[SPEAKER_08]: Hey everybody, welcome back to the Graemealkin Lane podcast where queer friends and allies gathered to review and discuss the original X-Men comics in continuity order.

[SPEAKER_08]: The theme on Graemealkin Lane in November for those that have been listening has been fascism in pop culture with the very clear throughline of the fascism is the backdrop of almost every media you've ever consumed, which is a crazy thing to realize.

[SPEAKER_08]: This is the baseline for villainy in Marvel comics.

[SPEAKER_08]: beginning with Captain America punching Hitler on the very first book, right?

[SPEAKER_08]: We've got this cut-of-through line.

[SPEAKER_08]: Now we're going to be tapping into a book that most X-Men fans may not realize is even an X-Men themed book.

[SPEAKER_08]: We're going to jump to September of 1994 to the [SPEAKER_08]: This is a world where Captain America was not revived in the mid-60s, but instead was revived in the early 90s.

[SPEAKER_08]: It appears, according to this story, Marvel's sliding time scale v-damped.

[SPEAKER_08]: So we have Captain America who represents the values of World War II America's baby boomer generation.

[SPEAKER_08]: He's the best of what America has to offer, even though he originally got his superpowers because I not see a Jewish Nazi mind you, defected and stole their science and brought it over to the states.

[SPEAKER_08]: a lot to talk about already.

[SPEAKER_08]: So in this world, Captain America did not come out of the iceberg until 1994, that's the story we're going to be exploring from what if numbers 67 and 68.

[SPEAKER_08]: I am so thrilled to be joined by two of my favorite people, my very dear friend in real life that would see me and my imaginary best friend, a teeny Howard.

[SPEAKER_08]: a both part like a dear friends and real life as well.

[SPEAKER_08]: Let me welcome you both to the show.

[SPEAKER_08]: And my intro question for you is what if Captain America were revived today in 2025?

[SPEAKER_08]: Let's begin with the Phil C.

V.

Highfield, welcome back.

[SPEAKER_05]: Hey, thanks for having me back.

[SPEAKER_05]: I'm Phil C.

V.

I use heave they pronouns.

[SPEAKER_05]: Your audience probably knows me from a lot of the work I've done on X-Men over the last couple years, mainly their infinity line as well as the story that I did with Tini in the X-Men wedding special last year.

[SPEAKER_05]: So, yeah, and to answer my question, Captain America today would be really busy, just punchin' Nazis left and right.

[SPEAKER_05]: Like, he'd have to have, I don't know, Bucky was a constant bucket of ice having to alternate his poor sore fists.

[SPEAKER_05]: He would just just plow through all sorts of people.

[SPEAKER_05]: He also welcomed TD Howard back at the show.

[SPEAKER_05]: Hi, TD.

[SPEAKER_03]: Hi Chad and hello Philip.

[SPEAKER_03]: My darling my name is Jean Howard.

[SPEAKER_03]: I use she her pronouns and this question I I love because I actually was just I thought it was one of the things we see a clip of a podcast on like Instagram but she can't remember unfortunately it was speaking it was [SPEAKER_03]: Someone's talking about how it's interesting that Marvel was kind of designed as this idea to like of you know the world outside your window, but like kind of saying that you know, it's a bit of the like Disney vacation of it and this mass popularity of it.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's really stops like reflecting some of that in the means of this kind of like key sneaking Pablo and that exists in a lot of media now where it's just trying to not really.

[SPEAKER_03]: You know, say anything too strong and upset anyone, where I was like, you know, in the 70s, Captain America was so upset by Nixon, he hung up the shield and became no mad and nowadays he doesn't do that and I think it's less to talk of you know what's happened to the character and more talk about what happens to art as it becomes corporatized.

[SPEAKER_03]: And as we can do more and more of a, you know, an old guard's country that's run by people who have money, you know, I think is interesting that this symbol of like American rebellion hasn't said they had to kind of feel silenced in a lot of ways or maybe not, maybe it's that, you know, you know, would believe in that guy would believe he would do different things, but I don't know, most of the artists I know that work on work on stuff would see him being an artist and a rebel, I mean, Steve is an artist, right, Steve Rogers is an artist, he's a cartoonist, [SPEAKER_03]: you know, I think all of our best cartoonists and all the ones that have really made their mark on us so rebels and I think Steve is a double capital America's a rebel and I was just I think a great question because I was you know like I said I was just listening to someone will talk about it and it really got me in my feelings about the character for sure.

[SPEAKER_08]: There are large swaths of this character's history where he kind of turns a blind eye to things and then you've got like issues where he like gives up the country or like betrays his quote unquote American values in order to stand for the right in the civil war he took the anti registration side.

[SPEAKER_08]: And even as recently as Krakow, he was killing workers' members alongside mutants.

[SPEAKER_08]: So we see this character become quite politicized at times and then very not that way at other times.

[SPEAKER_08]: But he's always striving against Nazi as I'm very specifically.

[SPEAKER_08]: That's always the story.

[SPEAKER_08]: It's always barren structure, arm and zola, red skull.

[SPEAKER_08]: It's always the fascism.

[SPEAKER_08]: It's always the caricatures of the Nazi war criminals alive today.

[SPEAKER_08]: Now 1994 is obviously a very different place than 1964, where were all of us in 1994?

[SPEAKER_08]: I was a 16, turning 16, things were not great at home.

[SPEAKER_08]: This is when I first started picking up X-Men books.

[SPEAKER_03]: I was nine years old, probably running around in my backyard pretending to be jubilee in a raincoat.

[SPEAKER_03]: playing in an enormous amount of nintendo or when I could borrow my cousin's friend's super Nintendo that probably living on undip from the local roller rink and Doritos.

[SPEAKER_08]: I hope it was not Doritos dipped in fun dip because that sounds really bad.

[SPEAKER_03]: No, yeah, I don't know.

[SPEAKER_03]: I wasn't that adventurous.

[SPEAKER_08]: Although Jubilee would do that.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, she was, I was my first thought too.

[SPEAKER_03]: I was like she would and then I hope that I wouldn't.

[SPEAKER_03]: She's stronger than me.

[SPEAKER_05]: and Phil?

[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, no, I think I was 10 and 11 that year, so I was reading lots of X-Men comics, watching the cartoon playing with Mounds of X-Men toys, dreaming of drawing comics at some point.

[SPEAKER_08]: I love that the two of you are real-life friends.

[SPEAKER_08]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_08]: Let's talk a little bit about your friendship as we're opening as well.

[SPEAKER_08]: How did you guys meet?

[SPEAKER_08]: We're had the friendship form.

[SPEAKER_08]: I regularly hang out with Phil who calls teeny their sister, [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, fills me sibling.

[SPEAKER_03]: We met because of top cow.

[SPEAKER_03]: We, we were part of the top cow talent, during a year, which was 2013, that produced a lot of people who are all like still in comics.

[SPEAKER_03]: There was like our editor, Ryan Katie, Steve Box, who is a good heart and he's a tillian season bridges, just a whole bunch of people from that.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah, um, so it was just like a really cool year where it felt like a really, [SPEAKER_03]: a really good graduating class.

[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know if the other years are like this.

[SPEAKER_03]: I feel like maybe I should reach out to people and ask, but in our group, it feels like we all like 10 years hence a lot of us are still here and still making comics and still good friends.

[SPEAKER_03]: And when I talk almost every day, we go out to the desert every year together and hang out.

[SPEAKER_03]: I've been to Salt Lake to see them in their partner for a few times.

[SPEAKER_03]: We're okay, it was like we came into the industry together, so very much as that feeling of like, yeah, we're simply who we were foreign and forged at the same time.

[SPEAKER_08]: If it was not already a Fantini, hearing Phil CV say I should be a fan of yours would be enough reason for me to be a fan.

[SPEAKER_08]: I know what a great bunch of character Phil is.

[SPEAKER_05]: Early on we started working together and then we've just kept up and very have a lot of similar tastes and then different tastes and ways that are really fun and interesting.

[SPEAKER_05]: We've had security or security called on us at hotels because we've been laughing about X-Men comics so loud at two in the morning that we were causing like, [SPEAKER_08]: noise disturbances and all sorts of good times have just been kind of like writer I ever sent hi would love to hang out both of you in person sometime but we didn't we had dinner together one time which that was lovely yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah one of the times I came to Salt Lake jumping to the year 1994 I'm just gonna put a little context out there to set the vibe [SPEAKER_08]: Bill Clinton's first year's president.

[SPEAKER_08]: Don't ask.

[SPEAKER_08]: Don't tell is happening.

[SPEAKER_08]: The AIDS crisis is in full swing.

[SPEAKER_08]: NAFTA forms.

[SPEAKER_08]: Janet Reno has just been appointed Attorney General.

[SPEAKER_08]: The world trades center first bombing.

[SPEAKER_08]: Lorraine Abobbit.

[SPEAKER_08]: The Menendez Brothers trial.

[SPEAKER_08]: The Michael Jackson Sex allegations.

[SPEAKER_08]: Oh, Jay Simpson murderers, the Tonya Harding, Nancy Carrigan, stuff, the death of Kurt Cobain.

[SPEAKER_08]: Jeffrey Dommer is murdered and prison.

[SPEAKER_08]: There's a lot going on in these years.

[SPEAKER_08]: And it's like oddly king was just before all of this.

[SPEAKER_08]: There's a ton happening.

[SPEAKER_08]: And the creative team we get on this book that we're about to read, it's a two parter from what if numbers 6768.

[SPEAKER_08]: We have Chuck Dixon as the writer.

[SPEAKER_08]: Chuck Dixon is currently age 71.

[SPEAKER_08]: He's known for incredible runs on Batman, Birds of Prey, Green Arrow, Nightwing, Robin, and for Marvel, Punisher.

[SPEAKER_08]: But he's written everything from Conan, to the 18th GI Joe to Valkyries, to Evangeline, to Mark Spectre, Mood Knight.

[SPEAKER_08]: He's also quite controversial, particularly in recent years.

[SPEAKER_08]: We could talk a little bit about some of that if we would like, but he leans a particular political direction and he would probably Chuck Dixon, if you're listening, I'm gonna advise you to turn this off now, because I don't know.

[SPEAKER_03]: I've got some things to say if you're listening to, but this is a nice podcast, so I won't.

[SPEAKER_03]: I get it.

[SPEAKER_03]: I am a huge nightwing fan, and so I read a lot of DAX and checksticks in nightwing comics.

[SPEAKER_03]: Admittedly, you once that runs such to people like Devon Grayson, and I was like, okay, this is one of my speed.

[SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, I love this comics, finding out that I probably wouldn't like me very much as a bummer.

[SPEAKER_03]: All right.

[SPEAKER_08]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're not.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's probably like I haven't been on a panel with him, but [SPEAKER_08]: We're not sure he would be very supportive of some of our political meetings at the very least, if not our queries.

[SPEAKER_08]: Yes, I think that's okay to say.

[SPEAKER_08]: The artist on this book is Dario Carrasco, who helps from the Philippines, he lives in Canada.

[SPEAKER_08]: He has done Alpha Flight Nova, Captain America, Star Wars, pinhead, he has his own studio.

[SPEAKER_08]: The art on this is good.

[SPEAKER_08]: It's 90s, it's not too in your face punchy.

[SPEAKER_08]: It's not a cinematic, as I think I would expect [SPEAKER_08]: on a book like this, but I really enjoy.

[SPEAKER_08]: I'm looking forward to always to Phil's thoughts on the art.

[SPEAKER_08]: We have a Thompson on Inks Bob Sharon on Colors.

[SPEAKER_08]: Janice Chang is on letters with Rob Toker, Marie Javins, Paula Foley, Kevin Summers, as the editors.

[SPEAKER_03]: Gain, Marie!

[SPEAKER_03]: It's amazing.

[SPEAKER_03]: I love Marie.

[SPEAKER_03]: I always got a shout out Marie.

[SPEAKER_03]: Also Marie was editing this book back in the 90s and just to you guys know, Marie is still one of the best people in comics to work with.

[SPEAKER_03]: She's the only person I could think of with EIC, a big name title like that who will email you just to be like, hey, don't forget to get your forms in.

[SPEAKER_03]: She is so good.

[SPEAKER_03]: I love Marie.

[SPEAKER_03]: I just want to put some respect on Marie's name, not only as a person I really like working with, but she's a woman who has been [SPEAKER_03]: in the trenches doing it and still does it like she's still she's not the kind of person who has a title and sits on her hands like she works hard and I love Marie and I'm as a woman in this industry I look up to her so much so I have to keep for her whenever I hear her name.

[SPEAKER_08]: Now this is also the height of Xman popularity.

[SPEAKER_08]: Claire Mott's kind of off the books at this point.

[SPEAKER_08]: New see as it's taken over.

[SPEAKER_08]: The lion is expanded.

[SPEAKER_08]: The cartoon is in full swing.

[SPEAKER_08]: The books are going huge at this point and [SPEAKER_08]: We have a lot of our favorite crossovers from executioner's song to, you know, etc.

[SPEAKER_08]: A fatal attraction is going on in this era as well.

[SPEAKER_08]: The book before this is what if Rogue had the power of Thor and the book after these two is what if Strife had killed the X-Men?

[SPEAKER_08]: So we're very strongly in an X-Men era even in the what if books.

[SPEAKER_08]: They are popular and we're going to see a lot of our favorite characters here.

[SPEAKER_08]: On the cover of this year's 67 we've seen Captain America rushing at the reader [SPEAKER_08]: yelling Avengers assemble basically, but the Avengers in this case appear to be the vulture, the abomination, titanium man, and surprise the juggernaut with Dr.

Doom's face looming in the background.

[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, it's kind of a classic homage to old Captain America, old Avengers stuff, looking like Jack Kirby type Avengers for and other similar things.

[SPEAKER_05]: mean you've got cap in the foreground and behind him you've got juggernaut in the abomination and vulture and doom's face is behind at all and it's you know it's fun I think the concept for the thing is you know we can talk a little bit about conceptually what is the what if story but it is this alternate assemble diversion of the Avengers that doom puts together [SPEAKER_05]: And it's like a lot of like really dealist characters.

[SPEAKER_05]: I'm wondering like what was where their editorial restrictions on imagination, or was it just like, I don't know what else is around.

[SPEAKER_05]: Like it's all green people in juggernaut.

[SPEAKER_05]: And it's like the lamest assembles of Avengers.

[SPEAKER_03]: So we're just going to say that current situation with the colors on this cover is it's like it's almost like an unfortunate tangent because it's like those three of them are green and juggle not is not and it I don't think it's meaningful I think it's just like oh we forgot look color these people were when we picked them for the cover but this cover looks like a huge mushy mask we got by [SPEAKER_08]: This is a fighting nonsense story, and just based on this cover, and this is subtle not quite stated out loud here, but abomination and titanium manner both Russian characters.

[SPEAKER_08]: Adam Cold War America already, right?

[SPEAKER_08]: Yeah, we opened on the time the Avengers were battling the submariner, and he was supposed to revive Cap out of the iceberg with that indigenous tribe that was keeping him on display.

[SPEAKER_08]: But in this world, the Avengers defeat name or instead, so now it's 30 years later.

[SPEAKER_03]: Cap never got woken up.

[SPEAKER_03]: because it is really funny to me that he fully just spreads his legs and takes it directly to the crotch.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's right.

[SPEAKER_08]: Yeah, yeah, it's a crotch hit.

[SPEAKER_08]: That's for sure.

[SPEAKER_05]: And his his ass is just sitting on the panel border just tangent like he's just like just sitting down on the border just taking a hammer right to the dick.

[SPEAKER_08]: That's a deeply uncomfortable panel.

[SPEAKER_08]: Other than putting the eagles out to Stanley presents a fighting chance.

[SPEAKER_08]: And the first page tells us that the Arctic Ice Captain America is immune to timed passage, which is, you know, kind of accurate.

[SPEAKER_08]: In this world though, Captain America gets found by Dr.

Doom, who is painting himself as liberties last hope.

[SPEAKER_08]: Captain America revived soon learns that in the last few years the Nazi sleeper robots go look at Captain America comics there's some early plots where Hitler's like ancient weapons of mass destruction slowly awake and wanted a time they're called the sleepers and they're kind of power-rangering up into like a giant like death robot I like the sleepers I actually think they're really interesting stories but the sleepers here basically won and brought back the third right the [SPEAKER_08]: which then leaves the eastern seaboard of the United States in ruins.

[SPEAKER_08]: And even though I brought this up about eight times on my show this month, there's some very man in the high castle energy here.

[SPEAKER_08]: Because the question asked in that book is what if the Nazis, you know, end Japan, like teamed up and defeated America?

[SPEAKER_08]: So with the eastern seaboard in ruins, we get the quote, in their wake came the storm troopers.

[SPEAKER_08]: they were criminals and scum called from the jails and pest holes of the world.

[SPEAKER_08]: Some were new recruits, some were Nazi's driven into hiding to await the day when they could once again vent their hate on the free gross.

[SPEAKER_08]: But also using this terminology, name or wasn't hammered in the crotch, he was hammered in the pest hole.

[SPEAKER_08]: I'm just gonna...

[SPEAKER_08]: In walks the worst fuck marry kill ever, the red skull and his American junta, the Baron Strucker, Baron Zemo, and the only fuckable one in the bunch, Viper, who gets like a little hood look here.

[SPEAKER_08]: There are all Nazi work criminals, however, America has become, quote, a hostage nation.

[SPEAKER_08]: And if you define that in popular terminology, a hostage nation is a country that's being held in a state of political, psychological, or existential crisis due to the actions [SPEAKER_08]: There was still resistance we learned, but it was futile and short lived.

[SPEAKER_08]: So in the wake in this new country, we have now branded the country, the United States Aryan Republic.

[SPEAKER_08]: Ooh, quote, any who opposed the scol in his forces were silenced forever or imprisoned in one stinghole or another.

[SPEAKER_08]: Unholy alliances were made to keep America under the form of the new axis, super beings and mutants were stripped of their powers and caged like animals, many died the victims of cruel experiments to find ways to artificially replicate their abilities.

[SPEAKER_08]: We see Motoc and Hydra overseeing mutants in their purple M concentration camp suits, [SPEAKER_08]: We see Professor X, Cyclops, and Angel along with the Hulk and a bunch of other characters that I couldn't quite identify being rushed in a crowd to the camps.

[SPEAKER_08]: And all of this then led to war with the Soviets, which then meant nuclear war, which then meant Russia was devastated, and we see crimson dynamo in the remains.

[SPEAKER_08]: And learning all of this, Captain America starts to cry.

[SPEAKER_08]: And boy, do we all know that feeling these days?

[SPEAKER_08]: Basically, if Captain hadn't revived, we'd be in days of future past.

[SPEAKER_08]: Like, that's the story that's being told [SPEAKER_03]: Well, the first thing I, I, when you're talking about and fight for, I was going to tell a story.

[SPEAKER_03]: I actually, I want to dress up as a diaper, not because I'm a fan of the character, but because my husband was Captain America, and so I was kind of an accessory for him to fight for photos.

[SPEAKER_03]: But like, she has like a hydrotatu, so I had a fake hydrotatu on.

[SPEAKER_03]: And it's like three people asked me if it was real, which was just the craziest thing.

[SPEAKER_03]: Like, no, I'm not, I'm not going to get a real tattoo of fake Nazis.

[SPEAKER_03]: I'm not even like stoked to be dressed up as her.

[SPEAKER_03]: She's just hot and I'm kind of an accessory for my, because it was like a performance cosplay thing.

[SPEAKER_08]: She and you both give like gorgeous bond villain girl energies, like totally see that working.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, no, it was a vibe.

[SPEAKER_03]: I had I had fun slinking around being in Captain America, especially because you He's like has a nickname species, but yeah, it was like I was like, no, I'm not gonna not gonna have a real hydrography No, the stuff of this.

[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, here's the thing is like, I love this kind of stuff, right?

[SPEAKER_03]: I love like alternate history.

[SPEAKER_03]: I love what ifs I love man and high castle.

[SPEAKER_03]: I love [SPEAKER_03]: I love Days of Future Past, right?

[SPEAKER_03]: I kind of did my nod to it another world in Night to Vex because I think, you know, we all regardless of whether we are culturally or, you know, how dramatically or whatever an underdog, we all feel like the underdog sometimes.

[SPEAKER_03]: And so we all love to see, I think, stories where the hero is laid low, right?

[SPEAKER_03]: Like, things like Days of Future Past and, you know, the kind of nod I did to it in Night to Vex are another world having other world be a place for me to interhate.

[SPEAKER_03]: here because you know we your characters get to a point of certain power people start to crave stories of them having to build back up and reminders of how they got there and I think what's interesting is when we look at stories where Captain America chooses to turn away versus stories where Captain America wakes up and finds the world fast and buy right like those are two those are two really different character one is the [SPEAKER_03]: kind of man out of time story which you know is great book.

[SPEAKER_03]: I love that and that's about cap feeling like he doesn't suit the world anymore and then we have stories we talked about like like no mad and stuff like that cap choosing to turn away from a country that would have him is kind of a different characteristic and right one is about cap feeling like he's not good enough for the country and the others about the country not being good enough for for him and his morals.

[SPEAKER_05]: I go I remember going through this here and I was like this feels like the laziest writing like [SPEAKER_05]: I mean, I can understand that the premise is fun, right?

[SPEAKER_05]: Cap wakes up in a world where Nazis have taken over.

[SPEAKER_05]: Like that makes sense.

[SPEAKER_05]: That's a perfect cap to America, what if story?

[SPEAKER_05]: But I could not track the throughline logic of how cap not waking up led to red skull and the Nazis basically, they wiping out all the other superheroes.

[SPEAKER_05]: I was like, what?

[SPEAKER_05]: Storybeat, are you pointing to, or Captain America was there that prevented a Nazi takeover that Iron Man or Spider-Man or, you know, all these other heroes can do it, and not that it doesn't exist.

[SPEAKER_05]: I was just like, it just felt very much like, well, because of course, Captain doesn't wake up in the 60s, the Nazis takeover, and I was like, you could try a little bit harder than that to set us up.

[SPEAKER_05]: I know, I know it's a what if story and what if stories, you know, very much just like it.

[SPEAKER_05]: This is a fun idea.

[SPEAKER_05]: Let's just roll with it.

[SPEAKER_05]: And I'm totally fine with that.

[SPEAKER_05]: But at the same time, it felt like, come on, dude, you can write a little bit better than that than just like, I guess not these one.

[SPEAKER_08]: I think the direct correlation is that when cap wasn't around the sleepers were able to win.

[SPEAKER_08]: It doesn't quite state that.

[SPEAKER_08]: It's not quite super specific, but like whatever reason, the tide turned to the other direction.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I think like you're exactly right because there's so much like front loaded exposition where I'm like if you're going to load me down that much of that exposition you better explain it because the other fun thing about what if is the how did it get this way?

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, when you do all that front loaded exposition you're just hamstringing that part of your story where it's actually a lot more fun to wake up and be like how did it get this way?

[SPEAKER_03]: could I have stopped it or could I have not was it something that would out of my hand?

[SPEAKER_03]: And if that's the case, this was out of my hands and what else is out of my hands?

[SPEAKER_03]: And that's the character beat.

[SPEAKER_03]: Or it's that I could have stopped it and I should have been here and I feel like I failed my country.

[SPEAKER_03]: That's a different character beat.

[SPEAKER_03]: But when you just frontload all the ex-vision, which I think, again, I'm not even going to feel mean saying anything about Chuck right now.

[SPEAKER_03]: I think you're completely right.

[SPEAKER_03]: I think it's lazy writing and I think it's the mark of a writer who thinks their ideas clever and their execution.

[SPEAKER_08]: Yeah, and we get two issues to explore that's a lot more space than a lot of people are given in these stories as well.

[SPEAKER_03]: And to just front load all your exposition, you know, it's like six pages of like, and I also look at it, you're going to be that kind of exposition, which is give the artist something big and cool to draw and just write your novel over it because there's so much crammed into these little panels of.

[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: Because it's just meant to be like, you know, new shots of crowds of armies marching, which I get, but it's not a TV montage.

[SPEAKER_05]: So, so much exposition here at the front.

[SPEAKER_05]: Make it interesting, instead of just like, morally, boringly recounting events that don't really have any connection or correlation.

[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, no, it's really difficult in talking in context, because I'm like, if this is fascist month that's ironic, we picked a Chuck Dixon comment, uh, comment to read.

[SPEAKER_05]: But like, he's hitting your talking, but it's fine to decide.

[SPEAKER_05]: No, I, I know it's not at all.

[SPEAKER_05]: I think we were having that conversation last week, but I'm like, it's one of those things where we're talking about the rise of Naziism.

[SPEAKER_05]: We're talking about the rise of fascism.

[SPEAKER_05]: Yeti, out of from someone who has worked for white supremacist publishing labels like Fox Day, who has done stuff posts.

[SPEAKER_05]: Like in the last couple of years for a comic line with a comic for Joe Bennett, who was fired from Marvel for sneaking anti-Semitic imagery into Hulk comics.

[SPEAKER_05]: Like you were a writer who has a right-wing authoritarian views who is very public about these things.

[SPEAKER_05]: Who have worked for a valid white supremacist who has drawn comics with anti-semites.

[SPEAKER_05]: You were like, hey guys, like...

[SPEAKER_05]: You're writing about the rise of Naziism from someone who espouses views that align with a lot of modern day Nazis, and it is just, I don't know what the right emotion or term is, but I was just like, it's ironic that you're, you know, this writer a couple years ago was writing about the rise of Nazis and fascism, and now espouses all the same views publicly.

[SPEAKER_05]: uncomfortable irony of it all and it kind of goes back to something I know Chad and I we've talked about but it's this question I constantly ask myself of people these days who support these right-wing authoritarian conservative politicians where it's like you guys voted for the same guys the Nazis love.

[SPEAKER_05]: how do you justify your aligning yourself with the Nazis?

[SPEAKER_05]: If you were in a room where you and all the Nazis are nodding your head in agreement, you need to stop and look around the room and really make some changes and it's right from the start.

[SPEAKER_05]: I was just like, oh, this is just this is so like pointedly on the nose, but in a sadly ironic way.

[SPEAKER_08]: And this is not the surrender or slow erosion of rights in this story.

[SPEAKER_08]: It's like a government take over that happens very quickly.

[SPEAKER_08]: And then the nuclear arm is getting.

[SPEAKER_08]: But the one we're watching around us is that slow erosion.

[SPEAKER_08]: And it doesn't feel so slow any longer, right?

[SPEAKER_03]: You see characters who go from feeling like an underdog to not being.

[SPEAKER_03]: There's a problem that happens in the real world with creators too when they go from feeling like a young scrappy pup to the 10th of the clock of the market and they don't remember being a reader.

[SPEAKER_03]: being a being hungry, being someone who just desperately wanted someone to listen to your art and your thoughts, and I hope they would read it like that.

[SPEAKER_03]: I think that's absolutely how you go from a guy who is, you know, writing a story where he's like, look, a Nazi takeover will be really bad to a guy who's like drawing comics of like Batman, helping ice agents, which like, come on, [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and he's literally like that man, the character who is in the bow, and I don't know.

[SPEAKER_03]: I think I think it's absolutely right, like it's so hard to read this now and to not have it alert by that, but at the same time, I think it's absolutely ironic, as you're so right, Phil, it's the only word I could bet that bit.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's just really ironic, it's to read this book from this guy because I can't read it and be like, oh, he's put up like, but as this version of [SPEAKER_03]: is the person behind cap right now ever going to write him and reading about immigrants or the disabled or black Americans or any of that like.

[SPEAKER_08]: And that's, but this is not nuanced.

[SPEAKER_08]: There's no black characters, there's no Jewish characters, there's no queer characters fighting for freedom.

[SPEAKER_08]: It's basically all white characters.

[SPEAKER_08]: The gayest person in this book is of Juggernaut, if you count that, and he's he's working for the bad guys.

[SPEAKER_08]: So let's keep going.

[SPEAKER_08]: Captain America starts to cry on panel, which is always a jarring thing to see Steve Rogers, right?

[SPEAKER_08]: In tears, he says, could this be true?

[SPEAKER_08]: Despite everything, could they have won in the end?

[SPEAKER_08]: And I wasn't there.

[SPEAKER_08]: The small contribution I might have made at least I would have been there, gone down fighting.

[SPEAKER_08]: This is all lies.

[SPEAKER_08]: America could never fall to these murdering thugs.

[SPEAKER_08]: Liberty could never die that easily.

[SPEAKER_08]: The whole world under the heel of a tyrant.

[SPEAKER_08]: I can't believe that.

[SPEAKER_08]: I won't.

[SPEAKER_08]: swallowed up in the world held in the fist of the Nazis.

[SPEAKER_08]: He says, and so he's awakened cap, but really we're going to learn dooms another bad guy and he has found Captain America and is using him as leverage against the Red Skull Empire.

[SPEAKER_08]: There's this spoiler for a moment from now.

[SPEAKER_08]: So he starts seeing that Cap might be able to galvanize people into action.

[SPEAKER_08]: He says, and he's put together a group that he's called a strike force, not to be confused with teeny Howard's book Strike Force, probably a few years ago.

[SPEAKER_08]: As seen on the cover, we have Vulture in this team, titanium man, abomination, juggernaut.

[SPEAKER_08]: But also add claw, who is that colonialist that murdered Black Panther's dad in an African country?

[SPEAKER_08]: We have Greg Argoil and Atuma.

[SPEAKER_08]: So we have two Americans, two Russians, a Dutch man, a Frenchman, and a Lemurian, you know, guy from undersea.

[SPEAKER_08]: Doomnotes, these are hard times and they have created harder men, but do not doubt in their earnestness.

[SPEAKER_08]: They will fight shoulder to shoulder to free your land.

[SPEAKER_08]: I know many of us like harder men.

[SPEAKER_08]: There's my, there's my fun zingsing.

[SPEAKER_03]: That's a huge, like, modern fascist thing on Twitter too, a hard timescreen hard men.

[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, dude.

[SPEAKER_03]: All right, like white boy.

[SPEAKER_08]: Something that Charlie Kirk would have said.

[SPEAKER_08]: Absolutely.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it's, it's very that right now.

[SPEAKER_03]: So I'm like, hmm, that's always, I mean, granted, you know, I've had character sales sorts of messed up things that aren't what I believe.

[SPEAKER_03]: Quickly because I'm trying to make some people.

[SPEAKER_08]: But there's a certain phraseology, right?

[SPEAKER_08]: Yeah, I get it.

[SPEAKER_08]: So, Capleads and Attack on the North Pole with the cry, let's hammer the rats and they kick Nazi ass.

[SPEAKER_08]: And sensing and seeing the violence Capwonders, I'm starting to wonder if the world is worth saving, maybe America and all it's stood for, gone forever.

[SPEAKER_08]: And I think all of us are feeling a version of that these days.

[SPEAKER_08]: But it turns out these are all criminals for hire.

[SPEAKER_08]: They're all working for our doctor doom.

[SPEAKER_08]: These are not people who were put into the concentration camps.

[SPEAKER_08]: These are mercenaries working across the Republic.

[SPEAKER_08]: Juggernaut goes wake up and smell the sour crowd.

[SPEAKER_08]: Pound, dooms as bad as the skull, except the pays better.

[SPEAKER_08]: So doom and the Nazis have split the planet.

[SPEAKER_08]: Again, very men in the high castle.

[SPEAKER_08]: The bad guys plan to kill cap, but then the expatriate show up.

[SPEAKER_03]: name more with a sexy pony tail, by the way, Wolverine, a gene also with a sexy pony tail.

[SPEAKER_03]: One of my favorite things about 90s comics, I gotta say, is throwing a sexy pony tail, and someone to make them look bad.

[SPEAKER_03]: Omega Red, Shatter Star gets a sexy pony tail.

[SPEAKER_03]: I just love a sexy pony tail.

[SPEAKER_03]: Is that the human torch we've got here?

[SPEAKER_03]: It is, yeah, yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: And Spidey doing a back flip.

[SPEAKER_03]: And yeah, the X Patriots, even though they're not all me, at least maybe in this time when they were, I don't know.

[SPEAKER_05]: No, I don't even think Wolverine's mutant powers only hinted at in the next issue.

[SPEAKER_05]: He doesn't have his claws and they say something bad.

[SPEAKER_05]: Like, oh, I always managed to heal, so it's a mismatch of people.

[SPEAKER_03]: Here's the thing.

[SPEAKER_03]: I would be super stoked if I were reading this issue.

[SPEAKER_03]: And these guys showed up at the end first of all because this issue, you know, was like, I knew the next issue was going to deal with you guys.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's first of all, I like a serious political comic that some might consider boring.

[SPEAKER_03]: I love Jonathan's Avengers, where it's just Steve and Tony making eye contact across dark rooms and having serious conversations.

[SPEAKER_03]: I love that stuff.

[SPEAKER_03]: But this issue is such a miserable slog.

[SPEAKER_03]: I'm so glad there's fun at the end.

[SPEAKER_03]: Like, oh my god, like seeing name more come back.

[SPEAKER_03]: I was like, thank god.

[SPEAKER_03]: I genuinely, genuinely think that having name orange human torch show up on a team to fight Captain America about a story like this is brilliant.

[SPEAKER_03]: You got to have those like first two to fight him if you're going to like do statements about the like beginning of Captain America.

[SPEAKER_03]: That's all, whoever picked that will pretend it was Marie.

[SPEAKER_03]: That was a Marie idea, but what was that to be about to her?

[SPEAKER_08]: in this world we have like if you're playing with all the toys in your toy box you get to just kind of put this ad hot group of heroes together they're like kidding me like kind of things at that a bit jeans and variation of her classic costume but Wolverines and like black leather would like a machine gun they're clearly together in this world because Cyclops went to the camps we saw the next cover shows all of them in another action shot with the red skull behind so the other group is all green this one's very like reds and [SPEAKER_03]: uh...

and then we open uh...

the second issue which uh...

the title is liberties sword with kind of the classic two-team spacing off with each other it's johnny human torch not yeah this is not jam him and this is fantastic yeah that's more exciting if it's jam him and to me yeah it's better choice i'd be way bugged if i picked up that second issue was like oh it's i mean i love johnny but like in this story versus catheter america and you have name more on the team having jam him and is way more clever sorry i have notes on this this thirty-year-old comic [SPEAKER_08]: No, I think I love it.

[SPEAKER_08]: I love it very much.

[SPEAKER_08]: We get a lot of really fun lines from Wolverine in this issue.

[SPEAKER_08]: It's almost my favorite part He gets the battle cry take him down nasty gene, which makes me feel so So we now have a big superhero brawl.

[SPEAKER_08]: It doesn't even feel like they're fighting Nazis because they're fighting the criminals that the Nazis hired.

[SPEAKER_08]: Well the criminals they're Dr.

Doom hired [SPEAKER_05]: I mean, yeah, it's pretty, pretty standard.

[SPEAKER_05]: Everyone kind of take someone on the opposite side.

[SPEAKER_05]: I'm trying to think if there's anything in the among the fight that particularly stood out to me.

[SPEAKER_08]: And they weren't doesn't know Captain America or doesn't believe it's really him until he proves it.

[SPEAKER_08]: But there's one sexy pose of like, name or knee like on caps chest.

[SPEAKER_08]: It's kind of hot.

[SPEAKER_03]: I do at least like that the first couple pages of this are like nice big action pages of just people fighting because I feel like the whole first issue was just six panel pages of crowds.

[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, the artist gets a little bit of space to do some stuff and like as far as 90s Marvel art goes in the early 90s It's fairly middle of the road, which isn't a bad thing by any means.

[SPEAKER_05]: It's not going to like, you know, leave a lasting impression But at the same time I'm like, oh, okay, like they're doing all the things, right?

[SPEAKER_05]: They're I can see the jimmy.

[SPEAKER_05]: I can see a little jaly.

[SPEAKER_05]: I can see some rob.

[SPEAKER_05]: I can see, you know, run limb in there.

[SPEAKER_03]: So, [SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, Todd's mighty.

[SPEAKER_05]: There's my favorite of the entire two issues.

[SPEAKER_05]: This is the best line ever.

[SPEAKER_05]: Spider-Man's talking to, I don't know.

[SPEAKER_05]: Someone says, hey, tin pants.

[SPEAKER_05]: We look in for someone to bust on and give money to dry.

[SPEAKER_05]: He's not going to titanium, man.

[SPEAKER_05]: I think it's what that dude is.

[SPEAKER_08]: The titanium pants for zoomably.

[SPEAKER_05]: So if you look at for someone to bust on, give me a try, which is just, is just prices, I love how people I would generally not consider large supporters of the LGBTQ community often write the gayest characters.

[SPEAKER_08]: Uh, Jean gets to throw juggernaut into the evomination with her totally can use this in one spot.

[SPEAKER_08]: There's another where juggernaut is running at the human torch.

[SPEAKER_08]: The human torch says, how much heat can you take bullet head and he goes, I can take a lot sport.

[SPEAKER_08]: It's a dry heat.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's a dry heat.

[SPEAKER_08]: just really fun.

[SPEAKER_08]: We get cops like shield thrown and bouncing off all of their heads.

[SPEAKER_08]: It's a fun little moment.

[SPEAKER_08]: We get name more grabbing abominations foot and slamming him into juggernaut.

[SPEAKER_08]: There's a lot of these two getting bashed into each other.

[SPEAKER_08]: There's a moment where a gene is making a tumor like just his pain receptors and his brain are lighting up.

[SPEAKER_08]: So then she kicks him in the head and just like pains over now.

[SPEAKER_08]: And then you know a [SPEAKER_08]: Buston teeth, which is ridiculous line.

[SPEAKER_08]: These are fun little groups.

[SPEAKER_08]: There's only one girl in the whole, you know, mess and why would you have more?

[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, not only one survived the Nazi uprising.

[SPEAKER_08]: So they had a liberating Captain America and they taken back to their secret base where Nick Fury's at.

[SPEAKER_08]: And he immediately recognizes cap of course.

[SPEAKER_08]: Nick Fury reveals that he has escaped the camps.

[SPEAKER_08]: instead of like the numbers that the Jewish people had put on their arms, he had like a barcode put on his arm which feels very 90's somehow in an odd way.

[SPEAKER_08]: He'd been put in a reeducation camp.

[SPEAKER_08]: He says they've killed or imprisoned anyone who would stand against them but maybe we have a chance if we take out the skull himself the rats will run for the hills.

[SPEAKER_08]: Now the red skull learns Captain America's still alive.

[SPEAKER_08]: He schedules a meeting in their Nazi base near the White House.

[SPEAKER_08]: uh, the White House isn't ruins and the Nazi base is this kind of new structure.

[SPEAKER_08]: Maybe it's the Trump ballroom.

[SPEAKER_08]: We don't know.

[SPEAKER_08]: It hasn't been a thousand satellites on the roof.

[SPEAKER_08]: It's truly bizarre.

[SPEAKER_03]: Red skulls are neck ruffle.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's like it's on his bomber jacket.

[SPEAKER_03]: This is a white collar.

[SPEAKER_03]: It does, it does do some good stuff for that costume.

[SPEAKER_03]: Like, it makes some look less.

[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's visually, it's a good villain look.

[SPEAKER_08]: I think like 1920's Dandy to me though.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: Like, I don't know.

[SPEAKER_03]: I love an evil Dandy.

[SPEAKER_03]: I know it's like, oh, problematic queer representation, but like, I don't care.

[SPEAKER_03]: I'm bisexual and evil.

[SPEAKER_03]: It could be evil Dandy's.

[SPEAKER_03]: I also just, I, uh, I always will have a thing for, for, I patch Nick Fury.

[SPEAKER_03]: You just, he always looks so good.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, the Nazi building next to the White House.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's so, one thing I really think of interesting is that, like, I know it's for the sake of showing the, like, post-apocalyptic rubble of it all, but, like, you know, fascism aesthetic is actually really, like, hyper-clean.

[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, I'm like, oh, you know, the fact that it's like the building looks kind of like shitty like everything around it is still like it in rubble is kind of interesting because I think blends of sense of like these guys are not perfect there they're trying to build in rubble and they're kind of building on crumbling things another thing I think is really interesting about this comic and this is very common in this era is like now a days we try to not use like the full swastika imagery and [SPEAKER_03]: in comic, you know, really all for a lot of reasons, kind of an upsetting thing to a page flip into.

[SPEAKER_03]: Also, you know, I think on some level if you're, you know, when you're selling a book with a swastika in it, you have to think about what you're making money on.

[SPEAKER_03]: And if you're, you know, if you're selling mouse, you're educating people.

[SPEAKER_03]: But if you're, if you're selling a Marvel comic, and you're using, you know, fake Nazis is a slacy thing to fight.

[SPEAKER_03]: I think you kind of are allowed to ask yourself why am I, am I going to charge someone to engage with this image?

[SPEAKER_08]: I have to call it very quickly when they're driving the ship.

[SPEAKER_08]: Jean and Wolverine are wearing matching helmets.

[SPEAKER_03]: They both look really good in those helmets.

[SPEAKER_03]: Jean looks great in a pilot helmet, which is great.

[SPEAKER_03]: It just feels like something about being a pilot in a helmet feels like you know, because Karmos has bold up right in bed and looks like something is right in the world.

[SPEAKER_08]: And when they get to the Nick Fury base for the Rebels, Iron Man's there, working on some Iron Man armor, at least it appears to be Tony Stark.

[SPEAKER_03]: He looks great, that's, again, I wasn't sure if it was Tony or Ford, I think it's Tony though.

[SPEAKER_08]: It looks like Tony, and then there's all these, there's all these like, you know, happy people kind of living in this base and you know, there's children and they all have like, you know, it's, it's everybody working together.

[SPEAKER_08]: uh...

the image of uh...

fury back in the camp we didn't comment as well half of fury has been like aged up it looks like great so of this hair is like white and amaciated while the other thing full-grown very two-faced that's actually peter in that image peter has gone so far from the trauma of losing it may and being in the camp and tortured so he's the one with the uh...

the barcode tattoo on his body you want to just introduce that whole plot line for me i fucked it up in my notes [SPEAKER_05]: No, no, it's okay.

[SPEAKER_05]: It's it's Peter talks about having been taken to the reeducation camp having lost everything he holds dear.

[SPEAKER_05]: There's a picture of Ed May dead on the ground.

[SPEAKER_05]: So now as he's taken off his costume half of his hair is white, he's got kind of like the 90's step shave on the other side, but then he was also tattooed with a large barcode across his ribs, which is the the modern equivalent of the the identification number tattooed on the arm for these reeducation camps.

[SPEAKER_08]: And this is jarring to look at theater man or like Spider-Man you're like hero and this is what the world of Nazis did for him like that drives the point home to a certain degree.

[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, I think the stuff was Spider-Man honestly is you know busting and not all over him out or not what's standing is like [SPEAKER_05]: some of the strongest stuff in the issue, because he is, you know, as they go on the attack, he is clearly stating, like, I'm here for revenge, and was in a quick amount of time, he kind of abandoned everyone on their mission, and it's like, oh, what happened to him?

[SPEAKER_05]: And then he ties into the climax of the issue a couple of pages later.

[SPEAKER_03]: That was a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a [SPEAKER_03]: And I really like it.

[SPEAKER_03]: Like, you know, like you're saying, like, it seems interesting.

[SPEAKER_03]: I think it's why I think it's one of the scenes that really works in this issue.

[SPEAKER_03]: And it's because of the way we're often, you know, the read, the reader are spider-man and captives who we look up to being seen and acknowledged by him as a hero.

[SPEAKER_03]: It was only the moment for Pete in the way it would feel like a moment for us.

[SPEAKER_08]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_08]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_08]: But we go to the Trump ballroom base in DC.

[SPEAKER_08]: Here's a giant swastika.

[SPEAKER_08]: I'm wondering.

[SPEAKER_03]: I bet the inside is like the Melania red Christmas.

[SPEAKER_08]: And inside the Nazis are having a meeting on a giant like Nazi rug, it's just like swastikas everywhere.

[SPEAKER_08]: It's like they're only decor and man in the wasp show up briefly to disable communications.

[SPEAKER_08]: And then the expatriates who now include Iron Man on the team as well attack the White House base.

[SPEAKER_08]: And it is time for final battle.

[SPEAKER_08]: But surprise, the Nazis have weaponized the Hulk to fight back.

[SPEAKER_08]: So we get the idea that he has been taken from the re-education camp and then turned back against the heroes.

[SPEAKER_08]: Cap gets to lead the charge.

[SPEAKER_08]: Jean gets one super cool power moment where there's just this kind of pink swirl of her being.

[SPEAKER_08]: And she lashes out at everyone.

[SPEAKER_08]: We're in a corner gene, do what you do best.

[SPEAKER_07]: She says, here goes nothing, but she's never expanded that much energy before.

[SPEAKER_07]: Oh, no, she might face.

[SPEAKER_03]: So we're saying that, but no shit, that pink panel.

[SPEAKER_03]: I screened half the descendant to a colorist for something I'm working on now because I was like, like, it just reminded me so much of the vibe.

[SPEAKER_03]: Like, that's a great, that's a great panel.

[SPEAKER_03]: I feel like any man other than Chris Claremont trying to write Jean in the 90s is a thing.

[SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, she looks like that panel is so good.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's pretty.

[SPEAKER_08]: So the Hulk is smashing everybody around.

[SPEAKER_08]: Baron Zimo gets involved.

[SPEAKER_08]: This guy's dressed like the son of Baron Zimo, but it's the dad, right?

[SPEAKER_08]: Like the one that killed Bucky.

[SPEAKER_08]: So Capkits to go and kick his ass, you know, I've been waiting for this all of these years.

[SPEAKER_08]: Wolverine gets surrounded.

[SPEAKER_08]: Got to congratulate you on this plan, Nikki, more fun than stay in home and blow in my brains out.

[SPEAKER_08]: I don't know.

[SPEAKER_08]: I don't know.

[SPEAKER_08]: Quit your belly aching, Logan, this is the fight you've been begging for.

[SPEAKER_03]: Logan, that's not really a big throw from Logan.

[SPEAKER_03]: He can blow his brains out just to make a point to define in four hours.

[SPEAKER_03]: You know, like, like, oh, much more fun than staying home, blowing my brains out.

[SPEAKER_03]: Like, literally he could do that and be fine later.

[SPEAKER_03]: So, you know, he kind of just, I think, pitches that to make people uncomfortable.

[SPEAKER_03]: Which, right?

[SPEAKER_03]: I like to make people uncomfortable too, Logan.

[SPEAKER_08]: Ironman gets the control helmet off of the Hulk who then turns on the Nazis.

[SPEAKER_08]: He takes down the helicopter with Baron Strucker and Viper inside.

[SPEAKER_08]: There's explosions and fire everywhere.

[SPEAKER_08]: People are grieving their losses.

[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, there's a panel of Wolverine where it looks like the Hulk sat on his head with the way it's drawn.

[SPEAKER_05]: It's like this way.

[SPEAKER_08]: He should have the explosion in your theory when you'd win when he saved him.

[SPEAKER_08]: Uh, so, you know, if you're always saying thank you, and then [SPEAKER_08]: Fury says to Logan take it easy Logan and Logan as Jean sits by I'm says I'll take it anyway.

[SPEAKER_08]: I can get it Nicky Another great lie.

[SPEAKER_08]: Oh Jean is worried you're a mess Logan.

[SPEAKER_08]: I don't know how you can make it this time You know me darlin Logan always comes back, but curse me if it don't hurt but then he and anor old pals A and this like close-up of his nose bleeding over his teeth which is always disgusting [SPEAKER_03]: It's a weird choice, too.

[SPEAKER_03]: I'm like, this story is like, Lori is a game member on the villain team and this book.

[SPEAKER_03]: And like, has become, you know, my character is the focus of the story, has shifted, but it's just like, he's not going to die, he's Wolverine.

[SPEAKER_03]: Like, he's still in fully pieces.

[SPEAKER_03]: He has a nose bleed.

[SPEAKER_03]: He'll be literally be fine in like two hours.

[SPEAKER_03]: And like the fact that we like use this enormous panel, like focus in and being like, [SPEAKER_03]: It's just a weird choice, it just looks like it slows the thing way down to be like, okay, yeah, Logan doesn't die.

[SPEAKER_08]: There's a panel.

[SPEAKER_08]: I'm not exactly sure.

[SPEAKER_08]: Let me see if I can get your interpretations.

[SPEAKER_08]: They finally make it inside the base as the story is closing.

[SPEAKER_08]: Kind of walks in on to the swastika rug and there's a metal chair, but when he turns it around the red skull falls out of it dead the gun has gone off and spider man has been shot.

[SPEAKER_08]: Oh, okay, I got it.

[SPEAKER_08]: The spider man killed the red skull.

[SPEAKER_08]: This is like the guy that survived the concentration camp coming back to kill him.

[SPEAKER_08]: He suffocated him with web.

[SPEAKER_08]: Red skull is dead, but also spider man's been shot and is also dead.

[SPEAKER_08]: So it's very World War II soldier, like think of famous imagery, Cap is holding split body as he walks out.

[SPEAKER_08]: You're suffering as over son.

[SPEAKER_08]: I only wish you could have lived to see the victor you helped achieve.

[SPEAKER_08]: When the role of heroes is called, it'll make sure Peter Parker's name is near the top.

[SPEAKER_08]: And then we just get kind of one big page of like the after effects of the war.

[SPEAKER_08]: the image of Spider-Man's head floats over everyone and, you know, Captain America, uh, uh, well, I'll just read the last caption.

[SPEAKER_08]: And from the years of destruction and tyranny in New America is born, and in this other world, this maybe place, liberty is not an empty word, liberty has a name.

[SPEAKER_08]: Captain America, the living legend of World War III, because he came back for one big fight at the end.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I hate this thing.

[SPEAKER_08]: This is not the best story I've ever read.

[SPEAKER_08]: There's certainly flaws in the representation, but it's superhero rompy, and the message of if the Nazis win what's left is kind of the theme here.

[SPEAKER_08]: It's not an example.

[SPEAKER_08]: Well, I want to talk about it.

[SPEAKER_08]: I think it's nuanced, but but there also is the three lens a lot of these stories I'm reading where the characters that we see sacrificing themselves, you know, they're dying, but we see a lot of Nazis die as well, right?

[SPEAKER_08]: Like it's okay to do violence against these individuals.

[SPEAKER_08]: Spider-Man committed a murder in this book, which is crazy.

[SPEAKER_08]: So that part alone is like, okay, if Spidey can kill a Nazi, what does that mean for me?

[SPEAKER_08]: What are you talking about on the message being sent here?

[SPEAKER_03]: I think the biggest weight not made in these two issues is how in the first issue we are overwhelmed by numbers again and again and again they're crowds masses of people and then when it comes time to solve the problem none of those guys show up they kill three Nazis and it's like we saved the world like no you didn't because you have crowds and crowds of people that followed them.

[SPEAKER_03]: you have a power vacuum with people waiting in the wing.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's like I don't understand why if the solution to the problem was to kill three Nazis, anyone but cap couldn't have done it, a hundred times.

[SPEAKER_03]: And it just the end, it ends, it feels like the middle of a more intelligent story, like a more intelligent [SPEAKER_03]: free is like we killed the bad guys and now we have to deal with the power vacuum while we're grieving the loss of this young man that was our symbol of hope and instead it's very like you you murdered our favorite boy so we win which is a really really ugly statement right now and I won't get any closer to it than that.

[SPEAKER_08]: I do think there's some real world comparison, and I'm agreeing with you.

[SPEAKER_08]: But, uh, intentionally, the people that were so afraid of that feels so untouchable, it took a little bit of wedding to stop him, right?

[SPEAKER_03]: Like, yeah, no, that's right, too.

[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, so like my, this is, this is my right or brain, right?

[SPEAKER_03]: Like my right or brain, so to that, then like, then it shouldn't take wedding.

[SPEAKER_03]: Then, despite you should do it with his bare hands, despite you should do it with something that we all have, right?

[SPEAKER_03]: Like, despite you should check them out.

[SPEAKER_03]: she didn't have.

[SPEAKER_03]: Like, you know, like, because the idea of Spidey that he's, you know, he's like all of us and he's, you know, the one that can do something.

[SPEAKER_03]: And like, we're having to like have him do it with something that we can do, but having him like off panel web and like what is a really unclear page, you know, a page.

[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, it's in trouble parsing.

[SPEAKER_05]: We didn't have time or space to show Spider-Man because we had to do those close-ups of Wolverine's weird face for a page.

[SPEAKER_03]: That's what we'll say!

[SPEAKER_03]: Why would you not have Logan just get, you know, whack and have him say, you know, off-handle?

[SPEAKER_03]: Like, you know, me, I always come back, go get him.

[SPEAKER_03]: And then, like, use that space to show.

[SPEAKER_08]: Spider-Man, killing fair in CFO, which apparently is all we needed to do to stop fascism forever and we've never seen this world again, but Dr.

Doom is still out there and half the world is still nuclear bomb to write like a, yeah, we have to go liberate the camps and and do all this stuff.

[SPEAKER_03]: And like I was hoping for more dooms stuff in this story because I always think he's interesting as during this era as a character who is ostensibly a fascist but also someone who is like an ethnic minority in the mind of like the Soviet Union, right?

[SPEAKER_03]: Like the Soviet Union, one of the biggest problems was that it's famously just tried to link a bunch of people who were enormously culturally diverse and did not want to be treated as, you know, [SPEAKER_03]: homogeneous, so it's like, you know, we're still dealing with echoes of that in Korea and Ukraine.

[SPEAKER_03]: And so I think Doom is a really interesting character during this era and the idea of him being like a willing to do like evil things with people that are not the Soviets in order to like that my a lot very ethnic people out from under like Soviet rule.

[SPEAKER_03]: I was like, oh, like that's an interesting villain.

[SPEAKER_03]: Be like, yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, just to that squeeze.

[SPEAKER_03]: And then to one squeeze of it, it is a writer, nothing makes me bad or even when I do something up.

[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm like, that looks good, that looks, that's a good do story in this era being like, I hate to so be it so much because they are, they think they are better than me and they're not like, I'm God Emperor team, you know, like, I just [SPEAKER_03]: I love doom as a character.

[SPEAKER_03]: I love him as a villain.

[SPEAKER_03]: I love him as a place to explore those like unapologetically evil ideas that are theoretically solutions.

[SPEAKER_03]: I think he's such a compelling villain for that.

[SPEAKER_03]: And instead, you know, instead, we got falter.

[SPEAKER_05]: Who didn't show all of those on the cover?

[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, I think kind of Titini's point, the power of fascism lies in the people that support it, not from the figure heads, like the figure heads can say, although horrible shit in the world, it's when people start accepting those things is when they empower them.

[SPEAKER_05]: So yeah, to to suffocate red skull and to blow up, you know, hit Zemo with the shield or whatever all the things we did.

[SPEAKER_05]: I'm like, yeah, it's cool, but at the same time, that's not what gave rise to the third right here, fourth right, whatever we want to call it.

[SPEAKER_05]: And as a story, it's fine.

[SPEAKER_05]: There's all sorts of problems.

[SPEAKER_05]: I'm sure for a disposable afternoon is a 10 year old.

[SPEAKER_05]: I would have been like, oh, cool, but.

[SPEAKER_05]: I think as a greater piece of work, like the problems in it and the simplicity of like, oh, that's how you fight fascism.

[SPEAKER_05]: Belize a misunderstanding of the fascism that the writer is writing about, which should, again, not come as any surprise who's followed checkfix in a social media at all, shaking hands with the fascists and becoming one himself.

[SPEAKER_08]: So, I thought this a lot, but I think this is the only time I'll end up saying this on the show out loud in this way.

[SPEAKER_08]: Almost feels like the message here in the 90s is that we need good old-fashioned American values back.

[SPEAKER_08]: We got to remember, I mean, as great as a country, you know, make America great again, almost energy, like let's go back to what our parents valued and then everything will be simpler, like it used to be.

[SPEAKER_08]: And I don't think our understanding is his there with that any longer.

[SPEAKER_08]: I don't know.

[SPEAKER_08]: That's how we'll break it.

[SPEAKER_08]: We need a break from old systems, not a return to values, where a lot of people did not feel valued.

[SPEAKER_03]: And I think, you know, it's a version of solving the Nazi problem that requires absolutely no introspection.

[SPEAKER_03]: Like no one introspection for like five seconds in this old book, except for Peter when he is like, hey, and actually for a moment, gives a voice to the people that are actually materially oppressed by the regime is like not surprisingly one of the only moments in this [SPEAKER_03]: groups of shirt off and it's like they treated me like yeah I learned very quickly that I was in the fact that I was here to matter to them I was just another person who was not like them which is a good message of that that is like but it feels like I don't know like check out a moment of insight with that one and then like bang has had on the keyboard until it went away something because [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it's like the only place that's sorry that I think to say about being about what it would be like to live under that regime and to be able to, you know, be a person who couldn't solve your problems by just punching and killing the bad guy, it like it seems like it's not surprising to me that someone there wrote this would then grow up to be like, of course, there are no Nazis.

[SPEAKER_03]: I would know when I would punch them and it's like my brother punch the mirror like, haha.

[SPEAKER_08]: I've read a lot of your work.

[SPEAKER_08]: I'm big fan of both of you.

[SPEAKER_08]: It's been an interesting journey for me doing this research, realizing how much these themes are all over every comic book I've ever read and probably everything I've ever studied or consumed, right?

[SPEAKER_08]: This baseline of how we measure evil, this kind of constant undercurrent of fascism on the rise in America is like present through everything I've ever consumed, including in some of the work I've seen [SPEAKER_08]: even if we're just talking about orcas alone, right?

[SPEAKER_08]: It's that same kind of parallel story.

[SPEAKER_08]: So any final insights in any thoughts you want to share, just on that idea of this being such a strong presence in our comic history?

[SPEAKER_03]: I think this is an excellent podcast.

[SPEAKER_03]: The best thing I can say is that one of the most exciting and liberating creative times in my life was working on [SPEAKER_03]: It's because I felt like there were people in power who not just were interested in the takes of marginalized people of queer people of women, but we're also willing to be our [SPEAKER_03]: strength when there were situations where they realized that they had more, you know, societal capitals than we do, or did it was an amazing time in it allowed me to removerable about being a woman coming into power, which is a lot of what capcomwritten story is about is a struggle between doing what's expected and doing what you want and finding that the truth is somewhere in the middle being a clear person, which I obviously differed a lot about on Krakowah [SPEAKER_03]: But just the feeling of like, Croco felt like a place where it was okay to have power and a challenge status quo.

[SPEAKER_03]: And it's really rare to get to be both to be in both this position at once, right?

[SPEAKER_03]: Like usually we either are able to challenge status quo or we have power.

[SPEAKER_03]: Having power and challenge in the status quo is how you lose it really fast.

[SPEAKER_03]: And I was really, really lucky to have people like Jordan and Jonathan and Jerry and all these guys who had been at Marvel for a while and were not just like advocates for what I do, but like, I mean, you know, Jonathan asked me to write kind of sorts of them and we had if I'm weird, I love weird things, you know, I always tell people part of why I was really.

[SPEAKER_03]: I was so quickly, yes, for working on Clico and I got that initial message from Jonathan with kind of the broad strokes is because I love New Xman so much And it was because it was my favorite time it felt like the Xman get to be sexy powerful adults who people hate and fear them because they're doing so well Right, and that's that's also like I mean, I think you know a lot of queers We really love pop music.

[SPEAKER_03]: We really love hip hop.

[SPEAKER_03]: We really love a lot of these And we really love superheroes, right in a lot of drag and wrestling and a lot of this stuff is about saying your name out loud and saying [SPEAKER_03]: and I don't care, you know, I don't care because I don't care because I'm real really.

[SPEAKER_03]: I don't care because I'm Spider-Women.

[SPEAKER_03]: Like I might not be what you expect, but I mean you love me anyway and you can't help it.

[SPEAKER_03]: And I love when the X-Men get to embody that.

[SPEAKER_03]: And I think that's, I think that's what we've been part of life for events really got that right is because like the X-Men were in there like in their stand era.

[SPEAKER_03]: like it's really in their bag and doing really well and it's fun to be hated and feared while you're also posting the Hellfire Gala because it's a really important reminder for marginalized people that people being hateful towards you and people scared of you did not mean you can't also have power and beauty and peace and rest and all of these things that marginalized communities deserve and money.

[SPEAKER_05]: I look back kind of historically and this is speaking maybe to like a broader context about fascism and authoritarianism and how it's represented in media.

[SPEAKER_05]: As we look back through all the conflicts and things America has been involved in since World War II World War II is the only action we've been involved in that.

[SPEAKER_05]: can easily be positioned as we were stepping up to help and protect people.

[SPEAKER_05]: And it's more complicated and nuanced than that, but honestly, we fought the Nazis and destroyed fighting authoritarianism and fascism.

[SPEAKER_05]: And every just about that I think of every military action we've taken since then has never been in defense of protecting minoritized groups and people who are oppressed.

[SPEAKER_05]: it has often been the opposite where we are going in as the oppressor and I can list a million different conflicts, but I think because of the the easy way to talk about world war too and the righteous cause we undertook we have tried to frame everything we've done through that same lens going forward.

[SPEAKER_05]: invading Vietnam because we're protecting democracy right kind of invading, you know, Afghanistan, we are invading Iraq, we are invading, you know, Korea, we can list a variety of things that we've done, not to mention just the CIA South American nation building of all the, yeah.

[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, it was a couple of years ago, probably 2017.

[SPEAKER_05]: I was reading this book called The Devil's Chessport by David Talbot, which is incredible and it's about Alan Delos and the CIA and Rise of America Seeker government is the the subtitle of the book, but it's going through all of the actions that the CIA undertook postworld war to the way we destabilize [SPEAKER_05]: So many governments when they democratically elected a leader who we decided was too liberal.

[SPEAKER_05]: So we funded contrast, we sent in all sorts of stuff.

[SPEAKER_05]: And just the millions and millions of people worldwide, we killed because we didn't agree with what they did.

[SPEAKER_05]: And this is all historical fact, right?

[SPEAKER_05]: This is not a fictional book and there was a moment I'm reading this book as however old I was in 2017 in my 30s.

[SPEAKER_05]: And I was like, oh, we're the bad guy that I've been told my entire life that we were fighting against.

[SPEAKER_05]: And I'm not trying to broad stroke say we are an evil nation, but so many the actions we've taken are completely the opposite of what, you know, we've been told we are fighting fascism and there's a reason we come back to fascism and authoritarianism and all this stuff in our media and in our fiction and because like that was the time we did something good for good reasons.

[SPEAKER_05]: Granted again, nuance complicated, but we stepped in because an oppressed group of people were being killed.

[SPEAKER_05]: We were hurt.

[SPEAKER_05]: We were doing all these actions where we can in the end say, we defeated the bad guy.

[SPEAKER_05]: So I think this comes up constantly in infection and in the messaging and the things we do because that was a righteous cause that's an easy touch point and people can all we can all agree [SPEAKER_05]: So if we can remind people and anything we do, it's just like that, it makes it more justifiable, and it also from a fictional standpoint brings us up to that moment of like, oh yeah, like that patriotism that we did the right thing because we were helping someone and I think that will always be in stories because in stories, think we talked about, you know, mentioned a little bit earlier.

[SPEAKER_05]: we all want to see ourselves as the, as standing up and doing the right thing and helping people in the way that it's very easy to connect to the dots too.

[SPEAKER_05]: And it's, I think our job is of people to constantly be re-examining and questioning those actions, both individually and broadly, to be like, are we, though, like, what?

[SPEAKER_05]: Who's being helped?

[SPEAKER_05]: Who's being hurt?

[SPEAKER_05]: you know who's cheering alongside us are the Nazis cheering next to us then we probably need to reevaluate the actions we're taking.

[SPEAKER_05]: We need to constantly be striving to not be the bad guy.

[SPEAKER_05]: We keep talking about attacking and defeating.

[SPEAKER_03]: My grandfather somewhat famously was in the CIA.

[SPEAKER_03]: He was mentioned it.

[SPEAKER_03]: He's mentioned it in an Alan Morpo.

[SPEAKER_03]: I'll brought to light by name, very weird part of my, you know, growing up because I love this man very much and after he passed away I read Naomi Klein's shock doctrine, which is very much about American foreign policy as disruptive as going into places and disrupting so that people can rebuild and make lots of money off of it and reading that book, that's what my grandfather had been having it.

[SPEAKER_03]: frame to something really close, really radicalized and like a huge way.

[SPEAKER_03]: And, you know, I don't, it's not like hard for me to believe that someone could compartmentalize themselves because that's how humans do anything.

[SPEAKER_03]: So it's not, I'm not sure, I don't ever feel shocked like how could the person who counts me on their knee, you know, be evil because that's how humans are.

[SPEAKER_08]: The feeling I have had our own versions of reckoning with that, I'm sure.

[SPEAKER_08]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and I'm sure I'm sure you guys have with your background as well.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's powerful and it's radicalizing and I really recommend shop doctor and by it may be fine if you're interested in reading more about kind of stuff that was talking about.

[SPEAKER_03]: You'll have to send me the name of the book that you mentioned because I want to read that one too.

[SPEAKER_08]: Yeah, I will.

[SPEAKER_08]: Another one I would recommend is how to hide an empire.

[SPEAKER_08]: Relatively easy read.

[SPEAKER_08]: I mean, it's essays, but it gives you a lot of this energy without having to deep deep it does all the explaining for you.

[SPEAKER_08]: Highly recommended.

[SPEAKER_08]: Okay, we've done a whole month on this on the show.

[SPEAKER_08]: I hope it's been enlightening and educational.

[SPEAKER_08]: This in the in conjunction with the processes we've been doing with the Rensical Conversations on the show as well.

[SPEAKER_08]: I hope you are learning.

[SPEAKER_08]: It is.

[SPEAKER_08]: I don't know.

[SPEAKER_08]: I'm not good at keeping secrets given my upbringing.

[SPEAKER_08]: So creating same spaces like this where we can nerd out and have fun and, you know, laugh about lands like, take them down nasty gene, but also have serious conversations about the erosion of democracy.

[SPEAKER_08]: I think it's necessary.

[SPEAKER_08]: I am grateful for queer friends and community and I am grateful every time I get to hang out with talented, wonderful creators like the both of you.

[SPEAKER_08]: So thank you for your time and talents.

[SPEAKER_08]: So let's go ahead and wrap up here where can people find you online and anything you want to plug for mid November?

[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, you can find me at Blue Sky Philipsyv and Instagram Philipsyv comic art as of today.

[SPEAKER_05]: So this is a couple weeks before our recording comes out, but the final issue of astonishing excellent affinity just came out issue for you.

[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, good job.

[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, opportunity.

[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you.

[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you.

[SPEAKER_05]: I'm glad you think that the way we did.

[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you.

[SPEAKER_05]: By now, hopefully it's announced and it's out.

[SPEAKER_05]: If not, I'll let you know how to time chat.

[SPEAKER_05]: But age of revelation infinity should be released.

[SPEAKER_05]: And I have drawn the first six issues of that that Tim Seely wrote.

[SPEAKER_05]: So that'll kind of be for the time being the end of my infinity work.

[SPEAKER_05]: But I just wrapped up the last issue just the other day.

[SPEAKER_05]: So [SPEAKER_08]: Excellent.

[SPEAKER_08]: I can't wait to see it.

[SPEAKER_08]: And I can't wait to hang out again.

[SPEAKER_08]: Please tell your family.

[SPEAKER_03]: Hello, uh, you can find me online at TV Howard on sub stack or Instagram.

[SPEAKER_03]: That's the only places I am.

[SPEAKER_03]: So keep my media where I'll still fall there.

[SPEAKER_03]: I want to update an Instagram at those pictures and on sub stack.

[SPEAKER_03]: I write stuff.

[SPEAKER_03]: And you can also support you monetarily there if you're interested in learning more about comic writing or more.

[SPEAKER_03]: There's some great stuff from fill there that's also behind the paywall fill.

[SPEAKER_03]: And I have a comic book.

[SPEAKER_03]: But I'm an off city that is started that got a little off because we've both been real busy.

[SPEAKER_03]: But if you want to see some of what's so that I have done together, you can read up the first couple chapters for free and if you want to read more comment and yell at me and yell at me and I'll yell at Phil and ignore it for a chapters.

[SPEAKER_03]: And then right now what it's going to be coming out is a Marion Heritage.

[SPEAKER_03]: I think number two is out.

[SPEAKER_03]: My new series from Game Studios.

[SPEAKER_03]: If you like my work on Excalibur, please check it out.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's more sad-safet girls with weapons fighting against a [SPEAKER_03]: group that wants to see her across.

[SPEAKER_03]: Two should be out now.

[SPEAKER_03]: Please check it out.

[SPEAKER_03]: If you like an attitude, please send in D series and D series like this week with her die on free orders.

[SPEAKER_03]: So we really appreciate it.

[SPEAKER_03]: And then I've also, if you were at New York Comic-Con, you might have heard announced Syrians Love Herths, which is my four-ish black label series from BC with Babs Tarr.

[SPEAKER_03]: I've been describing it as Sex and the City does belong Halloween.

[SPEAKER_03]: It's the three Gotham City Syrians and Dina, making friends and navigating relationships and planning, Gynas Wedding to Ollie, and also [SPEAKER_03]: hunting down a serial killer over one year in.

[SPEAKER_08]: Excellent.

[SPEAKER_08]: Excellent.

[SPEAKER_08]: I'm so happy to see you thriving at the other places, even though I'm mistuting our X-Men always.

[SPEAKER_00]: All right, everybody.

[SPEAKER_08]: Thanks for listening.

[SPEAKER_08]: Take care of yourselves.

[SPEAKER_08]: Bye, Phil.

[SPEAKER_08]: Bye, see you guys.

[SPEAKER_08]: Hey, everybody.

[SPEAKER_08]: Welcome back to the Graimalk and Lane podcast.

[SPEAKER_08]: We're queer friends and allies gathered to review and discuss the original X-Men comics in continuity order.

[SPEAKER_08]: I sometimes sometimes.

[SPEAKER_08]: I just take you to really weird places.

[SPEAKER_08]: We are more consistently doing themed months on the show.

[SPEAKER_08]: lately.

[SPEAKER_08]: So November on Grimmelken Lane is fascism month and I promise it's going to be silly and informative and our issue review today has nothing to do with the X-Men frankly, but we're going to be reviewing the series Marvel Zombies Destroy.

[SPEAKER_08]: You will understand the relevance very quickly.

[SPEAKER_08]: What's [SPEAKER_00]: Hi, thank you so much for having me, Chad.

[SPEAKER_00]: I met you on Amura, Hive.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, director from X-Men 97, but mostly just someone who also wants to punch a Nazi in the face right now, very, very much.

[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, this was a very, a very cathartic series to read, as far as the friends of humanity go.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, like let's talk about, you know, [SPEAKER_00]: Naziism fascism in the streets.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, that's what the expert have always been fighting.

[SPEAKER_00]: So to kind of switch gears for a little bit and go to a Marvel zombies where we just now get to just okay, there's zombies and their Nazis.

[SPEAKER_00]: Let's have some fun was also just very healing, very nice to do because I think sometimes in X-Men we have to take the political high and we can't always just like murder effo-wage in the street because it's not, you know, the message you want to put out there necessarily.

[SPEAKER_00]: but it's nice to get some, some anger out and some healthy ways, like zombies.

[SPEAKER_08]: Love you, also welcome Sarah Galey, back to the show, Hi Sarah.

[SPEAKER_02]: Hi Chad, it's both such a pleasure.

[SPEAKER_02]: Sarah Galey, say them, author of whatever they will let me write, which included a run of white widow last year, what year is it?

[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know, I think last year, in which you went up the lova and did up fighting an evil corporation that was, [SPEAKER_02]: participating in the corporate support of fascism as some people who I don't agree with on a lot of things, but on this one thing has said fascism is, you know, when the state and corporations come together and we see that happening in the U.S.

right now, especially I live in California in the Bay Area and big tech companies are really just speaking promising fascism that they can be besties for the resties.

[SPEAKER_02]: And so I got to have Yelena.

[SPEAKER_02]: fighting a company that was working to integrate AI into the gentrification process.

[SPEAKER_02]: And I keep telling people I'm not trying to write prophecy in my book.

[SPEAKER_02]: And yet, and that is, in fact, happening in my backyard now, so.

[SPEAKER_08]: There is a lot happening in the world.

[SPEAKER_08]: You have both written and produced some incredible content related to mutants and individualism and all kinds of things.

[SPEAKER_08]: You're two of my favorite people.

[SPEAKER_08]: And the two of you meeting together here is one of my favorite things this whole month.

[SPEAKER_08]: I think because you're both incredibly delightful.

[SPEAKER_08]: So I'm really happy you're here.

[SPEAKER_08]: Um, and now we're going to jump in off and I'll do a lot of preamble stuff, but we're going to jump right into the series because there's going to be a lot to talk about and we have time for all of the tangents that anyone would like to take.

[SPEAKER_08]: We're going to be looking at a series called Marvel zombies destroy Marvel zombies was a huge thing.

[SPEAKER_08]: Uh, I mean, there's that infamous series that later got turned into an animated series where all of our heroes become zombies zombies are usually kind of a horror trope, obviously.

[SPEAKER_08]: but the property as it existed had several follow-up series.

[SPEAKER_08]: So there's a series shortly before this called Marvel Zombies Supreme, which is hilarious.

[SPEAKER_08]: It's a really funny.

[SPEAKER_08]: Hyperion in one issue lands in the state of Kansas and has to fight the state superheroes of Kansas, which includes a woman dressed as a pioneer.

[SPEAKER_08]: and the leader of the team's name is Tapika.

[SPEAKER_08]: One of the members is like a human-sized sunflower.

[SPEAKER_08]: Like it's ridiculous.

[SPEAKER_08]: It's wonderful.

[SPEAKER_08]: One of the heroes is grain belt.

[SPEAKER_08]: Everyone's dying horribly.

[SPEAKER_08]: And there's all kinds of puns.

[SPEAKER_08]: It's wonderful.

[SPEAKER_08]: Absolutely recommended.

[SPEAKER_08]: And it's written by this individual, Frank Marfino, who I know very little about.

[SPEAKER_08]: I looked for Frank.

[SPEAKER_08]: I wanted to ask him about the series and I couldn't find him anywhere.

[SPEAKER_08]: I do know Frank has a history of publishing different kinds of books.

[SPEAKER_08]: He's done a comic on Melissa Ehridge.

[SPEAKER_08]: I also know he worked as like the head projectionist for radio sitting music haul.

[SPEAKER_08]: which is what I found online.

[SPEAKER_08]: So he's launching this series picking up on themes that he began in Marvel's Zombies Supreme, but two issues into this series.

[SPEAKER_08]: He ends up having some kind of health crisis and Peter David takes over as the writer.

[SPEAKER_08]: And there's kind of a narrative shift.

[SPEAKER_08]: You kind of wonder what this series would have been without the change in creative teams, because Peter David has a very different kind of humor than Frank.

[SPEAKER_08]: I find Peter is a little bit more massage-enistic, a little bit more demeaning to women, [SPEAKER_08]: Even though he's written a lot of my favorite books from X-Factor on, I do think there's a level to his humor that's not always appreciated.

[SPEAKER_08]: So kind of tossing all that out.

[SPEAKER_08]: The series opens with a Miracle Peer Fettered Ichi as the artist with Gary Henderson on colors, Clayton Kalon, Inc.

Jake Thomas and Mark Panishia on edits.

[SPEAKER_08]: And in Issue 3, the Penciler changes to Al-Bernoyevo and Rick Maggar.

[SPEAKER_08]: So there's a shift halfway through the series.

[SPEAKER_08]: Now, I gotta go over really quick here.

[SPEAKER_08]: There's a different marvels on these series written by Fred Menlenti at Marvel that establishes a new group called Armor.

[SPEAKER_08]: You guys have heard of shield or sword or these different organizations.

[SPEAKER_08]: Armor is the division that monitors alternate realities.

[SPEAKER_08]: So ARM-O-R alternate reality, monitoring, and operational response.

[SPEAKER_08]: They have a division of people, they have recruited agents at Lyra the She-Hulk becomes an agent of theirs for a period of time.

[SPEAKER_08]: The mutant portal, there's a guy named Portal who's Native American who works for them for a time.

[SPEAKER_08]: In this one, we get Howard the Duck is their primary agent for whatever reason.

[SPEAKER_08]: The last piece of continuity I'll give, this is officially an alternate reality.

[SPEAKER_08]: It is not from our world because there's too many details that don't match.

[SPEAKER_08]: But this book comes out a year before Dum Dum Dugin was revealed to be a life model decoy the whole time.

[SPEAKER_08]: So this is the old grizzled like Irish soldier from World War II as kind of the focal point character in this book.

[SPEAKER_08]: The other one that gets used a lot is a character named Battlestar, who's Lamar Hoskins.

[SPEAKER_08]: He was the literal Bucky to John Walker, Captain America, and those Greenwald stories.

[SPEAKER_08]: There's an issue where the character realizes because Mark also realized that Bucky is not a great term for codename for a black man.

[SPEAKER_08]: he has the he changes his name to battle star but he's a super strong Captain America guy he's a great character it's fun to see him used here.

[SPEAKER_08]: We're going to jump into the deep end with some crazy characters and I'm going to just toss the continuity at you with a lot of explanation and then we just get to the vibe on this series itself.

[SPEAKER_08]: So before I jump in with all of that preamble let me hear first from Emmett and then Sarah what was it like for you to jump into [SPEAKER_00]: It was interesting.

[SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't what I was expecting.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'll be honest.

[SPEAKER_00]: I wasn't sure as soon as I saw that it was dug in and then how are the duck leading this?

[SPEAKER_00]: I was a bit like, let's just put our fun cat on.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then joy with this ride is gonna be.

[SPEAKER_00]: It is interesting though.

[SPEAKER_00]: I will say your comments earlier on about being a little bit more like themes of misogyny in this.

[SPEAKER_00]: I will say I was catching onto where I was like, oh, this feels easy as far as like some of the female representation goes in this.

[SPEAKER_00]: But otherwise, yeah, I realized right off the bat as soon as I heard the duck entered, I was like, I'm in for a while, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: This is going to be interesting.

[SPEAKER_02]: I had a very similar experience for Emmett.

[SPEAKER_02]: Whenever you send me something, Chad, I go in blind for vibes.

[SPEAKER_02]: I am just because I know I don't have the, like, the extensive, [SPEAKER_02]: contextual understanding of what I'm stepping into and you send me something and you say, this is from the Splatoon era of X-Men, I know.

[SPEAKER_02]: Great.

[SPEAKER_08]: This is from the Nipple Lasers era of [SPEAKER_02]: We never step away from the nipple leaders.

[SPEAKER_02]: We keep them at our heart the whole year round.

[SPEAKER_02]: I also was a little like clocking some of the interesting characterization of women.

[SPEAKER_02]: There was some interesting complexity in some of the male characters.

[SPEAKER_02]: Like, dumb dumb having that moment of like, no man should have to see himself in this condition.

[SPEAKER_02]: Like, that was unkind of you to put me in this situation.

[SPEAKER_02]: I was like, oh, are we gonna get really like, [SPEAKER_02]: complex, thematic exploration of characters like grief and trauma.

[SPEAKER_02]: Oh my gosh there's lots do not characters in this too are we going to get interesting stuff with them and it's like it's all right not every comic has to be everything.

[SPEAKER_08]: Pam from Marvel's not be supreme is a little better than on this series but this one is the Nazi one but [SPEAKER_08]: So I'm going to do some brief summaries and then we'll vibe on characters as we go.

[SPEAKER_08]: There's a couple of series Marvel has done, and Marvel has done over the years, D.C.

has done this too, where like they'll go back and look in the amals of history, back into those old books from like the 30s, 40s, 50s, and they'll put together little teams of characters and give them like a modern update.

[SPEAKER_08]: That's happened a bunch of times.

[SPEAKER_08]: The invaders is that right in the 70s, it's the World War II superhero series that ran for a long time.

[SPEAKER_08]: And I think that's probably what this series was initially pitched [SPEAKER_08]: as they did marbles ambie squadron supreme so why not marbles ambie's invaders.

[SPEAKER_08]: Now there's a series called the 12 which I really love.

[SPEAKER_08]: It takes 12 obscure golden age heroes and puts them in a modern adventure and it's delicious.

[SPEAKER_08]: It has a strong payoff.

[SPEAKER_08]: I really love it.

[SPEAKER_08]: But there's a lot of versions of this ranging from the the battalion and Thunderbolts etc.

[SPEAKER_08]: where old world war 2 heroes get dusted off.

[SPEAKER_08]: So that's this.

[SPEAKER_08]: We go really obscure and there are some wild interpretations on this as we put together the team that we now get to call the Duckie dozen.

[SPEAKER_08]: So we open on Dumb Dumb Dugin.

[SPEAKER_08]: He is having a nightmare about winning the war, but basically only on a stack of giant bodies of all of his allies that enemies beneath him.

[SPEAKER_08]: So we open with this kind of old boomer carrying with him the weight of history, which I think is entertaining.

[SPEAKER_08]: He sees Howard the Duck there, what do you want Howard and Howard says?

[SPEAKER_08]: I want to stack a 50s piece on earth and from my girlfriend to call me back, not necessarily in that order.

[SPEAKER_08]: And that's the only time I have fun with how we're basically this whole series.

[SPEAKER_08]: I fun to pretty annoying with it, but that line may be happy.

[SPEAKER_08]: Are you guys how are the duck fans?

[SPEAKER_00]: No, I mean not really.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I enjoy the film from what it is, but I just, I, he's kind of outdated for me.

[SPEAKER_08]: That Howard movie is rough.

[SPEAKER_02]: I have encountered Howard the Duck only in moments where I really needed the refreshing like tone shift away from extremely self serious comments I every single time I've met Howard in the while it's been after reading like an extensive run of extremely grim and somber like like.

[SPEAKER_02]: Meditations on the death of all mankind because I'll get like a research packet and I'll read that research packet and then there'll be like, how are the duck crossover thrown in there just for fun and I'll get to that one and all of a sudden there'll be jokes and I'm like, so I and countering very much as a bomb, but I think it's because I have taken him in small doses.

[SPEAKER_08]: in April of next year, I was widely considering doing Howard Duck because he represents Marvel's kind of absurdist movement in the 70s.

[SPEAKER_08]: So I wanted to read, I've never read the early Howard The Duck stuff by Steve Gerber.

[SPEAKER_08]: It's like a blind spot for me.

[SPEAKER_08]: I read like the first 10 issues and I was annoyed as fuck.

[SPEAKER_08]: Not only is there like a lot of racism and sexism mixed in, but the character, I don't know, it's funny, I suppose, in like a mad magazine kind of way, like he learns like kung fu, but calls it quack fu, but he wears like Japanese ceremonial robes while quack fuing people, you'd like I get the humor, but he, [SPEAKER_08]: really, really bugs me as when I discovered Steve Gerber isn't not my favorite writer.

[SPEAKER_08]: Although I do love some of his absurdist stuff.

[SPEAKER_08]: Anyway, Howard is rough for me in this series as well.

[SPEAKER_08]: There are a few Howard stories I like, but I'm not a Howard the Duck fan.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's almost like he's Sarah's magic little fairy that comes around when they're [SPEAKER_00]: every year's sad, and just goes, hey, you need a joke, which I would actually prefer as this character archetype.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think that if you were to like, if this series had been done completely dark and serious, and you just had Howard who was holding everybody together, like literally just with like humor, I think it would make a little bit more sense, but then you get into like you're saying, like a deeper subject matter, and maybe they don't wanna go that deep for this.

[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe we just wanna see some eyeballs get eaten, so.

[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I think that's such an important thing for a project to know about itself is how deep it's meant to be and sometimes it's like a certain character cannot hold up the weight of serious conversations about like genocide like I don't want to hear how the duck's opinions on genocide.

[SPEAKER_02]: I want to hear how are the deck make a do you I don't you I don't like You have immediately identified that I'm extremely nosy chaotic and love gossip.

[SPEAKER_02]: So yes, I do But I don't think I should there you go.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's yeah, exactly.

[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe the world doesn't need it [SPEAKER_08]: I mean, to reference what you're saying though, I don't need bugs bunny on a Nazi playing field, you know, like that's not a story I under necessarily need now I have spoken on the show a little bit about this, especially on the Patreon episodes there isn't kind of an odd genre of like Nazi comedy if you think of the producers the great dictator Jojo Rabbit there's this kind of odd like in the back backdrop of of horror, you know, so [SPEAKER_08]: In this one, the Nazis and the zombies and the people behind it all are really truly horrible people who ruin everything and deserve to be destroyed in a bloodbath because if they bite you, then they turn you into one of them.

[SPEAKER_08]: That's the quick series.

[SPEAKER_08]: There's a lot of stylistic choices in this series I love.

[SPEAKER_08]: There's like propaganda pages when you open each book that's kind of talking about like armor and like the different ways that they might advertise themselves.

[SPEAKER_08]: Okay, we're in an alternate reality, how are the duck has recruited dumb-dumb-dugin, and they are putting together a team called the Duckie Dozen, which is definitely referencing old World War II films, fill in the blank.

[SPEAKER_08]: There's about 25 of them.

[SPEAKER_08]: So we have battle star here.

[SPEAKER_08]: We have red raven.

[SPEAKER_08]: I do have a full episode on the character Red raven on my Patreon, because he's in an early X-Men story.

[SPEAKER_08]: This is the human resident of sky island who lived among the bird people.

[SPEAKER_08]: Keepers shows up in red raving comics number one in 1940.

[SPEAKER_08]: We've got a guy called the eternal brain.

[SPEAKER_08]: Now this one's complicated.

[SPEAKER_08]: William Carbode is his human name, but this guy's actually one of the [SPEAKER_08]: and he grew himself a brain, like from a brain in like red raven comics, number one, also in 1940.

[SPEAKER_08]: But he had like a human identity and he like made it very aesthetically pleasing and he has a bunch of weird, like John Bern's stories in Marvel, the Lost Generation.

[SPEAKER_08]: He's a complicated character, but he's a brain and a jar with a body, like that's kind of what you did here.

[SPEAKER_08]: We've got Gore.

[SPEAKER_08]: This is one of the lion people from the planet, Ligra.

[SPEAKER_08]: Uh, no, I'm sorry, his name is GERG, you are GERG.

[SPEAKER_08]: The Lion people appear in Marvel Mystery Comics number 8 in 1940, but are not given any names.

[SPEAKER_08]: And in that same story, we also need a race of Dragon Man, and one of them is given the name Dragon here.

[SPEAKER_08]: So there's a Lion Guy and a Dragon Guy that are supposed to represent these two obscure races from 1940, which is intense.

[SPEAKER_08]: Another slightly complicated character is the blazing skull.

[SPEAKER_08]: This guy comes from Marvel Mystery Comics number 5 in 1940.

[SPEAKER_08]: His real name is Mark.

[SPEAKER_08]: Todd, he was a war reporter in the Japanese section of the war when some like tribal skullman gave him a thing that gave him a ghost writer kind of power, but this isn't in 1940.

[SPEAKER_08]: He'd like fought on the war effort.

[SPEAKER_08]: He got tortured by Hitler once.

[SPEAKER_08]: He'd save Churchill once.

[SPEAKER_08]: More recently, he was on an Invaders team, he's a lot.

[SPEAKER_08]: We have another complicated one.

[SPEAKER_08]: This guy's name is Flexo, Flexo's from Mystic Comics in 1940 as well.

[SPEAKER_08]: He was initially told to be a flexible rubber robot controlled by two brothers, named Joshua and Joel Williams.

[SPEAKER_08]: But more modern retcons of this, by arguing, this character has been prominently used in recent Hulk comics and Venom comics.

[SPEAKER_08]: He has a symbiote inside of him.

[SPEAKER_08]: So he's been powered up by a symbiote this whole time and you get to see symbiote like venom flexo if you want to go look for those stories by all of you in a few years ago.

[SPEAKER_08]: We have a character named Breeze Barton here.

[SPEAKER_08]: His real name is Kurt Baron.

[SPEAKER_08]: He first shows up in daring mystery comics number 3 in 1940.

[SPEAKER_08]: He's just like a fighter pilot who like had some problematic adventures in Africa one time.

[SPEAKER_08]: We have another character named Dyna Man, who is from daring mystery comics number six.

[SPEAKER_08]: Also in 1940, he's the sole survivor of an ancient Egyptian civilization who has also kind of like a godlike human who can fly his name as Lazaro.

[SPEAKER_08]: he has a very few appearances.

[SPEAKER_08]: And then finally, we get Taxi Taylor.

[SPEAKER_08]: Back in the forties, there was a guy named Taxi Taylor, who was a guy named Jim, who first shows up in Mystic Comics number two.

[SPEAKER_08]: In 1940, he drives a Wondercar in the war.

[SPEAKER_08]: And now we have his daughter also named Taxi Taylor here as part of the team.

[SPEAKER_08]: So that is your Ducky doesn't everybody.

[SPEAKER_08]: You didn't remember a single name that I said.

[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, I have to say, Dragoon is my favorite, but only in that panel when they said that they have two X chromosomes as well was I immediately like, are you non-binary?

[SPEAKER_00]: What's going on here?

[SPEAKER_00]: Are you in one of my new icons?

[SPEAKER_00]: Like, who are you?

[SPEAKER_00]: And then for them to barely be in this, like, you have all these characters and you just gave us such a huge history and because of that, some of them, I meanly went like, oh, that sounds really cool.

[SPEAKER_00]: I want to know more about them.

[SPEAKER_00]: None of that gets utilized in this.

[SPEAKER_00]: None of that.

[SPEAKER_00]: All that information you gave, they are literally all like one liners in this.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm just like, but wait, now I want to know more about Flexo, and actually dialogue man actually sounds kind of cool.

[SPEAKER_00]: This whole time I'm like, you look useless, but now I want to know more about the ancient Egypt stuff, like what's going on here?

[SPEAKER_08]: There's not a lot for that guy.

[SPEAKER_08]: I flex those really fun.

[SPEAKER_08]: I'd recommend if you want to deep dive Flexo's a good one to choose from this group.

[SPEAKER_08]: Red Ravens ridiculous and very queer-coded.

[SPEAKER_08]: The Eternal Brain is a really fun nerd-grided to sci-fi crazy, but the rest...

[SPEAKER_02]: First of all, I just want to second everything that Emma just said, it feels like, you know, when you have that friend, often I in my experience of like an older generation cohort, who every story they tell they're like, oh, and then so and so is there.

[SPEAKER_02]: He got his hand chopped off and affirming accident and then so and so was there and he robbed a bank one time.

[SPEAKER_02]: And anyway, all of us were talking about and then they tell this extremely boring story about like some conversation they were having about not understanding like, [SPEAKER_02]: and HOA in their data community or whatever.

[SPEAKER_02]: And you're like, go back, go back.

[SPEAKER_02]: What's that on the crystal?

[SPEAKER_02]: I really vibe on the Eternal Brain.

[SPEAKER_02]: I love really every part of that, the brain and the jar.

[SPEAKER_02]: I have a lot of days, I really, really, really.

[SPEAKER_02]: Woo hoo hoo.

[SPEAKER_08]: There's a shopping number of brain and a jar of characters out there.

[SPEAKER_02]: Like, yeah, that's our number.

[SPEAKER_02]: And like, you know, also because again, I'm like nosy and messy.

[SPEAKER_02]: And so getting to see the brain and like, let me look at it.

[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, not an ad.

[SPEAKER_02]: I want to see it.

[SPEAKER_02]: I want to see it squish around.

[SPEAKER_08]: This is a very brief tangent about brains and jars.

[SPEAKER_08]: There's a weird old character named Brain Brain.

[SPEAKER_08]: That was like a Nazi scientist's brain.

[SPEAKER_08]: But like hooked up to like a computer body.

[SPEAKER_08]: for war, and it commits a bunch of war crimes, like it's not a great character.

[SPEAKER_08]: But a few years back, when Ryan North was writing Squirrel Girl, he had Squirrel Girl and her friends reprogrammed the old computer and made him like a nihilistic hero that like wears a cape.

[SPEAKER_08]: He's still a brain and a jar, but he becomes like one of her best friends.

[SPEAKER_08]: But there's a fun Nazi brain and a jar connection for you.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's pretty cool.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I love it.

[SPEAKER_02]: School girl redeemed them.

[SPEAKER_02]: We don't need to put the world on the shoulders of Squirrel Girl here, but I do think that there's like, it's really interesting stuff to mind there about the programming efforts that's necessary for people who are in far right circles who have often been treated the way that people trapped in high control groups are treated.

[SPEAKER_02]: And 100% agree with everything that you're saying.

[SPEAKER_02]: If we truly have an anti-personal and abolitionist mindset, we have to be able to consider rehabilitation for people who have done horrible things and I think that the dream of being able to just beat their little computer panel and now that they're not Nazis anymore is pretty nice.

[SPEAKER_00]: As another tangent, I will say that's why Glob Herman is one of my favorite characters because when you read Glob's backstory, he was raised to be super racist towards mutants.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's from a family that hated them, so when he becomes one and the irony, I just feel like all that inner turmoil of now self-hatred, and then how he completely, to me, turns it around and becomes like an empathic friend and supporter and community member, and it's like, see you [SPEAKER_00]: can be raised the wrong way and still go.

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, that was the wrong choice.

[SPEAKER_00]: But I don't have to now feel guilty or ruin my life on that.

[SPEAKER_00]: I can just be different and be better.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm like, I think we need more characters like that now.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like you're saying exactly to represent, okay, we all made mistakes and we can all be human, but can we at least acknowledge that we made a really big one here?

[SPEAKER_00]: How can we heal and move on as opposed to now just trying to own that mistake?

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you don't have to.

[SPEAKER_00]: You can just go, oh, shit, you're right.

[SPEAKER_00]: I messed up.

[SPEAKER_00]: Let's move on.

[SPEAKER_02]: I was in, I was traveling about recently and I think it was in Washington DC, I had a taxi driver who we were in traffic for a long time and we had a really good conversation.

[SPEAKER_02]: And he recommended this memoir to me by a guy who was basically raised to become the head of the local chapter of the clan.

[SPEAKER_02]: That his dad was in charge of and he was going to be, you know, whatever, the grand gizmo of that.

[SPEAKER_02]: and he had been racist.

[SPEAKER_02]: His whole life for this he was he was groomed for it and his entire community and his childhood he was raised into this deep racism and he traveled.

[SPEAKER_02]: He went he went to college and he specifically went to a liberal leaving college because he wanted to like learn about the enemy and he met a bunch of people at the college and was like oh shit everything that I've learned my whole life is wrong.

[SPEAKER_02]: Like the good for him.

[SPEAKER_02]: Starting with, you know, the specific things I've been told about like the physiology of other people isn't right and then going into does that mean other things aren't true and he basically got deep programed and left the clan and now spends his time reaching out to white supremacists in prison to help rehabilitate them and be like, hey, [SPEAKER_02]: I know why you are where you are because I was there and so he can speak to them from the inside.

[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, we need to be hearing these kinds of stories because as wonderful as this fantasy of killing a bunch of zombies not these is and I enjoyed it a great deal and I am not criticizing it on this level.

[SPEAKER_02]: Like, well, we're going to be jumping past it thinking the other way too.

[SPEAKER_08]: Yeah, we're going to be jumping into glorious violence at a moment.

[SPEAKER_08]: And we opened on like, oh, I want to punch from shit on mad, right?

[SPEAKER_08]: But look how quickly this conversation with a gay man, a trans man and a non-binary friend who are all getting shit on right now already talking about like we don't want to punch that we just want people to rehabilitate and be better.

[SPEAKER_08]: And we can let it be that [SPEAKER_08]: To make it slightly lighter and finishing our tangent here for a moment, I was just at New York Comic-Con.

[SPEAKER_08]: There was a break and standing on a particular street corner waiting for a bus and a crowd of about 50 people was one soul squirrel girl cosplayer.

[SPEAKER_08]: It's the starting of a full squirrel tail.

[SPEAKER_08]: People were staring.

[SPEAKER_08]: I heard people going, oh, that's special.

[SPEAKER_08]: And then I heard someone like, oh, it's not Halloween yet.

[SPEAKER_08]: And I made sure to very loudly say, hey, excellent cosplay, it's just, thank you.

[SPEAKER_08]: It was a really delightful moment for me.

[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, it's probably a good ally, Chad.

[SPEAKER_08]: I will always be a good ally.

[SPEAKER_08]: That's always my top goal.

[SPEAKER_08]: Okay, so we jump back to the world of Marvel zombies, destroy the Ducky doesn't has been assembled.

[SPEAKER_08]: They quickly move into another reality.

[SPEAKER_08]: This is Earth 1, 2, 5, 9, 1.

[SPEAKER_08]: And this is the one where the zombies have taken over everything.

[SPEAKER_08]: Now, if you've ever read the Man in the High Castle, this is the alternate reality where like the Nazis won and now they're trying to invade our reality, you can see that on Amazon Prime, like that book, it's really fleshed out over like four seasons.

[SPEAKER_08]: It's pretty good, but it's dark.

[SPEAKER_08]: So this is very the Nazis trying to take over everything modality once again.

[SPEAKER_08]: In this world, we land on a militarized Mount Rushmore, and all of the heads have been replaced by the worst Nazi characters.

[SPEAKER_08]: We have the hate manga, which is the clone of Adolf Hitler.

[SPEAKER_08]: We have Arnhem Zoller, Luzola, the evil geneticist.

[SPEAKER_08]: We have Baron Strucker, like the military general.

[SPEAKER_08]: And we have the red skull who's like the guy in charge of all the camps, right?

[SPEAKER_08]: Like, this is not a good group of people.

[SPEAKER_08]: They're firing zombie heads in guns at the Ducky dozen aboard the taxi tailored ship.

[SPEAKER_08]: And girl, the lion man, we put a lion man.

[SPEAKER_08]: He's the first one to fall.

[SPEAKER_08]: He gets bitten by a shot zombie head.

[SPEAKER_08]: And then we get a quick [SPEAKER_08]: turn and I'll do this so fast, but we meet the zombie invaders.

[SPEAKER_08]: We got Bucky Barnes and I'm going to just list their debut years, not issues, 1940.

[SPEAKER_08]: The Submariner, 1939.

[SPEAKER_08]: The Wizard, 1941.

[SPEAKER_08]: The Human Torch, the original 1939.

[SPEAKER_08]: Arcus the Vision from 1940.

[SPEAKER_08]: The Destroyer, this is the original Kevin Marlow from 1942.

[SPEAKER_08]: His successor is the incredible queer character Roger Aubry, if you guys have read that character at all.

[SPEAKER_08]: We've got Golden Girl, whose real name is Betsy Ross from at 1941, and then the two outliers here are two characters that debuted in the 70s during the invader series that were set during World War II.

[SPEAKER_08]: That's Spitfire, or Jacqueline Fallsworth, and Union Jack, her brother, and these two characters from the mid 70s but set in the 1940s.

[SPEAKER_08]: So I'm talking a bunch at you.

[SPEAKER_08]: I don't know if you guys are invaders fans.

[SPEAKER_00]: Not a whole lot.

[SPEAKER_00]: I must admit, but mostly because I'm a cave troll and like I honestly this is the most I've read in a while, so thank you Chad.

[SPEAKER_08]: Yeah, I'm going to go this week.

[SPEAKER_08]: Well, if you like it, it's similar vibes, but it's just fun, fun, fun.

[SPEAKER_00]: And that's good.

[SPEAKER_00]: I will say that that was very upset.

[SPEAKER_00]: The girl was one of the first ones to go because I thought girl was one of the coolest and I mean anybody named Girl, I'm going to have a bias for anyway, but like this was that was sad.

[SPEAKER_00]: I was very bummed out and then they just they take them out so easily.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he's just gone.

[SPEAKER_02]: I was really, I was very disappointed.

[SPEAKER_02]: So good, it has this zombie head, and he's eating it, and he's saying like pray, and he's like lions on me voice, and I would read 28 issues of giant zombie lion men.

[SPEAKER_02]: Just saying pray and pray.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's the new pray foam.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's just, there is a zombie.

[SPEAKER_02]: Zombie's got to leave the predator.

[SPEAKER_02]: Would, right, go.

[SPEAKER_08]: Issue two, Red Raven gets set on fire and then bit.

[SPEAKER_08]: Now there was a gag in the previous squadron Supreme version of this where the character, the blue eagle, got like his leg severed.

[SPEAKER_08]: So he was like his zombie head with a pair of wings flying around at people.

[SPEAKER_08]: They almost could have done that with Red Raven here.

[SPEAKER_08]: Dynaman gets fed by evil name or to a zombie squid for reasons, and then we need a team called the suffragettes that I'm going to talk all about them in just a moment.

[SPEAKER_08]: But we also pan over to the Nazi base where there's a painting of four fascists on horses.

[SPEAKER_08]: up on the wall, when they get inside, Dragoon calls it, proto-fascistic propaganda iconography.

[SPEAKER_08]: Think of all these images of like Trump making himself all muscular and like standing majestically in places that's very with the world leader thing to do.

[SPEAKER_08]: They need a former Nazi scientist named Zephyr Zag, who reports that the Nazis have been trying to reach the Norse gods because these are the Aryan gods that are their like ideals.

[SPEAKER_08]: But then there was a llama into bet that gave them the death spore flour from hell that started the zombie contagion.

[SPEAKER_08]: But in the very, like next issue, Peter David's going to read that retcon that because it was Loki tricking them the whole time.

[SPEAKER_08]: Anyway, don't worry about it.

[SPEAKER_08]: That's where we're at with this weird series because it then takes a weird narrative shift.

[SPEAKER_02]: how much I love when you get a bunch of information in a comic that is immediately irrelevant when they're like, hey, you need all this world building sit down, buckle up, get your thinking cap on.

[SPEAKER_02]: Here's all the history, never mind.

[SPEAKER_08]: As the guy who wrote the handbooks, can I tell you how much I fucking hate that?

[SPEAKER_00]: That's fair.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's very fair.

[SPEAKER_08]: Hate with flames on the side of my face.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's very fair.

[SPEAKER_00]: Although I will say for this series, as soon as in this, I guess it's a little bit of spoiler because it's in the next issue.

[SPEAKER_00]: But when Loki came in, I was like, oh, thank God.

[SPEAKER_00]: Because they did they lay down so much plot and I'm like, but wait a minute.

[SPEAKER_00]: You gave me how are the Dug gave me Dug gave me all these crazy characters who you've now like written off in like single panels I mean some of them are just gone immediately and there's no like plot There's no oh my god now so-and-so's is not being we've got to deal with them.

[SPEAKER_00]: They're just gone and I'm like and then But you want me to hold all this information like it's super important [SPEAKER_08]: It was like a comedy beat like the characters giving their big origin story, but their head gets bit off halfway through.

[SPEAKER_00]: Hello Sam Jackson, they just get Sam Jackson.

[SPEAKER_08]: Yeah, it's just not, it's just not effectively delivered to make it a comedic device like I needed to be here.

[SPEAKER_00]: No, no, this was a bit painful when I was like, well, you want me to look at the iconography of the Fort Horseman, but [SPEAKER_08]: like okay you know like there's more like that's nothing that's nothing compared to what Trump has done so come on well still got book I really feel very shy of twin that don't impress me much oh you got zombie Nazis so one moment we have to call out taxi tailored immediately gets kind of harassed for being the girl on the team she then has to be the angry girl in the red beret to stand up for herself a red raven says that wasn't very lady like and then dragoon [SPEAKER_08]: The character that we want to love says I am ex ex chromosome hear me roar question mark and red raven kind of interprets that as oh she wants to fuck me and he's like uh maybe some other time so he's just been shaming another woman and then a dragon lady this whole scene drove me nuts but it's funny question mark how do we feel [SPEAKER_02]: on the same reaction as in it to see me.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm a text chromosome.

[SPEAKER_00]: I was like, let's go another for here.

[SPEAKER_00]: That was the most interesting part of that scene.

[SPEAKER_00]: Was revealing that Dregoon, I was ex ex chromosome.

[SPEAKER_00]: And like otherwise, everything else, I was like, all right, cool.

[SPEAKER_00]: We got the usual misogyny with a one chick casted like, [SPEAKER_00]: Defender self by screaming and then everyone goes oh, but you have the right to do that.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so basically she's also getting permission from others to defend her and I'm just like I'm overly scenes for banter I just because it's it's it's banter space and I'm like you couldn't come up with anything else.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I was too.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, and same with the suffragous, but we'll get there later.

[SPEAKER_08]: Let's talk about the debut of the Mount Rushmore Head of Nazi comic book Supervillins.

[SPEAKER_08]: Sarah Galey, Fuck America, I'm just kidding.

[SPEAKER_08]: What did you think you'd rush more?

[SPEAKER_00]: But also, maybe a little bit.

[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, boy, look, that is going to show up my spine.

[SPEAKER_02]: How are we going to see her early?

[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I, I, not to like put a hat on a hat here, but having a not see, not rush more is pretty on the nose, given that you two are both nodding.

[SPEAKER_02]: So I know that you already know about for trans listeners, like, not rush more is desecration of sacred native land.

[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it was an explicit project of commasation and desecration of the sacred rock formation to make it into American improves ethnography.

[SPEAKER_02]: And so having Nazi heads, I'm like, kind of same same.

[SPEAKER_02]: Like, yes.

[SPEAKER_08]: But it's also a monument to Nazi ideals.

[SPEAKER_08]: Let's put the heads of our leaders up on a mountain while we destroy everything.

[SPEAKER_08]: And then you'll remember us for doing it.

[SPEAKER_08]: Like, that's kind of all it is at the end of the day.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I liked the black rose idea for a second.

[SPEAKER_00]: I thought that was interesting for a second.

[SPEAKER_00]: It was, it was like, oh, cool, we're going on a mission.

[SPEAKER_00]: We're doing this.

[SPEAKER_00]: We're doing this.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like, we're doing an Indiana Jones where there's like this secret mystical item and it's down this thing to the Nazis.

[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, they want it.

[SPEAKER_02]: I don't, I don't mean this in a director way at all.

[SPEAKER_02]: A lot of the issues I was reading it, felt like they were scattering fanfic scenes.

[SPEAKER_02]: Like, there's something like that two X chromosome moment.

[SPEAKER_02]: I'm like, oh, pick that up and write a bunch of fanfiction about that species understanding of science and how they have similar chromosomal structures and chromosomal outcomes to us.

[SPEAKER_02]: And like, what does that mean?

[SPEAKER_02]: Like, yeah, let's go there.

[SPEAKER_02]: Let's go into like, hey, is this, is this creature transmisogenous?

[SPEAKER_02]: Are they biocentulist?

[SPEAKER_02]: But then the comic just goes, yep, right, pass it.

[SPEAKER_08]: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[SPEAKER_08]: And you don't give a shit about anybody except maybe Battlestar.

[SPEAKER_08]: I like him a lot.

[SPEAKER_08]: Battlestar, the former Bucky as I mentioned, says, after they meet the invaders, I can't believe anything would turn Bucky into a Nazi, which I don't even know.

[SPEAKER_08]: And then golden girl sneaks up and gets a moment of eating red ravens full face and he sacrificed him.

[SPEAKER_08]: I don't know.

[SPEAKER_08]: There's some really bizarre moments here like is this a redemptive arc, but then we land on the suffragettes and I know that this full page Whether you liked it or not certainly got your attention.

[SPEAKER_08]: Sarah told us also about that I said the suffragettes the suffragettes excuse me [SPEAKER_02]: Oh boy, the suffrage is, you're right.

[SPEAKER_02]: They did get my attention when they showed up.

[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I really enjoy.

[SPEAKER_02]: I enjoy like a big splashy entrance, right?

[SPEAKER_02]: From any character, I love a big splashy page.

[SPEAKER_02]: I love a splashy panel, but this splash page with them is very like, hey, we're here.

[SPEAKER_02]: And we are women.

[SPEAKER_02]: It just doesn't, it doesn't land for me the way it's supposed to.

[SPEAKER_02]: They're very, you know, they're doing very like [SPEAKER_02]: I was a boxer for a while and I can tell you none of these stances are correct.

[SPEAKER_02]: Like they're they're not ready to fight and they're also not really posing effectively.

[SPEAKER_02]: So it does have that kind of like misogynist undertone of like these just aren't effective heroes.

[SPEAKER_08]: So Miss America is the classic one from the early 1940s.

[SPEAKER_08]: She was she's Madeleine Joyce.

[SPEAKER_08]: This character and wizard from the, with the invaders team, there's a brief arc in the Avengers where they're revealed to be the parents of Pietro and Wanda for a while.

[SPEAKER_08]: So there's a period of time where Pietro and Wanda go by the last name Frank, because Robert Frank, the wizard, was their dad, but then they read Condonol to Magneto, and then not Magneto.

[SPEAKER_08]: It's, it's crazy.

[SPEAKER_08]: We have a character named Riveter here, clearly playing up on Rosie the Riveter.

[SPEAKER_08]: We've got a character named Colombia, and we've got a character named Libertas.

[SPEAKER_08]: And she's dressed like the Statue of Liberty.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's like I agree with you Sarah where of their splash page is them just it's standing there literally Miss America just to the shield and the previous panel to introduce them it's the smallest panel So it doesn't really introduce the shield and then she's holding it in the splash But they're all just standing there posing and defying gravity and it's like but if you're in the middle of an action scene You want to compose this like show that she just threw it [SPEAKER_00]: So the other two already like mid-battle or they're ready to punch or something, you wouldn't just have them standing here in a sunny hero moment.

[SPEAKER_00]: If this was dudes, they would have had them all like mid-about to punch the viewer.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like it's lazy feminism and it's like the go to all the obvious icons of the 40s without, I don't know, like Libertas literally wearing the saturated liberties outfit.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm like, are you serious?

[SPEAKER_00]: And then you just, did you just let Tina's turn name?

[SPEAKER_00]: Is that what you're doing right here?

[SPEAKER_08]: This is a few years before America Chavez shows up who we love, of course, but I kind of wish we could have seen what the original writer would have done with these characters moving on because then we have Peter David jumping in.

[SPEAKER_08]: Issue 3 is the team going in to find the death flower from hell that caused the zombie plague.

[SPEAKER_08]: They get attacked by the zombie valkourier, so Bruno Hill is leading all the women on the flying horses.

[SPEAKER_08]: The scientists get killed, libertas get killed, Loki shows up.

[SPEAKER_08]: There's a whole bunch of fucking zombie as guardians.

[SPEAKER_08]: The final page reveal is the zombie goats of Thor for some reason.

[SPEAKER_08]: Dragoon dies.

[SPEAKER_08]: We went from World War II to Asgard and it's kind of a jarring shift for me if I'm honest, [SPEAKER_08]: Um, let me hear your thoughts on this, but I'd also love to have you comment on the Norse gods being the Aryan ideal for the Nazis, which is somehow crazy to me.

[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so I got a lot to unpack here.

[SPEAKER_00]: I love the zombie balconies.

[SPEAKER_00]: I thought like, this is actually kind of cool.

[SPEAKER_00]: Why can't we follow them?

[SPEAKER_00]: I love the zombie goats.

[SPEAKER_00]: I thought that like, okay, yes.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think Marvel movies may have maybe overused that old old screaming goats.

[SPEAKER_00]: But like seeing them as zombies may be really happy.

[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe I just have a thing for zombie animals because it really is like the horses with the Valkyries.

[SPEAKER_00]: I love seeing zombie-brown-hilled eat the eyes of the supposedly converted Nazi scientists.

[SPEAKER_00]: Not only is it going to trust you, dog.

[SPEAKER_00]: Eat a size.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's great.

[SPEAKER_00]: About Norse gods and the Aryans.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm listening to a podcast right now.

[SPEAKER_00]: Sorry to plug in another one, but last podcast on the left is doing their hymler series.

[SPEAKER_00]: So good.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then the comparisons they're doing to today on even just like the micro social levels of like, hey, did you know hymler kind of started as an insult?

[SPEAKER_00]: And it's just like you watch all these patterns and how everything builds, but apparently he was looking for a mythology that would support Nazism.

[SPEAKER_00]: and like how the earrings are this superior race.

[SPEAKER_00]: So he went to Norse mythology because like they that was like their ancient ancient mythos, but it's like there was a root there.

[SPEAKER_00]: And there is actually a lot of this in real history where it which my brain reading this started to go, oh my god, they're actually tapping into that.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's really cool.

[SPEAKER_00]: Are we going to explore this more?

[SPEAKER_00]: And then they just kind of go, huh, just kidding, it's really because it's all just Loki's plan and then we're gonna write ourselves out of this.

[SPEAKER_00]: But I was actually starting to be like, no, this is actually along the lines of their real superstitions and their real beliefs and let's dive into that because what if they did find a way to make Norse zombie gods?

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I don't know.

[SPEAKER_00]: It isn't interesting alternate reality.

[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I think it's a...

[SPEAKER_02]: really fascinating connection and there's so much meat on the bone of the way that white supremacy across different genres of white supremacy against struggles to construct a heritage framework that will support its ideology as someone who runs and circles that have like spooky which he types in them a lot.

[SPEAKER_02]: You see like a white person who you don't know who has room tattoos and [SPEAKER_02]: because it's so baked in now to like supremacists and neo-nautzy culture that like Norse-Runic symbols are there kind of like dogless little to each other out in the wild.

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, don't take those from us!

[SPEAKER_00]: Come on!

[SPEAKER_00]: It's so delicious!

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm like you can't have that!

[SPEAKER_00]: Stop it!

[SPEAKER_00]: Let me just stop.

[SPEAKER_08]: It issue two when Miss America looks at Dumbdum Dugin.

[SPEAKER_08]: There's a single line.

[SPEAKER_08]: She learns he's American and she says Americans have always had a healthy disregard for unjustly imposed authority.

[SPEAKER_08]: The Nazi headquarters, which is like the secret science lab, I mean, there's a cute little character, but there's just not a lot of payoff and they keep bringing Howard the Duckin as the Captain America, like, role.

[SPEAKER_08]: It's just an odd odd place for this character.

[SPEAKER_08]: He feels so shooting, shoot horned in a little bit.

[SPEAKER_08]: I'm in a kind of sum up the rest quickly and then we're just going to talk about moments and vibes for the rest of this when we get into issue for this is the big revelation that Loki's actually the one that tricked the as guardians and they all got a zombie plague and then spread it across earth, which is now ruined.

[SPEAKER_08]: And then they have to like turn it against them all and like save the day by ending all of the zombies on the end.

[SPEAKER_08]: It's kind of unsatisfying unless it was the payoff from the beginning.

[SPEAKER_08]: You know, like if I knew this was like a zombie store book, I would be reading it very differently.

[SPEAKER_08]: But I'm just kind of like, wait, why?

[SPEAKER_08]: Why didn't Peter David take us here?

[SPEAKER_08]: hear of all places.

[SPEAKER_08]: I don't know.

[SPEAKER_08]: It's trying really hard to give us the vibe that this plague could be contained.

[SPEAKER_08]: But we're going to talk about some of the themes here.

[SPEAKER_08]: There's some weird moments like the empty box.

[SPEAKER_02]: And there's like a nuke.

[SPEAKER_02]: We've got a great gag with going into a big refrigerator to survive the nuke, which is of course an Indiana Jones joke.

[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I thought the ending was, I thought it was fine.

[SPEAKER_02]: I thought that it was a wild ride.

[SPEAKER_02]: I thought that the reveal that Steve Rogers has been right Captain America has been being stored in this refrigerator to be slowly eaten over time.

[SPEAKER_02]: Was a really good horpy similar to the eyeballs getting plucked out in eaten when I read that.

[SPEAKER_02]: I was like, now that's pod racing.

[SPEAKER_02]: Like we are moving.

[SPEAKER_02]: And I really love the brain and a jar kind of, [SPEAKER_08]: I knew the body horror of that scene, particularly it would be your favorite.

[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, he, he has somebody break open the jar and then his brain expands to the godlike size.

[SPEAKER_02]: It's supposed to be in order to be one of the most interesting brain in the world.

[SPEAKER_02]: Stay hungry, my friend.

[SPEAKER_02]: And all those zombies are climbing on this giant brain going, oh, I want to eat this brain.

[SPEAKER_02]: I want to eat this brain so everyone else gets to get away.

[SPEAKER_02]: That was super fun and I really enjoyed it.

[SPEAKER_02]: I did not so much enjoy the way this is narrative while engaging with the refrigerator bridges one of the female characters to be like oh she's sacrificing herself by writing a nuke and knowing that she's making a noble sacrifice because it's like I'm sorry these are super heroes you can jump off high stuff like what since [SPEAKER_08]: it is not a necessary death.

[SPEAKER_08]: It does give a little bit of energy to all of those old images of like world war two girls like writing a rocket, you know, like the, like, it's like very foul.

[SPEAKER_08]: Like, you guys know what I'm talking about, those little like problems.

[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, the pin-up, the pin-up art.

[SPEAKER_08]: But she just doesn't.

[SPEAKER_08]: She just didn't have to die.

[SPEAKER_08]: It seems unnecessary.

[SPEAKER_08]: I love the art through hope that all of this series, but the way Howard the duck's head is drawn at the end really bugged me too.

[SPEAKER_08]: He goes like a little fluffy duck thing on the side.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's kind of jarring, I thought the fridge was so dumb.

[SPEAKER_00]: I was just, but then it kind of tracked with the series of just like, how do we get out of this?

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I guess we could go into this fridge because those are clear proof.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm like, we cannot use the logic of an Indian and Jones film that they have not seen.

[SPEAKER_00]: But I also, and maybe that was because they were led line back then.

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know if that was like the stereotype running in the 40s.

[SPEAKER_00]: But it just felt like you are superheroes and we're surviving this inside a fridge.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like, I just, I didn't get it.

[SPEAKER_00]: I had a hard time tracking it.

[SPEAKER_00]: I also had a hard time tracking a little bit of some of the beats in the art because I didn't realize that that was zombie Thor and zombie dug in like evaporated in one panel.

[SPEAKER_00]: And it's cool.

[SPEAKER_00]: I guess it's like the way it started.

[SPEAKER_00]: It just ends.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I was like, all right.

[SPEAKER_00]: I guess we're done here.

[SPEAKER_08]: but also maybe Captain America still is on be at the end.

[SPEAKER_08]: To be continued, question mark.

[SPEAKER_02]: And that was like, you know, I really like.

[SPEAKER_02]: I love a dot dot dot, question mark after the end.

[SPEAKER_02]: I'm not here for a smart time.

[SPEAKER_02]: I'm here for a good, dumb time.

[SPEAKER_02]: And so I love, I love to the fridge, because I was like, yeah, we're not going to begin these days.

[SPEAKER_02]: They ate the brains.

[SPEAKER_02]: There's none of those left for writing the rest of this.

[SPEAKER_08]: So I'm going to ask you both a couple of complex but simple questions.

[SPEAKER_08]: First of all, what did you find satisfying about this series as a comics fan?

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I always love a good random team up of minor characters so you haven't really seen before.

[SPEAKER_00]: I like highlighting characters.

[SPEAKER_00]: You don't get to see often.

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know that this was it.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, yeah, I think the eternal brain got the coolest moment in which is awesome.

[SPEAKER_00]: But like otherwise, everybody else didn't really have a payoff in my opinion.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like a lot of the deaths were so like, I'm going to sacrifice myself into this train tunnel and I'm just like, [SPEAKER_00]: Okay, like, splat.

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.

[SPEAKER_00]: It was, it was interesting.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think Loki was interesting and I do think that the ties to the actual area in Belize were trying to find a mythos.

[SPEAKER_00]: I was, I was like, I'm digging that there's actual some real dumbness in this, like actual factual dumbness.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then, of course, I think the classic of seeing red skull have a speech to all the Nazi zombies and it's still just as dumb as any real speech, where [SPEAKER_00]: It's like, where are we going?

[SPEAKER_00]: Another earth when real soon.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm like, it's gotta be the dumbest group of people I've ever.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm like, good, accurate.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I mean, that was kind of fun to just get like the, look, even though there's zombies, they're still dumb as shit, guys.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, [SPEAKER_08]: There's a moment I forgets a highlight where Bucky is climbing up after Miss America and she is the human and he's the zombie but she bites his hand off to make him fall there's like this kind of like I will be savage if I have to defeat you your mother fucker and I'll die if I have to defeat you as well because fuck you fuck you fuck you right like that kind of message is satisfying in its way.

[SPEAKER_02]: I didn't expect to feel his way, but I actually found the lettering very satisfying at certain points.

[SPEAKER_02]: I really didn't like the zombie lettering when I first started reading because I found it difficult to read.

[SPEAKER_02]: And then as I acclimated to it, there was this moment where Dundam is seeking in undercover as zombie version of him.

[SPEAKER_02]: himself.

[SPEAKER_02]: And he shows up and someone says, oh, I'm not going to be going to be going to expect you back so soon.

[SPEAKER_02]: And he says, yeah, I'm back soon.

[SPEAKER_02]: And he's still speaking in his normal voice.

[SPEAKER_02]: So he has standard alive person lettering.

[SPEAKER_02]: And the zombie says, what's wrong with your voice?

[SPEAKER_02]: And he goes, I had a problem.

[SPEAKER_02]: I throw it and it changes to the zombie letters.

[SPEAKER_02]: I really like that.

[SPEAKER_02]: I like when there's a lot of playfulness in letters.

[SPEAKER_02]: And so I really enjoyed that.

[SPEAKER_02]: And I found a couple of the body horror moments very satisfying, right?

[SPEAKER_02]: Like, zombies the war gets his intestines ripped out and then uses them to garot, Loki, really fun, very, very, like, cool visual, very yvokken in.

[SPEAKER_02]: And of course, the brain that just that I was cracking up as I was reading that watching this brain expand and realizing that this was just a zombie to want to eat brains moment.

[SPEAKER_02]: I really enjoyed.

[SPEAKER_08]: The color is gorgeous, the letters are gorgeous, most of the art is really satisfying, and you kind of have to wonder what the disruption of the creative team did.

[SPEAKER_08]: I almost wish we would have reviewed Marvel zombies supreme instead, because it's more fun as but the topic this month being fascism.

[SPEAKER_08]: It's a really interesting thing in my brain to consider Naziism or fascism as like a zombie plague and suddenly everybody's just a mindless hoard slobbering for the consumption of everything that is different, right?

[SPEAKER_08]: If we're putting it in a particular way, this is a bizarre genre of public culture.

[SPEAKER_08]: I wanted to make room for this kind of conversation on the show.

[SPEAKER_08]: If we read this as a horror book versus as a comedy book, let me hear some of your thoughts.

[SPEAKER_08]: because it doesn't quite hit war genre or superhero genre, like it wants to, you know, there has to be absurdist comedy or a very, very tongue-in-cheek horror.

[SPEAKER_02]: It certainly does not land for me as comedy.

[SPEAKER_02]: The whole series, I think, is lacking in punchlines of any kind.

[SPEAKER_02]: I think, you know, narratively, you can have like a horror punchline and action punchlines something that is set up and then has to pay off in that really particular, [SPEAKER_02]: snap kind of way.

[SPEAKER_02]: And it does definitely does not deliver on a comedy level that way.

[SPEAKER_02]: I don't even know there are some good jokes.

[SPEAKER_02]: It's not a comedy book to me.

[SPEAKER_02]: As a horror book, I would say if I was going to be giving notes, I don't think we want to steer this more horror.

[SPEAKER_02]: How do you do that?

[SPEAKER_02]: I would say it needs more focus and more more time to breathe because horror has to get a chance to settle in [SPEAKER_02]: to you in order to be effective and nothing really gets to settle in here.

[SPEAKER_02]: It's part of why that last panel, I think, is quite effective for her because you get to take a beat with this, you know, slowly devour version of Captain America and then you get just the focus on the eyeball.

[SPEAKER_02]: But as as it's a little too frenetic to succeed in any of those genres, I think.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I agree, it feels like a chaotic dance, which I think when you kind of just go in and go, okay, this is just for fun.

[SPEAKER_00]: So to me, it still is kind of a history horror.

[SPEAKER_00]: It just moves too fast and has too much content to actually lend itself to any genre.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like, it's not, it doesn't, [SPEAKER_00]: actually feel like the goal was to tell a story here.

[SPEAKER_00]: It actually feel like the goal was just to be kind of silly and throw in as many like zombie nods Because as many characters as zombies as we could it was kind of cool to see like Odin as like the head zombie.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean [SPEAKER_00]: It's a lot of fun and I think that that was their goal because I think that there's actually a lot of punchlines in this but none of them land because there's no setup.

[SPEAKER_00]: There's no time for setup and actually it kind of got tedious where every line would almost be a comeback like are you are you happy?

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm never happy.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's like okay, yes, but in this moment right now when we're talking about zombies taking over like completely I'm like all of you are just throwing one lineers at each other constant [SPEAKER_00]: play and it was a bit like I don't know what your tone is like do you want me to take you seriously because Howard wants me to take this seriously which is ironic or do you want me to roll with this and have fun because you guys are supposed to have fun then?

[SPEAKER_08]: I either I either needed to care about the deadly dozen or the ducky dozen at an more extreme degree and watch it be a strong payoff for character stories.

[SPEAKER_08]: If it was the ducky dozen versus the zombie invaders with this kind of Mount Rushmore skull [SPEAKER_08]: When it takes the Asgard turn, that's where I just get baffled.

[SPEAKER_08]: We start with that kind of Norse ideal.

[SPEAKER_08]: So I'm looking for themes here.

[SPEAKER_08]: We opened up on Dum Dum Dugans dream.

[SPEAKER_08]: The weight of body is as he climbs over them, right?

[SPEAKER_08]: The, the wise and soldier.

[SPEAKER_08]: We then go to this other reality where the Nazi ideals took over when they turned [SPEAKER_08]: to their Aryan gods, and then the idea spread like a plague until it destroyed the planet, and now it's trying to invade ours.

[SPEAKER_08]: Okay, so we got a fight back, we got a punch back, we got to do something very strong.

[SPEAKER_08]: I suppose that story is there, and then we end on, if we parallel this to the opening dream sequence, the Captain America zombie had like, is the plague still there at America?

[SPEAKER_08]: But I don't think any of these ideas were intended.

[SPEAKER_02]: You know, zombies are a very classic way for us to use media to examine our contemporary fears, right?

[SPEAKER_02]: Zombie media has been used to look at, I'm sorry, I have to put this cat up through my don't know if you're hearing her squeaky little meow in the background, but she's deciding that now is the moment.

[SPEAKER_02]: So I'm not here.

[SPEAKER_08]: I'm sure she's adorable.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, because they've always represented whatever our modern kind of [SPEAKER_00]: disease fear fears are and I think that people are especially in to understand that ideas can be diseases as well.

[SPEAKER_00]: Thoughts can be can be spread.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think it was a Kurt Bonnegut.

[SPEAKER_00]: He said that like an idea can can spread and be a terrifying thing as well.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's like the power of words.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think that using using zombies as an idea of spreading fascism is exactly right.

[SPEAKER_00]: because there's not a lot of brain process being used there, but there is a lot of it's spreading, it's fear-based.

[SPEAKER_02]: I think it's really solid and very flexible as an analogy, right?

[SPEAKER_02]: It's like zombies have been communist, zombies have been ways for like full military industrial complex people to justify the way we treat people around the world by saying this terrorism is like zombies.

[SPEAKER_02]: And we've used it to mean a lot of different things because ultimately I think a zombie is someone who's doing something [SPEAKER_02]: cannot comprehend the motivation for.

[SPEAKER_02]: And so, you know, as someone who, as we discussed earlier, I try really hard to consider rehabilitation when it comes to people in high control groups, right?

[SPEAKER_02]: I'm struggling right now to find that compassion and that perspective for people who work for rights in the US.

[SPEAKER_02]: And as I was reading this, I was thinking, oh, that feels like that feels like a [SPEAKER_02]: threading in a way that doesn't make any sense and feels unnecessary and like why can't we just make this stop, why can't we just shut it down?

[SPEAKER_02]: It's like it's like some kind of invasion and it really speaks to that kind of uncomprehending horror.

[SPEAKER_00]: But it's also interesting that you bring up ice because it's it's it's going to be interesting when we start studying what's really going on there too.

[SPEAKER_00]: because some people are joining because they're told they'll get $50,000 for signing up.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, so there are people also being, I mean, because this has always been the wage gap, it's always been one of the biggest problems, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: So there are people kind of being forced in this position of, well, they're promising me more than I'm making a year for just that.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I think that they were promising you get it afterwards, so everyone's laughing and going, yeah, right, you think Trump is actually going to pay you afterwards.

[SPEAKER_00]: But it's interesting.

[SPEAKER_08]: I think speaking sociologically, I mean, let me just interject quickly.

[SPEAKER_08]: If we are using a rubric to measure something, how do you measure something like culpability?

[SPEAKER_08]: And you could only measure culpability by the results of something.

[SPEAKER_08]: So how do you measure those results, right?

[SPEAKER_08]: And I think that comes down to a conversation where all kind of having, and I like that my show gets to go to these intellectual places too, how do you define what a fascist looks like?

[SPEAKER_08]: People on the far right are saying it's not fair that we're calling it fascism.

[SPEAKER_08]: And I think if we go back to World War II, there were the soldiers on the front lines, there were the guards at the camps.

[SPEAKER_08]: there were the people stealing the homes and the businesses, right?

[SPEAKER_08]: There were the active people, and then there were the soldiers that got signed up and found themselves in impossible circumstances.

[SPEAKER_08]: There were the white civilians who were just trying to get by and do their jobs, but they also weren't speaking up or making change.

[SPEAKER_08]: At a certain point no matter where you're out on that culpability scale, the lion draws farther and farther to the left.

[SPEAKER_08]: where anybody who's in the middle had a certain point becomes culpable at various degrees.

[SPEAKER_08]: You look at something like the Nuremberg trials when they're trying to hand out sentences for people who've committed heinous workrimes, and they're just not just or consistent, but how do you prove something like that?

[SPEAKER_08]: So there's obvious it's easy because it's just slattering people looking for brains.

[SPEAKER_08]: We don't have to make it anymore complicated.

[SPEAKER_08]: And this is a huge part of our X-Men comics always, which is going back to the theme of my show.

[SPEAKER_08]: Magneto has survived this particular atrocity very directly, which is what fuels him to not want to see history repeat itself.

[SPEAKER_08]: Operation Zero tolerance and the purifiers and registration acts that are like these are the themes we see very consistently.

[SPEAKER_08]: this is kind of what we're fighting against at the end of the day and it's uh it's a crazy thing to consider.

[SPEAKER_00]: It is and this is why we love our media though because ideally then it's raising all of us to realize that these problems exist even if we put a different name on it like mutants that this still exists and what I want to show people is well how do we combat that and move forward?

[SPEAKER_00]: and not combat necessarily violently, but how do we, how do you put out positive messages out there that you don't have to be the zombie?

[SPEAKER_00]: You don't have to follow into that hoard due to whatever reason.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you have racism in your family, like, can you be an outside thinker?

[SPEAKER_00]: Can you find other voices to listen to?

[SPEAKER_00]: Can you not be in the echo chamber?

[SPEAKER_00]: So I just think that it's it's good to have media then and people like Sarah who are out there writing stories who can be like, but what about this?

[SPEAKER_00]: What about rehabilitation?

[SPEAKER_00]: Or what about believing in the greater [SPEAKER_00]: So glad we have them.

[SPEAKER_02]: I think there's two really valuable things and one of the valuable things is the fantasy of the zombie fascist toward which has, you know, like you said, had easy to identify and then there's one answer to zombie fascists and it's kills a zombie fascist.

[SPEAKER_02]: You can't undo them being zombies and so they got a die or else they're going to turn everyone into zombies and [SPEAKER_02]: We don't have to deal with the complexities in the Nuremberg tile.

[SPEAKER_02]: We don't have to deal with the complexities of like, oh, there's some scientists in there who are military ones.

[SPEAKER_02]: Like, do we decide to just erase the history?

[SPEAKER_02]: We don't have to deal with, like, extradition.

[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, we get to just go, okay, kill them.

[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, even this comic, this comic involves a fantasy of a nuke being justified of a nuclear weapon being a valuable good idea.

[SPEAKER_02]: to use because it's zombie fascists and so it's like that fantasy is valuable.

[SPEAKER_02]: It's entertaining.

[SPEAKER_02]: It's satisfying.

[SPEAKER_02]: It lets us engage with this in a much simpler way.

[SPEAKER_02]: And then there is the valuable work of, you know, things like when I'm at creates two, which is, hey, we have to look at these complexities.

[SPEAKER_02]: We have to look at the possibilities that are so endless when you're dealing with actual human people.

[SPEAKER_02]: And I think those both have their place.

[SPEAKER_02]: I think that when we try to say that one or the other is not valuable or not useful, we limit ourselves in unnecessary ways.

[SPEAKER_02]: I did have a blast reading this.

[SPEAKER_08]: Luke's can't be necessary.

[SPEAKER_08]: Just as long as they are ridden by women.

[SPEAKER_02]: Who?

[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_08]: I'm just kidding.

[SPEAKER_02]: You have to make sure.

[SPEAKER_08]: I value the two of you very much, you know this conversation for me started a long time back we were doing some Captain America stories with the secret empire in them and it's a watergate parody written in the 1970s by Steve Englehart and I really started to go okay hang on this is the barometer for evil in every comic book I've ever read.

[SPEAKER_08]: And then, you know, Cap's Punch and Hitler on the very first Marvel comic, you start to realize every one of our heroes is the atomic age born out of World War II.

[SPEAKER_08]: Like everything I've ever read and consumed has been influenced and the barometer for evil in every comic book has always been fascists.

[SPEAKER_08]: That's the guy that you could know is wrong.

[SPEAKER_08]: Now occasionally they give him the focal point, right?

[SPEAKER_08]: He becomes the protagonist somehow in certain stories.

[SPEAKER_08]: He does horrible things and we celebrate it because it's villainy.

[SPEAKER_08]: But when it's fascism blatantly, then it becomes very, very apparent on the page.

[SPEAKER_08]: And the zombie apocalypse is one particular view of all of that.

[SPEAKER_02]: My final thoughts are just this little blast.

[SPEAKER_02]: Always wonderful to be on the show, Ted.

[SPEAKER_02]: And it's fantastic to me, you, this was nice.

[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I mean, for all the critique that of this comic, it was a hoot to read.

[SPEAKER_02]: I did not have an unpleasant time with it.

[SPEAKER_02]: In terms of stuff to plug, I will plug my, I know that just came out, it's called.

[SPEAKER_02]: spread me and it is an erotic horror take on John Carpenter's The Thing.

[SPEAKER_02]: It just came out and if you want something not too long, spooky and a little bit spicy to read, it is available everywhere books are sold.

[SPEAKER_02]: I will also plug for anyone listening to this who works in publishing or is a [SPEAKER_02]: writer, authors against bookbands, and publishing professionals against bookbands are two organizations that are fighting, actively fighting bookbending legislation on the ground right now, often successfully.

[SPEAKER_02]: If you're looking for a way to get involved, you've been listening to this conversation about fascism and feeling helpless.

[SPEAKER_02]: It is a great place to start, but also encourage anyone listening to this to look into your local ice rapid response teams, which often have trainings available for you in terms of how to de-escalate situations, [SPEAKER_02]: legally helpful and useful to people who are being abducted on the streets right now.

[SPEAKER_02]: They are local.

[SPEAKER_02]: They're in your area.

[SPEAKER_02]: What's them up?

[SPEAKER_02]: Find them.

[SPEAKER_02]: There are things that you can do.

[SPEAKER_02]: I know what Gary, but you're brave.

[SPEAKER_00]: No, that's awesome.

[SPEAKER_00]: You are such a hero.

[SPEAKER_00]: I love this.

[SPEAKER_00]: I love this group of people.

[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you, Chad.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I love meeting you, Sarah.

[SPEAKER_00]: You're so awesome.

[SPEAKER_00]: Also so is your cat.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I can be found on Instagram, Robotic Marble, otherwise I try to be a cave troll and not do much.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm right now just trying to process the world by drawing, which is nice.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think otherwise in general, this was a great series to read because I think it's just fun to be able to, [SPEAKER_00]: Turn off your brain for a bit and just enjoy watching good guys beat bad guys, but it's always fuck ice.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I think you can you can do this matter things and follow Sarah saying and actually get involved, which I think is wonderful.

[SPEAKER_00]: I have apps and I have gone to courses like know your rights is very important.

[SPEAKER_00]: So find your local know your rights, but in general, fuck guys.

[SPEAKER_08]: I know as queer people in America right now, we're just doing our best, so however you are protesting, whether that is loudly, whether that is softly, whether that's just taking care of you in this crazy world, create joy, find your safe path, these are crazy times.

[SPEAKER_08]: I know it sounds really heavy, but it is really heavy.

[SPEAKER_08]: So we get to laugh and be serious at the same time.

[SPEAKER_08]: That's where my show went this year because it's where I'm at.

[SPEAKER_08]: And I did that's the journey I needed to take.

[SPEAKER_08]: So grateful for both of you.

[SPEAKER_08]: We're going to round out the month over on the Patreon channel.

[SPEAKER_08]: We have some focused conversations about fascism.

[SPEAKER_08]: We're ending the month with the characters, Masterman and Warrior Woman.

[SPEAKER_08]: And then we're closing out the month with the trial of Baron Zemo.

[SPEAKER_08]: If you guys remember Helmet Zemo, the son of the Nazi work criminal who went on to lead the Thunderbolts.

[SPEAKER_08]: That's where we're wrapping up the month.

[SPEAKER_08]: It'll be Zaney and Silly and also series.

[SPEAKER_08]: So I hope you guys are enjoying this journey with me.

[SPEAKER_08]: Thank you everyone for your ongoing support.

[SPEAKER_08]: Thank you to Emma.

[SPEAKER_08]: Thank you to Sarah.

[SPEAKER_08]: We'll see you all back here next time on The Grimalk and Lane Show.

[SPEAKER_08]: And now stay tuned for some thoughts on fascism, as a special guest tonight talked about a red skull story and its modern applications.

[SPEAKER_08]: It'll fit there's early rhetoric about leadership.

[SPEAKER_08]: Was rooted in criticism of weakness and fragmentation in that post-World War One Germany, if I'm our Republic we keep talking about.

[SPEAKER_08]: In the chaotic early years of this institution, he rallied against parliamentary democracy, coalition governments, and bureaucratic inefficiency, blaming Germany's humiliation, on leaders who compromised rather than acted decisively.

[SPEAKER_08]: In speeches and early writings, Hitler argued that only a single unified authority could restore strength to the nation.

[SPEAKER_08]: He admired the strict chain of command [SPEAKER_07]: One man must give the orders and better responsibility.

[SPEAKER_08]: At this stage, his vision was at a streamlined, militaristic state with a strong leader serving as the voice of the people and enforcer of national will.

[SPEAKER_08]: Or at least that's how it seems to the public.

[SPEAKER_08]: During the 1920s, especially while imprisoned after that failed Beer Hall push, Hitler's ideas begin to shift from simple critique to prophetic self-identification.

[SPEAKER_08]: In my income, by the way, our, for example, he described himself as a man guided by fate.

[SPEAKER_07]: I believe that I have been chosen by Providence to lead the German people to victory.

[SPEAKER_08]: His language grew increasingly messianic, framing himself not just as a political figure but as a savior of a suffering nation.

[SPEAKER_08]: The Nazi party was recognized as a re-organized around this principle of personal loyalty, the Fiora Princehip, where every member swore obedience directly to Hitler.

[SPEAKER_08]: It's where's the Fielty?

[SPEAKER_08]: Through propaganda, rallies and ritual, he cultivated the image of a redeemer figure who would bring about Germany's rebirth with followers speaking of him as the instrument of provenance.

[SPEAKER_08]: Once in power after 1933 Hitler initially centralized the authority, fulfilling his early promise to eliminate inefficiency and factionalism.

[SPEAKER_08]: meaning breaking into factions.

[SPEAKER_08]: The enabling act allowed him to rule by decree, opposition parties were banned, and regional governments were dissolved into a single national hierarchy.

[SPEAKER_08]: Hitler now embodied the state itself, expressed in the slogan, I invoke, I'm Reich, I'm Führer, or one people, one empire, one leader.

[SPEAKER_08]: However, as his personal dominance grew, Hitler deliberately fractured his own government, [SPEAKER_08]: by issuing vague directives and encouraging subordinates to work toward the fearer, quote, unquote.

[SPEAKER_08]: He maintained absolute control while fostering competition and chaos among those below him.

[SPEAKER_08]: And those who disappointed him, it was usually death or imprisonment.

[SPEAKER_08]: Not only for them, but often for their entire families or organizations.

[SPEAKER_08]: By the later years of the Third Reich, Hitler's image had grown fully inflated into a god-like figure replacing traditional sources of authority, such as the church and monarchy.

[SPEAKER_08]: His birthday was celebrated as a national holiday, his portrait hung in every home in school, his speeches staged like religious ceremonies.

[SPEAKER_08]: He had once condemned Germany's old leaders for weakness and disorder, but his own rule had become more chaotic than the system he replaced.

[SPEAKER_08]: As the war turned against Germany, Hitler spoke of himself in a pocalyptic terms, framing his survival and actions as divinely ordained.

[SPEAKER_08]: In his final days, he cast himself as a martyr, misunderstood by the world, a tragic Messiah whose death would redeem the German nation, a stark evolution from the early critic who had once promised clarity and renewal.

[SPEAKER_08]: Now we're going to take that story, these will melt together, I promise.

[SPEAKER_08]: But we're about to talk about maybe the weirdest fucking Marvel comics that story that I've ever read.

[SPEAKER_08]: That is really saying something, friends.

[SPEAKER_08]: I have never read this four-issue Marvel UK imprint before.

[SPEAKER_08]: And wow, wow, we're going to talk about it.

[SPEAKER_08]: My dear friend Christian Smith is here.

[SPEAKER_08]: We're going to let me review and then we'll discuss, because this was a fucking ride.

[SPEAKER_08]: In die cut, D.I.E.

[SPEAKER_08]: Hife and C.U.T.

[SPEAKER_08]: Numbers 1 through 4 and this is a character that existed before.

[SPEAKER_08]: limited series.

[SPEAKER_08]: We're just going to focus on the crazy.

[SPEAKER_08]: I'm not worried about it.

[SPEAKER_08]: It's the weirdest parts of X-Men chronology amplified, but with 90s art.

[SPEAKER_08]: That's all you need.

[SPEAKER_08]: Okay, so the Red School has funded an aim offshoot program called Project Manmaker designed to experiment on technology and the human genome to create superweapons.

[SPEAKER_08]: The lead scientist claimed, we follow the chaos theory and believe that we can only create the best in man if we prepare to unleash the worse.

[SPEAKER_08]: We take one promising individual and unlock the whole spectrum of their potential.

[SPEAKER_08]: The chaotic forces of creation will naturally produce many apparent failures, but we will also hit astounding peaks of human potential, begin a new race of human gods, and their first test subject, by the way, fucking surprised it's Henry McCoy the Beast, I've never had this story before.

[SPEAKER_08]: So the beast is like genetically copied, and then they release a bunch of copies that are all different versions of him, almost like they're from parallel realities, and they call this group the beast swarm, they're each mutations of the beast in some capacity, some are monsters, some have big craniums, some speak in like obnoxious alliteration, one is fully human, and the one with the most evolutionary evolutionary potential, the most savage, calls himself the ex beast, which I think is Christian's name in porn.

[SPEAKER_08]: The group also captured the alien warrior.

[SPEAKER_08]: Your die cut, who is, don't worry about it.

[SPEAKER_08]: Again, a loony and warrior named Cisorn Gisorn, who is kind of like a death's head derivative.

[SPEAKER_08]: They bring a die cut aboard their mobile base, called the Swarm Center, where he meets their weird agent, the Idsister, and I'm just gonna let you look her up on your own because I don't want to, to explain it.

[SPEAKER_08]: So the Idsister, that's all you need.

[SPEAKER_08]: So DICOT was programmed to be one of the, like, contours in this man-man-maker group's call squad, but he turned against them, and they end up on a secret Greek island where the Nazis have established a place called Cycladia.

[SPEAKER_08]: where they have produced a super group of Aryan super beings that read school considers to be gods.

[SPEAKER_08]: And all of the man-maker rejects get dumped in a place on the side of the island that's just called the dump.

[SPEAKER_08]: Like, it's just like all the rejects.

[SPEAKER_08]: So some of the rejects are cerebral beast.

[SPEAKER_08]: So cerebral, this is Hank McCoy of the huge cranium, and there's also someone named Severe, who is a dump version of it'sister.

[SPEAKER_08]: I'm truly skipping over a bunch.

[SPEAKER_08]: We don't even know the red skulls involved until right at the end.

[SPEAKER_08]: He's behind all of this, and he gets a snazzy green jumpsuit with huge shoulder pads.

[SPEAKER_08]: We jumped issue four, which is finally the red skull component.

[SPEAKER_07]: We are like you and I, none of the swans humanity to be a race of weaklings, and you know the saying, you can't make an armulate without killing [SPEAKER_07]: My man-maker sciences are putting together a society of gods, mentally and physically superior to humans.

[SPEAKER_07]: It's their destiny to rule, gradually they're learning about the world.

[SPEAKER_07]: It won't belong before its folly, its weakness comes to apparel them, they will recognize their superiority.

[SPEAKER_07]: And with my vision to guide them, we will see the dawn of the New Ily, I will be the godfather of a true master race.

[SPEAKER_08]: The Red Skull prepares to kill the other creations, including its in-sister and ex-beast.

[SPEAKER_08]: And if things weren't crazy already, suddenly we have a psychic monster who's a different version of the Edcister, called the Cron, this comes out of nowhere.

[SPEAKER_08]: I think it's supposed to, you know, wait, she attacks and makes everyone very like psychically afraid.

[SPEAKER_08]: And Redskill says, do you expect the Redskans to be destroyed by fear?

[SPEAKER_08]: Fear is my tool or my trade, my science.

[SPEAKER_08]: Desperate for power, the Redskill tries asserting his dominance over the creations he likes, which are the pretty blonde people.

[SPEAKER_08]: But they laugh in his face.

[SPEAKER_08]: They see themselves as elevated over him.

[SPEAKER_08]: How could you be our leader?

[SPEAKER_07]: We have evolved beyond you, we're superior in every way.

[SPEAKER_07]: Redscore says, you're rejecting me?

[SPEAKER_07]: You can't, you are made to share my vision.

[SPEAKER_06]: And the girl once says, look honey, I mean, mankind evolved from slime, but that's no reason to carry it around in a bucket and wash a bit.

[SPEAKER_08]: And in a moment of fury, the Redscore flips a switch destroys all of the creations, including the new gods and the ex-beast and all the people in the dump.

[SPEAKER_08]: It seems that once again, Man has proved himself superior to God, he says, as he flies away.

[SPEAKER_08]: Okay, this fucking story.

[SPEAKER_08]: Uh, so let me welcome my dear friend Christian.

[SPEAKER_08]: Thank you for sitting through that long, long preamble.

[SPEAKER_08]: Uh, Christiansmith, are you a red skull fan?

[SPEAKER_01]: I have a fan of the things that he causes in other characters.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I really couldn't think of any red skull stories.

[SPEAKER_01]: I've really read and remember to part of Magneto and red skull.

[SPEAKER_01]: And there was actually the one that I've probably read the most is when he basically gets Captain America killed the brew baker up and that's probably my favorite brew captain America run any And for oh yeah actually he does he's more of a chaos to go but that brings out the best We're going we're going chronologically so we're in 1994 here we will come up to that bro We are in 1994 with this [SPEAKER_08]: Okay, so Chad asks you read Dica 134 and your thought is, what the hell is this?

[SPEAKER_01]: First of all, I've never heard of it.

[SPEAKER_01]: Never heard of the character.

[SPEAKER_01]: Looked it up while you were talking to be about it as what the hell is this?

[SPEAKER_01]: The fact that it was Marvel UK and I've never heard of it either, it was just yeah, but and then I've read it.

[SPEAKER_01]: Honestly, I think between you and I in the last week, we've probably read it more than anyone else in the last three years.

[SPEAKER_08]: Yeah, I had, I don't have to do this often because I like to take notes and I have notes, I had to read like three times.

[SPEAKER_08]: I mean, the book is happening.

[SPEAKER_01]: The first time I had no clue.

[SPEAKER_01]: I could not, I did not have to look up with your articles.

[SPEAKER_01]: They explained what was going on.

[SPEAKER_01]: So like I've understand it the second time I read it.

[SPEAKER_08]: The whole entire, I swear, the entire issue is missing, at least.

[SPEAKER_08]: The artist on this is someone named Bernard Castodio, I know nothing about Bernard.

[SPEAKER_08]: The writer is Glen Dock, and who I know a little about.

[SPEAKER_08]: But, you know, this is just the thing in the 90s.

[SPEAKER_08]: You read like any fantastic four, X-Men in the 90s.

[SPEAKER_08]: The art gets crazy blocky.

[SPEAKER_08]: The characters are huge.

[SPEAKER_08]: The plot gets kind of lost in between massive images of muscley people, you know?

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, once I realized that this character came out, that's had to make a little more sense.

[SPEAKER_01]: Because that [SPEAKER_01]: was not a death set I liked.

[SPEAKER_01]: But you might, I ended up having to go back and read the deaths had to die out many years, to understand who the hell these characters are.

[SPEAKER_08]: So if we focus on the themes this series is trying to throw at us, it is the idea that man is capable of all different kinds of things.

[SPEAKER_08]: We take the character Henry McCoy and we put him in the genetic blender and we watch what pops out.

[SPEAKER_08]: And the one that is the greatest is the one that should survive, right?

[SPEAKER_08]: But the others should be cast to the side.

[SPEAKER_08]: That's kind of the man maker mythology.

[SPEAKER_08]: I know you were surprised to see the beast here because I was too.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that was a big piece story.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's not because he's not in it, he's your man.

[SPEAKER_01]: He just kind of, he gets your memory wiped and then sent off of panel as well.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's the other part.

[SPEAKER_01]: But I mean, this is postage of apocalypse where the dark beast doesn't actually have it.

[SPEAKER_08]: Speaks, it's craziness.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's the dark beast, the the Krakawama Koi, turned into a cannibal and just let loose.

[SPEAKER_01]: It was, what the hell is going on here?

[SPEAKER_01]: I have to go back.

[SPEAKER_01]: couple of times like, where is beast?

[SPEAKER_01]: He's just disappeared.

[SPEAKER_01]: Obviously he's just been subbacked for no memory.

[SPEAKER_01]: So he's been wandering around for 30 years with no memory that he was kidnapped and cross time-capred multiple times.

[SPEAKER_08]: We've got the beast, then we've got the in-sister who's another version, right?

[SPEAKER_08]: Like the fully realized version of her is this like chrome psychic that like devour [SPEAKER_01]: because it points out later on, but it's sister is also one of the creations.

[SPEAKER_01]: So who was her original?

[SPEAKER_08]: I guess we don't know, it doesn't quite say.

[SPEAKER_08]: We got to point out by the way, issue three of this series, the title of the issue is dump culture.

[SPEAKER_01]: And you forgot the best line that the reds, well not the reds got the reds go robot head came up with it, which just dropped me like that again and your human pastramy human.

[SPEAKER_01]: You can not make armbal it without killing a few people.

[SPEAKER_01]: I read this three, I read again this morning and it was just like I don't want to read this character again.

[SPEAKER_01]: I like the idea, I like the idea of the character that could cut through the barriers of realities, but I want you to go out now.

[SPEAKER_08]: Yeah, are you a Death's Head fan?

[SPEAKER_08]: I know Death's Head has a really strong place in the Marvel UK lineup.

[SPEAKER_01]: I am a Death's Head 1 fan.

[SPEAKER_01]: I remember reading him in Transformers and Dr.

Ho and then they turned him into [SPEAKER_01]: I've said 3.0 and hated both of those.

[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, I mean, I like the original one too.

[SPEAKER_01]: Two was the epitome of the 90s.

[SPEAKER_01]: Take a great character, a great design and turn it into a giant robot-hulking won't stop.

[SPEAKER_08]: In the X-Men world, Wolverine and Excalibur were always kind of my early blind spots.

[SPEAKER_08]: But I'm realizing even after all these years of being kind of a Marvel nerd, Marvel Head, Marvel and Cyclopidea guy.

[SPEAKER_08]: Marvel UK is just an area.

[SPEAKER_08]: I've never seen a single episode of Doctor Who.

[SPEAKER_08]: Like, I can fix that.

[SPEAKER_08]: In fact, if I ever do the trial of Captain Britain, I will for sure fix that.

[SPEAKER_08]: But yeah, these with the journey we've been taking in the Captain Britain script readings is all new material for me.

[SPEAKER_08]: And then we go to this this fucking place.

[SPEAKER_01]: I honestly do not recommend anything beyond the initial way.

[SPEAKER_01]: You've of the Marvel UK stuff.

[SPEAKER_01]: Ninety-pendracken absolutely amazing.

[SPEAKER_01]: Warheads up to the, [SPEAKER_08]: But there's also a lot of marble X men stuff in there.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's everywhere.

[SPEAKER_01]: So the second wife, they kind of threw X men into every other issue, just to try and boost styles.

[SPEAKER_08]: OK.

[SPEAKER_08]: So then we have this island of Cyclopeia or whatever.

[SPEAKER_08]: another word.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I looked this up, actually this is not a word.

[SPEAKER_01]: So the psychedies are Greek island in the agency, known for the picturesque blue-right architecture and the mythical place of Apollo.

[SPEAKER_01]: Now I know that makes a lot more sense just to why they were there.

[SPEAKER_08]: So the Nazis were doing like they were going into an Norway and like recruiting blonde women to bear their children.

[SPEAKER_08]: So this is them like leaning into that idealized like white blonde [SPEAKER_01]: Uh-huh.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you know, once I once I realized that that's kind of where they were going with the whole of creating gods out of normal humans, I'm like, hey, now it's making a lot more sense.

[SPEAKER_01]: You've got the gods amongst us.

[SPEAKER_08]: It's interesting.

[SPEAKER_08]: This man-maker thing, uh, you know, like the genetics soup.

[SPEAKER_08]: This is very dark beast.

[SPEAKER_08]: This is very sinister.

[SPEAKER_08]: This is very the jackal.

[SPEAKER_08]: This is very arnum zola.

[SPEAKER_01]: But it's the rest of it.

[SPEAKER_08]: No, it's the rest of it.

[SPEAKER_01]: But it really doesn't feel like a red skull thing.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, particularly with the robot head.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, if it sent it was our name Zola or even Dr.

Doom, I'd have probably understood it, but it just felt really odd as a red skull thing, because I suppose genetic manipulation and creating the Aryan race is exactly what is, there is, but not this way.

[SPEAKER_08]: Yeah, you know, the thing that does fit though is Mark Greenwald is writing red skull primarily in the 90s in Captain America.

[SPEAKER_08]: As like, he basically, there's a phrase he used to use as once.

[SPEAKER_08]: Has my finger in several dozen pies like he's he's like he's like funding white supremacist He's an anti mutant groups and like like he he's doing he's doing he's funding the scourge of the underworld like He just wants to create and film at chaos everywhere.

[SPEAKER_08]: So this makes sense.

[SPEAKER_08]: Yeah, so has copies in robots like doom bots You know versions almost [SPEAKER_01]: a patch of a child at the end of it.

[SPEAKER_01]: There's one scene where he turns to the god that there was better after the god-est Andrew and says about carrying around the bucket of slime.

[SPEAKER_01]: And the panel lex, you know the meme of the girl who's looking at the fire behind her?

[SPEAKER_01]: the little girl.

[SPEAKER_01]: If you look at that panel there, it's basically that girl's face.

[SPEAKER_01]: Now that actually makes a lot of sense, that he's just chaos at this point.

[SPEAKER_01]: And if it doesn't go his way, he's going to burn it to the ground and move on to the next thing.

[SPEAKER_08]: So I opened with thoughts on kind of the Messianic quote unquote journey of Adolf Hitler, and that kind of fitting ideology.

[SPEAKER_08]: I mean, we're not talking about the mass genocides.

[SPEAKER_01]: We're just talking about this man's own self-inflated ego among his allies, where he sees himself as a god and then a martyr, right?

[SPEAKER_08]: And then we draw the modern compares comparison.

[SPEAKER_08]: We see people who are uniting behind causes that feel like they're going to change, but when you have someone who's saying, I'm the best, I call the shots and you're ignoring all their weird shit.

[SPEAKER_08]: It's not going to end well, you know, someone who sees themselves as messianic is an ultimate form of narcissistic, you know, absolutely.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and the fact that he kind of builds in a kill switch to just destroy it already, why is that?

[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know.

[SPEAKER_08]: But you can't make an omelette without killing a few people is a funny line.

[SPEAKER_08]: But not so funny when we are watching people authorize murders.

[SPEAKER_08]: So, you know, I'm great.

[SPEAKER_01]: of course I want compassion so I can observe it not be ruled by it.

[SPEAKER_01]: I will see compassion fine as it always does.

[SPEAKER_01]: I need powerful have the right to survive.

[SPEAKER_08]: The real world application I live in Utah we're recording this in mid September just a couple of days after Charlie Kirk was killed and I've been watching all of the nonsense and craziness unfold at a professional and personal level and [SPEAKER_08]: It's visceral.

[SPEAKER_08]: We read these silly superhero stories and then there's this viral video of this man getting shot on the neck and it just takes it to a different place when it becomes real.

[SPEAKER_08]: I think there are viral moments that exist in history where you learn about something but then when you see the image of it, it means something different.

[SPEAKER_08]: You know, hearing about school shootings is very different than watching a public figure in this way as assassinated [SPEAKER_08]: Now, I don't believe he was a very good person.

[SPEAKER_08]: I knew do know he was a charismatic leader who had a very strong following.

[SPEAKER_08]: And I'm sure he was a good person in many ways.

[SPEAKER_08]: The fact that he was killed by a more extreme version of what he prophesied is ironic and painful.

[SPEAKER_08]: And I know my community and the American community are really, as we have been for months.

[SPEAKER_08]: But this is just such a visceral example of what is at stake in a very odd way.

[SPEAKER_08]: And I immediately heard everyone start blaming the trans community before any evidence was filed [SPEAKER_08]: So, I mean, we're being silly with like that, but these real-world applications is very much why I'm making these portions of the show is to have these conversations and like let them be real for a minute.

[SPEAKER_08]: How you hold love in in 2025, Christian?

[SPEAKER_08]: But, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but [SPEAKER_08]: Oh, Rickade!

[SPEAKER_08]: Uh, and he concluded that's on a die cut.

[SPEAKER_08]: Ah, please don't leave me because you can't.

[SPEAKER_08]: Please don't leave me because you can't leave me because you can't leave me because you can't leave me because you can't leave me because you can't leave me because you can't leave me because you can't leave me because you can't leave me because you can't leave me because you can't leave me because you can't leave me because you can't leave me because you can't leave me because you can't leave me because you can't leave me because you can't leave me because you can't leave me because you can't leave me because you can't leave me because you can't leave me because you can't leave me because you can't leave me because you can't leave me because you can't leave me because you can't leave me because you can't leave me because you can't leave me because you can't leave me because you can't leave me because you can't leave me because you can [SPEAKER_01]: I want to read this video series, y'all want to read the other video series.

[SPEAKER_08]: We can definitely have more Marvel UK conversations.

[SPEAKER_08]: I love you very much.

[SPEAKER_08]: Thank you.

[SPEAKER_08]: Thank you.

[SPEAKER_08]: Thank you for listening to Grimalk and Lane.

[SPEAKER_08]: We hope you are enjoying this podcast.

[SPEAKER_08]: Grimalk and Lane is produced and recorded in Salt Lake City, Utah, with music and editing done by my husband, Michael Bell, and promo art done by the incredible Seth Martell.

[SPEAKER_08]: Look for us on Patreon, where we are releasing weekly episodes about obscure characters and facts.

[SPEAKER_08]: It's a great way to participate with the podcast for only just a couple of dollars a month and it helps support what we are doing here.

[SPEAKER_08]: Also, the best way you could help [SPEAKER_08]: Grimmulkin Lane is by sharing and liking and subscribing, but also please leave us a review wherever you listen to your podcasts.

[SPEAKER_08]: We'll see you back your next time on Grimmulkin Lane.