[SPEAKER_03]: Hey, everybody, welcome back to The Great Mulk and Lane podcast.

[SPEAKER_03]: We're queer friends and allies, gathered to review and discuss the original X-Men comics and continuity order.

[SPEAKER_03]: We are here on the Patreon channel today to talk about a tangential character.

[SPEAKER_03]: I was chatting with my friend Molly Laser.

[SPEAKER_03]: We tossed some fantastic four characters that intersect with the X-Men sometimes around and we landed on the psycho man.

[SPEAKER_03]: And that's psycho, man.

[SPEAKER_03]: There's the only time you get that joke for me.

[SPEAKER_03]: There's also a psycho woman out there.

[SPEAKER_03]: We'll get to that, but she somehow more complicated.

[SPEAKER_03]: This villain is real fucking weird.

[SPEAKER_03]: He's a strange one, y'all.

[SPEAKER_03]: There's some weird weird stories with this guy, but I kind of love him.

[SPEAKER_03]: Let me welcome my dear friends Molly.

[SPEAKER_03]: Laser and Darrell Lawrence back to the show.

[SPEAKER_03]: I'd love for you to share a little about yourself and your pronouns.

[SPEAKER_03]: And then tell everybody your initial thoughts on [SPEAKER_03]: the cycle man prior to doing the research.

[SPEAKER_03]: Because reading this character front to back is a very different journey than whatever impression you had from him initially.

[SPEAKER_03]: Let me initially welcome back Molly Layser to the show.

[SPEAKER_04]: Hi everybody.

[SPEAKER_04]: I'm Molly Layser.

[SPEAKER_04]: My pronouns are she her.

[SPEAKER_04]: My yes as you would say in Yiddish is that I worked for Marvel as a assistant editor from [SPEAKER_04]: and drama.

[SPEAKER_04]: I'm a play director.

[SPEAKER_04]: I'm a performer.

[SPEAKER_04]: I'm in rehearsals for a production of Ragtime right now.

[SPEAKER_04]: Keep in busy.

[SPEAKER_04]: I have twins at home.

[SPEAKER_04]: And you're a novelist.

[SPEAKER_04]: And I'm a novelist.

[SPEAKER_04]: I forgot about that.

[SPEAKER_04]: I'm also a novelist and I have a book, I'll eyes a fairy tale and a collection of short stories also available.

[SPEAKER_04]: Psychoman is a villain that was kind of like, I don't know, in the background of my mind, like not as a major villain from having, you know, reread the entire Stan and Jack run with my kids a number of years ago.

[SPEAKER_04]: So he was, you know, just like a minor guy who I didn't really think about, but then when I have the chance to read stuff going forward for this podcast, wow, well, we'll talk about that later.

[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, is this your first time reading the art stories?

[SPEAKER_04]: No, it's not.

[SPEAKER_04]: I had them in my short boxes and read them about twenty years ago, but I haven't read them since then.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, there's two things that you're going to notice here and we'll get into this number one stories that you have not read in decades.

[SPEAKER_03]: Look very different from an adult lens in twenty twenty five.

[SPEAKER_03]: Number two, when you read from a particular characters perspective, when we're looking at the through line of the villain in the story, [SPEAKER_03]: Wow.

[SPEAKER_03]: Wow.

[SPEAKER_03]: Wow.

[SPEAKER_03]: Wow.

[SPEAKER_03]: And then you got to look at the authors behind it.

[SPEAKER_03]: There's a real rough run in the middle of this.

[SPEAKER_03]: You know it for one reason, but not for the other.

[SPEAKER_03]: We'll get there in a little while.

[SPEAKER_03]: Let me also welcome the lovely Daryl Lords to the show.

[SPEAKER_00]: Hi, Daryl.

[SPEAKER_00]: Hey, everyone.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is Daryl Lawrence.

[SPEAKER_00]: My pronouns are he him.

[SPEAKER_00]: Psychoman.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I think he popped up in like one episode of the animated fantastic four series that I grew up with.

[SPEAKER_00]: They would always [SPEAKER_00]: The only other frame of reference I have is a Marvel Legends action figure which comes with his little tablet, so that's where I know him predominantly from.

[SPEAKER_00]: And reading through this, it was actually really interesting to see where he popped up, and we're going to get into that.

[SPEAKER_00]: but the variety of titles where writers needed a villain, especially a micro villain, they went to this well and they're like, come on, psycho man, come on in.

[SPEAKER_00]: I need a batty of the week.

[SPEAKER_03]: When Darrell says a micro villain, he doesn't mean a villain small in stature, although this character literally is, he's a few inches tall.

[SPEAKER_03]: But he's also hails from the microverse, which is crazy.

[SPEAKER_03]: The name psycho is a really bold choice.

[SPEAKER_03]: This character's created in nineteen sixty seven.

[SPEAKER_03]: The Alfred Hitchcock film psycho came out in nineteen sixty.

[SPEAKER_03]: So this word at this point in the American lexicon.

[SPEAKER_03]: This was a very scary film for people.

[SPEAKER_03]: There were lines around the blog.

[SPEAKER_03]: There were people having nightmares.

[SPEAKER_03]: And the word psycho has always meant like an unstable person, right?

[SPEAKER_03]: We think of it as psychosis or like someone extremely aggressive.

[SPEAKER_03]: Psychoman doesn't really have any of those vibes.

[SPEAKER_03]: He's not like a real serial killer character.

[SPEAKER_03]: They seem to be using the word psycho almost as though it relates to like psychiatrist because this is a character that manipulates your emotions.

[SPEAKER_03]: He's got a classic visual where he's in this green armor with like an orange face.

[SPEAKER_03]: He almost looks like insectoid with like an exoskeleton in a way.

[SPEAKER_03]: The tech in his suit is like very streamlined.

[SPEAKER_03]: He shows no emotion.

[SPEAKER_03]: He's very like spock in that way.

[SPEAKER_03]: And he gets redesigned often, but you often see him with like lines across the space like opaque eyes.

[SPEAKER_03]: He looks a little like the regalian recorders a little bit.

[SPEAKER_03]: If you guys know those characters, he gives off very like inhuman robot kind of energy, but he is an extension.

[SPEAKER_03]: being from another dimension.

[SPEAKER_03]: He's a world conqueror even though with the name cycle man you'd think he was some sort of serial killer.

[SPEAKER_03]: He also carries a tablet around.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's like a little iPad with three giant words on it all written in English although maybe whatever language you see it is like the part of the tech just shows up in your language.

[SPEAKER_03]: that he has the words fear, doubt, and hate.

[SPEAKER_03]: And he can push the button and like blank it you in emotional energy that will make you behave unreasonably.

[SPEAKER_03]: One of my favorite X-Men bit villains is the character despair.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's like D apostrophe, SPA-Y-R-E.

[SPEAKER_03]: He's a crazy villain who like makes you confront your deepest fears, which is Danny Moonstar's power at a way too, right?

[SPEAKER_03]: Like she'll bring your fears or your desires to the surface.

[SPEAKER_03]: This guy is kind of all of that [SPEAKER_03]: He also is akin to those characters like Mr.

Fear or the Scarecrow who tend to like release unreasonable fear in the heroes and it's always fun to have that trope because it shows different parts of your characters, psychies.

[SPEAKER_03]: But I think the most stirring thing about this guy is the visual.

[SPEAKER_03]: It is a Jack Kirby design and his first appearance is fantastic for annual number five from nineteen sixty seven.

[SPEAKER_04]: He's freaky looking.

[SPEAKER_04]: He's like, human, but not human.

[SPEAKER_04]: I mean, yeah, he's got these like ribbed lines over his forehead and he looks like, you know, giant guy in a suit, but then like repeatedly, you find out that it's just a suit because he is this like tiny little micro guy.

[SPEAKER_04]: So he uses these giant suits to see more intimidating, but when they do do actually see him, he still looks like that.

[SPEAKER_03]: He also gives a visual for DC fans.

[SPEAKER_03]: He looks a little like Darkseed.

[SPEAKER_03]: If you guys know the character, Darkseed, who has that kind of green hood, like inhuman scary despo energy.

[SPEAKER_03]: But when Molly describes him as he like a guy in a suit, right?

[SPEAKER_03]: Like the original Kirby design, it's very, very [SPEAKER_03]: It's almost hard to describe.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's a little insecty, but it's very, it's very inhuman.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's like the vision in a way.

[SPEAKER_03]: But with this kind of iconic space armor, you'd expect to see it in like a nineteen sixties beef film.

[SPEAKER_03]: Like, I don't know, the bikini babes of Mars and we're fighting psychoman and moon dragon.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's actually giving me Star Trek the original series vibes, which was coming out at the same time that he came out, so maybe Kirby drew some inspiration in terms of, it's like a low level alien design because they didn't get real crazy on the original series because they didn't have the budget.

[SPEAKER_00]: So it's always humanoid, but a little different, so human, but orange with some lines.

[SPEAKER_03]: And everyone will redesign them just a little bit.

[SPEAKER_03]: Whenever he shows back up the armors a little more streamlined for the times, which is something that happens.

[SPEAKER_03]: They'll also streamline his weird tablets sometimes.

[SPEAKER_03]: Sometimes the letters are just written in regular font and other times, the word fear looks like it's afraid and the hate is very hateful.

[SPEAKER_03]: They think there's color, like, font changes that they go along with it.

[SPEAKER_04]: Going off of what Darrell was saying, it kind of reminds me of an old-timey doctor who villain as well.

[SPEAKER_03]: gloves are like very enchantress where they have like the concentric yellow circles that move up and down.

[SPEAKER_03]: That's my favorite part about this character.

[SPEAKER_03]: I also love the gimmick of like making the heroes react irrationally to things.

[SPEAKER_03]: So let me talk about his first appearance, which I think is his best one, although it's very wonky in nineteen sixties.

[SPEAKER_03]: On page one of the annual that I just referenced, we are informed that Susan Richards has fainted and Crystal looks very worried, but it turns out [SPEAKER_03]: Susan is pregnant.

[SPEAKER_03]: This is the pregnancy story.

[SPEAKER_03]: There are results in Franklin Richards.

[SPEAKER_03]: And in a nearby locked and soundproof building stands the Psychoman.

[SPEAKER_03]: His armor, a mix of green and white.

[SPEAKER_03]: He almost looks like a dragon up close.

[SPEAKER_03]: Psychoman is standing over a helpless human and the person saying, Psychoman, no, don't do it.

[SPEAKER_03]: I've been loyal to you.

[SPEAKER_03]: You gotta believe me.

[SPEAKER_03]: Silence, you abominable weakling, you have failed me.

[SPEAKER_03]: It was your task to deliver component five, but you delivered it to the wrong address.

[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm almost getting like the man behind the curtain with the wizard of Oz projecting the giant face.

[SPEAKER_03]: Like from the old film, that's the energy this gives me.

[SPEAKER_03]: It was an accident.

[SPEAKER_03]: Give me another chance.

[SPEAKER_03]: Please, you know the price of failure.

[SPEAKER_03]: Your cowardly cries are useless.

[SPEAKER_03]: Those cycle men is master of all emotions.

[SPEAKER_03]: I am a stranger to the emotion of pity.

[SPEAKER_03]: And then he holds up the biggest fucking iPad you've ever seen.

[SPEAKER_03]: Giant large print buttons on it.

[SPEAKER_03]: Large, large print.

[SPEAKER_03]: He does not want to get them confused.

[SPEAKER_03]: Fear, doubt, hate.

[SPEAKER_03]: And he pushes the fear button, which is always the one we see most in comics.

[SPEAKER_03]: And the guy gets scared and jumps out the window.

[SPEAKER_03]: And a speech bubble tells us the guys fight.

[SPEAKER_03]: Because the editor didn't want the readers to believe someone died.

[SPEAKER_03]: Psychoman then calls in his flunkies.

[SPEAKER_03]: One is live wire.

[SPEAKER_03]: One is a guy named Ivan and one is shell-shock.

[SPEAKER_03]: Live wire joins the circus of crime later and he has like an electric lasso and shell-shock his name is Gary Buesser, which is so close to Gary Buessie.

[SPEAKER_03]: And he has like a mask and a scary gun with settings and Ivan has a mustache and that seems to be his only power.

[SPEAKER_03]: So he calls his flunkies in and he says, do you think on where this armor merely for show?

[SPEAKER_03]: And then he pushes the doubt button and they all have a little panic attack and they're like, we serve you, master, we promise.

[SPEAKER_03]: We must get component five while there is still time.

[SPEAKER_03]: It should not be difficult.

[SPEAKER_03]: It was delivered to a blind girl.

[SPEAKER_03]: Psychoman, this is not just any blind girl.

[SPEAKER_03]: This is, of course, Alicia Masters.

[SPEAKER_03]: Psychoman uses his fear button on the thing, making him see a monster that's more powerful than himself, and they steal this component that got delivered to Alicia on accident.

[SPEAKER_03]: Now, with the material within that led-lined crate, I can create a giant-sized cycle ray, a ray capable of affecting the emotions of every man, woman and child, or other than whoever controls the emotions of the helpless human race, then becomes the total master of all humanity.

[SPEAKER_03]: So we don't really understand this man's motivations, except he likes studying people when they're having big emotional reactions.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's very Dr.

Faustus in that way, and he also wants to conquer the planet for some reason.

[SPEAKER_00]: And his Amazon package was delivered to the wrong address.

[SPEAKER_03]: So they head off to his secret base in the Caribbean, and the inhumans are here, and Black Panther is here, because they've all sensed the danger to the world.

[SPEAKER_03]: Encycloman, like the he sends his criminals out, and then he has like a mind-ray, and they can all see monsters that can't be defeated, so it's the fear button again.

[SPEAKER_03]: and their several pages of the heroes fighting their fears.

[SPEAKER_03]: And then he finally says, you may have already guessed that I am not an earth man, although in truth I am, for I come from the cluster worlds of subatomic worlds in which micro galaxies exist so small that your most powerful microscopes cannot begin to detect them.

[SPEAKER_03]: For Bar's safe vantage point with a single earthly atom, we studied the gigantic planet upon which you live, the planet which shall soon be ours.

[SPEAKER_03]: Turns out his world was growing overpopulated, and he was the chief scientist on his planet, and then he finally admits he's just a little microscopic guy who's animating a big ol' giant body.

[SPEAKER_03]: But in the end, I don't know, I'm skipping over some shit, obviously, but his form just collapses, and they open his armor up, and it's empty, and then he's missing in, you know, presumably back in the microverse again.

[SPEAKER_03]: Kind of a scary introduction, he's very unique in the fantastic four world.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's a really fun addition to their lexicon of villains, and the FF have a great series of villains.

[SPEAKER_03]: He needs a villain recruiter.

[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know where he got fucking live, why are shell-shock, and I've been like, are me.

[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, when I reread this issue, I would surprise at the end at like how quickly he's dispatched, like basically once almost as soon as they figure out that they've been fighting Android bodies the entire time, like, and they meet the real guy, it's over.

[SPEAKER_04]: I feel like I wanted to get to know him more and we don't get to, we don't see him again for like over a year in publication time.

[SPEAKER_03]: He uses the Doubt Ray once.

[SPEAKER_03]: He never uses the hate button, and he uses the fear button a lot.

[SPEAKER_03]: This is his initial story is all about fear.

[SPEAKER_03]: We're gonna see what happens in a while when his finger hovers over the hate button a little too much, it gets rough guys.

[SPEAKER_00]: So what you're saying he's like the go-to person when it comes to like science stuff for his world then it turns out that he's just a little tiny thing inside of so it's almost like he's a brain worm controlling someone who may be in charge of health perhaps or other science [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, there is that little thing where you almost want them to crack the armor open, then you suddenly like, hey guys, what are you doing?

[SPEAKER_03]: No, don't step on me.

[SPEAKER_03]: Like, there's a heck of energy.

[SPEAKER_03]: He's like a very like power puff girl villain in that way.

[SPEAKER_03]: I want to jump forward for just a minute to explain some of the strangeness with this guy.

[SPEAKER_03]: If we look in the official Marvel handbook, what it came out in the mid-eighties, I'm going to read a section from Power Man's right up by the marker and well team that existed back then.

[SPEAKER_03]: The being known in Earth's Dimension as the Psychoman is the unnamed chief scientist of the technocracy that exists on the planet Tron, TRAN, in the subatomic system.

[SPEAKER_03]: When the five planet subatomic system became severely overpopulated, the government ordered the scientists to find other worlds to colonize.

[SPEAKER_03]: The chief scientists determined that it would be easier to travel to extra dimensional worlds than extra stellar ones.

[SPEAKER_03]: scrutinizing the Earth with his scanning devices, he chose it as the perfect target since its populist appeared to be exceptionally susceptible to his unique emotional weaponry, fashioning a portable emotion projector and an armored battle suit to permit him to withstand Earth's conditions at the appropriate size of its inhabitants.

[SPEAKER_03]: The scientists traveled to Earth, calling himself the Psychomanian listed a number of human operatives to help him acquire the components to numerous and massive to transport through the dimensional aperture, [SPEAKER_03]: To build a large-scale version of his mind-ray emotion-controlled device, his plans, however, were thwarted by the fantastic four in humans in the Black Panther.

[SPEAKER_03]: In defeat, Psychoman vacated his Earth-scale armor and returned to his home dimension.

[SPEAKER_03]: And this is what the Handbook guys do.

[SPEAKER_03]: They take the story and they fill in the holes and they make it make much more sense.

[SPEAKER_03]: The microversan subatomic has its own deep, like lore.

[SPEAKER_00]: with the handbooks you're just looking for the truncated history and I think this gives an accurate picture of who he was up to that time and sort of cutting out the excess things that we're going to get into some of that, but it really cleans it up so that if I'm in the eighties and I want to know the background, I can get caught up real quick with this paragraph.

[SPEAKER_03]: I'm going to do one more work done section and then we're going to move on to chronology.

[SPEAKER_03]: I want to talk about his powers in the way they work in the original handbook right up.

[SPEAKER_03]: And again, this is what it has to say.

[SPEAKER_03]: The psycho man is an extra dimensional humanoid alien who's specific characteristics are unknown since he's only been seen in full body armor.

[SPEAKER_03]: The physical characteristics of his race besides basic humanoid configuration are also unknown since none of them have been seen either.

[SPEAKER_03]: The Psychoman possesses great intelligence, specific knowledge, and mathematical genius, perhaps the equivalent of Earth's read Richards, which also elevates a little scary, which presumably are superior to that of the majority of his race.

[SPEAKER_03]: This genius has enabled him to devise an extraordinary number of technological weapons and devices.

[SPEAKER_03]: Psychoman's major weapon is a portable emotion stimulator device, which projects a ray that is in an unknown way stimulates the centers of emotion within the brain.

[SPEAKER_03]: And if you guys remember, at the wedding of Reed and Sue, Dr.

Doom has that emotion machine that he makes all the super villains attack.

[SPEAKER_03]: This is an interesting thing too.

[SPEAKER_03]: This portable device is equipped to trigger three major emotional states, fear, doubt, and hate.

[SPEAKER_03]: The emotions the psychoman finds most effective in dealing with others.

[SPEAKER_03]: The simulator box has a control panel that enables the psychoman to control the duration and intensity of the emotional states he induces in others.

[SPEAKER_03]: The maximum duration of the emotional state produced by a single exposure to the emanations of the box is not known.

[SPEAKER_03]: However, he can produce such an intense state of fear that it will cause a human to die of heart strain.

[SPEAKER_03]: Frequently, the fear ray causes its target to hallucinate a particularly fearsome image [SPEAKER_03]: Dredged from his or her own subconscious, which only the villain can perceive.

[SPEAKER_03]: The Psychoman has other non-portable emotion-inducing weaponry with greater range and effectiveness.

[SPEAKER_03]: He was in the midst of constructing one that could have blankered the Earth with its rays, affecting the mind of every being on the planet when he was defeated.

[SPEAKER_03]: The Psychoman employs a number of full body suits of armor, [SPEAKER_03]: Many of which have been specially modified to give him specific powers and capabilities.

[SPEAKER_03]: He is more an armor for example, which provided him with sufficient strength to engage the thing in hand-to-hand combat.

[SPEAKER_03]: All of his armor is cybernetically controlled.

[SPEAKER_03]: The Psychoman has a world-ship containing all of the technological resources to carry out his projects.

[SPEAKER_03]: The ship is a self-contained environment, which can travel through interplanetary space, [SPEAKER_03]: But it's too large to traverse the interdimensional barrier between subatomic and earth.

[SPEAKER_03]: The specific capabilities of his ship are unknown.

[SPEAKER_03]: Now, usually, and when we get to two thousand nine, this is when I'm on the handbooks, although I didn't work on this specific entry, there's some like things that are added because there's a lot more complexity given to the character or a lot more appearances at the very least.

[SPEAKER_03]: They describe him much more like a psychic vampire.

[SPEAKER_03]: He draws strength [SPEAKER_03]: from emotion.

[SPEAKER_03]: So by generating these intense emotions, he's able to feed on these feelings.

[SPEAKER_03]: And so he becomes kind of like a fear vampire in a way.

[SPEAKER_03]: He can also use his rays to create feelings of courage, confidence, and love, which can make people reckless and overly sentimental.

[SPEAKER_03]: So we see some kind of variations.

[SPEAKER_03]: His suits are often portrayed as like crazy, super strong as well.

[SPEAKER_04]: So we're going to continue with Psychoman's next appearance in Fantastic Four Seventy-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-Six-S [SPEAKER_04]: And so they shrink down the term shrinkage is used a lot.

[SPEAKER_04]: I found that amusing.

[SPEAKER_04]: They find the silver surfer almost immediately once they get to Sevatamica like on the fourth panel.

[SPEAKER_04]: Then of course, what do you do?

[SPEAKER_04]: They fight him because this is a comic book.

[SPEAKER_04]: Silver surfer kicks their butts and he flies off and he immediately encounters psychomanche.

[SPEAKER_04]: And psychomanze initial description here is pretty awesome.

[SPEAKER_04]: The master scientist of Sevatamica, the supremely powerful, totally merciless master of the micro world, the emotionless entity known as psychomanze.

[SPEAKER_04]: So he doesn't engage with surfer himself.

[SPEAKER_04]: He actually sends out an indestructible one to bring surfer to him.

[SPEAKER_04]: And the indestructible one's like this silent king looking Android.

[SPEAKER_04]: Given what we've seen of him before, it's kind of interesting that psycho man's opening salvo here is to send out a being that is totally emotionless.

[SPEAKER_04]: But I'm guessing here, maybe it's because he doesn't know what silver surfers deal is.

[SPEAKER_04]: And so he uses the emotionless route to maybe watch and see how to best manipulate him in the future.

[SPEAKER_04]: The indestructible one attacks the fantastic foreign stead and then the silver server comes back and saves everybody with the power cosmic.

[SPEAKER_04]: issue, seventy seven.

[SPEAKER_04]: Psychoman drops down some sort of nutty gizmo as Johnny puts it next to the FF.

[SPEAKER_04]: Recall, Psychoman, the master of a science.

[SPEAKER_04]: We know nothing about which I also found amusing, given how emotionless read can be.

[SPEAKER_04]: Psychoman zaps the FF.

[SPEAKER_04]: FF into a ship and he says he's going to probe their brains for information about earthly science.

[SPEAKER_04]: Then they fight various versions of the psycho man created by his and cephalo projector, but they never know if they're fighting the real psycho man.

[SPEAKER_04]: So I think we can probably add paranoia to the list of emotions that he evokes.

[SPEAKER_04]: They also note that while subatomica appears abandoned, psycho man could be making them just imagine that there's no one there and they might not even have left the place where their ship was in the first place.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, this guy becomes very professor exe at a certain point.

[SPEAKER_03]: Right.

[SPEAKER_03]: Are my memories real?

[SPEAKER_03]: Did that really happen?

[SPEAKER_03]: Am I in control of my decisions?

[SPEAKER_04]: So eventually, psycho man, the real one comes out in this nifty green armored suit, which is a little different from what we seen the androids looked at, looked like.

[SPEAKER_04]: And he says it's their final confrontation.

[SPEAKER_04]: And they all fight then bend punches him through one of the support columns of one of the fields of machines and it falls on him and crushes him.

[SPEAKER_04]: And then he becomes very different.

[SPEAKER_04]: He suddenly starts pleading for the FF to save him and read actually insists that they do because he's the only one who knows where the ship is and they can't get home without it or so they think.

[SPEAKER_04]: So Reed then tells Psychoman that they need him to help them because if he doesn't, Galactus is going to destroy the microverse as well as our Psychoman's scams, Reed's brain and sees that this is true.

[SPEAKER_04]: He uses his powers then to send them home without their ship.

[SPEAKER_04]: So overall, I found it pretty interesting that rather than see him use all the emotional manipulation from his first appearance, like the iPad doesn't even make an appearance here.

[SPEAKER_04]: really here he's just using brute strength and illusions so it's kind of like a difference from where we saw him the first time with his little button device here not so much it's just more illusions in paranoia there's almost a little vibe it's it's subtext for me but reads like you want me to be afraid let me show you what fear looks like because there's a god about to eat the planet and say come on it's like oh [SPEAKER_03]: Okay, let's go now.

[SPEAKER_00]: Let's keep going with the micronauts.

[SPEAKER_00]: The micronauts where you license property from Hasbro that Marvel created comics about.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's the summary of what they are.

[SPEAKER_03]: The Avengers of the Microverse over simplifying.

[SPEAKER_03]: I have an macro year episode coming out next month on this channel, which will go deep into the micronauts lore.

[SPEAKER_03]: We'll have a good time.

[SPEAKER_00]: Acro year is caked up as fuck, like that guy does not skip leg day, just as an aside.

[SPEAKER_00]: So we have three issues written by Bill Mantleau.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you have ever read Bill Mantleau, you know that he really likes creating his own world, which is what he did with the micronods.

[SPEAKER_00]: He wrote this title from its inception through like issue sixty or something.

[SPEAKER_00]: So he wrote a lot of micronauts.

[SPEAKER_00]: Luckily, the gods have bro and Marvel got together and worked out licensing agreements.

[SPEAKER_00]: He can actually get them in omnibus form right now and no one's buying them.

[SPEAKER_00]: So it's like thirty five dollars per volume deals out their people.

[SPEAKER_00]: So we have the microverse involved, which we already know psychoman is in.

[SPEAKER_00]: The fantastic for Adronin, because there was a villain that popped out of the microverse, that shield tried to beat because he switched places with Captain Universe.

[SPEAKER_00]: There's a Prometheus pit, so if you, that may be triggering to some of you who know about Prometheus, Pegasus, all of the P things involving shield seemed to not turn out well.

[SPEAKER_00]: So the fantastic four have to go into the microverse to figure out what the hell is going on.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they run into the micro nods, what the hell is going on is psychoman.

[SPEAKER_00]: And Johnny's storm is left behind.

[SPEAKER_00]: He goes through the Prometheus pit to go help out.

[SPEAKER_00]: Psychoman is like, hey, I'm just trying to clean up junk down here with my, my little robotic minions get away.

[SPEAKER_00]: Micro nods.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going about my business.

[SPEAKER_00]: So he's doing his villain thing.

[SPEAKER_00]: Johnny Storm actually appears in the microverse as his fully formed self like he is full-sized and his flame dissipates all the oxygen.

[SPEAKER_00]: So they all sort of pass out.

[SPEAKER_00]: He eventually gets his ass sort of handed to him because it's the fantastic for in the micro nods in the actual micro not serious.

[SPEAKER_00]: There's nothing much of consequence.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's very much the B movie villain running around, bowing some bullshit.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's a lot of fun.

[SPEAKER_00]: Did I know any of these characters and had I ever read in a micronauts comic before this assignment?

[SPEAKER_00]: No.

[SPEAKER_00]: But I actually want to read more because they seem really fun.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's a tone quarter of the Marvel Universe where they're just pulling in guest stars.

[SPEAKER_03]: Go read.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's like, well, I'm Space Knight.

[SPEAKER_03]: There's a lot of fun content.

[SPEAKER_03]: There's a limited series called X-Men Micronauts, which is a classic that kind of has the first appearance of Charles Xavier's dark side of it, which is interesting.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's it's a worthy read.

[SPEAKER_03]: The Micronauts have a bunch of gimmicks.

[SPEAKER_03]: They are huge epic Star Wars level heroes.

[SPEAKER_03]: And they're literally fighting a man who's trying to like, genetically cleanse his universe.

[SPEAKER_03]: He wants to like kill lesser beings.

[SPEAKER_03]: He's like, he's like a real evil guy.

[SPEAKER_03]: And then the next issue, they'll be like two inch tall heroes on Earth who are like trying to understand what a puppy and a car are while they fight plant man in a greenhouse.

[SPEAKER_03]: You know, like it's, the series kind of goes back and forth.

[SPEAKER_00]: worth it that way.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's really fun.

[SPEAKER_00]: I would encourage people to check it out.

[SPEAKER_00]: You can't check it out on Marvel and limited because it is a licensed property that they didn't license for digital stuff.

[SPEAKER_00]: But you go to any comic con that has a bunch of comic sellers.

[SPEAKER_00]: You will find dollar bins full of micro knots.

[SPEAKER_00]: They're everywhere because no one knows what they are anymore.

[SPEAKER_00]: So you can get them real cheap.

[SPEAKER_03]: And there's some fun characters, Marionette and Bug and Hunter.

[SPEAKER_03]: Accro years an amazing character.

[SPEAKER_03]: There's a lot of commentary on race and prejudice in the series as well.

[SPEAKER_03]: So again, stay tuned for the Accro year episode.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm just so glad Microtron, he's like our two detail.

[SPEAKER_00]: He gets just right in the issue, fifteen, but don't worry.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's better by issue, seventeen when we say goodbye to Psychoman.

[SPEAKER_03]: biotron and micro-tron.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, there's some real transformers characters that they're too for sure.

[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, so mostly psycho man has been pushing the fear button.

[SPEAKER_03]: Talk about what happens when he decides to push the hate button a little more.

[SPEAKER_03]: Molly's going to tell us about fantastic four, two, seventy, eight to two, eighty one.

[SPEAKER_03]: Now, I'm a social justice oriented therapist.

[SPEAKER_03]: I remember stories like this.

[SPEAKER_03]: We've talked about stories like this on my show.

[SPEAKER_03]: We did the Necra introduction last year, which is all about racism.

[SPEAKER_03]: There's some infamous moments in X-Men history where a character will use the N word to try to prove a point somehow.

[SPEAKER_03]: There's moments where white supremacists are the major villains that the heroes are facing.

[SPEAKER_03]: We always keep it, I don't know, you'll see fires and burning crosses maybe, but they're not gonna put the end word on the page.

[SPEAKER_03]: In the eighties, there is something happening where this is a race story by John Bern that hits at a deeply uncomfortable level.

[SPEAKER_03]: And no matter how much I remembered the story reading it again, I was like, holy fuck, this is outright offensive in multiple parts.

[SPEAKER_03]: But it's famous for one major reason.

[SPEAKER_03]: What's the reason the story's famous, Molly Laser?

[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, the the dominatrix who storm.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, we just Sue storm in heels with a blue window.

[SPEAKER_04]: First appearance of Malice and by the end of this story, Archie is the invisible woman.

[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, okay.

[SPEAKER_03]: So invisible girl to invisible one and through this awful racist story, we'll occur right off.

[SPEAKER_04]: Oh my god, okay, this this story arc really must be up.

[SPEAKER_04]: I'm gonna say that.

[SPEAKER_04]: So yeah, I read these about twenty years ago and haven't read them since.

[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I will not be reading these to my children any time soon.

[SPEAKER_04]: This whole story arc opens with a quote from Cicero that's unrelated completely unrelated to the psycho man arc.

[SPEAKER_04]: It actually has to do with like a other plot line involving Dr.

Doom and Christoff.

[SPEAKER_04]: But I think it's really important to mention this quote here.

[SPEAKER_04]: Bern does a lot of quotes throughout his this arc to [SPEAKER_04]: to be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child.

[SPEAKER_04]: For what is a man's lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times.

[SPEAKER_04]: Breeding these issues for years later, in today's political climates, it kind of hit hard.

[SPEAKER_03]: It does, and it hits on both sides, because it has almost a connotation of like history matters, so I should be able to keep my Confederate flag hanging energy.

[SPEAKER_04]: That makes sense to like, I mean, actually in the context, especially in the context of the Dr.

Doom Kristoff story, because by the end of that little arc, Kristoff has basically become Dr.

Doom and by the end then they end up having to like come and like rip him and rip Kristoff the child out of this like grown up Dr.

Doom costume, but yeah, no, it's also messed up, but yes, in in twenty twenty five America with the way political climate is now it's so easy to forget where we've come from and that's why stories like this matter.

[SPEAKER_04]: Yes, okay.

[SPEAKER_04]: So the psycho man plot is like in the background of two seventy eight and two seventy nine because we're dealing with Dr.

Doom and Kristoff, but we see Johnny and Alicia walking down the street and where they see a poster for a prayer meeting for racial equality and right there, it's got the phrase inward lover plastered over it.

[SPEAKER_04]: And it is horrifying.

[SPEAKER_04]: Johnny is appalled.

[SPEAKER_04]: He finds the kid who's been doing it.

[SPEAKER_04]: And the kid says that the message is put on quote, honest.

[SPEAKER_04]: And he says that Mr.

Unger says the only way we can achieve peace as it is if we acknowledge our hatreds and send the inferior races back where they came from, which oh my God.

[SPEAKER_04]: It only gets more racist from there.

[SPEAKER_04]: Later we see a meeting of a white supremacist led by this Mr.

Unger who will later find out his psycho man's new hate monger.

[SPEAKER_04]: I think the last time we saw the hate monger, he was Hitler.

[SPEAKER_04]: So this is not Hitler, but it might as well be.

[SPEAKER_03]: So yeah, the hate monger just real quickly isn't early FF villain who's literally eight off Hitler.

[SPEAKER_03]: it off Hitler in a KKK hood that's black with a big red like H on it.

[SPEAKER_03]: That's a real character at Marvel who inspires hate in people.

[SPEAKER_03]: The hate manga in other versions is often like an energy source that will like possess someone and awaken their hate.

[SPEAKER_03]: And so this that character morphs from one thing into another, but it literally represents the ideas of the third Reich under like a black mask.

[SPEAKER_04]: So here we see there's a meeting of white supremacists that Mr.

Unger is leading.

[SPEAKER_04]: Priest comes in and begs them to stop and then he gets called an inward lover a lot and then under Mr.

Unger's orders, the white supremacists beat and probably kill him with that.

[SPEAKER_04]: And that's how issue two, seventy nine ends with a priest being beaten to death and psychoman who's like made very brief appearances here like he's in the shadows.

[SPEAKER_04]: He's talking about the annihilation of all mankind and then like if possible it gets worse because we find out that Unger can change his appearance and he turns into a black woman and says he's going to the black women's defense league meeting to so more hatred.

[SPEAKER_04]: So it's all really horrifying and I actually took a break between those issues and the next one.

[SPEAKER_03]: Well, and one of the major problems with the story that you just pointed out is we have a white writer who is basically arguing hate is about on both sides.

[SPEAKER_03]: But he's equating that the hate that a black woman has for a racist society is a kin to the miseducated hate that white people have for black people in a system of systemic oppression.

[SPEAKER_03]: And you can't equate the two.

[SPEAKER_03]: And to do so is assenine and frankly offensive.

[SPEAKER_04]: And actually in between being his blonde white Mr.

Unger and turning into a black woman, he appears as a brunette man who says he's going to like a sons of Zion meeting as well.

[SPEAKER_04]: We get more anti-Semitism in the next issue.

[SPEAKER_04]: So.

[SPEAKER_03]: Steve Gerber does this type of story quite often, where like it's the sons of the serpent, the white supremacists, but at the end of it, their leader was actually a black man under the hood, stowing hatred for his own personal profit.

[SPEAKER_03]: And like he does that story like three times.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's awful.

[SPEAKER_03]: And so this is kind of that.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's it's a very uncomfortable at that level.

[SPEAKER_04]: So then we go to two eighty and the cover to two eighty like deeply upsetting.

[SPEAKER_04]: So it's got the FF read and Sue and she holds who's subbing into the thing at this point and Johnny and they're plastered up and they're looking like kind of crucified on the front of the word hate.

[SPEAKER_03]: He's burning in against arrest.

[SPEAKER_04]: white supremacists are like fist pumping beneath them and there's like fire and it's bad at the beginning of this issue read and see we're talking to a policeman and then Mr.

Showinstein who is kind of a bit of a Jewish stereotype he comes up to them and he's been moaning the loss of his daily and it gets implied in this little throwaway line that his wife died in the Holocaust and the policeman tells read not to waste your breath apologizing to this garbage and he pushes Mr.

Showinstein up against the wall why a wingfoot comes in and tries to stop the policeman he gets a nice night stick to the face [SPEAKER_04]: She holds calls the placement and Nazi.

[SPEAKER_04]: He calls white, high, a watha and then a mob gathers and starts throwing bricks.

[SPEAKER_04]: Then we finally get our first look at good look at psycho man in this whole art.

[SPEAKER_04]: He's with hunger.

[SPEAKER_04]: He orders hunger to change his appearance.

[SPEAKER_04]: So he looks like read and sends him after sue.

[SPEAKER_04]: So the FF are staying at Avengers mansion because the back should build in gotics.

[SPEAKER_04]: bloated, and so Jarvis shows read these pro hate pamphlets that have been left all over the city, presumably by psycho man and younger, and read eventually figures out that they have alien origins, and it's never explicitly addressed, but I'm assuming that these are from subatomica.

[SPEAKER_04]: They just keep calling them like alien particles.

[SPEAKER_04]: She hooking Wyatt are going through the streets, everything's a fire.

[SPEAKER_04]: They see anti-Semitic graffiti on a storefront where the window's been smashed in and I really think that burn knew what he was doing here because it's very reminiscent of Crystal Nakh, which makes it even more disturbing.

[SPEAKER_04]: Jen then encounters Sue and it's her first appearance as malice, mistress of hate, yes, with her weird spiky mask and very little clothing.

[SPEAKER_04]: Oh, oh, and also at this point in the original floppy issue, there's an ad with Spider-Man and Powerpack talking about tips to prevent sexual abuse.

[SPEAKER_04]: He's an Irish issue, it's just like horrifying on every level.

[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I found the ad was like, oh, good God.

[SPEAKER_04]: Okay, so in at two, eighty one, we've got malice on the cover.

[SPEAKER_04]: Daredevil's in the background here, because he's the only one who can sense that Sue's like, he could see with his blind vision, Sue's force fields and figure out.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, can I pause you for just one minute?

[SPEAKER_03]: Because I wanted to describe if you haven't looked up this Sue's form malice.

[SPEAKER_03]: Look, just give it a Google, demand a martini would have some things to say about this outfit.

[SPEAKER_03]: This is very Claremont.

[SPEAKER_03]: This is Gene going dark Phoenix.

[SPEAKER_03]: This is when like Mastermind takes over Gene's grid like Gene's mind and she suddenly starts dressing like a slut.

[SPEAKER_03]: This is a open one piece bikini that has like straps over the boobs which are nearly exposed.

[SPEAKER_03]: One strap over the ribs which leaves the entire stomach exposed.

[SPEAKER_03]: And then very goblin queen, it has like a trail down between the legs, but leaves both hips naked with like thigh high boots, bicep high gloves that are all in black, a spiked collar, a spiked bondage mask, and then a big giant Dracula cape with like a huge like goblin queen fork to the bend.

[SPEAKER_03]: This is very like Madeline prior would look amazing in this costume.

[SPEAKER_04]: But for Sue, it's just like why.

[SPEAKER_03]: This is a mother.

[SPEAKER_04]: The issue to anyone opens with the hate monger and blanked by malice and psychoman.

[SPEAKER_04]: They're declaring victory.

[SPEAKER_04]: Psychoman says the whole plan has revolved around destroying the FF.

[SPEAKER_04]: And he wants to see, and I quote, their heads on spears, which yikes.

[SPEAKER_04]: So Reed has developed a device to stop the alien hate particles from the pamphlets.

[SPEAKER_04]: Malish shows up.

[SPEAKER_04]: He doesn't recognize her.

[SPEAKER_04]: He's just surprised to see a woman.

[SPEAKER_04]: And she says, don't you mean just a woman returns?

[SPEAKER_04]: Someone to be ignored at worst, patronized at best.

[SPEAKER_04]: Someone to be stifled, frustrated at every turn, capable of bearing children, but never responsibility.

[SPEAKER_04]: And I was like fist pumping there.

[SPEAKER_04]: Daredevil shows up basically tells Reed and Johnny that it's [SPEAKER_04]: Sue and she calls them out for not respecting her.

[SPEAKER_04]: Re comes up with this bonkers plan to kind of snap her out of it.

[SPEAKER_04]: That involves making her really hate him and his way of doing that is to tell her to shut up a bunch of times and insult her and then slap her in the face.

[SPEAKER_04]: Very counterintuitively, this snaps her out of the malice persona, something about her turning her love for him into actual hatred that's separate from malice.

[SPEAKER_04]: I don't know, but it's horrifying.

[SPEAKER_04]: As we go into a two eighty two to two eighty four, Susan's to be the more empowered to speak up, so that's good.

[SPEAKER_04]: She calls read out into eighty two for not letting her have her say like in general, reads snaps right back at her, calling her outbursts uncharacteristic, which is like a theme in the fantastic for for quite a long time of like everybody shutting down Sue having emotions, because you know, that makes her woman, which that's a different podcast.

[SPEAKER_04]: So Sue says that psychoman through the hate monger, and this is awful, grabbed a hold of her heart, twisted it, and turned it inside out, and says that even though she's physically fine, her soul's been assaulted.

[SPEAKER_04]: The FF go to subatomic and to find psychoman, they immediately get trapped by him.

[SPEAKER_04]: He was spying the whole time, so he knew that they were coming.

[SPEAKER_04]: At the beginning of two eighty three things get so weird that I actually thought I was reading the wrong comic.

[SPEAKER_04]: She hopes been replaced by a thing.

[SPEAKER_04]: Read is super old.

[SPEAKER_04]: Ben and Johnny die horribly.

[SPEAKER_04]: Read calls Sue a stupid useless female before getting crushed to death by spikes, which admittedly I laughed at.

[SPEAKER_04]: So Sue's alone now.

[SPEAKER_04]: She sees her parents who, of course, are skeletons.

[SPEAKER_04]: And at this point, we figure out, oh, this is all manipulation by psychoman.

[SPEAKER_04]: He blames the FF for Sue's torment because they're the ones who came to the microverse rather than letting things go after the whole malice incident.

[SPEAKER_04]: He uses his doubt and fear rays on Sue and it's really awful to look at.

[SPEAKER_04]: Read defeat cycle man.

[SPEAKER_04]: They put him in a cell.

[SPEAKER_04]: He immediately escapes.

[SPEAKER_04]: Reed starts to feel really guilty, which seems like a nice change for him, like he's taking responsibility for once, but it turns out it's just the psychomance doubt ray, making him feel that way.

[SPEAKER_04]: Sue grabs the emotion device from him with a force field and says she's going to pay him back in kind, but we never actually find out what that entails.

[SPEAKER_04]: So I went back and I looked at the end of this story art like a few times to see if I just missed something, but we don't find out what she did to him.

[SPEAKER_04]: We just don't see him for a long time after that.

[SPEAKER_04]: And whatever she did didn't actually get to reference in a issue.

[SPEAKER_04]: We're going to talk about a lot later.

[SPEAKER_04]: I wish I knew.

[SPEAKER_04]: And maybe it comes up in an issue that I didn't read, but it's not here.

[SPEAKER_03]: So one of the odd implications of this story, just to focus this particular lens for a moment.

[SPEAKER_03]: This is the story where Sue has been in existence for twenty-five years at this point, basically.

[SPEAKER_03]: And this is the story that makes her quote unquote grow up.

[SPEAKER_03]: She's got a child who is like a young child at this point, and she changes her name from the invisible girl to the invisible woman.

[SPEAKER_03]: Almost like a character's decision to cut their pig tails off.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's an odd energy, but it's resonant for this character.

[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, and she actually says is due to all this trauma that she's endured.

[SPEAKER_04]: And like, there's like a very strong rape metaphor here.

[SPEAKER_04]: And that made me really uncomfortable that idea that, oh, now she's been assaulted.

[SPEAKER_04]: So now she's a woman.

[SPEAKER_04]: I didn't like that.

[SPEAKER_03]: And then that vibe I talked about before, where like it's trying to equate all hate as the same thing.

[SPEAKER_03]: That's very offensive.

[SPEAKER_03]: But there's also some very racist stereotypes.

[SPEAKER_03]: The white characters get to be complex.

[SPEAKER_03]: The Jewish character is one thing.

[SPEAKER_03]: The black character is one thing.

[SPEAKER_03]: and it even in this is nineteen eighty five it even has the black characters using phrases like jive honky which is again just outwardly uncomfortably racist and burn does this across a few different titles across his tenure the burn of it all well it's [SPEAKER_00]: really hard because, as you know, I'm a big alpha flight fan, we will get to plugging what I'm working on later, but having consumed his work, looking at everything that he's written for that title, and then what he moved on to do, I think that sometimes, especially back then, his influence was seen as progressive, and now we look back at it, and it's very much not, especially when it comes to how he writes women can be very wrong.

[SPEAKER_00]: And you can see that seeping into more mainstream stuff because Elfaflight was super popular in the eighties and he sort of got more famous from there.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like he was doing Elflight the same time he was doing this fantastic forearm when you get to his she Hulk stuff.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, he wrote that character well, but some of those issues are very rough and they're blatantly sexist.

[SPEAKER_03]: There's a well-meaningness to it.

[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm not defending John Bern here.

[SPEAKER_03]: I don't, I think he's art's amazing, but there's an edginess to this story.

[SPEAKER_03]: Like this is a writer really stepping into like public sentiment and culture and for the time in the mid-Aides conservatism is having a huge rise in America.

[SPEAKER_03]: Right, this is God loves man kills where we're like labeling Christianity is the thing that's most evil toward mutants.

[SPEAKER_03]: This is that story where we're pushing the limits of something.

[SPEAKER_03]: And you can see the well-meaning intentions.

[SPEAKER_03]: So we're not here to call anyone racist directly, but this is a very racist story.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's deeply uncomfortable.

[SPEAKER_04]: And yet at the same time, when I was reading it this week, like, yeah, it's super racist, but at the same time, I was like, yeah, John Bern, yeah.

[SPEAKER_04]: that is happening.

[SPEAKER_04]: And so like I found myself like lacking a certain amount of outrage towards this story arc.

[SPEAKER_04]: It could be with the exception of some of the suit stuff at the end just because of when we are right now that like this felt way more real than a lot of other comics I read lately.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, the intention of something is important, but the context of it is also important.

[SPEAKER_03]: There was literally a time I was planning to do a themed month once about white supremacy in comics, which is a crazy thing.

[SPEAKER_03]: I was going to do like my academic panel was going to be about the secret empire and all of the episodes on the Patreon would have been about like black specter in the sons of the serpent in the front [SPEAKER_03]: humanity and the hate manga.

[SPEAKER_03]: And stuff like the watch dogs, orcas, like there's a bunch of these that exist in my brain that I still kind of want to do those stories.

[SPEAKER_03]: It'd be fascinating to have like a professor come talk on, you know, who's an expert in Hitler, come talk about the hate manga on this show.

[SPEAKER_03]: That's a fascinating conversation, but it takes you just such a dark place internally.

[SPEAKER_00]: The burn run on Fantastic Four is famous.

[SPEAKER_00]: People love his run.

[SPEAKER_00]: Whenever I talk to people about L flight, it's always, oh, I read the burn stuff and nothing else.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's often true for eighties and nineties fantastic for that people have read the burn stuff and nothing else.

[SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot to recommend it, but I think what you just described does give people a warning to take care of themselves.

[SPEAKER_00]: If they're going to consume it, that it can be some heavy subject matter, even if it is well executed.

[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, there's a reason that I'm skipping this middle chunk of fantastic for with my children.

[SPEAKER_04]: We've read the entire Lee and Kirby run and a whole bunch of like forty issues past that where we started at Mark Wade and we're going forward from there.

[SPEAKER_04]: We've read all Ryan North, but I'm skipping the middle for now.

[SPEAKER_03]: You know, and as a, as a comic fan and as a person who also reads comics with his kids, I think I'm sorting this out in real time.

[SPEAKER_03]: So give me a second to form my thoughts here.

[SPEAKER_03]: I like a story that has an edge.

[SPEAKER_03]: I like watching Captain America fight Hydra.

[SPEAKER_03]: That's fun.

[SPEAKER_03]: And it when people are doing hateful things.

[SPEAKER_03]: But when you see one of these groups like there's a rape implied or there's racial or homosexual violence implied when they see a character beaten to death.

[SPEAKER_03]: or when they have a noose in their hand and try to string them up.

[SPEAKER_03]: Or you see the phrase, an asteris asteris asteris asteris are L-O-V-E are written on the page, or you see a white character trying to reason with a black character about black people to hate white people is the same thing.

[SPEAKER_03]: Those things are deeply uncomfortable.

[SPEAKER_03]: So I think these stories, these are always the deepest villains in our comics, the hatred for people.

[SPEAKER_03]: But I think the stories take them too far sometimes, and the controversy becomes bigger than the intentionality.

[SPEAKER_03]: Let's step into some fun stuff for a minute.

[SPEAKER_03]: You want to take us through some fun psycho-man stories from the early nineties?

[SPEAKER_00]: I would love to.

[SPEAKER_00]: So we are starting off with the web of Spider-Man annual number six.

[SPEAKER_00]: I have so many questions about this.

[SPEAKER_00]: It is heart three of Spidey's totally tiny adventure.

[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, it's an annual back then to you several stories.

[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't have time to get to the anime in sales day for a shootout.

[SPEAKER_00]: But, this one is the lead story, is Spider-Man in, up from slavery.

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know when this story was written.

[SPEAKER_00]: Because the credits are Jerry Conway, Stan Lee, Gilcane, Selby Sema, Mike Esposito, and Alan Kupperberg, where the actual fuck did this story come from?

[SPEAKER_00]: Like, in the end, like, in the end, because it is even written, it's fun.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not shooting on it, but this comic was published in the end, and were they all alive?

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I'm calling into question where this inventory story was dragged from because it's zany in the best possible way, but it is very much Bronze Age zany.

[SPEAKER_00]: So you have Spider-Man and I didn't read part one and two.

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know what the fuck's going on.

[SPEAKER_00]: The Part III Spider-Man is already being tortured by psycho-man.

[SPEAKER_00]: We are at mid manipulation by psycho-man as he is trying his best and then he goes into a monologue because he's one of those villains in its very bronzy.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's been exiled from subatomica on his world ship, and he just has to wander the microverse.

[SPEAKER_00]: He is talking about how the fantastic four have, you know, defeated him, and eventually he just gets a mechanical claw like a claw machine to drag Spidey to a cage, but don't worry, Spider-Man makes friends with someone with tentacles.

[SPEAKER_00]: It is as sexy as you think it would be.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the friend with tentacles actually helps reach some tentacles around and snatches the web shooters.

[SPEAKER_00]: They're held in a glass case just out of reach to torture Spider-Man.

[SPEAKER_03]: And I mean, do you want the key to the puzzle here?

[SPEAKER_03]: It says this is Spider-Man in Honey, I shrunk the kids.

[SPEAKER_00]: It is.

[SPEAKER_00]: And Psychoman is basically the collector.

[SPEAKER_00]: He is collecting a bunch of representatives from different races.

[SPEAKER_00]: They're all together.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's why there's a technical person.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's a fellow prisoner.

[SPEAKER_00]: He uses the web shooters, he being Spider-Man to get the controls and they break out and they all go after Psychoman.

[SPEAKER_00]: Psychoman has some gas, but Spider-Man is wing above it and escape the gas.

[SPEAKER_00]: Psycho Gas.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he unveils what Psychoman is using to power everything.

[SPEAKER_00]: And it's basically an even smaller universe held within this micro ship.

[SPEAKER_00]: This just made Psychoman angry.

[SPEAKER_00]: He has his tablet.

[SPEAKER_00]: He is doing his best to shoot Spidey.

[SPEAKER_00]: But Spidey is too good for that.

[SPEAKER_00]: He ejects this little micro universe.

[SPEAKER_00]: He is able to use the various powers to [SPEAKER_00]: shrink, grow, defeat psychoman.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's basically all you need to do.

[SPEAKER_00]: Then he gets spit out of a microscope at the Osborne Chemical Plant and Upper Manhattan.

[SPEAKER_00]: And everything's better because he grows back up to full size in front of Norman.

[SPEAKER_03]: There's like an ant-man team up and like some zini, you know, spider-man's trapped at small size and can't get Mary Jane's attention.

[SPEAKER_03]: Like this is a little annual triptych is kind of fun.

[SPEAKER_00]: But the last page of this particular story is him having sex with Mary Jane.

[SPEAKER_00]: like they full on just like it's not showing up on zoom.

[SPEAKER_00]: They go to bed and then they transitions to like let's leave our far from platonic parkers.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's a celebration.

[SPEAKER_03]: We jump to a book that I can't believe exists at Marvel, the impossible man's summer vacation.

[SPEAKER_03]: Number two, number two.

[SPEAKER_00]: And by the way, both the previous issue and this one are on Marvel and Limited for reasons that defy logic.

[SPEAKER_00]: They have digitized these, recolored them, remastered them.

[SPEAKER_00]: Impossible man, summer special.

[SPEAKER_03]: Number two, I hate the impossible man.

[SPEAKER_03]: Police, favorite Marvel characters of all time.

[SPEAKER_00]: I agree with you after reading this.

[SPEAKER_00]: So the set up for the story is he and his impossible woman have tens of thousands of children who are all giving the same school report to them and they realize that number of if four thousand six hundred eighty two is gone.

[SPEAKER_00]: So he needs to find this one.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's called imp quest because he's impossible man.

[SPEAKER_00]: He goes and meets the watcher gets a clue from a watch too because a watch who is like, I don't want to deal with this thought.

[SPEAKER_00]: guy right now.

[SPEAKER_00]: He, I don't want to deal with your small problem, wink, wink.

[SPEAKER_00]: So we know it's in the microverse and he goes, he, it transforms himself into an enterprise from Star Trek to fly around.

[SPEAKER_00]: He tries to intimidate, psychoman, as the thing, but psychoman knows it's not the thing.

[SPEAKER_00]: I already use the word Zany.

[SPEAKER_00]: This continues to be Zany.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's a loony tunes episode, but really annoying.

[SPEAKER_00]: Every time he transforms into a separate thing, it's pop pop pop pop.

[SPEAKER_00]: He visits Hank, Pam, Hank, Pam at this time is West Coast Avengers, Orange Jump suit.

[SPEAKER_00]: Hank, Pam, which I argue is the best Hank, Pam, because he has gotten over most of his issues.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's post-slap and he is really gone on with his life before they do a whole bunch of other junk within the future.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the end of it, he doesn't even find his child.

[SPEAKER_00]: So this whole adventure with psycho man, he leaves a psycho man in the microverse, psycho man actually wanted help.

[SPEAKER_00]: So he can rule his universe again, and impossible man is deaf to it because he has a goal.

[SPEAKER_00]: And that's it.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's a very ten gentle psycho man appearance and one used for it.

[SPEAKER_00]: Probably the most comedic effect of anything we're seeing covered here.

[SPEAKER_04]: Molly, are you an impossible man fan?

[SPEAKER_04]: Oh, he's so dumb.

[SPEAKER_04]: And I kind of love him because he's so dumb.

[SPEAKER_04]: I mean, he is other than like turning into anything.

[SPEAKER_04]: His main superpower is being super annoying.

[SPEAKER_04]: And the fact that they defeated him the first time by ignoring him in fantastic for like, it's so dumb.

[SPEAKER_04]: And I love it.

[SPEAKER_03]: If somebody challenges me to do it, I would do an impossible man episode.

[SPEAKER_03]: And I would be miserable.

[SPEAKER_03]: Darryl takes particular joy in making me do these characters.

[SPEAKER_03]: My initial thoughts on this guy is he started his gumbie.

[SPEAKER_03]: So he's kind of cute and silly.

[SPEAKER_03]: But by this point, he's like, if you guys ever watched the old Jim Carrey, like, mask cartoon, that kind of energy through the whole show, that's who impossible man becomes.

[SPEAKER_03]: There's an ex-force impossible man team up in the nineties in one of the annuals, if you guys remember.

[SPEAKER_03]: But I do like the character eight often possible from the future foundation.

[SPEAKER_03]: He's one of the low kids that joins the students in the later FF run.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's really cute.

[SPEAKER_03]: I like that character.

[SPEAKER_05]: I don't remember that guy at all.

[SPEAKER_05]: I think I kind of blocked out a lot of that future foundations.

[SPEAKER_03]: He and Luna, he and Luna Maximov get to hold hands and watch TV together.

[SPEAKER_03]: They're cute.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then I'm going to quickly run through fantastic for unlimited number eight, which is not unmarvelling limited.

[SPEAKER_00]: Go to your bootleg sites people and read it online.

[SPEAKER_00]: So basically read Richard's is dead, but he's not really dead.

[SPEAKER_00]: He is in the microverse.

[SPEAKER_00]: So again, the fantastic four goes into the microverse with the help of Scott Lang.

[SPEAKER_00]: They because they detected pin particles at the core of why we disappeared.

[SPEAKER_00]: So they shrink down.

[SPEAKER_00]: They think that he is being held by Dr.

Doom.

[SPEAKER_00]: It is not Dr.

Doom.

[SPEAKER_00]: It is actually psychoman creating a Dr.

Doom construct and a bunch of it not Doom bots, but psychobot.

[SPEAKER_00]: Battle ensues the fantastic for beat him pretty easily.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's about it.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like he's he's just a fantastic for villain once again.

[SPEAKER_00]: So a lot of the stuff that happened from what Molly covered, not even reference here.

[SPEAKER_00]: It is just a straight up.

[SPEAKER_00]: We need to rescue Reed and it looks like he's bench runk.

[SPEAKER_00]: So we need to go the microverson of course, who's there, psycho man.

[SPEAKER_03]: I love me a sixties chick.

[SPEAKER_03]: This issue you also get to see Queen Parla, who's like an alien queen in a metal bikini from the FF like very obscure.

[SPEAKER_03]: I love Parla.

[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, she shows up in those John Burn issues too.

[SPEAKER_04]: She like rescue she'll hold from servitude in the migraverse.

[SPEAKER_00]: Darrell we could expect a perla cause play I'm assuming yes absolutely maybe after some in humans I mean if we're gonna go for a cause play from something and it's gonna be gender-bent I'm gonna go with Crystal from the fantastic for period so excellent [SPEAKER_03]: I'm going to cover the whole rest of his history, like very briefly.

[SPEAKER_03]: I love cable thirty seven through thirty nine.

[SPEAKER_03]: This is Ian Churchill.

[SPEAKER_03]: This is my childhood.

[SPEAKER_03]: Right interviewing Ian on my show was like a dream.

[SPEAKER_03]: He was like my favorite penciler as a teen.

[SPEAKER_03]: So anyway, love, love, love of the art in here.

[SPEAKER_03]: This is where Psychoman's all amped up, he's mussely.

[SPEAKER_03]: He goes to Earth to study cyborgs, I guess, and he makes cable and domino fight and kidnaps, Garrison Kane, weapon X, and takes him back to the microverse, but it's actually Vanessa Carlisle or Copycat.

[SPEAKER_03]: Who's a character?

[SPEAKER_03]: I can't believe I haven't done a Patreon yet.

[SPEAKER_03]: I love Copycat.

[SPEAKER_03]: She's there in disguise.

[SPEAKER_03]: The micronauts show up, and Psychoman is defeated when he telepathically experiences the one emotion that he could never understand.

[SPEAKER_03]: Love.

[SPEAKER_03]: We then get him again an X-Men in the uncanny annual of nineteen ninety eight, where we see a disgruntled scientist named Bradley Benian steal the emotion control box.

[SPEAKER_03]: and the exoskeleton, and he attacks the FF and the X-Men, and when Psychoman comes to get it back, he ends up shrinking back into the microverse with Benin, who's never been seen again.

[SPEAKER_03]: So also, Psychoman gets stabbed by Wolverine's claws like a bunch in this issue, which is crazy.

[SPEAKER_03]: We jumped a silver surfer, for one, forty, three, three, three, one, forty, five, a written by my friend, a jammed amethase.

[SPEAKER_03]: This is a silver surfer and Alicia Masters fighting the board in space, except they're called the Mergence.

[SPEAKER_03]: And the aliens want to absorb Earth or something, and there's this crazy woman named Tenabre who goes into the microverse and Psychomanic captures her and studies her and silver surfer gets captured and Psychoman tortures them and like he makes them fight each other.

[SPEAKER_03]: And then they defeat the silver surfer but end up on Earth and the emergence attacks and Psychoman's defeated.

[SPEAKER_03]: I'm like way oversimplifying, obviously.

[SPEAKER_00]: And you mentioned the board.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm really surprised that they didn't try to wedge this into the Star Trek comics that Marvel was publishing at the time.

[SPEAKER_00]: So, air amount must have given a thumbs down, unlike you can't actually use the board.

[SPEAKER_03]: the emergence as the parallel to the phylogs happening in the X-Men titles, right?

[SPEAKER_03]: Because that's the same thing.

[SPEAKER_03]: But we jump to the web spinners, tales of Spider-Man, four through six, where we see another psycho-man versus Spider-Man fight.

[SPEAKER_03]: This is like Enialis and his evil bugs are in the microverse.

[SPEAKER_03]: And psycho-man comes to earth to find people to help him fight them back.

[SPEAKER_03]: As silver surfers here, we jump to a warlock.

[SPEAKER_03]: This is that odd like Louise Simonson series.

[SPEAKER_03]: where Warlock has like a little technorganic monkey, then a girl that he's hanging out with, crazy, crazy, weird ex-men, from the M tech line.

[SPEAKER_03]: A psycho man has been on OZEMPIC, and he is in his snatched exoskeleton.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's kind of a rad look.

[SPEAKER_03]: He sends us some violent energy passing through the microverse, and he links it to the mutant girl, hope, or Esperanza Ling, who has a trans-mode infection, she's fighting off, and there's a fight, and Spider-Man shows up.

[SPEAKER_03]: Then he's used actually really hilariously in Peter David's Captain Marvel, which is really fun.

[SPEAKER_03]: Psychoman gets Drax the destroyer.

[SPEAKER_03]: He is trying to get him to do his bidding.

[SPEAKER_03]: So he's using his emotion control device on Drax and it keeps going wrong.

[SPEAKER_03]: So like, I don't know, Drax keeps getting like hyper focused on like counting or smashing when Psychoman uses his ray.

[SPEAKER_03]: So instead he, he pushes the doubt button and then drags his like, oh, what a, I, I'm questioning my very existence.

[SPEAKER_03]: And so it like nothing's working.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's like, oh man, it's to say, oh, man, I simply have got to add some more emotions to this thing.

[SPEAKER_03]: There's a character named Fred here who is an evil version of genus vell from like another reality.

[SPEAKER_03]: And it's truly not, it's, it's like, oh man, it's a basket.

[SPEAKER_03]: Again, we're just going really fast through it here.

[SPEAKER_03]: Um, we get to see him used in Marvel nights for nine through twelve, which is a really rad early two thousand, uh, fantastic four series.

[SPEAKER_03]: Uh, Psychoman is broken down on earth.

[SPEAKER_03]: He attacks a bus.

[SPEAKER_03]: Uh, he's going after Susan Richards for revenge over that whole malice thing for some reason.

[SPEAKER_03]: And he blankets Manhattan with bad feelings, which makes Alicia masters sculpt him, which is, I don't know, she gets psychoman in her brain.

[SPEAKER_03]: Things get worse, psychoman, like invades the backster building.

[SPEAKER_03]: He looks like a little like emaciated wormwood guy here.

[SPEAKER_03]: He's really creepy.

[SPEAKER_03]: He's like very horror villain.

[SPEAKER_03]: Uh, and he pulls images from the minds of the FF to torture them.

[SPEAKER_03]: He's quite scary.

[SPEAKER_03]: He makes Johnny see himself burning his parents alive.

[SPEAKER_03]: He makes Ben think he's married to Sue.

[SPEAKER_03]: Uh, they trick cycle man by having Alicia poses Sue because he can't tell blondes apart apparently and then seem to feed cycle man and he convinces her that he is dying and acting on his fears.

[SPEAKER_03]: I'm going to skip over several of his appearances here, but the one that I also want to take time to mention because it's also X-Men relative and [SPEAKER_03]: Black Panther volume four number thirty one, where Psychoman captures Storm and the Black Panther and likes makes them fight each other.

[SPEAKER_03]: This is before their wedding, and Storm is resistant to the emotional manipulation.

[SPEAKER_03]: The Psychoman makes Black Panther see his greatest fear, which is apparently a giant X-Men orgy.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's truly bizarre.

[SPEAKER_03]: He has this giant fear of like storm having sex with all of her teammates.

[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know.

[SPEAKER_03]: So there's this odd fever dream where he like black Panther walks in on storm laying in a pile of like scantily clad X men and they're like eating grapes and they all want to fuck him and he like lays down between storm and Emma Frost who tries to kiss him but then like baste the black Panther god like wakes him up out of the dream like snap of it to jala storm gets strapped to a table and psychoman gets out of bone saw [SPEAKER_03]: It's truly, it's truly crazy and just an insane storm black Panther story.

[SPEAKER_03]: This is during the time when they were in the fantastic floor.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's just nuts.

[SPEAKER_00]: I need to read this, obviously.

[SPEAKER_00]: It says to me that Black Panther would not be comfortable at the uncanny experience just seeing a bunch of the X people.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think his fears are rooted in the X men and seeing so many of them around storm rather than anything else.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you're a therapist.

[SPEAKER_00]: You can dig into this.

[SPEAKER_00]: but obviously the sex is just standing in for something and he needs to get to the bottom of his issue with her teammates because if Psychoman is able to pray on him that easily with this fear, it's sort of right there at the surface.

[SPEAKER_03]: There are a bunch of modern Psychomanic appearances.

[SPEAKER_03]: I'll just briefly mention a series called Fear itself, The Fear Some Four.

[SPEAKER_03]: simply because there's a cycle man versus Wolverine fight in there.

[SPEAKER_03]: There's some funny moments for him.

[SPEAKER_03]: There's moments where he's pretty scary.

[SPEAKER_03]: There's a follow up on the malice story again in like FF-SX-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S- [SPEAKER_03]: who is apparently his daughter but also an android and there's a story you guys in fantastic for annual thirty two from twenty ten where the psycho woman comes to earth sneaks into a club uh shrinks herself during the after a one night stand between Johnny Storm and Amy Bryce and then induces a pregnancy like she makes this girl pregnant after Johnny had sex with this girl [SPEAKER_03]: Because she wants to somehow use the fetus that would literally be the human torches.

[SPEAKER_03]: But the pregnancy didn't occur naturally.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's because psychowoman made it happen.

[SPEAKER_03]: Like they accused Amy of like being a gold digger and the FF shrink down inside the human torches body.

[SPEAKER_03]: But they also like look back in time to the night of the one night stand.

[SPEAKER_03]: and they like fight psycho woman inside of the pregnant woman.

[SPEAKER_03]: And in the end, after all this is figured out, Amy wants, they want Amy to abort the pregnancy.

[SPEAKER_03]: They're like, you need to not have this child.

[SPEAKER_03]: Like Johnny doesn't want this baby with you, but Amy doesn't want that.

[SPEAKER_03]: So she jumps into a time platform and disappears into the time stream to avoid the FF.

[SPEAKER_03]: And we've never seen her again.

[SPEAKER_03]: The biological child of the human torch implanted in this woman's womb by the psycho woman [SPEAKER_03]: who has a little pad, but the three feelings for her are envy, disgust, and indifference.

[SPEAKER_03]: This story is insane.

[SPEAKER_03]: We have to hear your thoughts on that, and we'll start our wrap up.

[SPEAKER_04]: Oh my God.

[SPEAKER_04]: Okay, so I reread this last night and this is the one is opposed to the John Birmingham one where I was like, who greenlit this?

[SPEAKER_04]: Okay, so first of all, I'm not sure she and Johnny even had sex because Johnny had nanobots in him too So it's kind of implied that like the nanobots stole his sperm and then somehow got into Amy and then a bit like I can't and like Sue sees like the fetus in Amy and like things is the most miraculous thing she's ever seen and like that's kind of horrifying also.

[SPEAKER_04]: Oh my god [SPEAKER_04]: I was looking at psychowoman's remote device and actually what I found interesting about it was that the indifference button it's black like I kept going back multiple times so like see did I miss what it said we ever get a good look at her device and we don't we never see all three buttons at the same time and that indifference button has nothing on it.

[SPEAKER_04]: I thought that was actually really interesting.

[SPEAKER_04]: I would love to see her like outside of someone's body like with this device utilizing it [SPEAKER_04]: but at the end then she says that she turned into psycho woman at the same time that Sue turned into the invisible woman because of what Sue did to her father, which we still don't know what it is.

[SPEAKER_04]: I don't know if we can really let this.

[SPEAKER_03]: I really just want to see Don Johnny's time traveling, psycho woman and planted baby, get to meet Johnny's leg of the laser fist scroll egg baby child.

[SPEAKER_03]: We don't get to see either of them.

[SPEAKER_03]: I just had to be siblings.

[SPEAKER_04]: I also thought that ending was a little unclear like it could be that she went back in time to go stop the pregnancy to begin with herself, but they never find out.

[SPEAKER_03]: Maybe Psychoman is the fetus.

[SPEAKER_03]: Maybe Johnny's child is Psychoman.

[SPEAKER_03]: And Psycho woman is now the human torturer and daughter.

[SPEAKER_04]: Engineering her own father's existence.

[SPEAKER_04]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_03]: The story is nuts, you guys.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_04]: I read this when it came out and I didn't have any memory of it now and like good Lord.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's like that meme where you're like, I did not expect where this would go from one sentence to another.

[SPEAKER_00]: It just wildly swings and you're like, okay, what?

[SPEAKER_00]: What?

[SPEAKER_03]: Well, the normal worst moment is when they tell this woman to get an abortion, you guys.

[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I've got it here.

[SPEAKER_04]: They say, yeah, they're at the time platform and Reed says the time machine is powered up and you're good to go.

[SPEAKER_04]: The remote is set and Johnny says when it mess up the timeline if I change things and Reed says it's a very minor adjustment and soon says getting rid of a pregnancy and then says he's going to stop the bad guys before they get her pregnant.

[SPEAKER_04]: They're novel they're they'll never be a pregnancy to get rid of like a morning before pill and Amy is standing right next to him like and they're talking about her like she's not even there like [SPEAKER_03]: And this is a man who has, like, they've suffered a miscarriage.

[SPEAKER_03]: Like a fuck you.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: He's rough, rough, rough, rough.

[SPEAKER_03]: Well, I love to always finish these conversations with, I'd love to hear any final thoughts, with the just resonance from how you're feeling.

[SPEAKER_03]: And is there any, like, psychoman story you feel like you need to get this character or that you want this character to have?

[SPEAKER_03]: I like this villain.

[SPEAKER_03]: I think he's scary.

[SPEAKER_03]: I think there's a lot of fun things you can do with him.

[SPEAKER_03]: I think he's very gimmicky.

[SPEAKER_03]: And I think the gimmick is a blast.

[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know that I need a lot of deep thoughts into his interior world, but I think he's fun and I would write him anytime because what a fun villain to punch in the face, you know?

[SPEAKER_03]: We're going to put this out on the show on Mark's wealth.

[SPEAKER_03]: So if you were beginning your wrap up, that's when the time it for.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is not a serious man and he should not be written as a serious villain at all.

[SPEAKER_00]: He belongs in [SPEAKER_00]: simple silly little stories where he is allowed just to press his little tablet, chase after Spider-Man or something like that.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's it.

[SPEAKER_00]: Keep him as guest appearances when you need a little comedic break.

[SPEAKER_00]: That is where he is best suited.

[SPEAKER_00]: I would love to see more of him in that sort of role rather than where he is this weird serious villain.

[SPEAKER_00]: No, that is not him.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's not his brand.

[SPEAKER_00]: If we want to talk about things that I can plug in things like that, [SPEAKER_00]: So you can find my podcast X-Factor files anywhere you find your regular podcast.

[SPEAKER_00]: We are covering Elfaflight Volume One and also all of the Marvel Star Trek comics.

[SPEAKER_00]: We are currently going through Starfleet Academy and then after that, we'll be Voyager.

[SPEAKER_00]: So it's a lot of fun.

[SPEAKER_00]: My husband and I just have a blast doing it and we really decide to focus on things that brought us joy.

[SPEAKER_00]: For this season, we were doing a lot of different titles in the previous season.

[SPEAKER_00]: There is so much doom and gloom in the world.

[SPEAKER_00]: Why not do something that's super enjoyable?

[SPEAKER_00]: So, patrons of the Patreon, you can look forward to July when I will be releasing a book all about Elfaflight Volume One, going in-depth on each issue so you get a synopsis and some analysis.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm currently in the middle of interviewing folks.

[SPEAKER_00]: Book launch will be at the Uncanny Experience in July where I'm hoping to snag chat into being my moderator to ask me some questions and hopefully I'll kick it off with a successful book sale there.

[SPEAKER_00]: For people who are hearing this when it's released to the general public, you can go find this book on the corporate oligarch site of Amazon where it is print on demand or reach out to me on Instagram, X-Factor Files podcast and I can sell you a signed copy and mail it out to you instead.

[SPEAKER_00]: So those are your two choices.

[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for having me, Chad.

[SPEAKER_00]: Great to see you can't wait to hang out in a few months.

[SPEAKER_03]: And then Molly.

[SPEAKER_04]: So I actually feel the opposite as Darrell.

[SPEAKER_04]: And I would be really interested in seeing psychoman be like the big scary villain.

[SPEAKER_03]: The dark scene.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_04]: I would be interested in seeing him in like a longer story arc being really scary because emotions can be scary.

[SPEAKER_04]: And the idea of somebody manipulating people's emotions is frankly terrifying.

[SPEAKER_03]: Second man is a comedy villain as well.

[SPEAKER_03]: How has no one written psycho man versus Deadpool?

[SPEAKER_03]: Like how has that never happened?

[SPEAKER_03]: That's amazing.

[SPEAKER_04]: That would be great.

[SPEAKER_04]: See, that's the thing.

[SPEAKER_04]: I'd also like to see him in little one off goofy appearances.

[SPEAKER_04]: Maybe more of him versus the impossible man.

[SPEAKER_04]: That would be great.

[SPEAKER_04]: Oh, I'm getting thumbs down.

[SPEAKER_00]: No, a challenge.

[SPEAKER_00]: That is saying no to that and I can [SPEAKER_04]: Hello.

[SPEAKER_04]: As for stuff to plug, you can find me on blue sky occasionally.

[SPEAKER_04]: My book is available on the corporate oligarch site as well.

[SPEAKER_04]: And if you're in the Philadelphia area and listening to this on the Jing and Town music theaters production of Ragtime goes up the first two weekends in April and it's going it's going to be good.

[SPEAKER_03]: I'm so grateful for smart talented friends who enjoy coming and talking comics with me laughing and academia is the perfect balance to the insanity of today's world.

[SPEAKER_03]: So thanks everybody for listening.

[SPEAKER_03]: I had a great time today.

[SPEAKER_03]: You can follow the show, Graham, look at underscore land on Instagram.

[SPEAKER_03]: We're posting regular content.

[SPEAKER_03]: The next episode you can watch out for on the Patreon here after this is one of my favorite Marvel characters of all time.

[SPEAKER_03]: This is one of my top like X-Men loves.

[SPEAKER_03]: The little character already Maddox, the emoji guy from like leaches best buddy.

[SPEAKER_03]: I love this character.

[SPEAKER_03]: So watch for me, Kevin Canary, and Michael Anderson for that.

[SPEAKER_03]: And then over on the main show, we are exploring all Thunderbird content in March.

[SPEAKER_03]: So the next episode coming out after this will be about giant size X-Men number three, which you probably have never read, crazy story.

[SPEAKER_03]: And my guess on that are Marcella Rockwell and Michael Shae, I'll share.

[SPEAKER_03]: So thank you, everybody, for listening.

[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you, Molly.

[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you, Darrell.

[SPEAKER_03]: We'll see you all back here next time on the Grimmoc and Lane Patreon.

[SPEAKER_03]: and now stay tuned for some thoughts on fascism as a special guest and I talked about a red skull story and it's modern applications.

[SPEAKER_03]: It off Hitler was born in eighteen eighty nine.

[SPEAKER_03]: In nineteen nineteen at the age of thirty he joined the German workers party which soon became the Nazi party and he quickly rose to prominence with support from a lot of allies and flunkies.

[SPEAKER_03]: In nineteen twenty-one he created the Stormobteilung [SPEAKER_03]: called the Brown Shirts in popular culture.

[SPEAKER_03]: This was putting a lot of unemployed world war, one, veterans, students, and kind of radical nationalists who felt like the German government no longer represented them after the First World War.

[SPEAKER_03]: This group was tasked with protecting Nazi rallies, attacking political opponents, and eventually in engaging in street violence while promoting political influence.

[SPEAKER_03]: In nineteen twenty five Hitler founded an elite bodyguard unit within the brown shirts who wore black so thus they were called the black shirts.

[SPEAKER_03]: These were people who swore personal loyalty to Hitler basically feel tea and the groups soon took on the promotion of racial purity as a main methodology to rise to power.

[SPEAKER_03]: One of Hitler's closest allies in this era was a guy named Ernst Vron.

[SPEAKER_03]: A noted homosexual who was quite publicly out during a time when it was pretty okay to be gay in Germany at least for a while.

[SPEAKER_03]: The co-founder of this Nazi party, who was right at Hitler's side through his rise to power, Rome, who was also a veteran, helped found the brown shirts and Hitler appointed Rome to be his chief of staff over the brown shirts in nineteen thirty-one.

[SPEAKER_03]: Then over the following three years, the ranks of the Brown shirts began attracting more and more influence in the Nazi Party soon growing to over three million, and they began wielding ever growing influence in Germany.

[SPEAKER_03]: Rome's power grew along with them, and Hitler started to get worried because a lot of his allies were rising in power along with him and at his side.

[SPEAKER_03]: In contrast by the way, three million members of the Brown shirts, the entire German military at the time, which had been sanctioned by international governments because of World War I, was at less than a hundred thousand troops.

[SPEAKER_03]: So this was a substantial rise in fascism and power.

[SPEAKER_03]: As Roman others grew more popular, Hitler grew more paranoid, and eventually he realized that in order to rise to the rank of president and eventually few [SPEAKER_03]: He would need the loyalty of the German army, but they were unsure about the brown shirts themselves and required the brown shirts to be disbanded in order to pledge their loyalty to Hitler.

[SPEAKER_03]: So Hitler turned on his allies.

[SPEAKER_03]: He turned on Rome and others, and in something called the night of the long knives over a three-day period in nineteen thirty-four, Hitler began putting pressure on everyone around him and eventually ordered the assassination [SPEAKER_03]: and arrest of most of the leaders of the Brown shirts, including Rome.

[SPEAKER_03]: Hitler had been pushing Rome to step down from power, even using his own homosexuality against him in public dismerching campaigns.

[SPEAKER_03]: But eventually Rome was placed in a prison cell, held at gunpoint and ordered or given the option to commit suicide when Rome refused he was shot to death.

[SPEAKER_03]: So the army pledged itself to Hitler who killed two hundred of his closest allies and the German public reacted favorably seeing this massive turn as a restoration of order and discipline in German culture after the sanctions worldwide won.

[SPEAKER_03]: After that serious conversation, let's jump to Captain America at two twenty-six and two twenty-seven.

[SPEAKER_03]: This is a nineteen seventy-eight story by Roger McKenzie and Sopu Shema, in which Captain America is seen training aboard the shield hell carrier, proving to himself that he has what it takes to beat a robot named Impact in combat.

[SPEAKER_03]: But suddenly, the minds of every shield agent aboard the helicopter are taken over by that of the Red Skull.

[SPEAKER_03]: Their faces transform into Red Skulls.

[SPEAKER_03]: And with the Nazi leader in complete control of them, the agents go after Captain America trying to kill him.

[SPEAKER_03]: Captain is now fighting his former allies.

[SPEAKER_03]: An army of Red Skull men and [SPEAKER_03]: gold robes are defeated by our hero as the red skull weights in the shadows.

[SPEAKER_03]: Of all my foes, you are always the most persistent, the most relentless, and the most damn nimble.

[SPEAKER_03]: So be it then, I damn you, Captain America, for what you are, we have always been deadly opposites you and I, and always before you somehow managed to thwart my plans of conquest, but you could never truly defeat me, before I returned, again and again.

[SPEAKER_03]: And now I have returned once more, but this time I hold all the aces, and the hands I've been doubt is death.

[SPEAKER_03]: Nick Fury has held in shackles and fetters at a sixty-style Batman Super villain trap, and you kind of are on my whole card.

[SPEAKER_03]: Within minutes, the morning sun will rise, and when it's raised, raise, strike the magnifying prison focused over your helpless head.

[SPEAKER_03]: While you were burned, kind of, just like millions of others, burned, it would be just like old times again.

[SPEAKER_03]: Captain America finds the red skull waiting in an elaborate table set with a full feast, and the skull tries tricking Cap into thinking that Nick Fury is being roasted to death.

[SPEAKER_03]: But Cap realizes it's only an LMD, and he defeats the red skull, who had been taking over the real Nick Fury's mind the entire time manipulating his thoughts, just like he had been the other agents.

[SPEAKER_03]: The technology allowing him to do all of this, a death's head satellite.

[SPEAKER_03]: The school planned on the fourth Reich being just a bunch of versions of himself that he could basically mind control.

[SPEAKER_03]: And this is all very Mr.

Sinister now that I think about it.

[SPEAKER_03]: And of course, the Red Skull escapes at the end.

[SPEAKER_03]: To talk about this crazy story, let me welcome my dear friend, Seth Martell to the show with me.

[SPEAKER_03]: Seth is the art collaborator on Grey Malkin Lane.

[SPEAKER_03]: And one of my very favorite people, Seth, welcome back.

[SPEAKER_03]: Are you a Red Skull fan, my friend?

[SPEAKER_02]: No, but I am a fan of Chad's Red Skull voice.

[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, you are a fan of my voice.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's a little more like hons and fronds and I picture the red skull, but I still really appreciate.

[SPEAKER_03]: I got to make him just sound as stupid as possible.

[SPEAKER_03]: If I can hate this guy, uh, set the welcome to the show.

[SPEAKER_03]: I know, uh, this is not your area of expertise jumping into old seventies capped in America comics, but what were your thoughts on jumping into this crazy two part?

[SPEAKER_02]: Uh, I mean, it was kind of a classic cap can overcome up to patriotism's inside you, kind of.

[SPEAKER_02]: A story, a little Bond villain thrown into it.

[SPEAKER_02]: It's kind of what I expected it to be at the end.

[SPEAKER_03]: The American dream pull yourself up by the bootstraps, rise against the fascist odds, and you can defeat them in the end, but the evil still remains.

[SPEAKER_03]: There's some truly silly moments where there are moments in this story that surprised you that it caused you to go, huh?

[SPEAKER_02]: Well, it took me a few because I'm not familiar with this era of Cap.

[SPEAKER_02]: I actually read a lot of later Cap, like in the Greenwall era when I was a kid, but this was way beyond me.

[SPEAKER_02]: And I was so confused at the very beginning why he was so skinny.

[SPEAKER_02]: And I guess I'd just missed over part of how he had been reverted to play old sea Rogers again.

[SPEAKER_02]: And I was like, man, this artist draws his pants so weird.

[SPEAKER_02]: They're all just hanging off him.

[SPEAKER_02]: And then I realized that he had lost the super soldier serum temporarily.

[SPEAKER_03]: something they do over and over that with this guy he turns into the ninety eight pound weekling or occasionally they'll age him up to an old man [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, old man cap.

[SPEAKER_02]: And also just that I'd never heard of impact, but I guess he's just a robot for this story.

[SPEAKER_02]: But that was that was a new character for me too.

[SPEAKER_03]: So one thing in this story is very much that idea of even the weakest American can try and pull over the greatest amount of fascism with just a little ingenuity and belief in yourself.

[SPEAKER_03]: That kind of cap indomitable spirit.

[SPEAKER_03]: Are you a cap fan?

[SPEAKER_03]: Like what's the era of cap that you are fond of?

[SPEAKER_03]: What do you like about this character?

[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I like the crew in old areas and I like the actually really love the MCU cap.

[SPEAKER_02]: I think he's a very good version of cap.

[SPEAKER_02]: I have not read anything new Captain America wise.

[SPEAKER_02]: Actually, unless it was like the cap in uncanny vendors.

[SPEAKER_02]: Guess I've read that by me.

[SPEAKER_02]: He was so terribly written during the like Avengers versus X-Men.

[SPEAKER_02]: part.

[SPEAKER_02]: I hated that cap, but that what really wasn't didn't feel like a fair writing of cap either.

[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, I like civil work cap.

[SPEAKER_02]: That's a great cap there.

[SPEAKER_03]: There's a lot of interesting versions of Captain America, whether he's towing the line.

[SPEAKER_03]: Now, I opened with the conversation about the brown shirts.

[SPEAKER_03]: We spread an idea among a disenfranchised population, and we see that idea take fire because people who [SPEAKER_03]: Had power who have now lost power, want power again, and we very much see that here, right?

[SPEAKER_03]: We have an organization of trained shield agents and assassins and elite, and it only takes one idea from the red skull to spread among them, and they soon turn into carbon copies of this man.

[SPEAKER_03]: A really uncomfortable reality, this guy, as he sits with his [SPEAKER_03]: feast, sending all his agents to death, you know.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's like almost comical portrayal, but it's deeply uncomfortable, too.

[SPEAKER_02]: It would be F.

Yeah, the FBI and ICE right now is just kind of like one ideal and one idea kind of can spoil everything else that fear that you have right now.

[SPEAKER_02]: It's kind of a real fear.

[SPEAKER_03]: Well, and, you know, the disenfranchised quote unquote Americans, you know, white men who have kind of lost some power now turning against wokeness by like really latching onto these Trump ideals.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's an uncomfortable parallel for sure.

[SPEAKER_03]: But if we take it to this kind of era, the red skull kind of sitting back and using tricks and flashes and, you know, a power that he didn't earn in order to distract people while he spreads his agenda through, you know, the building of the Fourth Reich being the ultimate agenda [SPEAKER_03]: He's tricky and caps only able to see through that by using common sense, which is something we should all listen to.

[SPEAKER_03]: This image of the shield agent's turning into the red skull, it's kind of uncomfortable as well.

[SPEAKER_03]: He's so horrified, it's body horror in its own way, and cap having to fight against that without his powers here.

[SPEAKER_03]: Thoughts on the story at all, or even on Nick Fury's involvement.

[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I just, the fact that he was LMD at the end was really stupid.

[SPEAKER_02]: I hated that, and thank you.

[SPEAKER_02]: You know, the other parts I kind of could understand like had a very, you know, seventies classic cap followed the patriotism and a little bond mixed like like I said before like that all kind of fell in line with like the history of his stories, but that switcheru that earned no merit through the story was kind of not a cool ending for me.

[SPEAKER_02]: I also thought it was really weird.

[SPEAKER_02]: Unless what did they call the deset?

[SPEAKER_02]: You know, that the deset really didn't have the power behind it that you thought it would, but I guess maybe that was possibly a metaphor for [SPEAKER_02]: like the evil isn't as bad as it presents itself to be or like isn't as like as doesn't have the depth or doesn't have the power that it presents.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah the wizard appears to be very scary in the Wizard of Oz until you pull back the curtain and realize it's just an old man right we're seeing that and wicked right now like the the fascist regime which is the wizard is easily exposed as someone who never had power in the first place a wicked coming out in this era of American government is insane because it's the exploring that that story in its own way.

[SPEAKER_03]: So this is a lot of silliness [SPEAKER_03]: course.

[SPEAKER_03]: Were you familiar with the history of the brown shirts at all?

[SPEAKER_03]: Like even hearing the recount that idea that one of Hitler's closest allies was a confirmed homosexual who it's very Trump right because Trump had that attorney who was gay that allowed him to rise to.

[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, there's always Peter Thiel as well.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's a really cool.

[SPEAKER_03]: So Trump has right called and helped him rise to power who was [SPEAKER_03]: a confirmed conservative homosexual involved in cardiism and then in the rise of Trumpism.

[SPEAKER_03]: The Rome parallel and then you know how quickly the red skull turns on his allies in the way that Trump will as soon as they are no longer a value and won't totalign any longer.

[SPEAKER_02]: So you can find parallels with any sort of fascist trying to convert everyone thinking that story is just going to be.

[SPEAKER_02]: It doesn't have to just be twenty twenty five.

[SPEAKER_02]: It really has happened so many times in history that [SPEAKER_02]: It's just a playbook that is used and, you know, two different levels of success depending on the audience and depending on the time and leverage, I think, unfortunately right now it seems like it's a ripe time for it to be more successful than other times in our nation's history, unfortunately.

[SPEAKER_03]: There are many, many examples of this in real world.

[SPEAKER_03]: If you look at fascist regimes in other governments, the idea of if I want to rise to power, I have to eliminate the ability for other people to vote against me.

[SPEAKER_03]: I've got to eliminate in prison, arrest, destroy my rivals.

[SPEAKER_03]: We look at this, and we've been exploring these conversations a little bit, but we put capitalism as the opposition to fascism, but we're also realizing capitalism has a lot of fascism in it, a lot the way to.

[SPEAKER_03]: So this idea of looking at the January six right with Trump like trying to storm the wayhouse to maintain power is very similar to the night of the long knives that I discussed.

[SPEAKER_02]: I did not really enjoy the story, but I thought it is really appropriate to your conversation.

[SPEAKER_02]: You know, it does, it does really work with all the parallels that you're drawing, but man, it's a messily drawn.

[SPEAKER_02]: You know, you always have that old Saldo Cima did such great dynamic layouts and the finishing is always just kind of half [SPEAKER_02]: but also two twenty seven has a great cover.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah, there's some pretty art, but yes, Vishemma was a machine.

[SPEAKER_03]: He would work so fast, but it often came across as very unfinished, which we've talked about a little in the show.

[SPEAKER_03]: All right, everybody.

[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you for listening.

[SPEAKER_03]: In the next episode, watch for a discussion about supervillain team up, sixteen, seventeen with my friend, model historian Peter Sanderson.

[SPEAKER_03]: This is a story where the red school is like the featured character for the first time, and it is jarring.

[SPEAKER_03]: So be ready for that.

[SPEAKER_03]: We will jump to the late seventies.

[SPEAKER_03]: We'll see you back here next time.

[SPEAKER_03]: Thanks, Seth.