In which Nightcrawler does Weird Tales; Iceman does Back to the Future; we want a vacation home in Dave Cockrum’s brain; Bamfs are terrible; the 1983 Iceman miniseries is straight-up bananas; parents just don’t understand; and Rachel will take literally any excuse to talk smack about John Ruskin.
X-PLAINED:
Vanisher
Nightcrawler #1-4
Bizarre Adventures #27
Iceman #1-4
The Well at the Center of Time
The downside to hanging out with pirates
A shark wizard in a tiny loincloth
Better living through sound-effect awareness
Boggies
The key to a classic Nightcrawler story
Earth-5311
Bamfs
The full extent of Rachel’s Smurfs knowledge
Cretaceous Sam
Sehv
Illyana Rasputin’s porn collection
The Drake family
An exceptionally unlikely girl next door
The definitive Miles’s Mom anecdote
Marge Smith / Mirage
White Light
Idiot
Kali (but not that one)
Two generations of Officers Ratchit
Pornography no one wants to see
Death by time travel
Oblivion
Night Man (kinda)
Our ideal cross-media adaptations
NEXT WEEK: X-Men ’92, with Chris Sims and Chad Bowers!
You can find a visual companion to this episode on our blog!
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X-Plain the X-Men recaps two minis I read as a kid. The Iceman mini was actually reprinted in the British Secret Wars comic, with a third of a U.S. issue every British issue. It was very, very odd to me at the time.
Why do I keep having to learn the same lessons over and over?
Those who follow my blog know that in recent weeks I posted some hot-headed remarks regarding my perception of how DC Comics treats creators. While I stand by at least one of my basic points – I think DC’s policy concerning…
I’m actually a very good sick person — no matter how lousy I feel, I tend to hold it together pretty well, but this time around, that was pretty hard to do even before I went to the doctor: I was dozing off unintentionally, feverish enough that I could hear myself talking to myself and being pretty much unable to stop it, and had apparently taken up vomiting as a favored new pastime. But then I went to the doctor, and he said “I think you should actually go to the emergency room, they can run tests in a far quicker way than we can here, and if it’s what I think it could be, it’s important that we find out as soon as possible.” Which is, to be fair, pretty much the least exciting thing you want to hear a doctor say to you.
Spoilers: it wasn’t the bad thing. Instead, I’ve got enteritis, which is an infection. A horrible infection, sure, but at least infections can clear up and aren’t going to require surgery or months/years of treatment (Other options brought up included my colon failing and/or kidney stones). The past few days have been the opposite of fun, but they have made me have an all-new affection for the small things: Being able to go to the toilet, for example. Or eating.
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Back when my husband first started campaigning for President, folks had all sorts of questions of me: What kind of First Lady would I be? What kinds of issues would I take on? Would I be more like Laura Bush, or Hillary Clinton, or Nancy Reagan? And the truth is, those same questions would have been posed to any candidate’s spouse. That’s just the way the process works. But, as potentially the first African American First Lady, I was also the focus of another set of questions and speculations; conversations sometimes rooted in the fears and misperceptions of others. Was I too loud, or too angry, or too emasculating? Or was I too soft, too much of a mom, not enough of a career woman?
Then there was the first time I was on a magazine cover – it was a cartoon drawing of me with a huge afro and machine gun. Now, yeah, it was satire, but if I’m really being honest, it knocked me back a bit. It made me wonder, just how are people seeing me.
Or you might remember the on-stage celebratory fist bump between me and my husband after a primary win that was referred to as a ‘terrorist fist jab.’ And over the years, folks have used plenty of interesting words to describe me. One said I exhibited ‘a little bit of uppity-ism.’ Another noted that I was one of my husband’s ‘cronies of color.’ Cable news once charmingly referred to me as ‘Obama’s Baby Mama.’
And of course, Barack has endured his fair share of insults and slights. Even today, there are still folks questioning his citizenship.
And all of this used to really get to me. Back in those days, I had a lot of sleepless nights, worrying about what people thought of me, wondering if I might be hurting my husband’s chances of winning his election, fearing how my girls would feel if they found out what some people were saying about their mom.
