Jay and Miles and Chris X-Plain the X-Men
March 15, 2016 9:16 AM   Subscribe

Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men (previously) has hit its 100th episode and has a very special guest star... Chris Claremont.
posted by Artw (31 comments total) 12 users marked this as a favorite
 
I met Claremont once and my companion had no idea who he was. Awkward.

Okay listening now
posted by The Whelk at 9:29 AM on March 15, 2016 [3 favorites]


And it's straight in with one of my favorite themes... Claremonts vision of an ever changing team roster versus the editorial view that everything should be sealed in amber, or as Claremont puts it "change is impossible and suspense is bullshit" (paraphrasing there) - editorial won the day, but before it settled down into a holding pattern Chris's attempts to keep things dynamic gave us some of the best X-Men stories, as well as a few continuity nightmares.
posted by Artw at 9:34 AM on March 15, 2016 [4 favorites]


(For people who didn't become regular podcast listeners after the first post, Jay is Rachel after coming out as trans last year.)

That was a heck of an episode. Claremont is a great interview and it's really cool to hear what he thinks of the run looking back on it - especially his frustration with the Phoenix retcon.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 9:34 AM on March 15, 2016 [5 favorites]


especially his frustration with the Phoenix retcon.

Which one?
posted by entropicamericana at 9:43 AM on March 15, 2016


That it wasn't really Jean, and she was still alive.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 9:44 AM on March 15, 2016


Pretty much the big one in terms of blocking off story progression.
posted by Artw at 9:48 AM on March 15, 2016


But she's dead again, isn't she? Somebody needs to make single-serving websites that show the current statuses of Jean Grey (alive, dead, insane with power) and Professor X (alive, dead, paralyzed, not-paralyzed, off canoodlng with Lilandra, etc.)
posted by entropicamericana at 9:51 AM on March 15, 2016 [6 favorites]


That was the change though, from permadeath being a possibility to revolving door.
posted by Artw at 9:55 AM on March 15, 2016


Whether or not Jean is alive right now kind of depends on your definition of "Jean." There are two Jeans, one alive and one dead. She's Schrodinger's Jean, is basically what I'm saying.

The Jean you remember from the nineties died sometime in the early aughts, and she remains dead. But a few years back, Beast went back in time to when the original X-Men were still teenagers and brought them into the present day in a crazy plot to make Cyclops feel bad about himself. They decided to stay, so now there's a teenage Jean running around.

It's all completely bonkers, but that's par for the course.
posted by Anyamatopoeia at 10:12 AM on March 15, 2016 [4 favorites]


Beast went back in time to when the original X-Men were still teenagers and brought them into the present day in a crazy plot to make Cyclops feel bad about himself

To be fair, "making Cyclops feel bad about himself" is always worth doing, even if it threatens the very fabric of time itself.

I mean, there was that one issue where Cyclops wasn't a whiny jerk, but it was a What If, so....
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:27 AM on March 15, 2016 [10 favorites]


A million years ago on Usenet I created a list of dangling X-Men plotlines, which became a bit of a thing. Because Claremont wrote it long enough, and consistently enough, that the idea of a dangling plotline was actually relevant, as opposed to just another bit of the incoherent mash that rotating writers leave behind.
posted by tavella at 10:48 AM on March 15, 2016 [6 favorites]


Don't forget the crossovers that bulldoze whatever a given creative team is up to every six months.
posted by Artw at 10:50 AM on March 15, 2016 [2 favorites]


KITTY AND RACHEL OTP I KNEW IT
posted by kyrademon at 11:02 AM on March 15, 2016 [9 favorites]


Kitty Queer, by Sigrid Ellis
posted by Artw at 11:07 AM on March 15, 2016


> "Kitty Queer, by Sigrid Ellis"

Yes, and I knew about Sat-Yr-9 and Illyana and of course Rachel but I did NOT in fact know that Kitty and Rachel were actually at one point portrayed as being a couple with kids of their own until I heard this interview.
posted by kyrademon at 11:12 AM on March 15, 2016 [1 favorite]


I'm going to transcribe that part because ... because.

CHRIS CLAREMONT: ... if you go down to "X-Men: The End" you will see that the significance of Kitty's two-term stint as POTUS is not that she's the first mutant president of the United States. Ideally, all the through the story, the 36 issues -- no, sorry the 18 issues -- the person who's constantly by her side is Rachel. And when you get to White House you never see who is the First Spouse, but the key visual is that one of the kids is a redhead.

MILES: You know, I don't think I caught that, but that makes perfect sense.

CC: The coloring wasn't quite right.

M: OK.

CC: One of the kids should have been a redhead.

M: But yeah, given their dynamic in "Excalibur", that completely follows that it could have gone in that direction.

CC: Yeah, totally.

JAY: Yeah.

CC: Yeah. And, also, Kitty is as bound to the Phoenix in her own way as Logan is. Because in the evolution of the X-Men hierarchy, it turns out Logan is as much a part of her ancestry and her life as her parents. And, you know, that's where it starts getting really convoluted and a joy to completists the universe over but a pain in the ass to editors.

M: Well, as people who are completists, on that side of the equation, we love it. We love it.

CC: Well, the thing was that, I mean, that's what made Ellen Page being cast as Kitty in my mind very ... a perfect casting, but then, for a whole host of reasons that go totally beyond the fact that she's a superb actress and a visual match for the character, it's simpatico on a whole bunch of different ironic levels.

M: Absolutely, yeah.

CC: I mean, with Kitty it's, the basic idea was that while she dated lots of people when she was an adolescent, the primal love of her life has always been Rachel. For me, that goes across the board.

CHRIS CLAREMONT SAID IT AND IT WAS IN A COMIC IT IS CANON FOREVER IN MY MIND. ZIP, LOCKED.
posted by kyrademon at 11:35 AM on March 15, 2016 [15 favorites]


In an earlier episode of the podcast, another writer they interviewed (the name escapes me) said that he'd heard a rumor that originally Claremont decided just before the Kitty Pryde and Wolverine miniseries that Kitty was the great love of Logan's life. They were destined to be together, once she grew old enough, and that the KP&L mini was a major step in getting her along that path.

As Jay and Miles both said "oh hell no," the writer repeated that this was just a rumor he'd heard.

That would have been creepy. I hope it was never the plan, because AAAAGH.

Kitty and Rachel, see, now that's just fine.
posted by Harvey Jerkwater at 11:41 AM on March 15, 2016 [1 favorite]


I have met Chris Claremont a couple of times while getting comics signed. He was really sweet and chatted with me about the comics for a little.

I've been listening to the podcast for over a year now am a huge fan. It's also really really cool to hear such an institution at Marvel discuss queer characters.
posted by KernalM at 11:51 AM on March 15, 2016 [2 favorites]


I'll just add that to my Chris Claremont Rocks list along with "Carol Danvers tells the Avengers to shove it", "Storm can still kick Cyclops' ass even if she doesn't have mutant powers", "No, there really isn't any other reasonable way to interpret what Kitty is saying to Sat-Yr-9 there", and "Mystique and Destiny are a canon couple long before Marvel allowed that kind of thing because Chris Claremont uses words for it that the editors don't understand and I had a dictionary".
posted by kyrademon at 12:13 PM on March 15, 2016 [8 favorites]




Claremonts vision of an ever changing team roster versus the editorial view that everything should be sealed in amber, or as Claremont puts it "change is impossible and suspense is bullshit" (paraphrasing there) - editorial won the day, but before it settled down into a holding pattern Chris's attempts to keep things dynamic gave us some of the best X-Men stories, as well as a few continuity nightmares.

Thinking back to this point in the interview, one nice thing about the X-Men line is that editorial didn't win out, at least not completely. Death is a slap on the wrist and nobody ever manages to quit superheroing forever, but at the same time the books never crystalized around a particular status quo like Mavel's other major properties. All the adaptations go straight to the mid-90s when they were a group of adult superheroes inexplicably based out of their old high school in Westchester with a few token trainee teenagers hanging around, but that period didn't last forever and since then there's been no snap back – the closest they came was the Jean Grey School where all the old cast were teachers and they were one faction in a mutant Cold War with Cyclops, so that's not exactly a carbon copy.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 12:57 PM on March 15, 2016 [2 favorites]


Somebody needs to make single-serving websites that show the current statuses of Jean Grey (alive, dead, insane with power) and Professor X (alive, dead, paralyzed, not-paralyzed, off canoodlng with Lilandra, etc.)

Something like Is Wolverine Still Dead?
posted by Peccable at 1:07 PM on March 15, 2016 [1 favorite]


A million years ago on Usenet I created a list of dangling X-Men plotlines

Oh wow, tavella. That was one of the very first things I ever read on the internet, reading rec.arts.comics.marvel.xbooks with n, an unthreaded Usenet reader that meant I saw the various pages of your list and the various discussions about it all scrambled up in whatever order they happened to arrive at the university's newsfeed. The list was such a weird mix of stuff I knew about from the comics I'd read and lots of "wait, what?!" stuff from comics I hadn't.

I think I'm more excited to "meet" you than I would be to meet Claremont.
posted by straight at 3:14 PM on March 15, 2016 [4 favorites]


Aw! I blush. I was an intern at DARPA at the time, so I had access to the internet and plenty of downtime, and was thoroughly hooked on X-Men.
posted by tavella at 3:19 PM on March 15, 2016


For the record: If you're eligible to vote in this year's Hugos and you don't give X-Plain the nod for best fancast or whatever it is...I will give you all of my mutant stink-eye forever.

AND my side-eye.

MUTANT SIDEY-STINK-EYE!
posted by scaryblackdeath at 5:11 PM on March 15, 2016 [2 favorites]


My favorite bit from the interview was the memorial issue for dead Wolvie that Claremont was asked to write, which he had planned to populate entirely with characters who'd come back from the dead and who would, during their memorial bonfire night, eventually put together a live pool to bet on when Logan would come back.
posted by ursus_comiter at 5:42 PM on March 15, 2016 [5 favorites]


I really only read the X-Men for a couple years in the eighties, but it was during a difficult time in my life and very formative for a young proto-geek. I absolutely adore this podcast and it's the best part of my Mondays. Harvey and Janet forever!
posted by These Premises Are Alarmed at 6:12 PM on March 15, 2016 [3 favorites]


I was trying to think of the name of a business I worked at ten years ago, and simply cannot, and I'm impressed at the level of recall Chris Claremont has over four years of complex plotlines. Maybe I shouldn't be, considering he'd pick up threads he'd started years earlier, but still, wow.
posted by elr at 10:56 PM on March 15, 2016


People may complain about later stuff, about this or that, but I really love Chris Claremont. He's responsible for so many good times in my life I can't even.
And Jay and Miles too. I've been listening to the podcast non-stop for the past month or so, in the car, on the plane, etc., and it's like my two best best high school nerd friends I never had.
posted by signal at 5:56 AM on March 16, 2016 [1 favorite]


Jay Eddin has brought me around to thinking that, done right, Cyclops can be more than just a whiny loser. That's some powerful persuasion.
posted by Artw at 12:40 PM on March 16, 2016 [1 favorite]




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