 11:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, he really was like trying to take all of that.
• 11:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right, and so I was like, I thought we could do it for Tusk, and that's my challenge today.
• 11:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: Okay, we're gonna open with some conversation points about Tusk.
• 11:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: We'll do some pretty swift review of his history, because there's not a lot there, but there's three components to this guy that I think make him really, really interesting.
• 11:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: in some ways that make me even a little bit uncomfortable.
• 11:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: So first of all, let's open with its nineteen ninety-one.
• 11:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: You just mentioned like the advent of X-Men volume two, which sold a bajillion copies and the teams are all reformatted and shuffled around, right?
• 11:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: Over in the X-Men we have the mirror island saga, we have the new mutants becoming X-Force.
• 11:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: X-Factor has been the original X-Men for a long time and it is just getting ready to be relaunched as the havoc strong guy, multiple man Polaris, World Spain, Quicksilver team, right, under the government.
• 12:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: So, extractor sixty-five is where we first meet the Dark Riders.
• 12:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: And there's a lot of characters here that are being marketed for kind of toy ability, if you will.
• 12:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: We have characters in the mutant liberation front and the nasty boys and the Dark Riders.
• 12:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: These teams are all kind of, I guess, the upper
• 12:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: starts there's a few others they're all kind of showing up as new mutant groups and they all get a toy very quickly even when nothing not much has been done with them in the comics but most of the characters from this era in the nineties are visually distinctive you can look at a character and see what makes them unique Tusk is a toy that I think could easily be if you if you buy the Marvel Legends toys there's always like the larger figure you can assemble Tusk is that
• 12:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: big guy in the background.
• 12:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: He fills the archetype on the Dark Riders of the Big Muscley Dude, like Warpath or Strong Guy or Beast or, you know, there's always the super strong juggernaut.
• 13:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's always the big dude in the back.
• 13:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: Tuskful fills that role, but there's a toy ability about him that makes him unique.
• 13:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: We pick a word, we make a design, and then we put it in a toy market light.
• 13:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I would love to hear some of your thoughts on the visual of tusk.
• 13:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: What makes him stand out from other characters from this era?
• 13:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: Because he's extremely visually distinctive.
• 13:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so I was just thinking as you were saying that there seems to be a trope that you sort of have to have when you're going to have villains by any x-steer.
• 13:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: There has to be at least one strong person because there's going to be a strong person on the x-steer, right?
• 13:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: As he said, could be warpath over an x-force or
• 13:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: or colossus and uncanny X-Men or beast in X-Factor, whatever.
• 13:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: But there is some sense of, okay, this person, first of all, they're not going to be as strong as the X-Person.
• 13:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're going to be a little bit weaker, and they're also going to be a little dumber.
• 13:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: So even if they're even, like, on the same strength, at least they're going to be dumber.
• 13:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: So you know, the X-Person's going to beat them up eventually.
• 13:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, and the other groups that I mentioned aside that quickly, if we look at those other groups that did you at the same time, we have slab on the nasty boys for our, on the mutant liberation front.
• 14:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like, if there's one in the accolades, there's one, like the, there's that character template in each group.
• 14:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: That is, yeah, it's a trope.
• 14:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's like, there's this role for the henchmen that they're the specifically strong person who are not a strong, or as clever as the ex-strong person.
• 14:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: The main thing that they do and the Dr. Criter is basically just get off on this and this is how they continue to survive is they get the drop on people.
• 14:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, they, and we'll probably get into this.
• 14:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, the Dr. Criter is do significant recon of the ex-factor team before they go and fight them.
• 14:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: The ex-factor team are like, why the fuck are you in our house?
• 14:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Who are you?
• 14:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then they're already getting punched.
• 14:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: So like, that's the way that, like, seems like the Dr. Criter's initially seemed bad.
• 14:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then I think we get the love diminishing villain, which is like this is the same way the back when the brood appeared.
• 14:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: There is a moment where Wolverine fought one brood who was like an assassin dude and he's like, this is the toughest battle I've been in.
• 14:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then of course at this point, it's just he can slash them in his sleep.
• 14:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right?
• 14:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's you could just take out a whole dozen of them without blinking, but it has that quality of like when they're initially introduced, they're super powerful, super scary, and then every time they come back, they just have a little bit less of an impact.
• 15:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that's what we see with us.
• 15:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: But when he debuts as this giant dude who can create other dudes, it just seems white.
• 15:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: So when we come to his visual some of these like strong guys show as the big mussely dude who has just a huge torso strong guy the visual with strong guy often makes me uncomfortable because he plays on this trope to a comedic almost like bugs bunny level where he absorbs kinetic energy and his torso just gets bigger and bigger but his legs and his head stay tiny right so it
• 15:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: Tuck has kind of that visual.
• 15:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: Tuck has a big kind of cartoony face.
• 15:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's got big jowls and a big jawline and he never really has much of a net.
• 15:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: So he's almost he's almost like comically drawn in this way, but he's drawn with this huge torso.
• 15:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's usually shirtless and his torso comes across almost like an insectoid kind of exoskeleton.
• 15:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's like, I'll realize that.
• 15:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: How silly that I'm like, knee deep in tusk.
• 16:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm like, oh, he never wears a shirt.
• 16:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: He, yeah, he's got this and it's almost like this is associated with his superpower.
• 16:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's got this giant kind of carapace.
• 16:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's almost like he's wearing like a big backpack, but it's like his skeleton.
• 16:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: So we have characters and this is the second visual.
• 16:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: I heard the thing I want to bring up with tusk in a moment.
• 16:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's a body horror character, narrow like sprouts bones out of her body.
• 16:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is one of those characters.
• 16:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's almost the key bulks up in a way.
• 16:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: Okay, so in the fantastic forward, the thing has that rocky skin and I hate it every fucking time when they do the thing where a bad guy's punched the thing and some of his rocks have come loose and it shows like the wounds underneath.
• 16:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: Tusc has kind of that energy.
• 16:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: So it's almost like he's wearing a carapace.
• 16:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's got like spiky shoulder blades and like a thick
• 16:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: Bony almost rocky like ribcage that seems to go all the way up to his neck and then he's got this protruding like backpack of like rocks and spikes with a couple of like sharp tusks growing out of it.
• 16:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: So he looks almost inhuman, which is ironic because he isn't inhuman.
• 17:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: We'll get there in a minute.
• 17:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: But that visual for him is really startling.
• 17:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: He stands out and he's brown almost in a way that like rock slide has that like slate ray look.
• 17:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: Tusk has like this like very brown and black.
• 17:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: So he's got bra- he's got black gloves usually and black pants and he's got this big old carapace on his back and we're gonna get into the body horror of it.
• 17:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: Do you want to tell us what Tusk's super power is?
• 17:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: Because it's truly horrifying.
• 17:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's disloved.
• 17:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so somewhere between Brandon Bayes, I just want to also mention that he has these shoulder pads.
• 17:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: He doesn't wear shirt.
• 17:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: He wears shoulder pads with his body.
• 17:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't think they're shoulder pads.
• 17:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think they're part of his body.
• 17:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: They're part of his body.
• 17:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: Wow.
• 17:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's crazy.
• 17:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: Because he doesn't wear anything on top, right?
• 17:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's got that big rocky carapace, and then the shoulder, like we don't know anything.
• 17:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: We just, maybe, shoulder pads on or off.
• 17:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I think they're part of his body.
• 17:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, perhaps, but I mean, that's why he doesn't wear shirts.
• 17:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because he has red on pair pants, and that's it.
• 17:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's that you can't get assured over these giant spikes that come out of your shoulders.
• 17:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so assuming that as you mentioned, he has this giant back.
• 17:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Basically, the fun fact about Tusk is that they based the substance off of him, where he basically can shoot these guys, like little versions.
• 18:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: He calls them underlings.
• 18:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're tiny or versions.
• 18:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: By tiny, he's a giant dude, probably, four feet tall, I'm guessing, versions of himself that can then act autonomously in the world that I seem to have a significant loyalty to him, but think independently of him.
• 18:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: and I'll get to this maybe a little bit later.
• 18:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're a little teeny like two feet higher rock guys.
• 18:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: You think they're two feet?
• 18:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I could see it.
• 18:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: Who looks similar in a way, but they almost come across as like those little aliens from Toy Story that are like that claw.
• 18:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's almost like they share a group mind there.
• 18:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's like a Jamie Maddrax kind of thing.
• 18:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: So tusks bits out like little baby versions of themselves, but they all have on red masks, red gloves, red boots and like they can do it more
• 18:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: close to me.
• 18:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, and like a wrestling singlet.
• 18:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's so weird.
• 18:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's um, it's that weird swimsuit that borat wears that has like just two thin lines and like like a couple over the crotch and then like the asses out because it's just the thong in the back.
• 19:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: It looks like that really horrifying swimsuit.
• 19:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: These guys are so creepy.
• 19:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: They just pop out like this and they give um, they give oompa loompa energy.
• 19:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: I want to sing them like see them singing songs.
• 19:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: And he cooks them in his back.
• 19:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: They like hatch out like eggs.
• 19:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's one of the most horrifying powers that's like an advantage of this guy.
• 19:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's my question.
• 19:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: He had a body of horror to the like enter degree for me.
• 19:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: Here's my question.
• 19:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I'm looking at him right now.
• 19:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's this panel.
• 19:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: We'll get to it with him being in Alaska.
• 19:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: He looks like he could probably be seven, maybe seven, a half feet tall.
• 19:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm looking at the the oompa loompa probably like four, four and a half feet tall.
• 19:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: Do you think that he cooks them fresh every time?
• 19:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Or do you think they get reabsorbed back into his body and they come out again?
• 19:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: We would need someone to describe that process for us to understand.
• 19:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: I would see it almost as like Maro's bone growth, right?
• 19:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like she pulls her off and then it keeps growing.
• 19:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: I almost wonder if he like has to pop them out and then another thing then there are like a hundred of them running around in the world right now.
• 20:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: Possibly, or maybe they like expire and decomposed or reabsorbs them, or like when one dies as a sad.
• 20:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: Or maybe it's that he produces a certain number of them at a time.
• 20:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: I don't think that they would continue existing.
• 20:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: I almost wonder if it's just like another form of him.
• 20:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: So there's a random appearance of Tusk in X-Men-IV-VI, and this is almost just like you have to, you miss it even if you read the issue three times, because the other piece of his powers, which is so creepy, is when you dig into this guy, there's a little teeny man in the middle of the husk.
• 20:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: That like, it's a small dude existing in the wider, it's like the little guy wearing the big suit of armor.
• 20:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: So when I have to, I wrote this power section, I'm gonna read it out loud, here's Tusks Power section.
• 20:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: Tusk is an inhuman and he likely underwent terror genesis and then his powers were altered and expanded by apocalypse.
• 20:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's unknown which parts of his powers are directly related to the terror genesis.
• 20:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: Super strong and durable, Tusk has a large rocky character on his back that is capable of producing smaller genetic copies of himself, often called underlings, which then seemingly exist independent of him.
• 21:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: It may be that Tusk controls these smaller creatures, however, he appears able to create several duplicates at a time.
• 21:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: Tusk has undergone significant brainwashing by apocalypse.
• 21:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: His true form appears to be a small skeletal creature who created the massive exoskeleton around himself and spends nearly all of his time in this super strong form, because there's a moment where ex-man digs the little dude out of Big Tusk, and that's gross.
• 21:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, and I think maybe that's it.
• 21:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe there's just it's like this power that he's able to create organic matter that allows him to walk around in this giant body and then also to create little bodies.
• 21:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: I guess that's the power said.
• 21:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, the like Sandman recent writers have said like Sandman's consciousness exists in like a single grain of sand, but he can expand his form by drawing other sand around himself.
• 21:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: Hydroman is similar.
• 21:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's like a molecule of water.
• 21:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: Rock slide kind of has this.
• 21:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: Rock slide can exist as a pebble or as a mountain range depending on how much bulky creates.
• 22:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: Tusk is a weird and there's some shit to explore with this powers of someone wants to, but truly body horror.
• 22:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's gross.
• 22:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's body horror.
• 22:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you know, I mean, again, I think there is something that you could do to explore this character.
• 22:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Let's give Tusk his own many series.
• 22:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I would write him in an ensemble, but I don't want to write that much.
• 22:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: Listen, what you'll fall in love with it once I give you the best way.
• 22:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: So the tusk gears.
• 22:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: So he's got two set things going from he's got I create this like organic strong guy persona and I've got multiple man like sort of powers.
• 22:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it sort of like there's many ways that you could just dissect this is fascinating.
• 22:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: I feel like it's more marrow than multiple men still to me.
• 22:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like this, this idea is gross.
• 22:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's interesting.
• 22:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: So, there, here's the third thing about Tusk is his weird monkey origins.
• 22:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: We've analyzed the savage land mutates on my show quite a bit.
• 22:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: Go back to the brainchild trial if you want more on these thoughts.
• 22:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: But the idea that Magneto created these mutates with kind of a loyalty gene.
• 23:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's like they have to have someone to follow.
• 23:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: So if that's zaladane or Kaza or brainchild or Magneto or Soron, they just
• 23:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's kind of like a wolf pack, like you need to have someone in charge and whoever proves the dominance has your loyalty.
• 23:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: The Dark Riders seem to have this gene baked in biopocalypse based on their transformation that makes them automatically defer to leadership.
• 23:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: So they follow apocalypse, they follow strife, they kind of jump around depending on who is the alpha dog.
• 23:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: which is an interesting thing where you kind of wonder who they were beforehand.
• 23:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: But the other crazy part is Apocalypse took these characters from the inhumans and they're specifically described as members of the inhuman royal family, which automatically makes this insane.
• 23:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's very little explored and very often overlooked.
• 23:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: that the humans have a bunch of crazy characters with crazy names.
• 23:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's that team from the seventies where there's like a tree guy named Tim Burius and like a lion guy named Leonis and they're all like very Roman.
• 24:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: This group of Dark Riders is an odd combination of human characters.
• 24:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: The second line-up later, which includes characters like life force, hurricane, deadbolt and spine,
• 24:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: Those characters are listed as mutants or in humans.
• 24:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: We're not quite sure, but the original line-up are all in humans.
• 24:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: So what are your thoughts on the inhuman origin idea?
• 24:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then this idea of kind of programmed loyalty that exists for tusk and the others.
• 24:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it feels like Pock lips was doing a little dip in the toe of like, let me just see what the deal is with the inhumans.
• 24:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: And if my whole thing is like, only this strong survive, maybe they're as strong as these mutants.
• 24:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: I should give them a chance.
• 24:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: But he was like, I'm not going to give them such a chance.
• 24:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to make them worse.
• 24:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: got to work your way up.
• 24:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I'm going to call them like the writers of the store, or sometimes they're called the Dark Riders, or commonly.
• 24:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think it's a really interesting choice.
• 24:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: It just feels like dropped in, which is so bizarre.
• 24:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: At this point in continuity, the in humans were generally just sort of dropped into other stories.
• 24:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: They didn't have, they hadn't gone to court with the X men yet.
• 24:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: People still were sort of like, I don't know what they're deal is, but you could just sort of say, oh, and this is an inhuman and hand wave it away without getting too far into the weeds.
• 25:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, okay.
• 25:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: So Apocalypse's origins, we have a retcons that show he came from ancient Egypt.
• 25:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: He was a mutant and subtenure.
• 25:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: There are stories from like X-Men, the rise of Apocalypse that show there was a group of like, I don't know, savages, horseback riding warriors across the plains in his origin that called themselves the writers of the storm.
• 25:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: So he's expanded on mutants.
• 25:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: He has an obsession with the four horsemen later writers will show his four children.
• 25:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: We're named, you know, like death and famine and pestilence.
• 25:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: And he's lost them at his wife into the other land, whatever.
• 25:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: So this is Apocalypse in his like damaged era.
• 25:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: He like goes to sleep and then he wakes up and he hyper revolves some shit like Mr. Sinister and then he goes back to sleep and he hyper revolves some shit like the harbinger of Apocalypse.
• 25:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: Then he goes to sleep.
• 25:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: So this is an era where Apocalypse, they're just kind of figuring out who this villain is.
• 25:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: is he has as an initial couple arcs and x-factor and now he's coming back in kind of a big way before he gets his huge glow up in the executioner's song shortly after this.
• 26:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: So when we first meet the Dark Riders or the Riders of the Storm it's right at the end of the original lineup of x-factor x-factor sixty five through sixty eight.
• 26:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's a storyline called Endgame.
• 26:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: Chris Claire months on his way out of the book, but he is involved in writing this.
• 26:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: And the premise is we have to wrap up our stories and get the original X-Factor team back so that they can rejoin the X-Men for the first time in years.
• 26:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: And we've got a lot of stuff that maybe we want to clean up at a Torioli.
• 26:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like, you know that baby Cyclops and Gene have.
• 26:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm not sure we want that in the main title.
• 26:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: What are we going to do with it?
• 26:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: So there's a huge lot per apocalypse.
• 26:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's a cleanup of a bunch of a continuity.
• 26:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: And the X-factor storyline endgame is the one that kind of wraps all of this up right before X-factor rejoins the X-Men.
• 26:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: Um, Will's Protasio and Jim Leare both involved here.
• 26:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: And Will's Protasio really impressively uses a lot of old X-Men continuity around this time.
• 26:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's the one that gives us Mikhail Rasbutin, which is like a one-line mention from nineteen seventy-six.
• 27:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then turns him into an Omega mutant, right?
• 27:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: What are your thoughts on endgame?
• 27:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think it's actually really fun to read.
• 27:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, particularly as you were saying with this sort of wrap-up time, there is this, I didn't even thought about this until I saw it on panel.
• 27:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's this moment where Cyclops is sort of narrating as they're storming the inhuman base and that apocalypse is taken over.
• 27:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he's like, apocalypse is X-factor's main villain in the same way that Magneto was to the X-man.
• 27:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like he just said, and he's like, that's assing, of course you go.
• 27:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, too.
• 27:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: But for the entire run of X-Factor, it's always been apocalypse.
• 27:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, and of course there's the old lore that we didn't know there was not going to be in apocalypse.
• 27:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: They were originally going to have this like group of mutants that were being run by some shadowy leader and it was going to be the owl, which is like so anticlimactic, you know.
• 27:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, I love the owl, man.
• 27:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's really lind owl.
• 27:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: But like you can't imagine like the owl being at endgame level right like it's just the apocalypse makes his appearance as this sort of a last-to-key shadowy strong of only the strongest of eye villain and then only grows and grows to the extent that he really has been the incredible antagonist for this entire series so it makes complete sense that he's here at the end and you know
• 28:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: Of course, we get the incredible moment during this thing.
• 28:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: And this is, if the dark red is should be known for anything, it's the fact that they were the ones that actually stole Cyclops's son and ultimately sparked everything that went into and becoming cable in the future and all of that.
• 28:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: So it's, it's fascinating that, this is the same story, this is the same story where the Ascani are introduced.
• 28:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: We, we're not going to go into it in a lot of detail.
• 28:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: But it's that till hour four infamous, right?
• 28:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: Okay, that's where that's where we would go find hours if we started introducing all this size stories.
• 28:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: Okay, let's talk about the lineup of the Dark Riders, all of them have their unique visual.
• 28:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: And frankly, all of them are worthy of the conversation, but I don't know that anyone that got lit will ever get another one of these episodes.
• 28:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: I could see him getting one, because he has his own kind of unique story.
• 28:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: So as we introduce these, Litter, let me just ask you the very simple question.
• 28:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: Fuck Mary Kill, Fox Bat, Barrage, Hard Drive.
• 29:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: You're welcome.
• 29:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, I think Fox bat is somewhat sensible, so maybe Mary Fox and then it's barrage and who's the other one hard drive hard drive.
• 29:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh my god kill hard drive, which I guess means I'm fucking barrage, which makes sense.
• 29:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 29:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: Wolf, I would kill Barrage.
• 29:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: Let's talk about the visual of these characters.
• 29:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Wait, question.
• 29:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Barrage is actually like the main leader, right?
• 29:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, that's gauntlet.
• 29:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: Gauntlet?
• 29:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, Barrage is I wouldn't want to be with gauntlet.
• 29:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: Barrage is the purple hair gun arm guy.
• 29:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: Who's that?
• 29:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's fine.
• 29:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's what I think.
• 29:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: Okay, so let's talk about the visual of each of these characters very briefly Let's go on to the time.
• 29:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'll do Fox bat.
• 29:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: You do got lit.
• 29:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: We'll start there.
• 29:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: So Fox bat is British question mark at least he talks British.
• 29:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's all brown and red.
• 29:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's got a red face.
• 29:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's got a little red symbol that makes like an X over his crotch and he's got like spiky forearms that seem to grow He has the powers of both fox and bat and he's kind of obnoxious and then do you want to take a gauntlet?
• 29:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, it's funny because when we're talking, you describe him as a scraggly looking troll on a green hood.
• 30:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that's pretty accurate, you know, he's clearly like has this mercenary background pro if he was in human royalty.
• 30:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know what he did.
• 30:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: He must have been some sort of bodyguard because he has this massive letter belt.
• 30:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's got this glowing red eye.
• 30:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, he is, or like, if you're familiar with the people on break world, he's vaguely like that.
• 30:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: Or sure.
• 30:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: Brush has purple hair and like a receding hairline and like pasty yellow skin and he has like gun arms, but also like a gun on his back and he gives me real like beavison butt head vibes.
• 30:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's awful.
• 30:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's visual.
• 30:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: One of my least favorite X-Men villains.
• 30:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: I don't know.
• 30:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's something about him that makes me just black a little bit.
• 30:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and sign-ups.
• 30:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, he's smaller.
• 30:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: They often call him the diminutive sign-ups.
• 30:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I know I'm getting hung up on everyone's side here, but because Tusk is so big, we see him basically riding on Tusk's shoulder at one point.
• 31:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: like the size of this guy's head.
• 31:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so he's very small.
• 31:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he has telepathic powers.
• 31:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: He is a snazzy dresser.
• 31:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: He often will wear like a vest.
• 31:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, I mean, gets fucked up by Jean-Grayed along the way, not surprisingly.
• 31:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: Here's the thought when it comes to sign-ups, if sign-ups is only a few inches tall, the little skeletal guy inside of Tusk is also a few inches tall question mark.
• 31:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe there's- I will come back to this later in the panel.
• 31:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: But yes, let's get
• 31:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: So then we have hard drive who just looks like a toddler covered in like money and wires.
• 31:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's like is a little being that looks like he was born out of the womb of a machine and he just exists in that womb.
• 31:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: But he can teleport you wherever you want to go.
• 31:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: And these are all the characters that are loyal to apocalypse.
• 31:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I'm going to cover this part relatively quickly, and then we can talk about the story breakdown.
• 31:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: In this story, basically, these characters have been modified to be loyal to Apocalypse, who has built a base on the blue area of the moon.
• 31:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: And the inhumans are mad about it.
• 32:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's just a whole bunch of weird dynamics.
• 32:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: X-factor comes to the moon because baby cable has been captured by apocalypse, who infects him with the Technoorganic virus.
• 32:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: And in an end of this story, this is where Cyclops and Gene have to send baby Nathan into the future to save his life, which we just saw in the Cartoon X-Men.
• 32:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: So they are analyzing arc angels fighting style for apocalypse, and he's kind of training them a little bit.
• 32:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: But soon like hard drive, okay, the X-Factor's a board ship, which is the old celestial sentient ship that like works for apocalypse, and he's been like called back, and the Dark Raiders are sent to battle X-Factor, and Tusk gets, you know, typical strong guy dialogue, like let's
• 32:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: talk more action and they all fight in Beast Punch's Tusk and Archangel shreds like his carapace with his big old metal wings and Ice Man hits him with a blast and when he knocks over a bunch of little versions of him like pop out of him and the sound effect used is literally pop POP exclamation point and Ice Man goes this is cute big fellas for smaller versions of himself popping out of his back like baby gremlins and
• 33:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it's just weird.
• 33:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: And the dark writers are defeated, but now hard drive is in ship and Apocalypse is here.
• 33:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: And Charlotte Jones shows up, and Ascania is here.
• 33:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: And they're called the writers of the storm, and the inhuman royal family gets involved.
• 33:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: And there's a big war, and there's a whole bunch of inhumans involved, and things kind of get chaos.
• 33:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: really doesn't have much to do in this fight except we get to see some tusklings fight beast.
• 33:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: And Medusa and Crystal get mutated by Apocalypse for a minute into truly horrific forms that last for about five seconds for them, but they're really your yucky.
• 33:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: In the end, X-Factor wins and Nathan goes to the future and that's the Dark Riders the end.
• 33:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: What are your thoughts on the nuances of this story?
• 33:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: Does doesn't have a lot to do?
• 33:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, tusks doesn't have lots of you.
• 33:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: I am curious what tusk look like before changed by apocalypse.
• 33:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: It also seems like there's sort of two ways that people get transformed by apocalypse.
• 33:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: One is sort of brainwashing and as you said, like crystal, Medusa, like they don't look completely different than they did before.
• 34:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then you have like gambit who does, you know, our perfect example, the original word in words in the third angel becomes archangel.
• 34:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, I do think there's a difference when Apocalypse uses a death seed on someone.
• 34:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's a Rick remainder edition later when he changes into a horseman.
• 34:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's like a celestial thing where this seems more like he just gave them an upgrade like an evolutionary upgrade with what a virtual machine like push a button like the high evolutionary, you know, like I'll devolve or evolve you a little bit
• 34:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think that's right.
• 34:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think it's like he took it was like, oh, for a dark grader, I'll go halfway up the crank and then for like a horseman, I'll go up to ten.
• 34:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: That sort of seems to be the difference.
• 34:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I just don't know what they did to touch.
• 34:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I imagine test probably looked in that comparison probably looked very similar, but yeah, you get some of these beings really transformed some dough.
• 34:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think that's it's a really well told story.
• 34:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: I love how you zoom through it.
• 34:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't have much to add because I'm going to focus on tusk and just there's not a lot of tusk here.
• 34:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: You hinted to me in our chat that you had come up with, like, a rich exterior origin story for Tuscan.
• 35:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: I would love to hear your thoughts.
• 35:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so before Tusk makes it on panel, we had to realize because he's a member of the Royal Lake.
• 35:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Basically, Black Bolt has a cousin who's named Beish Bolt.
• 35:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: So Beish Bolt had one child, Tuskador.
• 35:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: So Tuskador, Tuskador, Beish Bolt was an
• 35:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: Okay, first of all black black bolts real name is black agar bolt agon.
• 35:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: So does this make his cousin Bayer agar bolt agon?
• 35:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yes, that's correct.
• 35:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.
• 35:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's his full name.
• 35:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, but Tuska do we're baseball to do it gone.
• 35:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, okay, we're not doing this.
• 35:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: So here's the thing about baseball goes by baseball for sure.
• 35:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: He had a real gambling addiction.
• 35:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: He had a crude massive losses to Maximus of all people.
• 35:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Maximus basically tricked him, ruined him.
• 35:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is why we don't know about this whole side of the Inhuman family because they sort of went off into exile.
• 35:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Both Tuscadour is father and mother turned to drink.
• 35:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: He was actually quite a piece of beat up Tuscadour.
• 35:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: He grew up always sort of scared of these figures.
• 35:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: And in his early twenties, he started off becoming a preschool teacher because he could pop these little helpers out of his back.
• 36:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then at some point, uh, really found his calling as a backpack designer.
• 36:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was doing great.
• 36:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he's so sorry, like scared of authority figures at which point.
• 36:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: You don't have to ever be alone again.
• 36:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he's like, I'm going to transform you and he's gets transformed and brainwashed.
• 36:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's never alone again because
• 36:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: He can spread all these little guys out of his body.
• 36:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he goes back and beats up his dad to show how strong he's become.
• 36:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's all a little fucked up.
• 36:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's not after school special in sight.
• 36:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: But this is like how he, A, becomes so loyal to Apocalypse.
• 36:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: So very much embraces.
• 36:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: Why he embraces the only the strong can survive.
• 36:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because he has this horribly traumatic backstory.
• 36:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, I think that is like, you know, he was lonely.
• 36:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then like, I think it was part of the process with Apocalypse that he really discovered that he can generate these individuals that come out of his back.
• 36:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's my theory.
• 36:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: That is adorable and I hate it.
• 36:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: I didn't give this question to this though.
• 36:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: I love the rich interior world you provided for this band that makes me so happy.
• 37:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: I didn't give some thought to this though.
• 37:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think when it comes to a character like Tusc, there's not a lot of room on the page if you're going to write comics to give him a rich world.
• 37:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I do think, I don't know, if I'm writing a darker writer's story and I use them, I think there could be just a half-page flashback or even a full page where we show them just before their transformation.
• 37:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I almost like the idea they these are like the cousins of the royal family of some way, but they are a group of like a military unit that are known for savagery and they're not super trusted and apocalypse is built a base on the moon and this group sneaks out to like prove themselves like we'll show them and then they end up getting taken and transformed.
• 37:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like something doesn't matter.
• 37:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, I love both.
• 37:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think it's great.
• 37:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: But I think something like that's really interesting.
• 37:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: There could be a version where we're doing an in-human story where, you know, like Tuscany, of course, I'm going to choose Crystal because she's amazing.
• 37:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: That Crystal is like, Tuscany's been captured and Crystal's trying to reason.
• 37:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: Don't you remember me cousin?
• 37:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like, I'm your messy cousin that you love, and like, you know, I just don't remember.
• 37:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I think there's some interesting pieces that could be played up.
• 38:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: I also love that in this equation.
• 38:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: Crystal is still the messy.
• 38:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yes, she's one of the messiest characters in Marvel.
• 38:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: I will I will eventually do a trial of crystal, but is not as well you should it's not we're doing Hellcat this year though, and that's that like I can't do that in my favorites.
• 38:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, okay We jump to Xman volume two fourteen and fifteen Dark Riders have gone to Egypt to witness the rebirth of apocalypse.
• 38:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's like Odin every time he gets beat up he has to sleep for a while and
• 38:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: They're all there and there's little little tusklings or tuskets or whatever you want to call them.
• 38:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: And apocalypse like hatches a little too soon.
• 38:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: And they're like, we had to wake you up master because the summers are going crazy.
• 38:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: But then strife shows up and just kicks all of their asses.
• 38:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is executioner song.
• 38:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: We go over to X for seventeen where strife defeats apocalypse.
• 38:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: And he's like survival of the fittest bitches.
• 38:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: So now you follow me.
• 38:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: which gives us now the Dark Riders are being sent after Scott and Gene, because Strife is taking them to the moon where he wants to beat them up in space in a very melodramatic way.
• 38:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: I love the executioner song front to back.
• 38:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: We sometimes forget the Dark Riders are part of it.
• 39:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: Biggest thing that happens is they're a little fight with the X-Men on the moon.
• 39:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: I also was just generating thoughts about what these little underlings are called.
• 39:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: I thought of tuskets.
• 39:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: I thought of his, his testicles.
• 39:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm comfortable.
• 39:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: Ow.
• 39:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's also accurate.
• 39:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
• 39:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
• 39:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: And so much.
• 39:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: So when they fight on the moon, tusks around Cyclops at one point, it was your idea to attempt to escape Cyclops, but we're only here to take you back to your cell.
• 39:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: And Jean Grant would seem down to the morgue.
• 39:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: They just shoot him.
• 39:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: Cyclops, sorry, Tusk, we won't be able to join you or your extensions.
• 39:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: Jean and I have other plans.
• 39:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: So again, they don't have a lot to do here, but it's fun.
• 39:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: What are your thoughts on this?
• 39:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's just the most he speaks period.
• 39:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: What you just read.
• 39:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: That was the longest dialogue he ever has.
• 39:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: Continue.
• 39:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: No, yeah, what are some of your thoughts on the Dark Riders switching their allegiance over to Strife?
• 39:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like one bus beat up, now we're imprinted on the other.
• 39:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: I is exactly that.
• 39:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I love that for them.
• 39:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think it's like Strife was like, listen, I'm just gonna break it down.
• 39:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is your philosophy.
• 39:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: So you're either hypocrites or you join me.
• 39:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're like, well, they're all hypocrites.
• 39:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: They basically are like, okay, I will get down on that.
• 40:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's also really cool because compared to Apocalypse News Week at the time, Strife is like the strongest he ever will be at this stage.
• 40:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he's just there's this great panel where he is just sort of flexing his muscles and all of a sudden like all of the underlings are going flying and they're being hit by like boulders and things he goes and you underlings are hardly worthy of even the slightest attention useless it's like the very small font there's all of you useless unfit they're like oh shit well we have to be fit otherwise we're hypocrites so I get on board with them switching legions immediately
• 40:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: There is, um, there's a visual like when Tusk gets blasted like little pebbles being blasted off his back, which is also like a wolf wolf Wolverine cuts Tusk throat once, uh, in in the following battles.
• 40:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: He seems fine.
• 40:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then we get the big moment at the end where Apocalypse has been weakened by Archangel and the Dark Riders now turn on him.
• 40:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: with survival of the fittest, so we're now going to take you down, bitch.
• 40:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: Which leads us to some leader list, Dark Riders.
• 40:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: Got like, kind of seems to take over in the next year.
• 40:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, he's field leader.
• 40:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: So next time they show up is X-Men-Twenty-One, where they go after Mesmero.
• 41:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: They've done this thing where they're just now hunting down anyone that they deem as unfit.
• 41:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: And the legacy virus is going on during this time, which makes a lot of people weak.
• 41:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's a lot of survival of the fittest shit going on through this.
• 41:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: As mutants are like a weight, we're all over the planet.
• 41:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: So Mesmero is sick and they try to kill him.
• 41:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: It turns out he like brainwashing them into thinking he's dead and he shows up in alpha flight later.
• 41:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's another story.
• 41:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: But there's also a thing where like sign apps, again, the little two-inch guy is like coughing during this.
• 41:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: And the Dark Riders are like fuck you bitch and they shoot him and like knock him off a cliff and he's dead.
• 41:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: X-Men, twenty-three, which is where the Dark Riders show up in Alaska.
• 41:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: Do you want to tell us about that?
• 41:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: I do.
• 41:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: And also, I think it's so interesting, going back to the law of diminishing villains.
• 41:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Where, at this point, in order to prove that they're badass, they turn on each other.
• 41:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're like, well, we can't take down big people anymore.
• 41:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: We don't have the panel time for that.
• 41:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we're gonna identify the weakest member of our team and just take them out.
• 41:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: Then that's how you do them as, like, they don't have the ability to stop that.
• 41:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like, they're programming as such that they have to be fighting someone to figure out who the leader is.
• 42:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's like the wolves fighting until they elect an alpha, you know?
• 42:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's exactly that, and I'm sure there's some former backpack designer in their screaming, you know, I don't want to be doing this, but the programming continues to take hold.
• 42:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you know, that's just the story I'll stick to.
• 42:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I love X-Men, twenty-three because it is a quiet issue overall except for this one fight with the Dark Riders.
• 42:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Where Scott's in Alaska, Mr. Sinister just wants to hang out for a while.
• 42:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: And this is the classic thing that I think sparked a thousand summers brothers, where casually, you know, Mr. Sinister is standing there.
• 42:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he's just like, oh, you know, I care enough to wish you and your brothers to be protected from this illness.
• 42:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: And Scott just goes, brothers, he goes, excuse me, you said brothers, plural, yes.
• 42:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, I'm sorry, did I?
• 42:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now it was, and that was enough to spark.
• 42:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's how we got Vulcan.
• 42:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's how we got Adam X the Extreme.
• 42:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: You're welcome.
• 42:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm sure there's more coming down the pike from this wall.
• 42:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, there's always been the hint to that Gambit is the other lost brother.
• 42:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: I know I hit that one, just like Gambit.
• 42:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: Oh, I think it's great.
• 42:58
  [UNKNOWN]: Not for me.
• 42:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then the Dark Riders are like, before you get into brothers and solve this mystery, we're just the worst.
• 43:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: In addition to like, you know, taking your kid, we're now here to ruin any possible exposition about your other family members.
• 43:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the Dark Riders appear, they do look pretty bad at this point.
• 43:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're back, they're in full glory, much to sign apps, of course.
• 43:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: And there's this terrific moment where they're took talking, they're like, fight us fight us in the Cyclops, it's like, are you fucking kidding me?
• 43:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is so boring.
• 43:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: And Sina Sterbine, while I was like, kicking their ass is very easily.
• 43:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they're like, Sina Sterbine, you should ride with us.
• 43:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's like, oh, baby, no.
• 43:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, I should be, if I had time and interest, I'd basically be running this outfit, but like, no, I'm not gonna ride with you.
• 43:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: So there's like, you're so far beneath me.
• 43:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: You're so far.
• 43:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm in the VIP.
• 43:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: You're all so ugly compared to what I would do.
• 43:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's like just aesthetically, I can't do this.
• 43:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you know, Scott is like, I was forced to send my son into the future because of you.
• 43:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: My innocent child writers, you took him from me, and because of you, he became twisted and sick.
• 43:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because at this point, we thought Nathan had become strife, not a cable.
• 43:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Of course, I was later rectified.
• 44:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: His goal was to see Apocalypse, you, me, everyone, and everything dead.
• 44:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Didn't you realize the actions you took would become the catalyst to the very war you're predicting?
• 44:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: I love this, because essentially, in addition to whatever programming they had, they're basically in this like self-created cycle of we're fighting to prepare everyone for a war and he's like, you're perpetuating the war.
• 44:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: You're the one who brought the war about.
• 44:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: You're just continuing this, and they're like, sorry, we can't get over that.
• 44:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, they test him for like, I think Scott says, fifteen minutes, they fight.
• 44:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're like, you're worthy.
• 44:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's like, fuck you, dude.
• 44:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: I was just trying to go for a walk.
• 44:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: So we jump to Tusk's most prominent appearance, which is not much.
• 44:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's in cable, eighteen, nineteen.
• 44:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: We'll talk about some of the nonsense on the side here, but there's an interesting thing happening in the nineties.
• 44:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's an odd template that we see quite often where we have a big powerful bad guy who has a little teeny, diminutive, like sidekick.
• 44:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: We see it with like Trevor Fitzroy and then that little pasty guy, uh, a bantum that like has to teleport him around.
• 44:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: We see it with m play and like that little smiley guy, DOA and his like a little chauffeur cap.
• 44:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: So this is a tusk and his like little fucking tusklings.
• 45:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's almost like that where the heroes will go after bantum and beat this like two foot tall guy up so they can get it Fitzroy or they'll go after DOA to get it m play.
• 45:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is cable, along with Domino, Caliban.
• 45:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: I loved Caliban as a reader at this era.
• 45:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's one of my favorites as a kid.
• 45:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: Now he's fine as an adult.
• 45:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: But like, Caliban in and storm, cable has a stepson from the future who came back to the past.
• 45:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is Tyler Day Spring, who comes back to the past to become the awful character.
• 45:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: First, he's called Toliver, then he becomes Genesis.
• 45:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: And Genesis is the one getting a good name.
• 45:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, Genesis is like,
• 45:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: way, he's like a blonde Fabio hair in this giant armor.
• 45:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's ridiculous.
• 45:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's the one that like strips Wolverine of his adamantium.
• 45:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: And so, no, that was adamant.
• 45:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: Excuse me.
• 45:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's a story where the Dark Riders go after like no nose Wolverine.
• 45:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: And he kills Cable's shit kid.
• 45:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: Tyler's one of the worst X-Men villains ever.
• 45:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: Anyway, he's taken over the Dark Riders.
• 45:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's all you need.
• 45:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: So Cable's looking for his kid.
• 45:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: And they're in Egypt and they're running around and they're trying to find Tyler and they're trying to find the Dark Riders.
• 46:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: But they've isolated one of the little tusklings.
• 46:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I just have to envision that these little guys have like little high pitched ridiculous voices.
• 46:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: So he's like running away from them and it's very like you're running after me is like me without my tusk brothers.
• 46:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like that's the voice that comes into my head.
• 46:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: So Calvin's chasing him and storms blasting lightning at him and cables got a gun.
• 46:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: So cables like, listen to me, you piece of tusk.
• 46:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: You're gonna lead us to the Dark Riders or he goes, you don't scare me.
• 46:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: Apocalypse products.
• 46:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: Apocalypse is dead, right?
• 46:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: If you want a similar arrangement, he throws him into the grounds.
• 46:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: Stop, I'll help you.
• 46:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: Why wouldn't I got lit in the others judged and defeated Tusk Prime and my brothers?
• 46:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: I was the only one to escape.
• 46:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: Help to rescue them and I'll take you to the heart of the Dark Riders Stronghold.
• 46:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: So they get a group of camels and they make the little tuskling run across the desert while they ride camels behind it, which just fuck these guys.
• 46:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: But she's like a child.
• 46:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's really awful.
• 46:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: So Jay, Tyler is there.
• 46:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: Fox bat is dead because they've hunted him down.
• 47:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: And now they're in Akaba, which is the big apocalypse city with all the crazy cults and shit.
• 47:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: We're not going to go there today.
• 47:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: And there's a huge fight.
• 47:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: And the real tusk is there.
• 47:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: So the tuskling led the mutants into a trap.
• 47:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: The Dark Riders get defeated.
• 47:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: And this is where the other Dark Riders show up.
• 47:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like hurricane, life force, spine, and deadbolt.
• 47:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: Do you want to talk to us about those four Dark Riders?
• 47:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: They're fine.
• 47:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're fine, they don't require a lot of attention.
• 47:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: Spine is perhaps speaking of body horror.
• 47:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: One of the creepiest ones, like this long sort of Lizardy, red being with a spine outside of the spine.
• 47:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: The whole thing is like, I think Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool,
• 47:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know.
• 47:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's cute.
• 47:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: I like that.
• 47:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then we have a great line here, though, for Tusk, where he's now wearing a cool visor, like a sort of cyclops visor, but like white, and he's taking an elbow to Calvin's face going, riders rule the day jumps.
• 48:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, he has a little cute pair of sunglasses, I guess.
• 48:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's fine.
• 48:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, fine guys.
• 48:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's not great.
• 48:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: Hurricane is a guy that's just a big mussely dude with like he looks like bebop from the teenage mutant and jeterals except he's a human and he just blows with you.
• 48:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's got a mole which is crazy because they have storm with them.
• 48:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: See she's like I have ten thousand more powers than you.
• 48:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Why are you doing this?
• 48:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then the other one is life force, who has big ol' goggles on, which is a huge nineties thing.
• 48:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: Sienna Blaze, right?
• 48:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: Locus.
• 48:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: She has the longest updo ponytail, and the skimpyest, like, little swimsuit she wears in combat, and it, like, rides up her ass so much.
• 48:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: She's always posed, like, ass out, like, she's on the fucking cover of, like, a swimsuit magazine, and, like, ass and boobs out, and she whispers.
• 48:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's her thing.
• 48:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: She's like, I'm going.
• 48:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: She's like giving ASMR videos while she's slowly draining your life force away.
• 48:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: Truly, just one of the worst batch of characters ever.
• 48:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: Really, just all.
• 48:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: Okay.
• 48:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
• 49:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: We jump to X man, forty six.
• 49:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is the little guy revelation.
• 49:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: Do you have any moments from this?
• 49:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: We have the Dark Riders in Latvania.
• 49:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: Go back to my red queen episode.
• 49:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, you're asked through that one.
• 49:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: Uh, that's Nate Gray and Madeline price.
• 49:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you certainly hit the, you hit the main point, which is that we do get this sort of telekinetic group.
• 49:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: And there is this little exoskeleton with like this just revolutionized what we know about tusk.
• 49:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: And that's it.
• 49:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: And this is where like the red queen is driving Nate Gray mad.
• 49:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: Let's all you need.
• 49:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then we get the most recent Dark Riders.
• 49:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: So X uncanny X men volume four.
• 49:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 49:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: So the whole thing is the Dark Riders now that all of the mutants are getting taken out by the Terragion Misss.
• 49:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: Again, going back to the Inhuman stuff, which, I guess, may be the Swyther here.
• 49:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Dark Riders reappear, and they say, only the strong should survive.
• 49:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we're not gonna let anyone who would get taken out by a simple illness actually survive.
• 49:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: What are we gonna do that?
• 49:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're gonna kill all of the mutant healers.
• 49:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: So no, he mutant healer can go around curing the illnesses that are popping up.
• 49:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: They take out Mark Dale, Sister Salvation, Elixir, although Elixir revives himself.
• 50:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: hand wave that way and like all these other healers.
• 50:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: So they're basically looking for me in healers to kill so that no one could survive the empox who wouldn't otherwise survive on their own.
• 50:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: And this is not directly stated here, but one of the interesting implications of this storyline is the empox is happening because of the inhuman territory in mist which have been released and there are poisonous for mutants.
• 50:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: So now the dark writers are hunting who are in humans are hunting mutants who heal so the mutants can naturally die of empox.
• 50:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's not really super explained.
• 50:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: But this is the lineup in X-Men where it's like Saber Tooth Siloc, Archangel, and Tusc has nothing to do except the Dark Raiders get blown up.
• 50:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: But it's kind of a fun story.
• 50:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: He also looks like slightly mutated, like maybe some of the previous battles caught up with him, and he's not wearing shoulder pads.
• 50:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I think I don't either his shoulder pads, by key things, fell off his body, or he was wearing them.
• 50:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: We will never know.
• 50:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: But he looks more rock-slighty here.
• 50:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: He looks more like one of those stone guys.
• 50:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is the moment where someone throws a car at deadbolt, and he tackles deadbolt going deadbolt.
• 51:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: Look out, I'll cover you and get taken out.
• 51:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's like the only selfless act we ever see a dark rider ever do for another teammate period, which is why I'm like, that's interesting.
• 51:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: So we've talked about this already, but my final question usually for people is, what's the tusks story we need?
• 51:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: I don't know that we need Eddie.
• 51:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think he's finding an ensemble villain.
• 51:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think it'd be fine to give him a little bit of hard and pathos.
• 51:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's a few interesting takes on this character.
• 51:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: But visually, the little tiny body horror guy manifesting the rock body and then spit now other little dudes, he's just gross.
• 51:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: So we've explored a lot of the survival of the fittest concept and the idea of the space the Dark Riders represent, but it's another nineties villain that gets lumped in with all those like X-Men animated series villains, where we'll see him used once in a while when we need to dig someone out of the pile.
• 51:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: Also his code name makes no sense to me, but I'm fond of this character, but I truly never need to see them again either.
• 51:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, that's what everyone always thinks.
• 51:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: Here's my pitch.
• 51:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, I've been playing with this fish for a while.
• 51:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, we have a new Helions book.
• 51:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: The team leader is Gray Crow, who we all thought was completely redeemable.
• 52:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then, of course, that book did a great job sort of humanizing and bringing him back.
• 52:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: What if Tusk is on it?
• 52:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: What if we get a Helions book of like, just Munzer on the run?
• 52:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: In humans are on the run?
• 52:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: He looks like a mutant.
• 52:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's being persecuted anyway.
• 52:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: So you're talking, you're talking about the Thunderbolts.
• 52:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is where we take the obscure masters of evil and we give them the hero take, which is what Hellians is, right?
• 52:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: We make sure we meet Mimi and to songbird and suddenly you fucking care about screaming Mimi.
• 52:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: I love those books.
• 52:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm not saying these people are really right that book.
• 52:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: If we put to the team, I am all for it, but here's the thing.
• 52:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: If I need a strong guy on the team, I'm going to make a list of all the characters and Tusc is going to land it about number nineteen.
• 52:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's so many obscure villains I would love to explore.
• 52:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: I would love to put four arm on a team.
• 52:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's probably my top choice.
• 52:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think he's fascinating.
• 52:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: I love beef from the helions in a weird way.
• 52:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: But I don't know that Tusk is on my list.
• 52:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: If he was assigned to me, though, I would fucking do it.
• 52:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like we could make people care about this guy.
• 52:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: Listen, my will you have a choice.
• 52:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a crossroads in terms of this new book.
• 52:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you can go with a forearm or a beef, or you could try and, you know, bring beige bolts, youngest son back to you.
• 53:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I find
• 53:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Tusk versus Mamma Max to the death only one time.
• 53:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: I can't wait to hang out again.
• 53:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: I can't wait to have you back on the show.
• 53:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I hope we get to meet in real life this year.
• 53:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: You're a delightful human.
• 53:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're gonna do it.
• 53:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: As we're wrapping up, any final thoughts?
• 53:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: Where can people find you online?
• 53:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: And anything you want to plug for mid-February.
• 53:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, you know, I think it really is just Instagram these days.
• 53:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm at X-Men panels daily.
• 53:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: I also have like a load for Rinsler account, but like if you want X-Men stuff, could X-Men panels daily.
• 53:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: My personal is not as interesting.
• 53:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's like meditation stuff.
• 53:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, for expert horoscopes, we have a really power pack season coming up.
• 53:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: So as you said, we just released an issue, or an episode with Amanda Martini, coming up, we have Clayton Cowles.
• 53:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's going to be this upcoming week, letter extraordinaire.
• 53:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: The life, well, I can't wait to hear.
• 53:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I love that you're building roads with people that I know and love.
• 53:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: They're going to have a great time on your show.
• 53:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: And if they message me and said, hey, will I enjoy my time on this one?
• 53:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: I would say,
• 53:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: Fuck yeah, LoDro's great.
• 53:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I'm so happy you're here.
• 53:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: Okay, over on the Patreon next week you can watch for an episode all about George Washington Bridge another crazy nineties character huge mussely guy with a white beard Andre Mason's joining me for that Bridges soul porny for cable you guys.
• 54:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's a really fascinating train on that one that I can't wait to have Andre back on the show over on the main show you can watch for an episode featuring X-Men Origins Wolverine number one
• 54:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: which is a crazy giant size tangent.
• 54:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: We're spending all your time on Jane's size right now.
• 54:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: My guess on that episode featured our Jeff Fisherwood Penciler, a Gregory Wright, and Glenn Herdling writers.
• 54:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: All of them are great friends who worked on comics in the nineties.
• 54:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: Had a delightful time.
• 54:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: And Jeff is sure what just did moonstone for my wall for those of you that tracked my art journey.
• 54:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: Then watch for the trial of Shannon the Sheetable, which I've been ready for for a few months.
• 54:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I can't fucking wait.
• 54:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's gonna be stupid and you'll laugh your ass off, I promise.
• 54:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: Thanks, everybody, for the ongoing support.
• 54:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: Thanks for listening.
• 54:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: I hope you had a great time thinking about tusk today.
• 54:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: And thank you, Ludra, for joining me.
• 54:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: We'll see you all back in a second.
• 54:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm on the Graham Alkin Lane Patreon channel.
• 54:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: And now stay tuned for some thoughts on fascism as a special guest and I talked about a red skull story and its modern applications.
• 55:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: Okay, we're gonna talk a little bit about this part later in a future episode, but during the events of World War II in nineteen forty two, twenty six nations,
• 55:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: signed the Declaration by the United Nations, pledging to fight the Axis powers together.
• 55:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: And that group officially formed as the United Nations, the UN in nineteen forty-five.
• 55:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: Again, more on that another time.
• 55:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: But let's fast forward a few years to a place where we've talked at all about Nazis, mostly at these.
• 55:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: But in nineteen sixty-five, Huey Newton and Bobby Seal founded the Black Panther Party for self-defense, implementing a social support network for Black Americans living in America,
• 55:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: A country that, of course, is historically and systemically openly raises toward people who color, and they launched programs like Free Breakfast for Children.
• 55:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: Now, the Black Panther movement did advocate for defending yourself.
• 55:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's okay to use violence if others are violent against you, which was against some of the other policies being taught at the time by Martin Luther King, who was very much a non-violent approach.
• 56:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: We hear that Magneto Professor X divided like Professor X's like Martin Luther King and Magneto's like Malcolm X.
• 56:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: but that's not actually how the writers intended it.
• 56:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: Anyway, so we have programs like Free Breakfast for Children being advocated, we have self-defense classes, teachings of Malcolm X and a very long history of anti-colonial liberation struggles to draw upon.
• 56:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: We are in modern era looking upon the Black Panther Party with much more kindness and understanding, but at the time
• 56:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: Things were getting tricky, so as the movement spread around the country, we started seeing more political assassinations, including that of Dr. Martin Luther King in April, in sixth-eight, which was the same year that Jay Edgar Hoover, who was a terrible person, labeled the Black Panther Party specifically as, quote, the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States.
• 56:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: Over the next few years, the FBI declared war.
• 56:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: On the Black Panther Party, they stormed the home of Fred Hampton on false charges and shot him in his bed.
• 57:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: They framed the leaders of the Black Panther Party in various places for crimes that they did not commit.
• 57:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: Find reasons to kill and shoot them or imprison them and basically starve to the party of what it was capable of doing until it went over.
• 57:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: Now, the symbol for the Black Panther Party was the raised fist, the Black Panther fist of power.
• 57:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I'm going to give you a quote, because this is where our issue today is going to open.
• 57:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: We open on an image of the Black Panther fist.
• 57:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: And John Lennon quote from nineteen seventy one saying, you say you want a revolution, you better get it on right away.
• 57:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: Welcome to Captain America, one forty three through one forty eight.
• 57:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: My guest is already fired up.
• 57:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is a story published in nineteen seventy one just a couple of years after all this and Gary Friedrich is the writer with John Ramita on pencils and this story is a problem.
• 57:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: Okay chapter one is called power to the people Sam Wilson is dating Layla Taylor who has an arm band with the fist logo of a fictional group called the people's militia on it
• 57:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: He calls her mama, and she calls him daddy, and she calls him uncle Tom, he's he's working with the white man, and then she invites him to a rally of the people's militia.
• 58:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: And at the rally, there's a man dressed in yellow with black gloves, and he has a hood on, and he's standing before them with the black Panther fist in blazing at a logo on his front and his back.
• 58:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: And he organizes the group into a black revolution, ready to declare war in the streets against white oppressors.
• 58:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: Chapter two of this story is called Burn Whitey Bird.
• 58:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: And soon we see a group of furious black men ready to burn the city to the ground, righteously frustrated with the country's treatment of black people, and they face off against a line of police officers who are all like basically.
• 58:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's a couple of people who mixed in with the crowd.
• 58:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: So the art shows the black faces full of rage and carrying lit torches, and it shows the white lines of cops as a very calm and reasonable people.
• 58:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: And at a key moment, the leader of the people's militia, the parody of the Black Panther Party, unmasks as the red skull.
• 58:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: As if to say that Nazi principles are what is it driving the black power movement in nineteen seventy one.
• 59:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: Now the scholars capes we got to take a quick side job because we first meet the group hydro which will be talking much more about later in these episodes in nineteen sixty five.
• 59:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: They are the counter to shield shield is an international peacekeeping force that receives resources from multiple governments and reports to the United Nations.
• 59:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it's the leader of the opposite group, Hydra, is called the Imperial Hydra, who is a white man who's disgruntled with the American economy, and turns to Hydra to give them to get him power.
• 59:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: But the true leader of the group is called the Grand Imperator, which is very much sending like the Ku Klux Klad.
• 59:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: We'll talk more about this another time.
• 59:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: It turns out it's another surviving Nazi, that in the Wolfgang von Strockler, the father of the Fenris twins that you know and love, and they really love each other.
• 59:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: The tagline of this group used over and over is Hail Hydra, the mortal Hydra.
• 59:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: We shall never be destroyed.
• 59:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: Cut off one head, two more shall take its place.
• 59:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: We serve none but the master as the world shall soon serve us.
• 1:00:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: Hail Hydra.
• 1:00:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: They have green robes inlay with a yellow h and it's very hard not to see this as just a direct reference to Hitler.
• 1:00:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: So again, it's in nineteen seventy one.
• 1:00:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: We continue the story in Captain America one forty four.
• 1:00:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: We open on the green robe men burning an American flag.
• 1:00:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: So right after we saw the people's militia.
• 1:00:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: Now it's the Nazi Hydra group.
• 1:00:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: The story builds until one forty eight.
• 1:00:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's a bunch of crazy shit.
• 1:00:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's some LMDs running around.
• 1:00:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: The king pen and his son, his flopson, like Richard Viscar here.
• 1:00:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: And eventually the true hat of Hydra is also revealed as the red skull.
• 1:00:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's the same reveal with two different groups.
• 1:00:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: So Hydra has been a front for Nazism and the fourth Reich.
• 1:00:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: Oh, a long, wa-ha-ha!
• 1:00:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: And now he is awakened the fifth and final sleeper, the Nazy superweapon, so powerful enough that it will emit a nerve gas that will cook everything living in its vicinity, and the only way to defeat it for all of the warring factions to work together.
• 1:00:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: All races, those with different agendas, heroes, and villains.
• 1:00:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: The kingpin fights alongside Captain America and the Falcon, and in the end, the red skull explodes inside his own superweapon.
• 1:01:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: But he's not gone.
• 1:01:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: Stay tuned for next time.
• 1:01:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: Thank you to my dear friend.
• 1:01:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: No one cosplay for joining me on this episode.
• 1:01:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: I already am picturing you in my brain saying the phrase, I'm annoyed.
• 1:01:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm so sorry.
• 1:01:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm sorry.
• 1:01:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm sorry.
• 1:01:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: It opens.
• 1:01:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hi, I love you.
• 1:01:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: It opens and I'm like, why is this?
• 1:01:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: What's your phone?
• 1:01:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, rain knows, like early, nineteen, sixty, nineteen, seventeen, seventeen, nineteen, eighties, nineteen, nineties, comics are questionable at times.
• 1:01:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so, like, I have to, like, put that into perspective, like the dialogue, just.
• 1:01:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: It made me laugh because it's so ridiculous.
• 1:01:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: But then on top of that, like, okay, like, I'm understanding the time of place.
• 1:01:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: I understand the intention here.
• 1:01:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And like, I also tried to like look at it from the standpoint of like, they're not intentionally being stereotypical here.
• 1:01:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're not intentionally.
• 1:01:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: I hope at least they're that.
• 1:02:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: I don't know that that's true, and I think we, you know, I think call a story racist without calling the writer racist, right?
• 1:02:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: This may just be an uninformed white writer who was taught along the way the black party Black Panther party represented like domestic terrorism, right?
• 1:02:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: But to equate them with Nazis and put the red skull behind their movement with no sympathy for the black voices, they put every character who believes in the people's militia.
• 1:02:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: as like someone who's easily led, they paint their faces full of rage.
• 1:02:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's not an okay story by any means.
• 1:02:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then we immediately follow up so the red skulls leading this and also he's leading the Nazi group and wants to kill everyone.
• 1:02:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: You can't draw that line and not call it racist.
• 1:02:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's a horrible story.
• 1:02:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: I also feel like it's the negligent of the actual historical facts that you know of.
• 1:02:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: And reality as well about the back of the party, but also about lack of America as it existed at that time.
• 1:02:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like we talk about, you know, everything leading down from Jim Crow into this time period, we know that the reason the back of their party was formed on top of wanting independence and wanting, you know, basic decent human rights.
• 1:03:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: was also in response to a lot of black, you know, black on towns, black govern spaces, black businesses being attacked and being destroyed by racism in our country lynching lynch mobs denied the right to vote.
• 1:03:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: fucking slavery, a police force who was created specifically to harm black and brown people, and to create this story and just show them fighting the cops and to promote the line that the cops are real, but the black people are Nazis, not okay.
• 1:03:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I'm going to open all these questions with this.
• 1:03:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm opening all these interviews with this question.
• 1:03:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: Hey, no, what are you a fan of the red skull?
• 1:03:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hell no!
• 1:03:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hell no, I hate the Red Bull and like for me to like as we even get into like more modern stories and we see like what sort of mischief he's up to and I mischief his light a light version of what it's doing with men is I mean it's a monster
• 1:03:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Um, but like, and I always think that's like the conversations now, like how marvellous try to spin the hydra as like not not see as them as it's like this organization that like was founded during that time, but has, you know, evolved past that so they can like use it.
• 1:04:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I'm like, no, they're not sees like just call it what it is.
• 1:04:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: That man is the worst of it all.
• 1:04:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's the baseline for evil in Marvel Comics.
• 1:04:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: Hydra and the Red Skull every time.
• 1:04:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: Okay, so let's focus on the fun parts for a moment.
• 1:04:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, parts of this story that you enjoyed, if any.
• 1:04:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: I enjoy the, the conversation that Sam is having, you know, gaining his independence from underneath Captain America.
• 1:04:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: I do enjoy, like, the new costume.
• 1:04:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: I do enjoy him.
• 1:04:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, okay, I'm gonna step up on my own.
• 1:04:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm gonna try to do what's right and stick up for my community as best I can.
• 1:04:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Even though I feel like he's not with it yet.
• 1:04:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: Layla Taylor can get it.
• 1:04:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think she's amazing.
• 1:04:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, I love her.
• 1:04:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: She calls them out all the time, which also cracks me up in my girl.
• 1:04:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: You are a mess too.
• 1:04:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: But also, you know that, man, it's time for me.
• 1:05:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Stop messing with him.
• 1:05:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: But now, I love, I love that there's like, I can find a sense of like pro black in there, even if it's very like my new.
• 1:05:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's nice to see multiple black characters interacting on the page from different viewpoints.
• 1:05:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: I do think that part's magic.
• 1:05:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's something as well about like the sleeper robot.
• 1:05:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: The idea that it's a sleeper.
• 1:05:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like it's the Nazi ideas buried beneath the earth.
• 1:05:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: And if we awaken them, they will destroy us all.
• 1:05:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: But there's something funny and amazing about it.
• 1:05:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, superheroes punch in a giant death robot every time.
• 1:05:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: That part of the story is fun.
• 1:05:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: I feel like that's like also like very like classic comic book trope like where it's like the giant robot and it reminds me like the like powering is almost where it's like our enemy is small and then it gets really big and I I really like that too but like for me that's like I'm like okay like I know they're gonna defeat this robot like I'm not at any anywhere in the kitchen like although they all
• 1:05:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, the problem, like, so we'll go to the problematic next.
• 1:06:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: The thing that pisses me to fuck off about this story is for them to use the symbol of the Black Panther fist.
• 1:06:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then in the very same thing, use the symbol of the Highl Hitler and the Nazi Swastika.
• 1:06:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: The Swastika is all over this story.
• 1:06:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: It shows up in these pages like a hundred times, but so does the Black Panther fist.
• 1:06:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: And impressionable white readers, because that's for sure who this was written for, but also Black kids picking up a book with Black characters on it.
• 1:06:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is a
• 1:06:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: fucking problem, it makes me so mad.
• 1:06:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: For me too, it's like when they first see the like rebel like leader guy or whatever, he looks like he's doing the how Hitler side on the A like, I'm like, oh, that's not, that's not right.
• 1:06:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't like that at all.
• 1:06:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so like I knew immediately, like, without really a lot of kind of seen it, because like you and I had talked about it, like how it's been like, on review of the Reds goal, okay, cool.
• 1:06:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: But like I was like, oh, that's the Reds goal.
• 1:06:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's in there.
• 1:06:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like that's this is terrible.
• 1:06:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: No.
• 1:06:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: But for me, it's all over the place on top of that too.
• 1:07:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's like, I really don't feel like, especially at that time, like, historically.
• 1:07:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, we knew, like, I had infiltrated that back in the party, that we knew that, you know, we were questioning everyone and everything.
• 1:07:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, they're not questioning, like, who's under the mask?
• 1:07:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, y'all didn't think to check.
• 1:07:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's no way.
• 1:07:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, and that's why I open today with talking about the FBI's very well-documented attempts to frame the leaders of the Black Panther Party as criminals and insurrectionists, worthy of murder and imprisonment, right?
• 1:07:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: Because here we have that same thing.
• 1:07:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: Now, we see this story in a multiple attempt.
• 1:07:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: Go back to my Blacksploitation Month conversations in the necromanment that I did last year where we talk a lot about some of these stories, like Steve Gerber saying, you know, the person
• 1:07:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: behind these like white racists who are killing black people, it's actually a black man in a hood, right?
• 1:07:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like we see that story in the comics, an uncomfortable number of times, it's the same type of thing, but this one is not sees, it's crazy.
• 1:07:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: And for me, I'm like, it's diabolical in the sense of like, okay, I can see how like you can spend the story.
• 1:08:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you look at things now, I'm like, hmm, all of this kind of like, you know, hey, and you know, policy and everything that we see moving forward in our government is fueled by by racism and by all these things the same time.
• 1:08:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I just in this story the way that it's done is it's
• 1:08:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's done in such a like sneaky, almost nefarious way in the sense of like the only good people, only genuinely good people are the heroes, like they just want peace for everyone.
• 1:08:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm like, that's not honest about.
• 1:08:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
• 1:08:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
• 1:08:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: So you brought it here already, but let's do the comparison between nineteen seventy one and twenty twenty five.
• 1:08:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: We have we have conservative movements weaponizing against black lives matters.
• 1:08:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: We have literally an entire fascist regime in our government right now that is built on anti-wokeism and the word woke simply means educated.
• 1:08:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: How dare we question how dare we need things?
• 1:08:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: We are looking at a time of like ice raids against people of color, police violence, men with guns walking around our fucking communities, you know?
• 1:09:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: And the pride flag being labeled now as the really evil thing.
• 1:09:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's the thing you should be afraid of.
• 1:09:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's jarringly not really that different, all these years later.
• 1:09:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: What are some of your thoughts as a queer person of color in twenty twenty five?
• 1:09:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: Because it sucks right now.
• 1:09:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: I've got it sex.
• 1:09:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: I tend to always think of these things in the sense of like, and like this is probably gonna be like a little jarring to to have this conversation, but it's like, we all wanted to leave that, you know, Martin Luther King Jr., and the civil rights movement, those leaders, they did the work, and you know, all of the things that we, you know, used to deal with, just like, win a way.
• 1:09:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think, you know, during Black Lives Matter and like leading up to this, you know, research and open and direct racism and, you know,
• 1:09:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, very clear hatred.
• 1:09:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think that we have to question, like, well, what were the successes of the, you know, some rights movement?
• 1:10:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then, like, if it was the eradication of racism, then do we argue that that was a failure?
• 1:10:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: And if it wasn't that, like, what were the goals?
• 1:10:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Was it equal rights?
• 1:10:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Was it?
• 1:10:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: changes in policy, because what we're seeing now is what happened with that over and direct racism is that we made it private.
• 1:10:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: We privatized that.
• 1:10:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so we never really eradicate.
• 1:10:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: We didn't go anywhere.
• 1:10:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so what we allowed for it to do is just faster and now it's bad.
• 1:10:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: So, and it's been present all the time, right?
• 1:10:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: The denial of resources, the denial of healthy food, the establishment of prison systems, like there's so much in our country that has so much directly to do with the harming of black people and the making of black communities and black potential smaller.
• 1:10:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's very direct, but it's also queer people.
• 1:10:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's also disabled people, right?
• 1:10:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like there's a lot of
• 1:10:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's a lot of forms of discrimination, but discrimination against people of color is at the top of that list for everything.
• 1:10:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think it's because it's a visual too, like it's very easy to determine who's a person of color.
• 1:11:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: It may be a little more challenging to side who's queer or not, right?
• 1:11:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you know, disability is also a spectrum, but the colors and the racism and all of that.
• 1:11:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's very clear to how, you know, the difference between people of color and like whiteness, which when you see, you can't unsee it.
• 1:11:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yes, and it's very frustrating for me too because it's like that is such a superficial thing as well because when we talk about Latin communities where there is a range of shading there as well, their association with whiteness and colorism is very different than the American version of that.
• 1:11:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so we see as a subtle race or a direct race isn't there as well in the fact that they see whiteness as a goal to achieve and so people of color in those communities as well are discriminated again.
• 1:11:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: So on top of that, you have to factor in those cultural differences as well.
• 1:11:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's very frustrating for me in the sense of like, how do you address these things with honesty and
• 1:11:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: giving people dignity without wife.
• 1:12:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: And if you're like me and here's the big shift and we'll wrap up our conversation shortly after this is prior to November of last year.
• 1:12:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: There was a part of me that still expected decency and still hope things could change.
• 1:12:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: But now it just kind of flipped on its head.
• 1:12:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's no decency left.
• 1:12:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I want to say out loud, very, very clearly, to everyone listening, wokeism is not fascism.
• 1:12:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: Queerness is not fascism.
• 1:12:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: Women's rights and black rights and disabled rights are not fascism.
• 1:12:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: The removal of those things of society, the labeling of them, the weaponization against them,
• 1:12:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's literally fascism, but for them to call it fascism in this comic book, I've been reading these little silly red skull stories just one at a time.
• 1:12:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is like my eighth one of these conversations now, but this is the one that I'm like, no, I'm so mad.
• 1:12:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: And for me, too, it's like, because, like, I know that it's just not factual in the sense of like equating these two things is similar.
• 1:13:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: For me, I'm like, you definitely miss the mark here, sir.
• 1:13:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, that was terrible writing.
• 1:13:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then you can tell, like, it was never even attempted to talk to a person of color about this or about this, like, the subject.
• 1:13:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: You just took whatever news or if we should very surface level, if you knew, and kind of ran with it.
• 1:13:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: Number one, I think you are incredible.
• 1:13:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: I love hanging out with you all the time every time you're in a backpack again and again and again to talk about whoever you want any time open open agenda.
• 1:13:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: We're gonna hang it out in I'd be hanging out with the uncanny experience before this is released likely.
• 1:13:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: I don't have a time table yet, but do you have any final thoughts before we close?
• 1:13:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you see the reds full punch in, and anyone who's like, no, but in all seriousness, I think that we need to start moving in the world with action and with purpose.
• 1:13:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: So if you're hearing this, and it's, you know, you're nervous about the world, you're geared, don't be.
• 1:13:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: We went from Krikoa in the comics to a whole bunch of little camps of mutants trying to survive on their own.
• 1:14:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I think that's where we're at right now.
• 1:14:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: We got to take care of us and ours, you know.
• 1:14:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think that's what we got to do.
• 1:14:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: And that's okay, even as we are united.
• 1:14:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: Super grateful for you, my friend.
• 1:14:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: Thanks for showing up today.
• 1:14:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: We'll see you back here next time.