Your regular Upstarts are joined this week by Dr. Hailey “Stone Cold” Austin to talk about good and bad buts/butts in the totally radical Excalibur #72, “Oohhh... Siena!” In which the team moves to Muir Island and nothing will ever be the same again, including our eyeballs and eardrums after this barrage of bodacious badonkadonks and phoney phonetic accents. The one good infection is infectious laughter and this ep’s got plenty of that!

For better or worse and death 'til us part—Excalibur is an X-Men comic now. It’s also definitely a 90s comic, with all the explosive melodrama that implies But it’s not all bad (in fact, some of it is even good!) in Excalibur #71, “Crossing Swords,” the tail end of the “Fatal Attractions” crossover in which Colossus doesn’t understand the difference between atheism and nihilism and one good Jean/Rachel page demands a bad one. X-pert Austin Gorton makes his triumphant return to help us wade through the morass of EMOTIONS and reminiscence about this being the first Excalibur comic he ever bought.

For the crime of podcasting about Excalibur for 126+ weeks, we're being punished with reading one more issue about kissing Cerise goodbye... if in fact it is Cerise, and not a 90s Bad Girl who just happens to have the same fondness for pink armor and fuzzy blue elves. In any case, we've blackmailed returning guest Dr. Michael Hancock into joining us on this backwards journey into irrelevance, discussing Excalibur #70, “Crime and Punishment.” We talk Bad Girl tropes and what makes a good goodbye kiss, and because we apparently didn’t already have enough to gripe about, we also take swipes at the 1998 Oscars...?

A sexy little number can’t save Excalibur #69, “Blight and Fog,” from living up to its title. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun writing better (and queerer!) stories about everyone’s favourite Warrior of the Ghrand Jhar Shi’ar war criminal with the stalwart support of a writer who’s also Cerise’s Biggest Fan, Hunter Felt! We talk might-have-been’s and could-still-be’s and wonder what a good Cerise/Kurt relationship might look like in a different world where they were allowed to love their difference instead of surrendering to 90s tropes. We also toast the presumably bright future of the character find of 1993—gender-swapped Fang!

After a brief sojourn lost in a temporal wave, we’re back and ready to talk you through Excalibur #68, “Facades”—a comic that maybe shoulda stayed lost in a temporal wave. But it's not all grim ‘n’ gritty griping and mourning the loss of more than one character we used to love. We also have lots of fun talking 90s tropes and reboots and transmedia transformations with comics & games scholar and all-around Gotham expert Dr. Kalervo Sinervo! 

The 90s have arrived in 2015 and Excalibur is a gun now... but actually, Excalibur is still Excalibur, which is to say—a beautiful story about love saving the multiverse

This week, we’re going back to “Back to the Present,” and by present we mean future, and by future we mean the far-flung year of 2015, when the world was/will be run by Sentinels and a dude obsessed with Rachel Summers, Moby Dick, and thigh-high boots. Joining us on this journey is returning guest Nola Pfau, fresh off an Eisner Award hat trick for her Editor-in-Chief-dom of Women Write About Comics! We wax poetic about women and circles, debate the mechanics of time travel vs interdimensional travel vs are they actually the same thing, and say we love comics a lot, because we do—including this one, a lot.

Andrew got lost in the timestream this week, but we learned from the best that when you lose a founding member to cosmic forces beyond your control, you gotta solider on with new friends. So here we are, doing our first annual discussion of the first Excalibur Annual, accompanied in this heroic endeavor by educator and fellow podcaster Jason Hundey, co-host of the Requiem Metal Podcast! We hash out important topics like: why Annuals? Can we give 1993's newest Dark Elf enough heat to make Jason’s Khaos trading card worth more than the paper it’s printed on? And, most importantly: is this comic book metal??

Some truths are dark and many lies are white in the not-aptly-named Excalibur #65, “White Lies, Dark Truths.” We talk about that plus KISSING with scholar, educator, and psychotherapist Dr. Valentino Zullo! Do Cerise and Kurt really love each other? How can we tell? What does love mean, anyway? We're not sure, but Alan Davis sure draws it pretty

Fresh off winning a freakin’ award, your very genetically stable team of comics scientists is back! Talking superheroes and science and why mutants are like vaccines in Excalibur #64, “Ascension,” with multi-talented researcher, writer, game designer, and educator Alison Humphrey! Plus a perfect Nightcrawler panel, Anna’s favourite Rachel sequence, the glory of nine-panel grids, and (gasp) discussion of the mutant metaphor? But this time, with SCIENCE.