Art by David Wynne. Wanna buy the original? Drop him a line!

In which Lisa Winters pinch-hits for Jay, we take a trip to the newspaper funnies and back, Spider-Man and Beast are natural BFFs, nothing good ever happens at the Brand Corporation, and "mutant" can be a pretty fuzzy concept.

X-PLAINED:

Bessie the Hellcow

Spider-Man: Mutant Agenda (the newspaper strip storyline)

Spider-Man: Mutant Agenda (the comic book miniseries)

Spider-Man: Mutant Agenda (the cartoon episodes)

Four-color hoards

Three-panel newspaper comic structure

Sunday strips (and their Mark Trail deceptions)

Hero Jaws - a breakfast-based theory

Spider-Man (Peter Parker)

The Brand Corporation

The Beast (Henry McCoy)

Narratively convenient Spider Sense

Hobgoblin (Jason Macendale Jr.)

Goblin gliders

Picket signs (*air horn sound*)

Finger blasters (heh)

Laser cages

Arcade’s superpower flowcharts

Mutants: newspaper versus comic continuity

Coming home to the 90s

Lisa’s favorite X-Man

Beast’s versatile character design

Spider-to-X ratios

Dark, tortured heroes

Herbert Landon’s selective memory

Confirmation bias

Anti-mutant cancer goo

Ironic reversals

Wolverine, the most marketable mutant

Evil British accents

The most adaptable Spider-Man / X-Men crossovers

The X-Men and the newspaper funnies

NEXT EPISODE: X-Factor mourns and moves on.

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