Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men

By Jay Edidin & Miles Stokes

Arts Visual Arts

What's Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men about?

Daunted by complex continuity? Can’t tell a mutate from a warpie? We are here for you. We have trained for this responsibility for decades. We have the backissues, the calluses, and a really detailed map of the Summers family tree.

We’ve been explaining the X-Men informally for years–to our friends and family, to the Internet, and, occasionally, to patient strangers on the street. Now, we’re making it official, with Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men: a weekly podcast dedicated to unpacking the weird, wonderful world of our favorite superhero soap opera for newcomers and die-hard fans alike.

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LAST EPISODE

329 – Scheming and Argument

04.12.2021

In which Nate Grey has the soul of a man in a mesh shirt; Black Air is somehow even worse than you thought it was; Hulk does not want to be x-treme teen from alternate dimension; we are excited as ...

Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men episodes:

04.12.2021 329 – Scheming and Argument In which Nate Grey has the soul of a man in a mesh shirt; Black Air is somehow even worse than you thought it was; Hulk does not want to be x-treme teen from alternate dimension; we are excited as ...
04.04.2021 HAWK TALK – Doctor Internet This would usually be a skip week, but the world is still being a jerk, so we made you a bonus, entirely unedited, and almost entirely off-topic episode. This time, we talked about the Internet. Topics, roughly: Blazing fast 28.8 ...
03.29.2021 328 – Single Blue Male In which Sam Guthrie will take all your money; Gambit has exceptionally poor judgment; having friends who are couples means getting to be the big spoon AND the little spoon; Hank McCoy is the agrarian Rube Goldberg; and there are ...
03.22.2021 327 – The Sounds of Gravity Art by David Wynne. Wanna buy the original? Drop him a line! In which nobody’s ages ever make sense; Sebastian Shaw catches up on villain speeches; nobody puts Louise Simonson in a corner; Tabitha Smith has a bad day; Gambit ...
03.15.2021 326 – Son of a Gun In which it’s hard to be a hologram; the Internet is terrible and you should probably avoid it; we have no idea how Naze is still alive; this is not your mom’s Adversary (if your mom is Fall of the ...
03.08.2021 HAWK TALK – Turtle Power This would usually be a skip week, but the world is still being a jerk, so we made you a bonus, entirely unedited, and almost entirely off-topic episode. This time, we talked about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Topics, roughly: ...
03.01.2021 325 – Captain Bloodscream In which we recommend against having a birthday in the Marvel Universe; Shinobi Shaw was a proto-Quentin Quire; Lee Forrester returns under the best possible circumstances; Bloodscream lives his best unlife; Belasco is apparently master of the cat people now; ...
02.22.2021 324 – Snack Attack In which Cordelia Frost is a terrible friend; Mondo is better than the story arcs that surround him; and we’d really love to see a series about Sean Cassidy’s super groovy past.
02.15.2021 323 – Baby Talk In which we spend a large amount of time on a group of small characters; X-Babies stories cover a wide range of quality; Mojo is relegated to public access; the ‘Vengers rebel against their creator; the X-Babies excavate Star Comics; ...
02.08.2021 HAWK TALK – Call Any Vegetable This would usually be a skip week, but the world is still being a jerk, so we made you a bonus, entirely unedited, and almost entirely off-topic episode. This time, we talked about vegetables. Kind of. Topics, roughly: Vegetables. Like ...
02.01.2021 322 – Do More Crimes In which the X-Babies fail to charm; clones are people, too; Iceman doesn’t (quite) come out; Gambit and Bishop bond; Joseph comes into ambiguous being; and Principal Nezu and Charles Xavier would probably get along okay.
01.25.2021 321 – Revolving Doors In which Sabretooth does not get effectively rehabilitated; nobody has the moral high ground; Val Cooper is the worst possible person to call in any emergency; Bishop needs a better support system; Jay knows several things about onions; and not ...
01.18.2021 320 – The Accountability Wagon In which Pete Wisdom is the guy you love to glare at; Nightcrawler is right (and a delightfully complex individual); Colossus has a lot of issues; and Wolfsbane gets the confrontation we’ve been waiting for since the New Mutants graphic ...
01.04.2021 319 – Giant-Size Special #9 (feat. Vita Ayala, Tini Howard, & Leah Williams) In which Jay and Miles receive a mysterious missive and are visited by three of our favorite X-writers; Further Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix is a pleasant surprise; Nathaniel Essex is the most dramatic man in the Marvel Universe; the ...
12.28.2020 HAWK TALK – Surviving 2020 This would usually be a skip week, but the world is still being a jerk, so we made you a bonus, entirely unedited, and almost entirely off-topic episode. This time, we talked (exhaustedly) about This Freaking Year. Topics, roughly: This ...
12.21.2020 318 – Leprechaun Hill In which we are broken by leprechauns.
12.14.2020 317 – Acquaintances of Humanity In which Nicholas Cage is more of a concept than a human being; Rogue’s angst-fueled road trip continues; Gambit and Sinister have complementary aesthetics; there are a lot of Guthries; the Trasks are never up to any good; and whether ...
12.07.2020 316 – Return to Megalopolis: At the Movies with the New Mutants In which we review the New Mutants' film debut.
11.29.2020 HAWK TALK – Surviving the (Holiday) Experience This would usually be a skip week, but the world is still being a jerk, so we made you a bonus, entirely unedited, and almost entirely off-topic episode. This time, we talked about holidays, winter and otherwise. Topics, roughly: Time, ...
11.23.2020 315 – Theater Is Dead In which Jay and/or patriarchy ruin everything; Archangel is dubiously aspirational; we need a moratorium on Jack the Ripper stories; there are a lot of Masterminds; and Arcade is a whole bundle of psychosexual weirdness.
11.16.2020 314 – Feelings, Alaska In which Haven deserved better; Cyclops and Havok have a lot of feelings in Alaska; X-Factor is the cop team; breaking up with your girlfriend between issues is a massive faux pas; Haven got a bad deal; no one cares ...
11.09.2020 313 – Iguanafall In which sky pirates are the best pirates; Wolverine eats chicken in the woods; Xavier’s area loses its status as our least favorite panel; Cable is suspiciously credulous; we search in vain for a consistent metaphor; Storm has a thing ...
10.26.2020 312 – Something Amazing Had to Be Done, feat. Bob Proehl In which author Bob Proehl joins Jay to discuss the Resonant Duology and what it means to write original work rooted visibly in the X-universe!
10.19.2020 311 – Love Makes a Super-Team In which we decide to stop recognizing the nominal difference between X-Men and Uncanny X-Men; time travel may or may not wait for you; Mister Sinister has probably appeared in at least one Ed Wood film; we are a pro-Tingle ...
10.12.2020 310 – Attack and Dethrone God In which we take a substantial detour; Minipax is no Raul Julia; Corsair tries (and fails) to retire; everything is cooler in space; vengeance is more of a vocation than a career; the Starjammers win an intergalactic war with a ...
10.04.2020 HAWK TALK – Hawktober This would usually be a skip week, but the world is still being a jerk, so we made you a bonus, entirely unedited, and almost entirely off-topic episode. This time, we talked about our current, and Jay's favorite, season. Topics, ...
09.27.2020 309 – Excellent Turtle In which ballistics get weird; Black Air is no W.H.O.; we have surprisingly mixed feelings about Pete Wisdom and Kitty Pryde as a couple; there is an actual creepy clown bar in Portland; blood eagles are excessively ostentatious; the Uncreated ...
09.21.2020 308 – No Story Is the Whole Story In which writing X-books requires a somewhat different approach to continuity than writing about them; time is weird; Jay overthinks fictional publications; Scott Summers is (at least sometimes) Autistic; Sinister is not subtle; and no story is the whole story.
09.14.2020 307 – Ugly Mootants Only In which Cable has clearly inherited his father’s inability to go on a date that doesn’t end disastrously; Husk is a lightweight; we are very taken with a turtle; you really don’t want to run into the other Hemingway in ...
09.07.2020 HAWK TALK – Playing With Super Power (feat. Matthew Hunter) This would usually be a skip week, but the world is still being a jerk, so we made you a bonus, entirely unedited, and almost entirely off-topic episode. This time, our producer Matthew Hunter subbed in for Jay and he ...
08.31.2020 306 – Between Here and There In which we continue our ongoing tour of the post-Age of Apocalypse X-Universe; Onslaught gets a name; nobody’s sure what Noah Dubois is doing there; Iceman gets to be the practical one, for once; T&A should not generally appear on ...
08.24.2020 305 – The Sleep of the Wicked In which X-Factor gets its own roster shakeup; most bartenders will look at you funny if you order a flight of superheroes; Kaboom is a great name for a nightclub; we lack significant feelings about the clone saga; Yukio probably ...
08.17.2020 304 – Explosive Ops In which Jay discovers a continuity loop; phonetic spelling reaches a new level of implausibility; it’s always already Onslaught; X-Force’s roster gets shaken up; Siryn goes undercover; and the Upstarts remain vaguely plot-relevant despite our fervent wishes.
08.10.2020 HAWK TALK – Video Renaissance This would usually be a skip week, but the world is still being a jerk, so we made you a bonus, entirely unedited, and almost entirely off-topic episode. This time, we talked about the movies we grew up on! Topics, ...
08.03.2020 303 – No Simple Answers, feat. Laura Hudson In which writer and editor Laura Hudson joins us as we take a break from X-Men comics to discuss the complicated ethics of consuming and covering comics by creators we’re not comfortable promoting. LINKS: Read more of Laura's work! We ...
07.27.2020 302 – Space Junk In which you should probably not mess with space junk; Exodus is terrible at many things; Rusty Collins deserved better; X-Men #100 references are dirty (but effective) pool; Magneto goes through a lot of orbital bases; Nate Grey makes things ...
07.20.2020 301 – Can’t Beat the Real Thing In which we enter our fourth century of podcasting with brand new theme music; we have both Wolverine questions and wolverine questions; it is extremely rough to be Bishop; the creator of Garfield may or may not live in a ...
07.12.2020 HAWK TALK – Attack of the Franchise Cartoons This would usually be a skip week, but the world is still being a jerk, so we made you a bonus, entirely unedited, and almost entirely off-topic episode. This time, we talked about the television shows we grew up on ...
07.06.2020 300 – Götterdämmerung In which the Age of Apocalypse comes to an end; Angel briefly lives up to his potential; Bishop was sometimes right; It’s not a climactic ending without an X-Men #137 reference; Colossus breaks our hearts; X-Men: Marvels Snapshot will be ...
06.29.2020 299 – Toaster Ovens of the Gods In which some universes are more pleasant than others; Havok is basically a Care Bear; Wolverine is a P.R. nightmare; Nate Grey tries; stealth is not among the Silver Surfer’s strengths; Night Thrasher ascends to godhood; Jay and Miles dive ...
06.22.2020 298 – Unlikely Avengers In which the moments of X-Universe are better than the whole; the code name “Dirigible” carries some inherent risks; Tony Stark is often more interesting without Iron Man; Clint Barton is no James Rhodes; there is somehow a Matt Murdock ...
06.08.2020 297 – Blood Is Compulsory In which Nate Grey is a drama kid; Forge-295 is the hero we need; Mister Sinister is a graduate of the Danielle “Moonstar” Moonstar school of secret identities; and we really, really, really wish that the theater troupe had gotten ...
06.01.2020 296 – Hard Choices In which Magneto doesn’t really do work/live divide; Amazing X-Men is a bit of a misnomer; Exodus is the lawful evil to Fabian Cortez’s chaotic evil; smoking is bad for you; moisture molecular inversion is fairly definitely not a real ...
05.24.2020 HAWK TALK – Florida Mans This would usually be a skip week, but the world is still being a jerk, so we made you a bonus, entirely unedited, and almost entirely off-topic episode. This time, we talked about a whole bunch of random topics suggested ...
05.18.2020 295 – The Nuclear Naked Art by David Wynne. Wanna buy the original? Drop him a line! In which this episode may or may not be a temporal aberration; Gambit is bad at marketing; Jubilee’s sixth birthday was probably worse than yours; Earth-295’s chronology doesn’t ...
05.11.2020 294 – The Infernal Gallop In which a whole lot of things burn; Nightcrawler gets gritty; it’s hard to be Dead Man Wade; Apocalypse’s IT department has some explaining to do; Mystique is the most mom of all moms; Doug Ramsey dies (again); and Jay ...
05.04.2020 293 – The Monster Under the World In which not all Mondos are created equal; the kids are only rarely all right; the Age of Apocalypse is not Magneto’s fault; Sugar Man is the stuff of universal nightmares; “cartoonish” is not necessarily a plus; and the Age ...
04.27.2020 HAWK TALK – Formative Novels This would usually be a skip week, but the world is still being a jerk, so we made you a bonus, entirely unedited, and almost entirely off-topic episode. This time, we talk about the (non-comic) books we grew up on! ...
04.20.2020 292 – Weekend at Sinister’s In which it is probably not actually possible to be too nasty for Earth-295; Sinister is on nobody’s side but his own; Vulcan is still the worst Summers in the multiverse; the Bedlam Brothers are too delightful for the EMF; ...
04.13.2020 291 – Eat Malarkey and Die In which we celebrate a birthday; nuclear war is never a good Plan A; every Logan is Old Man Logan; we are underwhelmed by the Pretty Boys of Earth-295; Jean Grey is one hell of a pilot; there are so ...

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