in which I kind of write about mutants, again
I’ve talked about X-Men a lot before, in person and in this newsletter. I’ve written about finding that copy of Uncanny X-Men #210 in the early nineties as a kid, I’ve talked about my Saturday mornings watching the animated series, I’ve probably shared panels of recent comics with some of you over WhatsApp or LINE.
The thing is, I don’t really have any “comics friends.” I have lots of friends who read comics. I even have a couple of friends who like Marvel/DC stuff. But I don’t have friends who read X-Men, or the current Marvel stuff, that I can talk about the latest issues with. So - sometimes, when I’m really into something I’m reading, or just feel like sharing, I’d share panels or talk about the comics/characters a bit too much. Other times, I listen to podcasts. (Yay, parasocial relationships!)
I tried and stopped listening to a bunch of comics related podcasts before, but the first that really stuck for me was, maybe unsurprisingly, Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men. I discovered this podcast during the second lockdown (I think), when they already had hundreds of episodes out. It took me a few months, but I listened to every single episode - even the Hawk Talk ones, where they talk about things that are not X-Men. This podcast isn’t a review podcast, or even a summary podcast. They mainly talk about the X-Men comics in continuity (at the moment they are in the 90s) and, well, explain them. It’s fun! Also they seem like some of the nicest people ever, which really is not something I would say about every person I have a parasocial relationship with.
Because of how much I was enjoying Jay & Miles, I began to look for other podcasts to listen to - unfortunately, many of them were just too cishet (aka dudebro) for me to get into. Of course, I would then get into Cerebro which is just DELIGHTFUL and so fun to listen to - this podcast dedicates each episode to one mutant character, and has a guest that loves that character - preferably comes from a similar background, for example the guest for the Kate Pryde episode would be preferably Jewish, and the guest for Storm would be black. The guest for the Cyclops episode is Jay from Jay & Miles which is just perfect because of course they talk about reading (and writing) him as autistic coded. I no longer listen to Cerebro these days, not because it isn’t good (it really is!) or because I hate it (I don’t!), but because Connor, the host, hates Jean Grey a lot and I can only take so much Jean slander before I hit unsubscribe. When you insult Jean in particular, I take it personally.
And then there’s Comic Book Queers: Legacy, which is also fun and kind of bitchy, and does have the occasional Jean slander*, but it’s done jokingly enough that I tolerate it (for now.) This podcast seems to fill out the other thing I need in my life - the hosts discuss the X-Men (and other queer) comics that come out that week, as well as queer or comics-related movies/shows that are recent. A few episodes ago, they started a new segment where they talk about BL shows, too. Right now they’re discussing Thai BLs in that segment. I like it because of all the X-Men chats, of course, even though I often disagree with them, but it’s also nice to hear them talk about shows I’m not watching (like The Boys, or the DC CW Universe stuff) so that I can catch up without looking up plot summaries. Makes my job easier, y’know?
A different catching up-type podcast I’ve been listening to on and off is My Marvelous Year, which talks about the 10 most interesting/important Marvel comics released year by year, in chronological order. I’m still at around 1989, while the last episode released so far is at 1999. Anyway, I was mostly a passive listener throughout, and was binge-listening to it in my bus and train trips to work (since I am not on Scribd right now), happy to fill in all the bits I missed out because I was too focused on the X stuff when I read the 80s comics. Then they got to the Mutant Massacre episode, which was apparently a very divisive topic for the hosts. It got me to write a LONG email to them, typed on my phone in the bus.
One of them was rather dismissive of Mutant Massacre’s place as one of the important comics from that era, and I had mostly written to remind them that they were reading it from a cishet white American male perspective. I wrote about how Uncanny X-Men #210 (the first issue of the Mutant Massacre event) was my first Marvel comic, and how due to the fact that I never got to read the story in full until I was an adult, I never saw the part where Angel was pinned to the tunnel walls, but the scene that #210 opens with, where Tommy was being chased down and killed by the Marauders, haunted me for years to come.
I wasn’t really expecting the email to be read, let alone replied to, but I did get a very nice reply which resulted in a short conversation of sorts about recent comics and stuff, and I was invited to their forum which is great but also a bit too active for me to keep up on (the time difference doesn’t help - I’d check it in the morning and find more new posts than I can read for the rest of the day!)
I’m still binging on The Anthropocene Reviewed, so I guess I will give comic book podcasts four stars :)
- Yes, a lot of the fandom hate Jean for some reason. Yes, a lot of my favourites are people the rest of the fandom seem to hate.
While I don’t know anyone I can discuss regular comics with, I do know a lot of fellow manga readers. One of them is a colleague whose taste in manga is excellent, although my esteem in them might be slightly lower now that I realise that they never heard of Ouran High School Host Club, which I’m currently rewatching and also is one of my favourite comics featuring an agender protagonist!
Recently this colleague was browsing the manga new arrivals while I was displaying new single issues, and I asked them if I would like Blue Lock, because I generally enjoy sports manga, but so far I’ve yet to love any of the ones focused on football. And they were like, “…there’s a lot of guys? And power attack stuff?”
I replied, amused, “well, yeah, it’s a sports manga.”
They then explained that they weren’t sure if I’d like it because it wasn’t quite like sports manga I like (like Haikyuu!!, and Yowamushi Pedal, both titles they recommended to me when they were new) - “there’s no teamwork or friendships, it’s just a lot of kakkoii players trying to compete to be the ace.”
Oh. Turns out that it’s about some dude taking a bunch of really good strikers and making them compete to be the best one, putting them into strenuous tests and stuff. So - it wasn’t really a sports manga, it was like a survival manga or a battle royale thing that happened to be sports-centric. I told my colleague, after hearing this explanation, that I totally got why they thought I wouldn’t like the manga, and that they were right. Then, realising it as I spoke, I added that this was why I was an X-Men fan, and can even enjoy the occasional Fantastic Four story, but most of the time I would never choose to pick up a volume of Avengers.
The Fantastic Four are family - they bicker and they exasperate one another but they always had each other’s back. The X-Men are found family - they chose to be there for one another, and many of their stories are about teamwork and friendship and overcoming the odds together.
The Avengers do work together, and they do care for one another (or at least some of them care for some of them) but even as they do, it’s very obvious that they were comprised of solo heroes who were there for a temporary team-up. That’s what they felt like to me, at least. And I would rather read Captain Marvel, and read about her girls’ night out with Spider-Woman and She-Hulk and Jess Jones in them, or read She-Hulk and see her snarking about Tony Stark to her bestie Hellcat (who is dating that fuckboy) on the phone, than an Avengers comic where all of them might be in, but won’t interact in quite the same way. I don’t know, it just doesn’t feel the same. Is it just me?
Sometimes I think I’m just biased, but then I think about the MCU and how the Avengers film worked because they made the effort to introduce the heroes separately in their own films first, but I don’t feel like an X-Men story would work quite the same way. Even characters like Storm feel more like herself when she’s gently ribbing Cyclops, or hanging out with Kate or Jean. Even though he’s got so many solo series and movies, Wolverine solo would never be as interesting as the Wolverine who is mentoring Kate, or Jubilee, or Quentin. Individually, most of them just don’t have whatever is required to carry a solo story well as Thor or Doctor Strange did. But together, they’re not only the best soap opera fodder ever, they easily beat out the Avengers, the Inhumans, Fantastic Four, and in the current event, the Eternals.
I like stories about found family. I like stories about dysfunctional families. I like stories about people with very different personalities and talents working together towards a common goal. (Sports manga and heist movies ftw!) I like stories about incredibly flawed people who are so, so much stronger together.
The X-Men stories are kind of all of that. And a conversation about Blue Lock, something that is very much not like that, made me think about this. Anyway, I would absolutely give sports manga as a genre four and a half stars out of five.
Drink lots of water, and stay safe!