Episode 012 - Inner Circle Jerk

## Episode Description

In which we wade into the first arc of the Dark Phoenix Saga, Rachel does not like Sage, the Hellfire Club are the mean girls of the Marvel Universe, Cyclops and Phoenix have a Moment, Mastermind ruins everything, Emma Frost is a force to be reckoned with, Wolverine gets awesome, and we meet the Dark Phoenix.

## X-Plained

* Sage
* The Hellfire Club
* The Inner Circle
* Jason Wyngarde (again)
* Sebastian Shaw
* Harry Leland
* Emma Frost
* Donald Pierce
* Hegemony and social politics of the Hellfire Club
* 18th Century bondage cosplay
* Kitty Pryde
* The worst disco ever
* Alison Blaire
* Tiny shorts
* How to make Wolverine work
* Sexual politics of the Dark Phoenix
* Why Magneto’s powers are broken post-AvX
* The P.E.N.I.S. five

## Listener Questions

* The Dark Phoenix Saga is my favorite comic book story of all time. Lately, though, I've read people on Tumblr call the story problematic because it tells a story of a woman with too much power not being able to control that power, and thus needs to be killed. How problematic is The Dark Phoenix Saga in y'all's opinion, and how much does that affect how you react to the story?
* Can you X-Plain why Magneto's powers are broken post-AvX? He wasn't one of the Phoenix 5.

## Transcript

[Editor’s Note: Rachel now goes by the name of Jay and uses male or neutral pronouns. This episode was recorded before Jay’s transition. At Jay’s request, we are using the name and pronouns they used at the time when this episode was recorded to keep the integrity of the transcript.]

Transcribed by Harold; Edited by Rebekah

(00:00)

**Miles**: Hey Rachel, when are we going to explain Sage? People keep asking.

**Rachel**: Oh god, Miles, do we have to?

**Miles**: She's Hellfire Club relevant. C'mon, what do you have against Sage?

**Rachel**: Miles, she's everything frustrating about Claremont in one compact package.

**Miles**: She can't be that bad.

**Rachel**: Miles, Sage is a retcon elemental. She's worse that Rachel Summers. I mean, she's worse than Wolverine.

**Miles**: Hey, hey, hey, no-one's worse than Wolverine.

**Rachel**: Oh, Sage is. She was introduced in 2001, then back-written to be involved in a bunch of major *X-Men* stories. And she's impossible to research without mainlining like 40 years of comics because every article that goes into her history lists *X-Men* #132 as her first appearance, even though that was a retcon from 30 freakin’ years later.

**Miles**: Right, yeah, she was a spy in the Hellfire Club then, right?

**Rachel**: Oh yeah, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Did you know she was also the kid who rescued Xavier after the fight with Lucifer where he lost the use of his legs?

**Miles**: What?

**Rachel**: And then later he recruited her at the same time as the original X-Men, but he kept her secret and raised her-

**Miles**: [*crosstalk*] Uh-huh....

**Rachel**: -to be an extra-special spy that none of the other X-Men ever knew about.

**Miles**: [*uncertainly*] Seriously?

**Rachel**: Oh yeah. And she's got a million superpowers, and they're all either hand of god or exposition themed.

**Miles**: Like what?

**Rachel**: Well, she's basically a living super computer with no maximum capacity.

**Miles**: Well, that's not that bad.

**Rachel**: She's got a freaking reboot switch.

**Miles**: Okay, that's silly but not terrible.

**Rachel**: She can read people's genetic code.

**Miles**: Uh, seriously?

**Rachel**: She can also rewrite it to trigger latent mutations, jump-start mutant powers, or soup up existing powers. Oh, and she's a low level telepath, and she can resist other telepaths, and then, when she was on the New Exiles, she killed Roma, absorbed all of her knowledge about the multiverse, and is now basically omniscient.

**Miles**: WHAT?!

[Intro: *Excerpt of X-Men: The Animated Series theme song*]

(01:43)

**Rachel**: I'm Rachel Edidin.

**Miles**: And I'm Miles Stokes.

**Rachel**: And we are here to X-Plain the X-Men.

**Miles**: Because it's about time someone did.

**Rachel**: Welcome to the 12th episode of "Rachel and Miles X-Plain the X-Men", where we walk you through the ins, outs, and retcons of our favorite superhero soap opera.

**Miles**: This week we're going to be wading into the first half of THE iconic *X-Men* storyline, the Dark Phoenix Saga.

**Rachel**: This is technically the start of the Dark Phoenix Saga. The Dark Phoenix isn't actually going to show up until quite a ways in.

**Miles**: That's one of the things I love about this story is Claremont, he knows how to build something up. So by the time she does show up, the story has freaking earned it.

**Rachel**: Where are we so far as - in terms of the Phoenix? Sh-first showed up in 101.

**Miles**: Yeah, so that was after the X-Men went into space and fought some Sentinels, and something something something that's not really relevant right now, but the relevant part is the X-Men, they're escaping this space base, and uh, the space shuttle they came in gets pretty wrecked, so Jean, uh, essentially sacrifices herself to get the X-Men back to Earth. She seals them in the one remaining radiation shielded part of the space shuttle, and she uses her telekinesis, her telepathy to absorb the knowledge of how to pilot it from Peter Corbeau, and her telekinesis to protect herself, a little bit, as much as she can, from re-entry.

**Rachel**: Enough to get the shuttle down safely. And I mean, she doesn't just essentially sacrifice, herself, I mean she literally sacrifices herself - she dies.

**Miles**: But in what may be one of the quickest turnarounds in death-to-life history in the Marvel Universe, it's only a few pages into the next issue that she emerges from the water wearing a slick green jumpsuit and says, [*as Phoenix*] “Hear me X-Men. No longer am I the woman you knew. I am fire, and life incarnate. Now and forever, I am Phoenix!” And it's really awesome.

**Rachel**: Now.. I want to point out that this Phoenix isn't actually Jean Grey. This is going to be the subject of one of the largest, most enduring, and.. most perennially convoluted retcons in Marvel history. You can get a detailed rundown of this in *Classic X-Men* #8, but for now, we're basically going to be looking at the story within the frame of reference that existed as- at the time. So as far as readers know at this point, in fact, as far as the writers knew at this point, as far as Marvel knew, this was Jean Grey.

**Miles**: You know, I think the Dark Phoenix Saga is a lot more effective if you look at it in the context of when it came out. This is comics, this is *X-Men*, everything that happens will be in some fashion updated or undone at some point later, but right now let's tr-try to keep the sense of immediacy that readers in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s had as they were reading the Phoenix Saga and the Dark Phoenix Saga.

**Rachel**: So Jean dies, she comes back as the Phoenix, and over the next twenty-odd issues it becomes increasingly evident that the Phoenix Force is something that's now part of her, but it's a lot bigger than her, a lot bigger than the X-Men, it’s a lot bigger than Earth. This becomes EXTREMELY clear in *X-Men* #108, when she essentially rewrites reality within the Shi'ar M'Kraan crystal.

**Miles**: What's kinda cool is after that we don't really get a whole lot of explanation. Like Moira McTaggart, the Scottish scientist that's been working with the X-Men for a while at this point, she's researching it, a lot of the characters are pondering it, but we don't really get an explanation for quite a long time.

**Rachel**: Jean goes back to the team, is going around as Phoenix, she's more powerful, but it's basically business as usual, except for some other things that have been subtly building up in the background.

**Miles**: What's been going on before this storyline, and we talked about this in our last episode, the X-Men are sort of split in two - Jean and Beast and Professor Xavier on one side and the rest of them on another - and each side thought the other was dead because there were no cell phones in 1979 and 1980.

**Rachel**: Now, Jean ended up on Muir Island, which is Moira McTaggart's research facility. She was hanging out there with Multiple Man, Havok, and Polaris, as well as Moira and basically testing the Phoenix's powers, and while she was there she started getting these weird flashbacks.

**Miles**: She's being followed around b-at this point by this guy named Jason Wyngarde who's this handsome, dashing, 1700s-looking gentleman.

**Rachel**: In the flashbacks she's having what she thinks are ancestral memories of some, some distant ancestor of hers in in the 18th century, whose name is also Jean Grey, who does stuff like go on trans-continental voyages, and hunt humans for sport, and mostly romances it up with a dude named Jason Wyngarde.

**Miles**: We the readers have seen him a number of times being all sleazy in the shadows with his, his, uh, debonair sideburns. He also, unbeknownst to the readers or Jean at this point, during her travels around as she's trying to get over the X-Men, as far as she knows dying, he's been posing as different people, like a priest she talks to on a train, just really gaining her trust in a sort of confusing subtle way.

**Rachel**: Now what we know, and Jean doesn't, is that Jason Wyngarde is actually Mastermind.  If you'll recall, this is a guy who was part of the Silver Age Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. He's super creepy! He is basically a proto-pickup artist. We saw him back in the Silver Age again, trying to hook up with Scarlet Witch using illusions, and now he's basically playing that long game with Jean. He's trying to manipulate her into some kind of alliance with something called the Hellfire Club.

(06:12)

**Miles**: The Hellfire Club are so much fun.

**Rachel**: The Hellfire Club are basically the *Mean Girls* of the Marvel Universe.

**Miles**: Th-they kind of are, except very few of them are actually girls.  But they are extremely mean.

**Rachel**: It amazes me that the Hellfire Club was not made up by Jack Chick, because it reads like the kind of cautionary organization that you'd see, like in a Chick tract.

**Miles**: [*laughs*]

**Rachel**: So the Hellfire Club is a nebulous shadow organization. Branches of them have been mentioned before, specifically they were part of the rebirth of the Sentinel program, the series of events that landed Jean at the bottom of Jamaica Bay and led to the emergence of the Phoenix to begin with. What the actual Hellfire Club is, is going to vary a lot over the next forty years. Here's the stuff that stays consistent.

**Miles**: The Hellfire Club's essentially a high-society gentleman's club, so movers and shakers like, y'know, your rich industrialists and stuff like that, your politicians looking for influence, they'll gather there. And we'll actually see family members of a couple of *X-Men* characters as part of that over the years.

**Rachel**: Well, and other parts of the Marvel Universe. I think Tony Stark is a member of the Hellfire Club.

**Miles**: Uh, yeah, I think he is.  And Warren Worthington II, which is to say the father of Angel, is a member, uhh, Sunspot...

**Rachel**: I mean, Angel technically is too.

**Miles**: Uh, true.  Uh, Sunspot's father. Roberto da Costa, Sunspot, so, uh, Mr. da Costa, who probably has a first name, is a member as well.

**Rachel**: And, uh, Sunspot actually becomes part of the Hellfire Club Inner Circle, which is again something that that we see come up again.  There are sort of two levels to the Hellfire Club. There's the big part where the people who THINK they run the world get together and broker power, and then there's the Inner Circle and those are the people who ACTUALLY run the world.

**Miles**: I mean, they-they try really hard anyway. It seldom works out all THAT well for very long.

**Rachel**: There's always sort of an undercurrent of weird sex club stuff and serious, serious 18th century anachronism. The Hellfire Club looks a cult, and it looks like it's going to be a cult, but for the most part it's really not, it's mostly people who are about power in whatever form.

**Miles**: Power, and also, uhh, 1700s cosplay.

**Rachel**: Except for the ladies who are basically all about softcore BDSM lingerie.

**Miles**: Yeah, gender's really really weird in the Hellfire Club, which I guess, y'know, if it's all about privilege and power and money, I can sort of see that following...

**Rachel**: We're going to talk about this more now, and we're going to talk about it a lot more when the White Queen becomes a major character in *X-Men*. So they're literally making a bid for world domination, or-or setting things up to in this arc. Most of the Inner Circle are mutants but they're also partly responsible for the Sentinel program, and again the Hellfire Club is basically all about the immunity of privilege, that if you have enough money and enough power you can totally set up killer robots that go after people like you and assume that it's not going to be an issue for you personally. The Hellfire Club is super creepy.

**Miles**: Uh, yeah.

**Rachel**: Super creepy

**Miles**: And I think Angel actually mentions that even though he's been there before - well, not the Inner Circle part obviously, but the rest of it - that it was just really weird and he didn't want to go back and that was messed up.

**Rachel**: Yeah, they're all like super jerks. [*laughing*] Hee-hee-hee. Inner circle jerks.

**Miles**: Oh, you said that?

**Rachel**: I totally said that. [*laughs*] I'm going to call the episode that.

**Miles**: I... Okay.  There we go. Episode whatever we are - Inner Circle Jerks.

**Rachel**: [crosstalk] 12.  Episode 12.

**Miles**: Perfect

**Rachel**: Inner Circle Jerks.  Yeah

**Miles**: [*laughs*] Okay, so let's talk about who's in the Inner Circle of the Hellfire Club. So we have five people, we have the-these four men and then we have, uh, like Rachel mentioned, Emma Frost.

**Rachel**: Uh so we're already met one of the members.

**Miles**: Yeah, that's Jason Wyngarde, who is Mastermind. Now, y'never really find out how Mastermind goes from sleazy sketchy-looking mustache guy who was running around with Magneto in the Silver Age to being a member of the inner circle in the Hellfire Club, but, y'know, he's a pretty powerful mutant, he's very good at dealing with people.

**Rachel**: He is still sleazy and sketchy-looking and he still the-the creeper mustache though. Um, he-he just himself looks like he has super-impressive muttonchop sideburns using his powers of illusion.

**Miles**: And that's one of the things I think is kind of cool is that we, as the readers, we always see him the way he wants everyone to see him, at least while he's conscious and in control of himself. Like, he's always that really suave-looking, uh, Jason Wyngarde, dashing dashing man.

**Rachel**: So the most persistent central figure in the Hellfire Club is Sebastian Shaw. Sebastian Shaw is the Black King of the Hellfire Club, and periodically the Hellfire Club inner circle ranks are eventually going to be primarily set up like chess pieces: the Black King and Queen, the White King and Queen. Sebastian Shaw is the Black King. He is a mutant. He absorbs energy, any kind of energy, so kinetic energy, y'know being hit, also telepathy.

**Miles**: What about being really stoked? Can he absorb that?

**Rachel**: I-I'll allow it.

**Miles**: Okay good, good, good.

**Rachel**: Beca-because it's totally up to me.

**Miles**: That makes him so much more powerful than he was before we described that aspect of his powers.

**Rachel**: [*crosstalk, laughs*] So, and he channels that into physical strength. Shaw interests me 'cause he's one of those characters who I always thought of as sort of background, but my best friend, he's one of her favorite characters and I was completely baffled by this and-and asked y'know "What's interesting about him?" and she sent me this long email, which I was going to quote and then completely forgot to print out and bring because I am organized like that. But um...

**Miles**: [*crosstalk*] What was- what was the gist of it?

**Rachel**: He's absolutely ruthless and he's a lot of really interesting contradictions and juxtapositions that you don't see a lot in villains. So first of all he's a super-dramatic villain. I mean, he's got the amazing outfit and the serious sideburns and he-he talks like a villain. Like, he chews scenery to an appropriate extent.

**Miles**: He also, I-I like that whenever he gets in a fight the first thing he does is take off his shirt and he's got this amazing sash.

**Rachel**: He's-he's definitely got the Dalton thing going on.

**Miles**: *Roadhouse*? Pain don't hurt him, because it just makes him super super strong.

**Rachel**: He's way better than Dalton, like he would totally take down Dalton with, like, a withering glare. Well, he's all about ruthless acquisition and maintenance of power.  He's incredibly brutal and also very cultured and, y'know, with the Hellfire Club, with Magneto for instance who's our who's our iconic villain at this point, is all about manipulating things from a distance.

**Miles**: And also grand speeches at every opportunity.

**Rachel**: [*crosstalk*] Grand speeches and being the conductor. And Shaw, y'know, has minions but he's also all about just cracking his knuckles, stepping in, and getting his hands dirty.  And then when he gets beaten at the end of this arc he just goes "fuck this!", gets in a car, and leaves.

**Miles**: Yeah, like he's not really bent out of shape about it. He's like "okay, well I lost the battle, there's no point in dwelling on it, let me think about what I'm doing next.”

**Rachel**: Shaw isn't about a grand philosophy or design. He is directly, thematically, and practically about power. And that makes him interesting and it makes him ethically really interesting too, 'cause there are points where he does ally and team up with the X-Men and it's basically always about the most direct path.

**Miles**: Now Shaw was also one of the main villains of *X-Men: First Class*.  He was played by Kevin Bacon, and boy-howdy that was a weird casting choice.

**Rachel**: [*crosstalk*] That was a really different Shaw. Yeah. Comic Shaw is not a Nazi. Comic Shaw is, he's about the same age or as or a little younger than Professor Xavier. He features pretty heavily into the first arc of *X-Men: Legacy* which is a really interesting comic, worth looking up if you want more Shaw backstory.

**Miles**: Now we get to talk about somebody who's much less interesting and significant, that is Harry Leland. You may remember Harry Leland from being an inconsequential player in a number of stories that aren't remembered very well. So he's this sorta.. big dude, his- he's a mutant also, his mutant power is to manipulate mass - he can make people much heavier or I-I think maybe lighter, but he mainly uses the heavy thing in combat. So, according to our research assistant Dr. Internet, he's based visually on Orson Welles and he's named after Welles characters. He, he comes back later, he's-he gets his ass kicked in this arc, like he almost dies. Wolverine just cuts the crap out of him. And he does come back later where he does die and then he's brought back as a zombie.

**Rachel**: [*crosstalk*] Yeah he dies of a heart attack which should pretty much tell you his level of plot significance in the Marvel Universe. All on- all on its own.

**Miles**: [*crosstalk*] Exactly.  And yeah so then he comes back as a zombie and then like they they sew his mouth up and and do put put a bunch of salt on him to make him not come back.

**Rachel**: [*crosstalk*] So he's Deadpool?  Movie Deadpool.

**Miles**: [*crosstalk*] Uh, uh kind of. And then he comes back, like he's brought back from the dead yet again during Necrosha.  Ehhhh.. and that's very-

**Rachel**: [*crosstalk*] He has very nice hair.

**Miles**: Well, you're in the Hellfire Club you kind of have to have really nice hair.

**Rachel**: Then there's Emma Frost.  Emma Frost is the White Queen of the Hellfire Club and she is, of this group, the one who’s going to end up a main character in the X-Men. Uh, she runs the Xavier Academy at a couple different points. She's, I think even from the start, one of the most interesting characters. When we first meet her, in addition to the Hellfire Club, she's also hes-headmistress of the very prestigious Massachusetts Academy, which we don't know a lot about now but is going to play very, very heavily into *New Mutants*. She's an extremely powerful telepath. We've been talking about how powerful the Phoenix is; Emma Frost is powerful enough at this point to briefly hold her own against the Phoenix.

**Miles**: Frost's role in the Hellfire Club is-is kinda weird because, y'know, obviously she's incredibly powerful. I think you could argue that she's the most powerful of them in terms of just raw mutant strength.

**Rachel**: Oh, easily.

**Miles**: But this weird gender thing that's going on, let's talk a little about that.

**Rachel**: The first and most prominent visual difference in the inner circle of the Hellfire Club is all of the dudes dress like 18th aristocracy, and Emma wears a white corset, panties, and a cape. And variations on that corset/panties/cape thing are the uniform for women in positions of relative power in the Hellfire Clubs.  When Jean is the Black Queen she basically wears the same outfit in black. Shaw has some kind of sway over her, and it's never quite clear what, and it's never quite clear if it's a deal or if he has some kind of direct power, and again this is this is something that the comics do go into and kind of deconstruct later. But the gender dynamics of the Hellfire Club, and especially the Inner Circle, I think they're a good measure for the ways in which, for again I guess another way in which the Hellfire Club is unsettling and kind of creepy, because it is still very much about power and control in a vacuum, but it's also very much about exaggerating and reproducing existing social power dynamics.  And it's fun to see that subverted too. One of the best visual versions of that, uhh, Jamie McKelvie redesigned the White Queen at some point just for fun, it never made it into a comic, and basically created a costume for her that looked analogous to what the male members of the Inner Circle wear and it's super cool looking. I'm going to see if I can dig it up. It’s so sharp.

**Miles**: [*crosstalk*] That is awesome. I will say later on Emma Frost ends up with some of the most impressively impractical costumes, uh, we've ever seen in the Marvel Universe, but y'know she kinda owns it. Like, using her sexuality almost like a weapon is part of that character, and so I-I feel okay about that.  I don't feel like it's, y'know, emblematic of how comics as an industry is super messed up gender-wise. At least more than a little bit.

**Rachel**: It's part of that character and it's something that that character frequently, deliberately, and explicitly deconstructs.

**Miles**: Totally.

**Rachel**: It's occasionally treated as the, y'know, "oh no it's just empowering.  It's just her owning-owning her sexuality." But when she actually talks about it and when it's actually explored, it's basically all about a really cynical approach to navigating a system that is weighed profoundly against her. Like, I want to do a whole episode that's just gender theory and the White Queen at some point.

**Miles**: [*crosstalk*] I think we just did about a third of one just now.

**Rachel**: It was like 3 minutes.

**Miles**: [*laughs*]

**Rachel**: C'mon.

**Miles**: The last member of the Inner Circle is Donald Pierce. Now Pierce is unique in a couple of ways.

**Rachel**: His hot-pink frock coat is one of those ways.

**Miles**: This dude's choice in colors is really questionable.

**Rachel**: He is like the disco prince of the colonial era.

**Miles**: Oh no, disco hasn't even entered into it yet, but it will. So, he is, uhh, first of all he's not a mutant. He's the only member of the Inner Circle who's not a mutant. And he what he is is a cyborg.  It's really not explained it just like "oh yeah, robot arms. Whatever dude."

**Rachel**: He just is, yeah. Wolverine cuts off his arm and it's wires and they're like "oh! He's a cyborg.”

**Miles**: "I guess we're in an *X-Men* comic."

**Rachel**: [*crosstalk*] “Rock on!”

**Miles**: [*laughs*] Um, he seems really incons-inconsequential right now. Like he's just one of the members of the Inner Circle, he's a little whiny, uhh he's really...

**Rachel**: [*crosstalk*] He's a lot whiny, be fair.

**Miles**: He's a lot whiny. He, uhhh, sort of flips out when the Hellfire Club loses. But what's interesting with him is that he comes back a whole lot, way more than, say Leland, whose also not terribly interesting at this point. Umm, he ends up being linked to the Reavers, he ends up being linked to the Purifiers, he ends up being linked to Bastion. He's not one of the iconic *X-Men* villains by any means but he keeps coming back in major storylines, over and over and over. But for right now, he's just a dude with robot arms and a terrible fashion sense.

**Rachel**: The Hellfire Club, the Inner Circle specifically, have their fingers in everything. They are, again, super-powerful, they are part of the Sentinel program, and they've also got access to all of the X-Men's data.  In *X-Men* #110, which we basically glossed over-

**Miles**: [*crosstalk*] 'Cause it was boring.

**Rachel**: -a throwaway guy and a minor *Iron Fist* villain named Warhawk breaks into the mansion and sets the Danger Room against the X-Men. And what you find out later on is that he was working for the Hellfire Club. And he went in to set up Hellfire Club bugs in Cerebro, in the danger room, in all of the X-Men's files, so that the Hellfire Club literally have access to everything the X-Men have access to, plus additional resources right now. That's going to be important.

(17:35)

**Rachel**: Now, we talked about how we're doing the first half of the Dark Phoenix Saga. It separates kind of naturally into two arcs and the first one is all about the Hellfire Club, but it also introduces some other new characters.

**Miles**: This is where I start getting really excited. Now, okay-

**Rachel**: Miles has feelings about disco.

**Miles**: Well, ev.. even more than that though let's just take a step back here for a moment. So the Dark Phoenix Saga, we've talked about how it's the iconic *X-Men* story, and one of the best *X-Men* stories. And, looking over it again in preparing for this episode  and the next one, I personally had forgotten just how tight this story is. And I think it might be Claremont at his very best and the X-Men at their very best.

**Rachel**: I agree with you partially. When it is tight, it is Claremont at his tightest, it's the X-Men at their best. I don't think it's that way throughout. I think there are major digressions from that. I think for the most part it's excellent, for the most part it's really good, there are some points that get away from it. Still it is, it is, yeah it's-it's the definitive arc. And some of you will disagree, and you're wrong.

**Miles**: So, before we get much further I know probably no-one's going to actually listen to me on this one, but if you want to pause the podcast right now, go pick up the trade paperback of the Dark Phoenix Saga, read it, and then come back, this one is worth experiencing.  This one is worth not just hearing about, but reading. It is, it's just an incredible piece of writing and some incredible art.

**Rachel**: If you don't want to do it right now, between now and the next episode, at least sit down and read *X-Men* #137.

**Miles**: Yes. Possibly the greatest single issue of *X-Men*.

**Rachel**: [*crosstalk*] We'll be talking about that one next week, but we-we'd been joking about making the next episode just a dramatic reading of that issue, because it's that good.

**Miles**: We also joked about making it just 45 minutes of us in silence rustling pages reading through it ourselves and then just saying "Wow" at the end.

**Rachel**: Eh, yeah, even maybe a couple times through it.

**Miles**: [*laughs*] Exactly.

**Rachel**: Maybe some crying.

**Miles**: Uhf, al- almost certainly.

**Rachel**: [*crosstalk*] But like, like the good kind.

**Miles**: Mm hmm!

**Rachel**: Yeah.

**Miles**: But in the meantime, we have Hellfire Club stuff and like Rachel mentioned, we have two new mutants. So, as you may recall from the last episode we discussed, the X-Men have just come back, they've all just re-united, everyone realizes that everyone's alive again.

**Rachel**: [*crosstalk*] Except for Professor X; he's in space.

**Miles**: Well, he actually gets back very near the beginning of this. But before that happens Banshee, Banshee who we love, does leave the X-Men. Now he, essentially, lost his powers a number of issues ago. He burned them out fighting against Moses Magnum.

**Rachel**: [*in unison*] Moses Magnum.

**Miles**: And so he decides to stay with Moira McTaggart in Scotland who, uh they they've fallen in love and they're actually adorable together. It it's wonderful, that makes me happy.

**Rachel**: I'm pretty convinced, just based on the two of them, that this is actually a selective breeding program and they're trying to create the worst phonetic accent ever written. Like somehow they're going to have a baby and it's going to be Welsh.

**Miles**: [*inhales*]

**Rachel**: Can you imagine Claremont trying to write Welsh?

**Miles**: I...

**Rachel**: It would just be all vowels.

**Miles**: But it would just be like, uh, page after page after page of full speech bubbles of them.

**Rachel**: Of vowels! It would... [laughing].

**Miles**: [*laughing*] So yeah. So Banshee-

**Rachel**: [*crosstalk*] Oh, man.

**Miles**: -we, we bid farewell to Banshee. Now he, he's going to be around a lot in the future of the X-Men, but for now he's not on the team, he's just doing his thing hanging out with Moira. And y'know, I think he's earned a break. I'll buy that. Um, Xavier in the meantime...

**Rachel**: [*crosstalk*] And they're adorable together.

**Miles**: They really are. [*laughing*] ...has come back from space. And it's a really rough transition getting back to him running the team.

**Rachel**: The previous X-Men he's been teaching since most of them were teenagers. I mean, some of them he basically raised to some extent. This team is grown-ups.

**Miles**: And what's more they're grown-ups who have worked on their own without Xavier for quite a long time. That whole, like, year of comics, when the X-Men were just trying to get back to their headquarters in New York from all the hell over the place - the Savage Land, and Japan, and everywhere. Like they've really grown as a team. They've grown to really work together, and Cyclops, I think you could say, has greatly gown as a leader, past anywhere he ever was in the Silver Age.

**Rachel**: And he's really spent a lot of time adapting to that new team, and figuring out the ways in which the old-school techniques and philosophies just don't really apply and don't really work with them and finding things that do. And Xavier comes back with none of that frame of reference and decides that he's just going to pick up right where he left off and it does not go well.

**Miles**: Like he tries to give Wolverine a bunch of demerits for something that happens in the danger room and it's like "Aww Chuck, dude, you're, you're kind of missing on a lot of what's going on here."

**Rachel**: [*emphatically*] "We've had character development. It's Claremont! We're all dynamic now!"

**Miles**: [*laughs*]

**Rachel**: And Xavier basically goes "Go to your room." Cyclops goes "You're not my real dad!", y'know.

(21:25)

**Miles**: So they don't have time to-to fight for very long because all of the sudden Cerebro's like "Hey, what's up guys? There are two new powerful mutants." And so the X-Men go to check it out. Now what I like about this part right here, is that we really haven't seen this aspect of the X-Men in quite a long time. Y'know, them being students at, slash working for, the Xavier Institute, a place that attempts to protect and train mutants.

**Rachel**: We really haven't seen that since the Silver Age actually, because the new team was gotten together just to go rescue the Silver Age team, and they're.. I mean they were they were brought to be superheroes, immediately.

**Miles**: And so-

**Rachel**: [*crosstalk*] The Xavier School hasn't been a school in a very long time.

**Miles**: Yeah, and so now, uhh, they're kind of going back to that mission statement. Well, briefly, admittedly. And so they split the team in two and go to check out these two new mutants.

**Rachel**: The first one is in Deerfield, Illinois, suburb of Chicago.  It is..

**Miles**: Kitty Pryde. 13 and a half years old and a character that I think half the comics-reading population of the United States fell in love with immediately when she showed up.

**Rachel**: Weirdly the other half seems to kind of hate her with a passion and I think-I think that specific line, the more talk to people, it's like the Cyclops thing. It's the cartoon. It's that people who grew up watching the cartoon think of Jubilee as the character who defines that role. And people who-who started out with the comics and kind of came through there kind of think of Kitty as that. Kitty is awesome, by the way.

**Miles**: She is and it's actually interesting because we haven't seen, uh, a mutant this young in the X-Men before. Like, even in the Silver Age Iceman was the youngest and he was 16 or something?

**Rachel**: Yeah, something like that.

**Miles**: Yeah, so Kitty is 13 and a half. She always says "And a half," which I find adorable.

**Rachel**: And she's very much a kid. She's super-excited about the X-Men. Her powers are just beginning to manifest. She's dealing with teenager stuff. She's stressed out at school. Her parents, she thinks are on the verge of splitting up. They are, but we're not going to find that-that out y'know for sure for a little longer.

**Miles**: So we actually see the first time her powers manifest. She's been getting these headaches and all the sudden she closes her eyes and wakes up on the floor below where she was. She's phased through the floor of her-her bedroom. And that-that's her power - she can uh, phase through solid matter.

**Rachel**: And later on she's going to learn to do stuff like walk on air. For now, she mostly just freaks out and falls through walls a lot. And she really sort of starts to learn her power in this arc because the first thing that happens, Emma Frost shows up and tries to recruit her to the Massachusetts Academy, because again the Hellfire Club has all of the X-Men's data so they know about the mutant manifestations. And then the X-Men show up and Professor X sits down to talk with her parents and sends her and the remaining X-Men, which are, um, let's see Wolverine, Storm, Colossus, who Kitty immediately gets.. a terrible crush on, off to the neighborhood malt shop where they are immediately attacked by Hellfire Club goons.

**Miles**: I really love that there's a malt shop here 'cause that's, this is 1980 I believe when this comic comes out and were there really malt shops then? I mean, I guess they still exist.

**Rachel**: [*crosstalk*] I would believe it if it were in Evanston, I don't know about Deerfield. I don't really know Deerfield that well-

**Miles**: [*crosstalk*] Oh that's true, you have family in Illinois.

**Rachel**: -but Evans-Evanston would totally have had malt shops.

**Miles**: Well there we go. And two of these Hellfire Club goons show up and they're in big robot suits, kind of like Mandroids but not really. And the X-Men all fight but the X-Men are actually, uh, captured.  They, they lose this battle.

**Rachel**: They do. Umm, Kitty gets away though. Kitty phases through the wall of the malt shop. She sneaks along after them when they're taken away. The Hellfire Club thinks that they've lost her, but she wasn't their main target to begin with. Th-they were after the X-Men and they knew the X-Men would be going after these newly manifested mutants. Now, they know who Kitty Pryde is, they don't know who the second mutant is. All they know is that she's manifested somewhere in New York, and that she's somewhere around this creepy gross club. Cyclops, Phoenix, and Nightcrawler head to pick this new mutant up.

**Miles**: Yeah, and it's just Jean and Scott in the club because Nightcrawler has decided to stop using his image inducer because he feels he doesn't want to cover up who he really is, but he still hides anyway so I don't know if that works logically, but whatever.

**Rachel**: It's, it's, it's a little awkward. Although I feel like if there were anywhere where he could get away with just going around in his normal appearance, it is this club because it turns out that it is the grossest disco in New York.

**Miles**: It's like an evil disco. It's wonderful.

**Rachel**: Oh, it's amazing. Its' denizens are just vile.

**Miles**: Um, at one point it mentions, uh, Jean mentions in a thought bubble that she finds the vile thoughts in the disco "almost attractive." And that's actually the first time we see this sort of influence of Jason Wyngarde who's been messing with her mind and sort of turning her a little bit dark a little bit at a time.

**Rachel**: [*crosstalk*] Again it- a little bit dark a little bit at a time?! One of the first ancestral flashbacks he gives her is hunting humans for sport! Like literally, that's that they're doing.

**Miles**: I-I-I-I have that, I have that dream all the time, is that bad?

**Rachel**: [*uncertainly*] Ehhhh?

**Miles**: So Jean and uh Scott, they're in the club. A bit of narration, [*dramatically*] "from the first, both X-Men realized that this disco isn't a very nice one."

**Rachel**: [*laughs*]

**Miles**: Let's just chew on that sentence for a moment.

**Rachel**: [*crosstalk*] And again, we're at a disco. So if you know *X-Men* at all you know who they're there to pick up.

**Miles**: Yes.

**Rachel**: This is none other than Allison Blaire, the motherfuckin' Dazzler.

**Miles**: Now she would go on to have a relatively long career, uh, in a solo book. She had a graphic novel called *Dazzler: The Movie*. She's been in and out of the X-Men ever since. At the moment, though, she is a fabulous, like, sequined, long haired, face-painted, roller skating disco star!

**Rachel**: Who will forever influence Kitty Pryde's fashion sense. Yeah, Dazzler as a superhero goes around on roller skates and I respect the hell out of that.

**Miles**: So Dazzler's power, she can transmute sound into light, which if you're a disco singer that's a pretty great tailor-made power right there.

**Rachel**: And she pretty much just uses it as entertainment. Except the Hellfire Club are going to attack here, she's going to have to weaponize it, but first, a familiar face shows up at the disco. A familiar face with familiar mutton chops and familiar deep creepiness.

**Miles**: Yeah, so Jason Wyngarde's here in the disco and I like that there's just "Oh it's 1700s dude in the middle of an evil disco. Okay."

**Rachel**: I mean it is an evil disco.

**Miles**: And, yeah, he brings Jean into a vision and all the sudden Jean and Jason are making out and Scott's looking on like "what, what what what's going on here?"

**Rachel**: [*crosstalk*] "What the fuck man?"

**Miles**: "Why-why is this happening?"

**Rachel**: And I mean they're just, they've just been having a conversation about how he kind of dated Colleen Wing when she was dead so it's like "is this like a revenge thing, what the hell?" and she's like "yeh. Ehh? I ‘unno." But they don't really have time to talk about it because the Hellfire Club attacks the disco.

**Miles**: So they fight. They end up escaping along with Dazzler who doesn't really know what's going on but does know that she doesn't want to stick around and be attacked by a bunch of robots.

**Rachel**: There a Panic! at the Disco joke in here somewhere, but, I don't really care enough to make it.

**Miles**: They do end up escaping and find out relatively quickly-

**Rachel**: The rest of the X-Men have been taken to the Hellfire Club and to the-the secret experimental chambers of the Hellfire Club, where Kitty manages to get a phone number from Storm. Y'know, to call in case of emergency. She calls, Nightcrawler picks up.

**Miles**: Yeah, and so Kitty ends up meeting with the X-Men that are free. They bust in and there's a big fight, they let the other X-Men out, they take on the White Queen, specifically, Phoenix takes on the White Queen.

**Rachel**: And it is a really cool confrontation. It's also, again, this is the moment again of "WOW, Emma Frost is really goddamn powerful." Because this is Phoenix who just rewrote the universe and took down a herald of Galactus. Not messing around.

**Miles**: If Emma Frost can go even for a second against her, I'm pretty impressed. They do manage to escape, they get away from the Hellfire Club, uh, specifically from Emma Frost. And one interesting thing is that as far as the X-Men know at this point, Emma Frost, it's just referenced in a caption, in in the issue after this fight. Cyclops mentioned that she preferred suicide to capture, so it's implied...

**Rachel**: [*crosstalk*] Which is weird cause they didn't see her die, and they don't really have any evidence that she's dead, they just sort of decided. They've been fighting Magneto for how long now?

**Miles**: Y'gotta see the body and even then, maybe see the body twice. Maybe see two bodies.

**Rachel**: Oh, X-Men. You try.

**Miles**: So what I like here, is a lot of the time super-team fight a bunch of villains, they get away and they're like "well I'm glad that's over." but the X-Men decide "hey, these people keep coming after us, we should probably take them on. We should probably-"

**Rachel**: [*crosstalk*] "They know things they shouldn't know. This is creepy, this is big, we have to deal with this."

(28:32)

**Miles**: But before they do they decide to take a break in the glorious, uh, chalet of our buddy Warren Worthington.

**Rachel**: [*crosstalk*] Well they're not taking a break. Again, remember, Warren comes from high society. He comes from really old money. He's a member of the Hellfire Club. So they go to him figuring that he might have some answers. And he's hanging in New Mexico, basically swooping around in tiny shorts.

**Miles**: *Swooping Around In Tiny Shorts*, the Warren Worthington III story.

**Rachel**: Yeah, basically.

**Miles**: I just wrote his biography. But there's also an iconic scene right here where Jean and Scott meet up, they're on this sort of butte in the middle of the the the desert. And this is actually a beautiful scene, this is one of my favorites.

**Rachel**: And this is a scene that's going to come up again and again. It's going to be referenced later in *X-Factor*, it's going to be referenced a lot in *X-Men* after Jean's died. It's going to keep coming back up, and-and actually again also briefly in-in *X-Men: The Last Stand*, which is the worst adaptation of the Dark Phoenix Saga ever.

**Miles**: [*chuckles*]

**Rachel**: They're out on a mesa and they're talking and Jean tells Cyclops, y’know, "Take off your visor" and he's like "[*sputters*] no! God! What?! [*sputters*] Are you fuckin' out of your mind?" and she's like "no no, it's cool, I can totally contain your powers." And she does.

**Miles**: Think about this must be like from Cyclops' perspective. This is something he's always had to hold back, he's alwa-always had to hold in, you know, for fear of hurting everybody around him, especially the people he loves. And here he can just let go for a moment. He can just trust Jean, trust that she's got it, that he's going to be okay, that she is going to keep both of them safe.

**Rachel**: He has literally never.. had his powers contained with his visor off since he was like 16. It's a really quiet moment but it's also, again, a little unsettling, and that's something that's played up a little bit in this issue and the previous one, is just how powerful the Phoenix is getting and how much the power of the Phoenix is starting to define Jean and they way she relates to the people around her.

**Miles**: Yeah, there's a line a little bit earlier, "her power is a song within her, a passion beyond human comprehension. She is more alive than she has ever been." And we get that kind of narration again and again and again. Just, she is a cosmic force, she is a force of pure passion and emotion and power.

(30:25)

**Rachel**: Fast forward to a week later and we've got Scott, Jean, Storm, and Colossus, heading into the Hellfire Club, with an invitation they've gotten via Warren, through the front door. Meanwhile Wolverine and Nightcrawler are going in via the sewers and they are going to figure out what's going on.

**Miles**: The short version is they do find out a little bit of what's going on, they meet up with the Inner Circle, who talk about they're essentially collecting mutants.

**Rachel**: [*crosstalk*] Well, by "meet up with" you mean "get captured by." Shaw basically tells Mastermind "Come on dude, you've been playing this for, at this point like… almost 30 issues now. Get your shit together. You've got Jean Grey here, great. Have her take out the rest of the X-Men. And he comes down and gets her, and this is the second time we've seen this effect but the first time Cyclops has actually seen it. He sees the silhouette, he recognizes that Jason Wyngarde is, in fact, Mastermind.

**Miles**: Oh man, that guy?

**Rachel**: That guy.

**Miles**: [*crosstalk*] I hate that guy.

**Rachel**: Right?

**Miles**: [*crosstalk*] Fake Scott.

**Rachel**: Everyone hates that guy. He's a douche.

**Miles**: [*laughs*] So yeah the X-Men are captured. The only one after everyone gets together that makes it out is Wolverine, who because of Leland's sort of mass changing powers ends up getting punched through like a shit-ton of floors back down into the sewers.

**Rachel**: Where he becomes the coolest character in *X-Men*.

**Miles**: See, that's the thing. As much as Wolverine bugs us, like at this point in *X-Men*, he-it-he is a genuine badass, he is fascinating, and it is a pleasure watching him, like, in the sewers sneaking, starting to sneak through the Hellfire Club to rescue the other X-Men.

**Rachel**: We're going to talk about two more issues and one of them, *X-Men* #133, is basically the most badass Wolverine issue ever.

**Miles**: I would say this is kind of when Wolverine becomes the character that, uh, became so appealing to so many people for so long.

**Rachel**: Right! And again, this is- Wolverine doesn't have his own series now, he doesn't really show up outside of the main *X-Men* book. He's been kind of in the background for this because this, y'know, the Dark Phoenix saga so far is really a Jean and Scott story. And Wolverine's been kinda hitting on Jean but it's not as big a thing at this point as it's gonna be later in the comics and it's definitely not as big a thing as it is in the movies. So he's been kind of relegated to the background. And in 133 he's stuck in the sewers of the Hellfire Club and the Hellfire Club sends all its goons after them and he spends the whole issue cutting through them and delivering some of the best, and most character-defining speeches. Like this issue, yeah I'm-I'm sick of Wolverine. I've talked about this before, I'm looking forward to him dying and just being gone from the Marvel Universe for a while. And part of why is that when he's used well and appropriately and not over-saturated, he's awesome. He should be awesome. He should be this badass, and these moments should stick out. We shouldn't be getting these every week because it takes away their impact. Like, this works because we haven't seen it before. And there's actually there's a speech on the fourth page of this issue where he's facing off against a goon that I think we should do. The lines are so great.

**Miles**: Alright, I got this. [*as Wolverine*] “He's scared. Can't say as I blame him either. Let's see if I can make him feel worse.”

**Rachel**: Can you do this with a Canadian accent?

**Miles**: No I cannot, so I won't.

**Rachel**: Aww

**Miles**: [*as Wolverine*] “Hey bub, I know what your thinkin'. 'He's hurt, and he's 5 meters away from me and I got a full clip of ammo in my rifle. Question is, can I kill Wolverine before he can reach me and cut me into shish-ka-bob with those freaky claws of his?' Well bub, Wolverine is virtually unkillable. Wolverine's claws are adamantium, the strongest metal known, capable of slicing through vanadium steel like a hot knife through butter. And 5 meters of floor ain't much distance at all. For me. It's your play, hero. I'm waitin'.” At which point the goon drops his gun. [*as Wolverine*] “Shoot. I was hoping you'd go for it.”

**Rachel**: Y'know, we've talked before about how how Byrne is really a Wolverine guy.

**Miles**: John Byrne, the artist.

**Rachel**: Yeah, John Byrne. You can hear the dialogue in there. You gotta actually see the page because it's one of those pages that looks, you-you can just tell how much fun John Byrne is having. Meanwhile, upstairs in the Hellfire Club, let's see, we see Senator Kelly - I think this is actually his first appearance.

**Miles**: Yeah Senator Kelly, who if you've listened to our episode on Days of Future Past or watched any of the movies you'll recognize him as a prominent anti-mutant politician.

**Rachel**: And Jean shows up, stuck in 18th century mode, as the Black Queen. She's got the fancy outfit. Cyclops knows what’s going on in her head because she's mentioned the weird flashbacks to him, but also because of something that we find out happened while they were on the mesa having visorless sex or whatever. She set them up with a permanent psychic link.

**Miles**: I don't get the impression that they can get every single sort of mental word from each other but they at least always know roughly what's going on in one another's head. Which, y’know, that's a lot of trust right there, I think that speaks a lot to just how deep that trust and love runs.

**Rachel**: Or to just how incredibly persuasive the Phoenix Force is. The- what's Jean versus what's the Phoenix question is never really gonna go away entirely.

**Miles**: Scott does manage to try to go in through that psychic rapport into Jean's head to try to break her out this and he is not prepared for what happens.

**Rachel**: So, Jean's basically seeing everything with this weird 18th century filter. She's encountering all of her friends that way and in this world she's the Black Queen of the Hellfire Club and she's married to Master- she's married to Jason Wyngarde. She's got sort of vague rationalizations for why they're there and he's the captain of the ship that they sailed to America in.

**Miles**: So yeah, Scott goes through this psychic link and he doesn't really know what to do. He has no experience with this kind of telepathic stuff, he just figures "well, I love this woman. These are dire times. I've got to do something, right?"

**Rachel**: Oooh, oooh can I point out kind of a cool visual thing with him in that?

**Miles**: Do it.

**Rachel**: When he's in the, the 18th century mode he's got a hat with a really wide brim and you never see his eyes, like it’s, they're always over-shadowed, like it's a visor.

**Miles**: That's kind of awesome and yeah, that's what happens, he-

**Rachel**: [*crosstalk*] I really like that detail.

**Miles**: He finds his own uh sort of astral form being influenced by this world he's in that slowly builds in Jean's mind.

**Rachel**: And he shows up and he's like "Yeah I'm gonna take you back." and Wyngarde's like, "Oh hell no. I knew you were gonna follow, this is my territory, let's duel." And Mastermind straight up kills Cyclops.

**Miles**: Y'know, they-they-they have these swords, psychic metaphorical swords of course, and Cyclops doesn't really know what he's doing, he's-he's not a telepath, he's not a swordfighter even if this were literal, which it's not. And yeah, Mastermind stabs him through the chest. Um, which of course leads to another one of those, "He's dead!" First page of the next issue: "Oh he's actually okay!"

**Rachel**: Yeah, I mean you said Phoenix was the fastest resurrection this is literally a "dies on one page, back the next."

**Miles**: But what that is is it's enough to break Jean out of this. I mean, this man she's loved since she, since she was a teenager, that she has this psychic rapport with, that's enough to snap her out of Wyngarde's fake world that he's put her in.

**Rachel**: Something shifts, we don't know what, but at that point Wolverine breaks in, Jean stops him basically as a distraction, and frees Cyclops and the rest of the X-Men, who take down the Hellfire Club.

**Miles**: During this fight there's one little bit I love which is uh, y'know as usual the X-Men sort of pair off with their opponents. Colossus is fighting Pierce the cyborg who yells at him "On your knees, you Bolshevik buffoon!" Like that right there qualifies Pierce to be a super-villain, just that single line. You have your alliteration, you have your-your, uh, reference to nationality, it's a threat, it's great! I love it.

**Rachel**: [*crosstalk, laughs*] Oh Donald Pierce, you're delightful.

**Miles**: We find Jean alone with Jason Wyngarde in the aftermath of this.

**Rachel**: And she basically fries his brain. She says "Okay, you want power? I am going to make you think you're omnipotent. I'm going to tap you into the universe as a whole and completely burn out your brain."

**Miles**: Yeah, so she leaves him this just comatose mess in a-as basically vengeance for what he's done to her. And as she mentions, for what he set in motion, for what he's unleashed within her.

**Rachel**: Meanwhile, this is in Manhattan, it's only a few doors down from the Avengers mansion and their security feeds are picking up the X-Men attacking. Fortunately, Beast is the Avenger who's on monitor duty. And he looks and he looks and he thinks about alliances and he thinks about loyalty because this is going to be a big theme coming up and he says "y'know what? Fuck this!", erases the security tape, and goes to help the X-Men, and it's a good thing he does because what Jason Wyngarde has set in motion comes to fruition. And on the last page, we meet, finally, the Dark Phoenix.

**Miles**: All the sudden Jean is wearing red and we hear some familiar words. [*as Dark Phoenix*] Hear me, X-Men. No longer am I the woman you knew. I am fire and life incarnate. Now and forever, I am Phoenix!” I love this callback because it's the exact same words but it's totally different. It's this triumphant, joyful thing the first time, this "Holy shit this character we love, she's going to be okay. Something is- something magnificent has happened.” And here it's terrifying. The uniform.. well for one thing it looks a lot less like a uniform which I think is a good call. It's not just-

**Rachel**: [*crosstalk*] Mm-hmm.

**Miles**: -the Phoenix outfit but red, but you don't see the visible seems, it's uh it's a lot of black with red highlights, it's a much larger logo. She looks more like sort of a cosmic entity which is exactly what she's becoming more and more.

**Rachel**: And when Byrne draws her as Phoenix he draws her in a lot of of sort of classical poses, very proportionate. When she's Dark Phoenix he tends to use exaggerated perspective a lot.

**Miles**: So she is terrifying, all the sudden Phoenix is Dark Phoenix, what's going on? And that's really where part 2 of the Dark Phoenix Saga picks up so we are going to stop for now and I cannot wait for our next episode guys.

(38:45)

**Rachel**: But first, you've got questions.

**Miles**: You always have questions and we love you for it. So, here we have Astonishing Brett White asking "The Dark Phoenix Saga is my favorite comic book story of all time." Good choice. "Lately though I've read people on Tumblr calling the story problematic because it tells the story of a woman with too much power not being able to control that power, and thus needing to be killed. How problematic is the Dark Phoenix Saga in y'all's opinion, and how much does that affect how you react to the story?"

**Rachel**: This is something that actually Chris Sims addressed at fair length when he covered the way this was handled in the cartoon, to the point of actually soliciting titles for fake women's studies papers, and I'm sure there've been actual ones too. The Dark Phoenix, as a metaphor for sexuality, is a thing. It's a really present thing especially in the first half of the Dark Phoenix Saga. The whole thing with Scott and Jean and the powers on the mesa in New Mexico, the whole Hellfire Club buildup and the extent to which that is about y'know sexuality and power and control. At the same time, I think it's more problematic in its original context than it eventually grows to be. Because what we're eventually gonna learn about the Phoenix Force is that it is a big damn cosmic thing. It's a functionally genderless cosmic thing. We see years and years later in *Avengers vs. X-Men*, we see Cyclops have literally the same Dark Phoenix transformation with the same speech. For me at least and the way that I've always read this, and I'm coming as someone with a really crunchy gender theory approach to superhero comics, I mean, I-I've written papers on this stuff, as a writer and an editorial writer this is something that I-I cover a lot and gender and queer theory related to comics are kind of my thing. For me I think it says more about Jean's situation, that relative character's situation, and functional and structural repression as herself, than it does about her lack of control as Phoenix. The stuff that makes Phoenix evil, it's not the sexual agency. The problem is y'know when sh- specifically when she starts to kill people.

**Miles**: That does typically tend to be a problem, it's true.

**Rachel**: It's kind of a tipping point, right?

(40:38)

**Miles**: Okay, what else do we have?

**Rachel**: Topcat360 on Twitter asks: "Can you explain why Magento's powers are broken post-*Avengers vs. X-Men*? He wasn't one of the Phoenix Five. Love the show." Thank you.

**Miles**: Okay, so little bit of context for this one, this is a much more current thing we're going to be talking about than we've been. During *Avengers vs. X-Men* the Phoenix Force comes back to Earth, uh-

**Rachel**: [*crosstalk*] And Tony Stark ruins everything for everyone.

**Miles**: He does. Uh, the details are unimportant, but the Phoenix Force splits itself between five uh mutants, five X-Men. They..

**Rachel**: And I want to point out th- the first initials of those 5 X-Men's names spell out penis.

**Miles**: ... [*excited*] It's a secret code!

**Rachel**: Speaking, y'know speaking of the X-Men and sexuality metaphors.

**Miles**: Well there you have it. Anyway, um, Magneto's allied with, uh, Cyclops who's one of the Phoenix Five as they're, they come to be called.

**Rachel**: Th- Cyclops, um Emma Frost, Magik, um-

**Miles**: Colossus and Namor.

**Rachel**: [*crosstalk*] Colossus and Namor.

**Miles**: Yeah.

**Rachel**: God, Namor with Phoenix powers is no-one's friend.

**Miles**: It's true. And Magneto's allied with them. Uh now, when the Phoenix Five end up getting th- getting de-Phoenixed their powers get super messed up, like they become less powerful, less in control of their powers.

**Rachel**: And this happens to Jean post-Phoenix too, earlier on.

**Miles**: Uh yeah, but th- the same thing ha- happens to Magneto who wasn't one of the Phoenix Five hence the question. So his powers are less controlled and less powerful.

**Rachel**: And what it basically comes down to is that they're, they've been warped by sustained proximity to the Phoenix Force. It's powerful enough, it's out of control enough, and it's been fractured and fucked up by whatever Stark did to it enough, that it's-it's affecting not only the people who were Phoenix hosts but the people who were around them a lot.

**Miles**: Now that said,I think it's kind of a cop-out, I think it was mainly used as a story tool to make Magneto less powerful and thus, uh, really change the direction his stories, taking him from this megalomaniacal supervillain-slash-occasional reluctant superhero to a smaller scale, more individual character for his current solo series, which I think kind of works.

**Rachel**: Uh, speaking of that current solo series it's really solid. I recommend it. Uh, Magneto makes a really really good sort of noir character and that's basically what he's doing these days.

**Miles**: It's full of murder.

(42:28)

**Miles**: Alright, well, I think that's all the time we have for today.

**Rachel**: "Rachel and Miles Explain the X-Men" is recorded at the Roseway in Portland, Oregon and produced by Bobby Roberts, who's also the co-host of "Welcome to That Whole Thing," which you can check out at *welcometothatwholething.com.*

**Miles**: If you're enjoying the show please take a minute to rate and review us on iTunes or Stitcher. And check out our shop at *rachelandmiles.redbubble.com* for t-shirts and stickers.

**Rachel**: You can find a visual companion to this episode as well as blog posts, fan art, and additional fun at *rachelandmiles.com*.

**Miles**: We'll be back next week-

**Rachel**: -with the second and final part of the Dark Phoenix Saga.

**Miles**: See ya then.

[Outro: *Excerpt of X-Men: The Animated Series theme song*]