Funny Book Forensics 340 Accidental Dave Cockrum Tribute

[00:00:00] Speaker A: You. [00:00:03] Speaker B: I want to let you know you are being recorded. [00:00:10] Speaker A: Yay. I'm being recorded. I can't believe it. After 20 minutes of amazing podcasting content. [00:00:18] Speaker B: Yeah. As I discovered, Greg sold all his Dave Cochrane X Men books and, like, instead of letting me have a first chance at them, even though he knows I love. [00:00:29] Speaker A: Know. [00:00:29] Speaker B: And it's not Dave Cochrane on Legion, but, jeez, I have those. Those are cheap. You can buy those for a. [00:00:38] Speaker A: Sometimes. Sometimes it's just one of those things where you're just. Do I, do I let Dan keep adding to the horde? [00:00:47] Speaker B: Yes, for those. [00:00:49] Speaker A: For those or do I pepper the comic books in? No, you don't. I know what Dan would want, but I know what the people want. And these are our comics. In this case, these are the people's comics. [00:01:09] Speaker B: Well, yeah. You're just being an idiot. Well, there's been some sickness in the retro Emporium household, so we wanted to keep it easy and simple this episode. And it's the start of a new year. And what book is better to indicate a new start for several reasons. Right? Than giant size X Men number one? [00:01:33] Speaker A: Hey, giant size X Men number one. It's giant size. It's X Men and it's number one. [00:01:40] Speaker B: And let's set some ground rules for this book. I'm going to tell you what we're not going to do. [00:01:45] Speaker A: What are we not going to do? [00:01:46] Speaker B: We are not going to try to cover every angle possible on giant size X Men number one. Because. [00:01:53] Speaker A: Why not? There's so many angles we could cover on X Men size X Men number one. [00:01:57] Speaker B: There are many angles we could cover. This is one that's been overanalyzed to death. So I'm sure people have reviewed it many, many times. [00:02:06] Speaker A: Who? [00:02:07] Speaker B: Everyone. [00:02:07] Speaker A: Not us. [00:02:09] Speaker B: Well, it's one of the most famous books. We haven't comics. We've never. No, we haven't. No. Well, we've kind of talked about it because I've talked about Dave Cochrane moving from Legion to X Men. [00:02:19] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:02:20] Speaker B: And I know, I've mentioned on the podcast that Dave Cochrane's art was responsible for the number two selling book at DC in the 1980s and the number one selling book at Marvel in the 1980s. [00:02:31] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:02:33] Speaker B: And I shouldn't say his art, but his art designs. Right? [00:02:36] Speaker A: Like his designs, characters, his amazingness that he brought to the page from his mind. [00:02:42] Speaker B: Yes. So obviously that happens. So we'll talk a little bit about that. You're going to cover a little bit of probably X Men lead up into this when I don't know what I'm talking about because I've never read them. [00:02:53] Speaker A: And you are mad. [00:02:54] Speaker B: Came out the year I was born. [00:02:56] Speaker A: And you were like, oh, yeah, X men. And he just sold them off. And I'm so mad that he just didn't tell me about him. And here's a guy that never read, and he's mad that I just got rid of them. [00:03:06] Speaker B: Well, I didn't read the pre Cochrane, X Men and Claremont. That's correct. Right. This Len wean book is. And then it's Claremont. Yeah. I would have taken Cochrane and Claremont books a billion times. You're. You're killing me, because you know exactly what you're like. Being ridiculous. You know exactly the ones that I like, and then you're like, I sold those. I was bored with them. [00:03:31] Speaker A: I know. Well, I mean, I find it funny to you when I opened up the message from you, and I'm sorry, lose my voice here a little bit. When I said, oh, I mentioned what this was, and my wife is like, oh, so you usually read. This is one of my annual reads. This is definitely in my pile of stuff that I would cover in my own, like, oh, hey, yeah, it's that time of year. Pull it out, dust it off, and check back in with. [00:04:03] Speaker B: And I should. I need to add to your annual year, like, the legion introduction to wildfire, like, two years before. Right. Because then you'd get double cockrom graded. You need a couple of them. Well, and the funny thing here is, I think we're going to get into future artists later. Okay, so we are covering giant size x Men number one. [00:04:30] Speaker A: Yes. [00:04:30] Speaker B: And the very first annoying thing about giant size X Men number one is they hired Dave Cochrane away from DC, put him on X Men to relaunch it. [00:04:41] Speaker A: Yes. [00:04:42] Speaker B: And had Gil Kane draw the COVID with Dave Cochrane's designs. Now, what are Gil Kane's strengths? A, faces, or b, costume design? [00:04:56] Speaker A: Yes. Faces. Faces. [00:04:59] Speaker B: And the faces on here ain't that great? Actually, that's not true. The blue wash faces, the black and white faces in the background of the old X Men. [00:05:08] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. [00:05:08] Speaker B: Are fantastic. And then it's like. He's like, well, I don't get to draw the book, so I'm going to draw all the faces on the Cochrane characters terribly. Yeah. [00:05:17] Speaker A: No, those blue wash faces of X Men team futures past. [00:05:28] Speaker B: It's almost like Gil Kane was saying, I'm going to draw the Silver Age beautifully and the Bronze Age terribly. Yeah. [00:05:35] Speaker A: They look. I mean, on purpose. Storm's looking pretty contorted. Contorted and. Yeah, Wolverine's got a. Like. He looks like a rubber stamp and. [00:05:48] Speaker B: Everybody has white eyes or yellow eyes, but nobody has pupils. There are no nightcrawler. [00:05:54] Speaker A: Looks like a rubber stamp. Yeah. Thunderbird looking pretty bad. Cyclops is not even looking good. Cyclops looks like he's going diving. [00:06:05] Speaker B: Yeah. So it's super interesting because we get giant size X Men number one. And there are two interesting things about it right off. Right. One, you have a. And two, Len Wean writes it's. And then Len Wean co plots with Chris Claremont for the next few issues, but then it's Claremont's book for the next 15 years. More than that. 18 years. Right. Because he was well into 93. Right. [00:06:33] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:06:33] Speaker B: So you're talking. Because he still held uncanny even when Jim Lee was drawing. Right? [00:06:39] Speaker A: I believe, yeah. [00:06:40] Speaker B: And when they relaunched it, number one, I forget, did Jim Lee write and draw it? [00:06:45] Speaker A: I think he did write and draw and continued on for a bit until. [00:06:52] Speaker B: He went to image. [00:06:52] Speaker A: Until he went to image. [00:06:53] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:06:53] Speaker A: It was his book until then. [00:06:56] Speaker B: And then they tried to bring back Claremont in the book. Was it with extreme X Men? [00:07:02] Speaker A: Extreme X Men. [00:07:03] Speaker B: And then they tried to bring Claremont back again on the book. But Claremont had a good 15 year run. He had 18 year run. [00:07:11] Speaker A: He had a pretty good chunk of time. And then he did a couple of really interesting things with, I want to say, additional characters that were bringing characters into different storylines that were not under. That were underutilized in previous stories. So I found a lot of stuff that was brought into these runs were really. [00:07:41] Speaker B: Yeah. Let's be honest. Chris Claremont's known for the. [00:07:47] Speaker A: If it. A lot of what he did definitely turned into the movies, and a lot of the movie matter isn't the best stories, per se, because if you take a listen to a ton of different podcasts, I'm not talking, like, let's chop up the X Men stories and talk about all the different stories. I'm talking about. There's some really fantastic X Men podcasts that are just, let's go through and do, like, an audio podcast telling of the X Men, and they do a great job in giving you a very cinematic story for the brain, story for the mind podcast. And it's a much better cinematic universe. [00:08:31] Speaker B: Sure. But the Claremont run. Okay, the world know, including new mutants. Right. Including Wheezy wrote X Factor. Right. And so before she went over to do Superman. Right, at Claremont, but she was working with Claremont on the whole universe. Right. It wasn't just when they brought X Factor and they only brought X Factor back because of the popularity of X Men. Right. [00:09:02] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:09:03] Speaker B: So. And X Factor, for those don't know. That was the relaunch of the original X team. X Men team and new mutants. And then. Yeah, I mean, it was his universe for a long, long time. [00:09:20] Speaker A: Alpha flight, like, all the different team books that. [00:09:24] Speaker B: And I've seen sad Chris Claremont sitting at conventions before with nobody at his table, and I'm like, what the hell? But admittedly, too, like, Chris Claremont got mad after he was put off of X Men and went to DC, which is to be. And then, because it's still unclear why they thought they needed to take him off of X Men, and when they were at their height selling a million issues. Right. It didn't make any sense. And then they were on a kick for new art. New artists. And they lost all those new artists to. Well, we know Jim Shooter is an idiot. Jim Shooter is on a kick for new artists. Was like, clermant's been on the book too long. Let's get him off of there. And maybe that was true, except they were selling a million copies and the story quality went way down, and that ended up being part of the downfall of comics in the 90s, because X Men freezed in is, like, the strongest, the strongest franchise in comics. And the downgrade of the X Men storytelling quality with the pretty art was part of its downfall. And of know, they were also like, well, X Force, they got in there. That's amazing. We love this new, violent shit. We got to get Claremont out of there. I'm not saying Claremont was perfect. I mean, we have some terrible fucking characters that came out of that run. But, of course, you're going to have. You have terrible characters. 18 fucking years. Right. There's going to be some characters that aren't great. [00:10:48] Speaker A: Right. [00:10:49] Speaker B: That's going to happen. But what I think, people forget, and we're talking about Claremont. Claremont is not even the author for the writer for the first story. Lyn Wean is the writer for the first. [00:11:00] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:11:01] Speaker B: And all the concepts came from a guy name that people don't talk about because he was only on the book for two years. And then John Beren takes over as the artist. Right. With Claremont is Dave Cochrane, and Dave Cochrane is as responsible. I want to say as responsible. Probably the most responsible person for the X Men. Claremont creates the universe, but Dave Cochrane creates the character. The uncanny X Men. [00:11:28] Speaker A: Yeah. Because without Dave Cochrane, you don't get the designs. You don't get the actual characters. [00:11:37] Speaker B: And Cochrane even was beyond designs right. He's into the backstory matter too, because he uses the backstory matter. Cochrane used to study fashion magazines of the time and then try to draw Runway fashions onto superheroes. And if you look at Storm's costume, it's very much that. If you look at Colossus's costume. Yeah, it's very much something you try to put together that would only work on a Runway. Right. Like, it would not work in real society. [00:12:09] Speaker A: Yeah, same with Thunderbird. Yeah, it's not same when you take a look at it, it's really interesting too. You take a look at Nightcrawler and everybody's seen the meme out there. Oh, it's a demonic captain Neo. But Nightcrawler's outfit did spawn a very interesting design based off of what? Like, created based off of his fashion love, his love for fashion and high fashion. High form. Right. [00:12:45] Speaker B: Well, and the other thing with Cochrane, I mean, if you know the history of the Nightcrawler character, Cochrane had been drawing Nightcrawler for years before he ever made a first appearance. Cochrane had pitched versions of Nightcrawler to DC and had been drawing Nightcrawler forever. He was pitching Nightcrawler to DC as early as 71, I think. And I have three different Dave Cochrane books. We're going to be referencing one of them, the life and art Dave Cochrane by Glenn Catigan. But I have two. One I bought specifically when he was dying of cancer that was used to support his treatment, if you can believe it. Know, he's a comic book artist, yet none of the freaking comic book companies he worked for would actually help him with health insurance or anything when he was dying. So I have one of those books. And yeah, he had drawn Nightcrawler several times. He'd drawn Nightcrawler into some back matter for a group called the Outsiders. He was pitching to DC. He was also pitching two other groups called, another group called the Devastators, or the annihilators. I almost called them the Annhillators, which is a great. But he was trying to universe build in the 30th century, and DC just wasn't ready for it because he was revitalizing the legion of superheroes at the time. And so Legion starts to catch on in sales, and as Legion is catching on in sales, he's like, okay, let's pitch some more world building here. The sad part is DC could have had all of this. [00:14:25] Speaker A: They could have had all these characters. [00:14:27] Speaker B: They could have had all of this. And DC's like, nah, no, we don't want this. And then I guess the back matter I want to share that I've referenced before is Dave Cochrane. So this is how it ties to last week, folks. We covered a tabloid issue and Dave Cochrane drew a tabloid issue with the marriage of bouncing boy and duo Damsel. And people often call bouncing boy the luckiest legionnaire because he's married to duo damsel. [00:14:56] Speaker A: I see. [00:14:57] Speaker B: You see? Not even a pop for that. You're just going to be like, I'm going to. No. Sell you there. Yeah. Thank you. Wow. Yeah, you suck. So it's. But he basically, so he draws these huge tabloid pages, right? And he draws this amazing tabloid page that has all the legionnaires standing on these round, elevated platforms. And basically the writers, I think Paul Levitt's actually had something to do with it. But Paul Levittz liked to do things to get rid of. It may have been shooter. It may have been Levitz, I can't remember. But right at the exact time period, I think it still might have been shooter even. But they like to get rid of, sometimes get rid of characters that were hard to write, like bouncing boy and duo damsel. Bouncing boy can bounce and duo damsel can split into two. [00:15:56] Speaker A: Two. It's better than one. [00:15:58] Speaker B: Yes. In the 30th century, maybe not the most exotic or useful power, right. But he draws this beautiful spread. He draws basically a whole ton of characters. And he just goes to DC and he goes to Moore, Weisinger, and he's like, hey, I would like my art back from that book. And he says they promised it to him. They say they didn't, but they won't return his art. So he quit just straight up at the height of his popularity, relaunching a book. He quits. Now, one major difference that we're going to see in Cochrane's history here is that Mike Grell takes over the Legion for Cochrane and Mike Grell does some tracing. But Mike Grell also creates himself. And so there are new costumes and more things that keep coming in the legion. And the Legion keeps getting popular almost solely on Mike Grell's art because I'm going to tell you that the Carrie Bates and Jim shooter stories weren't the thing that was carrying it. It wasn't much later until Paul Levitz gets like a six year run on Legion when it really takes off, which you're going to notice a theme here, writer, long run with great art results in sales, at least back then, at least in the Bronze Age. Right. And the 80s. Right now, I don't know that, that works right now, it's a lot of times it's like, put a great artist and writer together that people know about and give them a twelve issue run on something. [00:17:30] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:17:31] Speaker B: And then hope that sells. [00:17:32] Speaker A: And if it doesn't, then take it, throw it away, and then let something else happen. [00:17:38] Speaker B: Right. And so you're not getting these long extended runs on books anymore. Right, right. But just in the legion, the legion fans brought it back because they're like, this stuff's crazy. And they had, uh, amateur press association, for those of you that don't know. And a lot of writing about that. And Dave Cochrane interacted with those folks a ton and got people all excited about the book. And so it had to be when Dave Cochrane goes to Marvel. Right. And he's given, I mean, we're talking about a book, and this is where you can give some of the background, but we're talking about a book that was in reprints for two years. Right? [00:18:18] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:18:18] Speaker B: And at least two years. And the last person, the last great artist they'd thrown onto the book was Neil Adams. [00:18:28] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:18:31] Speaker B: And people weren't buying a Neil Adams drawn book. So the stories must have been freaking terrible. Right. [00:18:36] Speaker A: Well, I think at that point too, they'd already run a bunch of stuff. I mean, they'd already been running a lot of stories that felt like it was, in all honesty, going back and taking a look at some of the stories, it felt like, how many times can the team, and you're dealing with a team of teenagers that are bucking against a system that wants to keep them down, bucking against a mentor who is saying that they're there for their best interest. But as they're finding out, and as the story, like, nearing this point in the story, is doing things in order to get what they think is what the kids think is not in their best interest, but what Professor X is like, no, this is in your best interest. And manipulating them in a way, and then obviously not to spill the beans for anybody on a 30 plus 40 year old story. But Beast is like, hey, I'm not doing this anymore. You've invaded everybody's minds, Professor X. And I'm out. And that causes everybody basically to rethink what they're doing. And at one point, everybody jams out, causes a bunch of stuff to go sideways in the school, and at a point there's like nobody there for a while. And it's like, scott's like, no, this is the only place that I know. And he's like, the brooding X Men. He's like, very emo. Scott. [00:20:16] Speaker B: You get a big run of Roy Thomas early on in Roy Thomas's writing, right, with Neil Adams art, looking back on these. So the reprints start at issue 67 and the new stories start in issue 94. So it'd been, what, about three years of reprints just to keep the property alive. It looks like the last issue, you were saying that the beast kind of. [00:20:48] Speaker A: Trying to. Obviously, they need to make somebody. He's the oldest of the group, even though. And he's not the leader. Scott's the leader, but he's like, hey, I'm out, and I need to go and do what I need to do in my life as an adult, right? So he leaves, and that causes a big rift. And then he's know Professor X didn't do anybody, right, because he invaded Gene's mind. He messed with us all. He's not got our best interest. You need to rethink what you guys are doing. And basically that causes a fracture in the house. Everyone kind of has to rethink what they're doing. And Beast comes back and forth in the house multiple times and with the team to help them out throughout the history of X Men. But at this point in the series, he's out and leaving Scott and the original X Men to where they're at right before this book second Genesis kicks off. And they're trying to basically gather up other mutants and stuff like that, trying to find other powerful mutants because they've got all these things that are going on in the world at this point. They've already fought Magneto. They've got Magneto and all these things that are going on, they're already going up against the first wave of the government implementing different types of mandates. They got the Sentinels, but they've got the first mandate against mutants and mutant kind and then putting the sentinels out there. Although these sentinels aren't free thinking sentinels at this point, they're just sentinels. And then as we start to move forward into the books, then they become more of a, I want to say, of a sentient sentinel. [00:22:46] Speaker B: The other one piece of back matter that I want to share, too, before we get moving forward, the crazy part. So the original series ends in 1970. So January of 1970 with a cover date of March 1970, the last issue, Marvel tries to relaunch the beast on his own, which is why they sort of have, and you get the big blue furry. He's still the not furry beast in 1970. So I think they brought him in in what? Marvel premiere, they make him an avenger. So the beast is sort of off on his own. And you'll see that referenced in the book here. So they were trying to use the beast, but it was not successful. [00:23:22] Speaker A: Actually. It's kind of sad, too, because up until the point where he joins the X Men, I mean, he's just a normal dude with big feet, and he's got some amped up powers. He's like a good football player, all these other things. And then as he's working on a science stuff, he wants to get rid of his powers, or not his powers, but his appearance. Right? His mutant type appearance. And then that's how he ends up as the big furry beast. And then this whole entire time that he's off on his own, he's trying to just reverse this thing, and it just keeps making it worse. [00:23:56] Speaker B: And then the other thing I'll just toss out there that you probably knew, but I didn't. So not issue 66, which is the last issue. Right. But there's a fill in issue in issue 65, which shouldn't surprise you that there's a fill in issue because they're about to end a series, right? Yeah. The writer and penciling team for the fill in issue are Denny O'Neill and Adams. [00:24:19] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:24:20] Speaker B: About to go to DC, about to move and launch a very critically acclaimed but unsuccessful Green Lantern. [00:24:28] Speaker A: Oh, I know. So. [00:24:32] Speaker B: That run gave them Batman. Right? So then they did Batman, and that was hugely successful. And obviously the Green Lantern Green arrow stuff. We did the drug issues, and we've done the first appearance of Jon Stewart on the podcast. [00:24:44] Speaker A: Honestly, without that run of Green Arrow and Green Lantern, you don't end up with the Green Arrow tv show, Green Arrow, anything. [00:24:55] Speaker B: Yeah, well, and you don't end up with the classic 70s Batman stories or. [00:25:00] Speaker A: The Green Lantern movie with everyone's favorite. [00:25:03] Speaker B: No, the Green Lantern. No green Lantern movie. Please stop. The Green Lantern movie is very steeped in those Gil Kane John Broom stories, which, again, talk about picking up a terrible era to do a movie about. Right? It's like, let's go to the Silver Age and do the movie based off the Silver Age. Genius, beautiful art with terrible stories. Back to that again. You're just baiting me now, right? [00:25:30] Speaker A: I didn't mean to sidetrack you, but. [00:25:33] Speaker B: No, I think all this back matter is important, though, because, one, there's just a circle of amazing freaking writers and artists here. And then Len Wean is going to do a bunch of stuff for DC, too, after this, like, swamp thing. You've heard of that guy. [00:25:49] Speaker A: Yeah, the swamp thing guy. We talked about him last week. [00:25:53] Speaker B: There's a lot of tie ins happening right now because we're stuck in the middle of the 70s. But Cochrane comes over, and the idea is to put Cochrane on this book with new writer Chris Claremont. And Len Wean is going to be, like we said, chris Claremont's babysitter for the first few issues. So they get Claremont over, and he basically opens his book full of designs and says, well, here's all the shit that I pitched to DC. And Len Wean says, well, I've got some character ideas. By the way, before we continue to the first page, there are some amazing fishing reels you can get for 1495. [00:26:35] Speaker A: Oh, my gosh. [00:26:37] Speaker B: Yeah. I just want to make sure we point out the fishing rule reels, but. [00:26:42] Speaker A: We get 411 pieces. Damn. Let's get on the fial river. [00:26:48] Speaker B: So we flip this, and first off, we get a splash. [00:26:51] Speaker A: We have been going for 46 minutes, and we finally got the first page. This is amazing podcast, people. [00:26:58] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, we're to the first page. Like I said, we're not going to necessarily try to cover the story word, page by page, because we think most people know the story. [00:27:07] Speaker A: They don't. [00:27:07] Speaker B: But when we're looking at this, it's funny. We get a cover by Gil Kane, and probably, knowing Cochrane probably just is a giant. Fuck you. He just draws the COVID again as a splash page, but better. [00:27:20] Speaker A: He redoes the same art, but 100 times better. And it is like. I mean, as the kids on the street today say, this is lit. [00:27:31] Speaker B: Well, he even draws the X Men as they are now. Like how they'd be looking at these folks. So you get the blue, right? Yeah. [00:27:38] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:27:39] Speaker B: And you get the original. We get the. We don't have havoc back there or anything. We have the original lineup. We've got Marvel Girl, otherwise known as Jean Grey. [00:27:51] Speaker A: Jean Grey. [00:27:52] Speaker B: We have Angel, angel, and Cyclops, and Beast and Iceman, but not the snowball. So. And then we've got a splash page, and we'll be introduced to all these characters because we don't know who they are yet. [00:28:06] Speaker A: That's right. They're all new. [00:28:08] Speaker B: That's not true. We know who some of these characters are. Okay, if you read X Men. So you're going to correct me if I'm wrong, but if you read X Men, we know who. Well, no, if you read the Hulk, you know who Wolverine is. [00:28:19] Speaker A: You know who. You know who Wolverine is from the Hulk. And if you actually, in some of the previous backmatter of the X Men, you might have been introduced to one or two characters from the previous issues. They might have just dropped. [00:28:39] Speaker B: You would have met before. Yeah. [00:28:41] Speaker A: Even Banshee. Yeah, for sure. [00:28:45] Speaker B: And he gets his original costume, too. He doesn't get a nice costume update, right? [00:28:49] Speaker A: No. And that's what I like about that end scene with sunfire. [00:28:52] Speaker B: But sunfire gets a costume update. [00:28:54] Speaker A: Yeah, slightly mask and the rising sun, which I don't like it. [00:28:59] Speaker B: I like the rising sun flag on it. [00:29:02] Speaker A: Okay. There's a whole reason why I don't like. [00:29:07] Speaker B: Well, in this comic, right. There's some stuff they screw up a little bit because it's the. It's a white guy trying to write a multiracial cast. [00:29:19] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:29:20] Speaker B: There is one panel in here, one single panel where you're like, is Len Wean the most racist person in the universe? One panel. We'll get there. We'll get to that panel. And it's also going to illustrate why Greg doesn't like the rising sun. There's two. Okay. I was thinking of. There's one panel, though, that has two slurs in it at the same time. [00:29:41] Speaker A: Well, I can tell you. I'll just say off the mean. As a japanese American, the rising sun, anything with the rising sun on it is kind of like looking at a rebel flag. To most Japanese Americans. It's like, why would you wear that? [00:29:56] Speaker B: And I noticed in the Godzilla movie, there weren't even rising sun flags in. [00:30:00] Speaker A: It, because a lot of japanese people just look at it like a rebel flag, where you're like, right. [00:30:08] Speaker B: And, I mean, the most recent Godzilla. [00:30:11] Speaker A: Movie, kind of a blight on the nation. We acknowledge that it was a thing. And if you want historical accuracy, yes. Okay. But for the most part, it's like most Japanese Americans, you see a dude that, like, a white dude with his car with a big old imperial flag on it, and it's like, cool. You put that on your Honda, and you don't even understand the concept, the reasoning behind it. Cool. Awesome. [00:30:39] Speaker B: Yeah. And that's. Let's get. Let's get into. See. But there's four new characters here, and we have no idea who those characters are. And Len Wean is bringing. Len Wean was writing the. [00:30:51] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:30:52] Speaker B: And wrote the first appearances of Wolverine. So he's bringing Wolverine over from the, uh. It's interesting because if you read Dave Cochrane's notes anywhere, he didn't like Wolverine at all. He just thought he was a berserker moron. He hated the character. And that's why in later issues, he's the one that starts drawing him with the rednecks tuxedo, the furry Jean jacket, and the sideburns to try to humanize. [00:31:22] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:31:23] Speaker B: And it's just one more way of Cochrane inserting himself as an artist. Right. To try to soften something and give it some life, because he was thinking Wolverine and his original incarnation is just basically the Hulk. Right. You can't do much with him. [00:31:39] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:31:39] Speaker B: And it's another situation where a writer and artist work together. But often just an artist will take a character and humanize the character and help develop. And let's know, Len Wean created Wolverine. Dave Cochrane is the reason Wolverine is Wolverine. [00:31:55] Speaker A: Yeah. And it's such an interesting and paid. [00:32:00] Speaker B: No money ever for the creation of Wolverine because he didn't create him. [00:32:04] Speaker A: He just enhanced, perfected him. Perfected him well. And then this lineup is such a powerful lineup, too, of characters. When you take a look at it, it is wild to think, because in the previous lineup, you've got beast. Like a tank. Right? You've got Cyclops, kind of a tank in a sense, but then you've got Gene Gray. [00:32:31] Speaker B: Thunderbird's a tank. [00:32:33] Speaker A: Well, no, no, I'm talking about, like, the previous got. You got beast, tank, Cyclops, Tank, iceman, gene Gray, strategic. And then you got angel, who's worthless. No, he's your aerial strategist. Okay, then who's worthless. [00:32:50] Speaker B: He always sucks. [00:32:53] Speaker A: He flies. He flies. [00:32:55] Speaker B: He's not cool. Until he becomes Archangel, and then they change him back. Yeah, because then they made a character that had razor shoots razors at people, and only villains should be able to shoot razors at people because heroes that shoot razors at people would murder them. That doesn't make a good hero. [00:33:11] Speaker A: Doesn't make a good hero. And then this team is like Wolverine, powerhouse, Thunderbird, powerhouse, a tank. Tank. Peter is a tank. Banshee. And Banshee is a tank, too. [00:33:30] Speaker B: Well, Banshee is more of your. But I would make the argument that Banshee is more of your. That storm and Banshee, we can get into the criticism I laid last week because they really do use Storm. Storm is a tank, too, but they use ban, and I think rightfully so, with this group. Right. Banshee and Storm are your distance and sunfire are your distance, folks. Right. Wolverine is like, you throw Colossus and Thunderbird in first, and then Wolverine comes in and cleans up. Right? Yeah, because he's getting anybody that comes through. And then you've got your reconnaissance in. You've got your rogue. You got your reconnaissance with Nightcrawler, right? [00:34:12] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:34:15] Speaker B: If you were creating a dnd group, you'd want this group. Yeah. [00:34:20] Speaker A: No, this is a great group. This is a great team that you would roll up and want your stats up high and stuff like that. I mean, honestly, Storm is like, she's your all around catch. She does everything and she does it great. That's who you want on your team. [00:34:38] Speaker B: But she's like you're fighting mage, right? In that sense, because she doesn't have to go to the front lines most of the time, but when she does, she's going to win. [00:34:52] Speaker A: Yeah, of course. [00:34:53] Speaker B: And of course later they write her that way, too. But let's not get into fighting Callisto in that because. All right, we should at least get to the second page. But I will tell you that Len Wean is the writer, editor and co creator with Dave Cochrane. So it's noted as co creator. So if anybody was ever wondering, they even noted in the book Dave Cochrane co creator, illustrator Glennis Wean. So is that Len Wean's relative? Is that Len Weane's wife, Glenn? [00:35:25] Speaker A: Maybe. Maybe it's his full name. [00:35:27] Speaker B: No, the. [00:35:30] Speaker A: Glennis wean. Oh, yeah. I don't know. I guess you'll have to look that up. [00:35:35] Speaker B: Podcast. Yeah. And John Costanza, I guarantee. Dave Cochrane's favorite letterer right here. All right. [00:35:44] Speaker A: I have a feeling we're only going to get to, like, this book is broken up into four parts, folks. I think we're only going to get to a third. [00:35:51] Speaker B: We'll get. So, first off, art is beautiful throughout. You've got amazing characters, the background. So we have this blue guy running through a village away from people with fire. [00:36:05] Speaker A: Oh, my gosh. Yeah. In the alps, and there's like, all this wild stuff going on, the torches. [00:36:15] Speaker B: We get a migo advertisement for the falcon, the lizard, green goblin, and the Hulk. Multiple eight inch figures. And if Rick had those, he would be keeping those. Those were not things he would sell. [00:36:26] Speaker A: No, they're not. And honestly, when I was a kid, I swear my cousin Eric had these because he was a little bit older than us. He must have got these at a garage sale or something like that and thought they were dumb, and he just blew them up. [00:36:49] Speaker B: In fact, Glynnis was Lenween's wife for several years. [00:36:55] Speaker A: Oh, wow, look at that. Look who's smiling now. [00:36:57] Speaker B: Since 1985, she's been using her maiden name of Oliver. However, say that one more time. [00:37:03] Speaker A: Oliver. [00:37:04] Speaker B: She's been using her maiden name since 1985, so that should. [00:37:07] Speaker A: What's the maiden name? [00:37:08] Speaker B: Oliver. So, Glynnis. [00:37:09] Speaker A: Oliver Glennis. Oliver. Okay. I thought you said Oliver Howell. I was like, that is all very long. Okay. [00:37:18] Speaker B: But anyway, of course, Professor X comes in and stops this, and he's like, hey, would you like to come to my school for mutants? And he's like, sure, because you're taking me away from this rabid crowd who's murdering me, trying to murder me. So we get that. And by the way, before we continue, there is something we forgot to say with all that starting talk. So the idea here was you had already made the point that the stories had run stale with the group of sort of the persecuted heroes from. Right? [00:37:52] Speaker A: Yes, yes. [00:37:53] Speaker B: So the idea here that they had in the relaunch, and I think they gave. Didn't the Cochrane book give a little bit of credit to Roy Thomas for this, too? But Len Wean and Roy Thomas and Cochrane, they want a group of international heroes to illustrate that mutants were everywhere. Right? So it wasn't just folks in the United States. So that's where we're getting this sort of cross section of heroes. So now we end up in Quebec. [00:38:20] Speaker A: I want to say the first round. And Professor Xavier's school of gifted students, gifted youth, they'd already gone through, like, two. I want to say two or three classes at this point. And a lot of those kids, obviously all from the States, all from one of them at this point. I want to say angel, because in this storyline, he is from England. So he was the international student. But everyone else is all from. So. [00:38:58] Speaker B: And they're all very. [00:38:59] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:39:00] Speaker B: They're the persecuted white. [00:39:03] Speaker A: We've got. We need to mix it up a bit. [00:39:06] Speaker B: Yes. And I will say, too, as we go through. Well, we'll get to it when we get there. But they try to introduce multiracial cast sometimes. Okay, well, anyway, so we are in Quebec, Canada, and Wolverine's hanging out at the future. Be known as Weapon X facility. [00:39:33] Speaker A: Yeah, weapon X facility. Alpha flight space. [00:39:36] Speaker B: But we don't know that stuff yet. [00:39:38] Speaker A: Oh, my gosh. There's so much. I want to talk about this, but I can't. I'll say it for another time. [00:39:45] Speaker B: Well, we don't know this stuff. You're just going to have to pick us out a Weapon X story later. Right. [00:39:49] Speaker A: I know. Run a four issue. [00:39:53] Speaker B: But starting up the Wolverine personality. [00:39:57] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:39:59] Speaker B: He is short. He's originally drawn with the blue and the yellow by Cochrane, which I think a lot of people assume that he's originally drawn with the yellow and the Brown, right? [00:40:09] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:40:10] Speaker B: Or the brown, but he's not right. He's originally the Yellow and the blue, and he's got the winged headpiece to make him look like the Wolverine. And it said in the Cochrane bio that he didn't draw him originally. Like, this character wasn't drawn like the. He was drawn like a different character. Cochrane had been drawing. I forget the name. It was one of the proposed characters Cochrane had been working on, which is interesting. But then when he later, he draws them with the mutton chops and make him look more of. That's where you see the similarities there. So there you go. Not Timberwolf. If we were counting. [00:40:51] Speaker A: If we were counting. [00:40:53] Speaker B: Yeah, not Timberwolf, but still kind of Timberwolf. So we're going to go in. Timberwolf is a character from Legion of superheroes who has agility powers and recuperative powers. So not recuperative powers. The level of Wolverines, by any means. But there you go. So not even close, but there are some similarities. So we go over and. Yeah, Wolverine basically tells the canadian army to go fuck themselves and leaves with Professor X. That a fair summary of a couple pages? [00:41:29] Speaker A: That's a fair summary of a couple. I just. I can't leave this page without saying. And from that point on, it seals his fate as being a marked man. [00:41:44] Speaker B: Canadians are not as nice as you think they are. [00:41:46] Speaker A: They are not as nice as you think they are, because, boy, oh, boy, anytime Wolverine steps foot in that country, he is a marked man. [00:41:56] Speaker B: They spent a lot of money on that guy. [00:41:58] Speaker A: Well, alpha flight and the weapon X project from that point on, is all about getting Wolverine if he goes into Canada. [00:42:08] Speaker B: Now, what I think is hilarious is you can tell Banshee is going to be a big part of the next group because he gets a whole two panels. [00:42:15] Speaker A: Well, I mean, he was a big part of the previous group for minute or. And. Okay, so leading up to this. So Banshee, if you don't know who he is, he's a previous law enforcement officer back in the UK, so he was also from the UK, too. Okay. And Professor X had a friend who was helping out run a installation to hold his. Professor X's brother in Moira chamber. Yeah, Moira to hold his lover at one point. [00:42:56] Speaker B: But spoiler. [00:42:58] Speaker A: Spoiler. They saw things differently. They just were on a friendship level, and Banshee and her took up the. So. [00:43:11] Speaker B: But now Banshee is in Nashville, Tennessee. Yeah, exactly where I thought he would be. [00:43:17] Speaker A: Well, I mean, he's a man of music and taste. [00:43:21] Speaker B: You will also know. Notice that, right? Sitting in front of, somehow, phantom girl went back 1000 years, ended up in the Marvel universe, is sitting right in front of Banshee, because that is Dave Cochrane, phantom girl, dead on right there. [00:43:40] Speaker A: Really? [00:43:41] Speaker B: Yes. Crazy with the pigtails and everything. So there we go. And you're also going to see some of that. And, of course, Banshee's relationship to legion of superheroes is because Mike Grell is forced to draw the first black legionnaire, Tyrock, who has the exact same power set as Banshee. [00:44:00] Speaker A: Interesting. Okay. [00:44:02] Speaker B: And that's another story for another. Uh, fair enough. Now we go to Kenya, and we meet Storm, who is being worshipped by people as a goddess of the weather. And she basically seems like she knows this is not quite right. [00:44:26] Speaker A: She knows that she's kind of like a huckster, in a sense. She's like, hey, you guys want the weather to be good for you in your crops to grow? Okay, excellent. Give me this, this, and this, and I'll make it happen. All right, cool. You got the good weather. [00:44:45] Speaker B: And her hair seems to always cover her body. [00:44:49] Speaker A: Yeah. Because. [00:44:54] Speaker B: Cochrane is known for having costumes that show a lot of skin, because they're those fashion costumes we talked about. Right. Things that would only work on a. And so, anyway, she's going to add a little bit more to her costume later than her hair. And her, if you know about her. [00:45:12] Speaker A: Power set, though, she does have the ability to do that kind of stuff, to really change and sway the weather and make things good. She can bring rain and all that. That can help crops and stuff like that. So it is good for the area that she's in. But it's a definite sad thing when she leaves, I'm sure. [00:45:35] Speaker B: Yeah. And she says to Xavier, comes to her and is like. She's like, what can you offer a goddess? And he's like, what I offer you is the world. It's like, it's not beautiful, but it is real. And he's like, you are no goddess, Aurora, and you are a mutant, and you have responsibilities. And she thinks about it, and she's like, okay, perhaps it's time for me to go and do something with my life. So she goes, and she goes off on her hero quest, which is really. And if you follow the storm character, right. When Storm was being written, well, storm was always on a hero quest of some sort. [00:46:11] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. [00:46:12] Speaker B: Like, whether that's when she shaved her head or because she was despondent during a low part of her hero quest. Right. Even after the wonderful. I don't think because Claremont didn't get it right all the time, even after the perilous storyline, she's still on that hero quest. That's how you get Gambit. Right? [00:46:34] Speaker A: Right. [00:46:37] Speaker B: This is her start. So it's always a cool one to see, because she makes the decision to say, well, I'm going to go on this quest. Right. There are things for me beyond my station right now. [00:46:49] Speaker A: Yeah. And that's the cool thing. Like you said, she's always on these quests, but her hero arcs are really good. And if you do follow her storylines and how they intertwine a lot with Jean Grey and her story and arc and how they're very. I'm not going to say complementary, because they don't complement, but they do bounce and balance. [00:47:18] Speaker B: When I always thought, and I know later on in the 90s, this changes, right. But I always thought the storm character never succumbs to temptation. That was also one of the great things about the character for a long, long time. Right. I know they did some things later in the 90s which I don't want to discuss, but throughout the Claremont run, right. [00:47:37] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:47:38] Speaker B: She was tempted by power, she was tempted by fate. She was tempted by many things and never succumbed to them, for sure. [00:47:46] Speaker A: What I like about this run, what this builds up to is, I mean, it definitely puts her into a thing where she has lived her life as a goddess in Africa, doing all these things for the people and being worshipped, and then she's put into a team situation where she has to find her footing amongst other people. And not all of them have great personalities, obviously. [00:48:17] Speaker B: But I feel like I'm, like, the only person that likes the Morlock storyline, but I think that's why I liked it, right? [00:48:22] Speaker A: Oh, no, she breaks out. [00:48:25] Speaker B: Okay, so maybe I'm not the only one. I always feel like I'm the only one because people shit on that storyline all the time. [00:48:30] Speaker A: Oh, no, it's so good because when you get into it and everything's happening and she's got the empathy. Right. [00:48:42] Speaker B: One of the comics I got as a kid was in that three pack. I get the story where she comes back from that, right? And gets rid of all her plants and shaves her head, and Kitty pride is, like, freaked out, like, what happened to you? And so I had to go back and read around that because I read that story, like, 50 times as a kid, but had no context for what was around it. But I was like, this is fascinating. But anyway. All right, so we've got to keep going. Never get done. [00:49:15] Speaker A: It'll be like 09:00 hours later. [00:49:18] Speaker B: Yeah, we can't. Okay, so let's get to sunfire for a second, because I want to listen to you talk. Because costume aside. Okay. Because costume. You're like. That's offensive. Okay, cool. I've always thought I figured you, as a japanese American would find Sunfire offensive for a fuck ton more reasons than his costume. Right. I've always found Sunfire in every iteration to just be a character I never want to see on the page, ever. He's always an asshole. They used him later on for Rogue to take his powers away. She could have powers again when they reintroduced Ms. Marvel. [00:49:55] Speaker A: Right. [00:49:57] Speaker B: To me, he's just always been a character that, to me, has no redeeming qualities at all on the page. So tell me about Sunfire, because you've probably read a little bit more of these early Sunfire pieces, and maybe you can explain to me why they keep bringing this character back and forth. [00:50:14] Speaker A: All right, so Sunfire is a businessman, and that's why he's such a hard ass. And then also the Wolverine connection later on that you're, like, bearing the lead up. I mean, there's a whole entire freaking movie based on their crap relationship. [00:50:37] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:50:40] Speaker A: And his love for. Not Sunfire's love, but Wolverine's love for. [00:50:53] Speaker B: Helping me. [00:50:54] Speaker A: Sunfire is a yakuza. He's a secret yakuza. He's connected to Yakuza people. He's a good guy, but a bad guy. He's a mutant, so he's just doing this because he's like, oh, hey, people know that I'm a mutant, so I got to do this. But also, I'm connected to these bad people. And then there's also all these other things that are out there that are like. I mean, he's very tropey, but then. [00:51:22] Speaker B: Again, he's a series of stereotypes. [00:51:25] Speaker A: He's a serious series of stereotypes. [00:51:27] Speaker B: He's a series of stereotypes in a book where almost every character is a stereotype. [00:51:31] Speaker A: So how can you hate one thing if you like everything else? [00:51:34] Speaker B: Well, no, because I didn't say I liked everything else, first off. And second, his is just, like, a stack of stereotypes. And he's always an asshole. I want some redeeming qualities for my characters. Right. And he's just, like, understandable. Always an asshole. [00:51:53] Speaker A: At the same point. It's like when a majority of the time, when you're looking at people based off of either stereotypes or interactions with people, and you don't understand culturally why they act that way. And a lot of times when you're talking to asian business people that are just either quiet or standoffish, it's not necessarily that that's necessarily how they are. It's just how they conduct themselves in those types of situations. They might be jolly and jovial in lockdown, personal situations and stuff like that, but if they're handling themselves in a business type situation, he's having this conversation with Professor X and every other interaction that he's having with all of his teammates, he's looking at a business situation or interaction, he's going to be a jerk. Regardless. [00:52:39] Speaker B: We have to have a geisha bringing him tea. [00:52:41] Speaker A: That's his sister. [00:52:42] Speaker B: Is it, does it indicate that anywhere. [00:52:45] Speaker A: If you read further onto the story, into the rest of the story, that his sister. [00:52:50] Speaker B: Right here, it doesn't. [00:52:52] Speaker A: It, right there implies, but generally speaking, probably acting as a servant. But for the most part, though, I mean, for it, you're. You're putting the gacious stereotype on the. [00:53:07] Speaker B: Person, but most of the time, 1970s comic book. [00:53:12] Speaker A: It's a 1970s comic book being delivered. [00:53:14] Speaker B: Things by a woman, but eastern cultural wear. Putting it there. [00:53:20] Speaker A: You're putting it there. [00:53:21] Speaker B: I'm putting it there. [00:53:24] Speaker A: The art is putting it there. But you're also putting that lens over it because, have you been to Japan? Have you seen cultural wear? [00:53:31] Speaker B: I've never been to Japan. Because you won't go. [00:53:34] Speaker A: I've been. [00:53:35] Speaker B: I know you've been. [00:53:36] Speaker A: Anyway, no, I'm just saying. But cultural wear wise, and even at this time, too, when this was written, and I'm just putting this lens on there for you, is maybe this was the appropriate attire at the time for them to be wearing. [00:53:57] Speaker B: Okay. And it would also not surprise me for Dave Cochrane to research the shit out of. [00:54:03] Speaker A: Yeah, so, but you're saying geisha also, geisha's would have more makeup on for their facial makeup and other things like that. That does not indicate geisha to me indicates just probably either a family member or, as I know from the future stories, stuff like that. His sister does do a lot of these servant type things as his attache. Okay. [00:54:30] Speaker B: I don't know I like that any better. Okay. [00:54:35] Speaker A: Moving forward. [00:54:37] Speaker B: Well, we will move forward, but I will say, too, I think what brings the stereotypes to the front of this is his overarching attitude too, right? [00:54:45] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay. You want to know? [00:54:48] Speaker B: Perhaps it's time once more for me, for the world to love me. I know it doesn't say that but that's pretty much. [00:54:54] Speaker A: Okay. You want to know how my, as an asian American, would I want this or not as an asian American at this time, if I was a kid reading this, you got to remember there's not a lot of representation in comics on the screen, either on tv or in movies. And if it was represented, it was usually done by a non asian American. So case in, when people were put on the screen to be in those roles, they generally weren't. So David Carradine, not asian american kung fu. [00:55:39] Speaker B: Well, no, I'm picking at this a little bit because I wanted to get into one of these characters. Right. And you have more insight than I do. So I'm picking at this a ton. We're going to get into Peter Rasputin. [00:55:50] Speaker A: In a minute, so I won't pick. [00:55:52] Speaker B: On that too much. [00:55:54] Speaker A: But when you put in a character like this and they put in all the stereotypes and stuff like that, sometimes it's like, yes, heavy handed stereotypes, but at the same point, it's like, all right, you have this or you have that or you don't have it at. So what. What would you rather have? Right. [00:56:11] Speaker B: And that's the same with storm character. Right? [00:56:13] Speaker A: Yeah. Not saying that it's better or worse, but it's in the same. Know, you got a character named Rasputin from, you know, Siberia. It's. [00:56:26] Speaker B: Let's jump. Let's jump to. Right? [00:56:30] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. [00:56:31] Speaker B: So let's jump there because I wanted the commentary on Sunfire. I wanted to spend it there instead of on auroro. Right. Like, we could have spent that same. Had that almost identical conversation about the stereotypes where storm is presented. [00:56:44] Speaker A: Right. [00:56:45] Speaker B: So I think it's good to have it there because I think you're far more qualified to talk about those panels in my mind than I am to talk about native African. Right. [00:57:00] Speaker A: The same thing that I said about sunfire can be said about Thunderbird as well. [00:57:09] Speaker B: We'll cover. [00:57:13] Speaker A: Spoiler alert, Thunderbird is only in the series for, like, four issues. [00:57:20] Speaker B: Well, because you always got to kill one of the tanks. But here's Peter Rasputin. Yeah. I've never been a big fan of the last name. [00:57:30] Speaker A: He's unkillable. Dan. That's a great name. Rasputin is unkillable. You can't stab him. You can't shoot him. You can't poison him. You can't drown him. He's unkillable. [00:57:42] Speaker B: Well, the most important thing is. The most important thing should have called him Rasmutin. Yeah. So Peter is on a collective farm in Russia. [00:57:52] Speaker A: Yes. Wait, it's their farm. The farm is theirs. [00:57:56] Speaker B: Yeah. No, it's not our farm. [00:57:59] Speaker A: The farm is our farm. [00:58:01] Speaker B: And anyway, we get the retconned first appearance of magic, which is not referenced at all right here. Could be any little girl he was saving. Does it say it's his sister? I don't remember it saying it's his sister. Peter, look. [00:58:15] Speaker A: Our sister. [00:58:16] Speaker B: Your right. That's right. [00:58:17] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:58:18] Speaker B: But the retcon first appearance of magic as well. [00:58:22] Speaker A: Yeah. Because later on in the series, his sister, everybody. [00:58:30] Speaker B: And obviously the most important first appearance in this. Oh yeah. [00:58:35] Speaker A: Oh yeah. [00:58:36] Speaker B: It's why everybody buys this issue is Ileana's first appearance. [00:58:40] Speaker A: Of course. [00:58:41] Speaker B: That's why everybody seeks out this issue. Right? Yeah. You didn't know? It says right here, supporting characters, Ileana Rasputin, first appearance, unnamed. That's why this issue is worth so much money. [00:58:55] Speaker A: Exactly. [00:58:56] Speaker B: So anyway, same idea. He saves her, he unveils his powers. His parents are very sad, but Professor X convinces him to go off for a greater cause, to save the world. So our group of international heroes are, and then we get the most racist stereotype in the issue, which is the first appearance of Thunderbird. John Proud star. [00:59:17] Speaker A: John Proudstar, which is. [00:59:19] Speaker B: They do better with James Proudstar later. I'll just say, yeah, much better. [00:59:24] Speaker A: Yeah, his brother. [00:59:25] Speaker B: Yeah, but that was written much later. [00:59:28] Speaker A: Yeah. The redemption story of like, you can do better than your brother, be better than your brother. Don't be stubborn like your brother. [00:59:38] Speaker B: Yeah. And they call him an apache, which there's a couple of other things in there that really make me uncomfortable later on about would say, I would say about the first appearance of John Proudstar is we do have native representation, which is good. It's very similar to some of the native representations I saw in the Neil Adams, Denny O'Neill. Green Lantern works right where they're trying, but they don't always get it right. I think at least in the Green Lantern Green Arrow stuff where they go back and they try to save, it's the famous one where Green Arrow and Green Lantern get in the fight in the. I don't even think we've covered this in the podcast, but they get in a fight in a river and knock each other out. [01:00:25] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, no, we did cover it a little bit. We did cover. [01:00:28] Speaker B: They're fighting over the rights of natives to rule their land. Right. And Green Lantern is like, I'm going to go to the government and they're going to help. And Green Arrow's like, I'm going to run the loggers off the land because the government ain't going to help. And they get in a fight over it. I think just because you had two issues where you could sort of fully develop this storyline, we get a few panels and so they don't get as much time to develop it. [01:00:57] Speaker A: Right, right. [01:00:59] Speaker B: But they do show he's a powerful dude because he's like chasing a buffalo and takes it down. [01:01:05] Speaker A: Yeah, he wrestles that thing down. [01:01:07] Speaker B: A bison. Excuse me, a bison, which is a buffalo. And he gets recruited by Professor X. Again, I have no idea how Professor X got his wheelchair out there. [01:01:20] Speaker A: And that's what he asked him. And he's like, how did you get out here? [01:01:24] Speaker B: But he agrees to join. And Professor X is like, but will any of you, my new X Men, be equal to the task that lies before you or will you carry the world down into. Uh oh. Now one thing I do want to bridge here is that I think one of the other things too that happens with Professor X and those old stories is DC has in my strange adventure. Right. They have the chief. Right. [01:01:54] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:01:55] Speaker B: Which is basically Professor X. Yeah. So we know two teams of basically mutant and DC based goes as far as saying mutants. Right, right. So we have almost two identical teams happening. And I think that the concept gets burnt out by both. Right. Because Doom patrol goes down to a sad fate too, that they tried to launch several times. And Doom Patrol really, I mean, Doom Patrol in its entire history outside of probably the tv show. Right. And the tv show is based off the 80s Morrison run. [01:02:26] Speaker A: Right, right. [01:02:27] Speaker B: So the Doom Patrol, they do a lot more with X Men. Doom Patrol really has like two years of success of good stuff and they've tried to relaunch it over and over and over and over and over again. And why am I blanking on the dude Gerard way? [01:02:45] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. [01:02:45] Speaker B: Did a couple good years of it, too. Recently they even had John Beer and try to do Doom Patrol and it wasn't super great. So I thought that was funny. It's like you bring John Beard to do the analog book for the X Men. But I guess at that point DC was trying to get anything they could get out of John Beard after he destroyed. [01:03:06] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:03:07] Speaker B: Well, anyway, we'll be to John Beer in a minute. I promise not to get there yet. So chapter two, we're going to fly a little bit because, oh, we're going. [01:03:15] Speaker A: To actually go into this. You don't want to hold off. [01:03:18] Speaker B: You know what? [01:03:19] Speaker A: Give the listeners a reprieve in a minute to soak all this in, and then we'll come back. [01:03:25] Speaker B: We should have a part two. I think you're right. So if you're reading along with us, we are going to stop at. I don't know if you'll get this before we record this next one. You know what? I'll probably put this on New Year's, so they will get it before we record this. We are. We're through chapter one, and that's it. And a lot of backstory about Dave Cochrane. And we're going to get into what these new heroes have to face next. [01:03:51] Speaker A: Oh, my goodness. They had to face so much. [01:03:54] Speaker B: We'll talk about John Beer, and in the next podcast, we'll talk about John Beer and being a tracer over Dave Cochrane. [01:04:01] Speaker A: Tracer. Just like, why can't I think of the name of the movie now? Chasing Amy. [01:04:08] Speaker B: Amy. Yeah. Well, the thing here, too, is Cochrane inked his own stuff, at least for the first appearance. [01:04:17] Speaker A: Gotcha. [01:04:18] Speaker B: And then they have Bob McLeod. It looks like they have a whole bunch of different anchors for Sam Granger. Sam Granger. So, yeah, it looks like Sam Granger inks him for a while because Cochrane was too slow. That's one of the things. Cochrane will love to ink his own stuff, too, but he's just not fast enough if he's doing. But Cochrane inks a few of his own stuff, a few issues, and they can change out inkers. Because Cochrane's pencils are so finished, it's not hard to ink him. Right. [01:04:44] Speaker A: Yeah, solid, solid work. [01:04:46] Speaker B: Bob Layton inked him in issue 105. Fun fact. Yeah. There are tons of inkers that went over him. [01:04:53] Speaker A: He's been inked by all of them. [01:04:56] Speaker B: Yeah. And I could go on with this. Oh, my God. Yeah. 107, the first appearance of the Legion. I mean, Imperial Guard. If there's colossal boy, the Legion makes it back. And then after the first appearance of the imperial Guard, we get one more issue. And actually, that was it. No, there's the imperial Guard. And then that was the star smasher or star jammers. My bad. Not the imperial guard. But there's still colossal boy standing there, in all honesty. [01:05:27] Speaker A: They do. Like, was it? [01:05:30] Speaker B: Yeah. And then you get John Beer with issue 108, drawing Chris Claremont's characters, when. [01:05:37] Speaker A: They get further into any of this, there is a whole entire run. Yeah. When they get all the characters back out of everything from this, there is a whole entire thing that does happen. Yeah. You do get a lot of Legion style story. [01:05:55] Speaker B: Oh, you do? [01:05:57] Speaker A: Yeah, you do. When I was going back, when I was enjoying a lot of these stories last year. I was like, oh, man, this is very much up Dan's alley. [01:06:07] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. And again, we'll wrap this podcast, but they say, let's wrap this first one up by talking about image comics for a second. Right, okay. So image was created by artists or writers. [01:06:27] Speaker A: Well, that's a good question. Easy. [01:06:29] Speaker B: Because they were created by artists. Because they've acknowledged that. Right? [01:06:32] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:06:33] Speaker B: Because unless you write the Walking Dead, you've never been a vice president or a co creative president, whatever they called it. Right. Image. Right. [01:06:42] Speaker A: Gotcha. [01:06:43] Speaker B: So unless you're Robert Kirkman, like, he was the first writer they let be an executive. Right. So I don't know if you knew. So that's the first writer they let be an executive in their company. Right. Which obviously, I mean, from a fiscal standpoint, you kind of had to, I would think, at that point, right, because you need his properties. But you think about. A lot of people say, like, well, and obviously, I want to give Claremont the credit. We were talking about this beginning, but I want to stress the point we were making, right. Cochrane designed the characters that were the number one selling book at Marvel in the number two selling book at DC from 1982 to 19 to crisis. Until John Beerin destroyed Legion. [01:07:30] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:07:31] Speaker B: Because John Beer, when he relaunched Superman, said there was no superboy. And if there was no Superboy, then there's no legion of superheroes. [01:07:39] Speaker A: Right, right. [01:07:41] Speaker B: I mean, there is. But there's no tie to the present. Right. That was the whole thing. Right. And then I would make the argument that John Beard, being just massively overrated, later, gets that big contract at DC and just destroys one of their biggest properties, to the point of them killing Superman in the early 90s. [01:08:05] Speaker A: Right. [01:08:06] Speaker B: And it's amazing to me. Right. And again, John Baron, as a creator, I may not like everything he did. There's some people that like what he did with the Superman launch. Sales would tell you otherwise. Right. Because they got him off the books. Right. [01:08:25] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:08:26] Speaker B: Very quickly. Why are you tapping the. Anyway, I just. I don't know. To me, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, because John Beardon was on X Men for a long time, right. But to me, he gets pumped up by Claremont and Cochrane, and I don't think he ever delivered in any way close to what they delivered. And, in fact, when he got opportunities to deliver heavy, he failed often, and it was all pushed out of this. I can't argue that on the DC side, because Mike Grell is Mike Grell, and he went after Cochrane for Legion and then went on to do all sorts of his own shit. Right. Yeah. But what's the great John Beer and indie book that's out there that you want to grab? I mean, what's his, and again, I don't want to take away from John Beern, too. I want, I want to back myself up just a little because, you know, he had run on Fantastic Four, as he had. He created she Hulk. Right. I think. No, created by Stan Lee, it says. [01:09:35] Speaker A: But he did a lot of the build. [01:09:37] Speaker B: He had the 70s shehulk. Right. [01:09:39] Speaker A: Yeah. And that led to the shehulk that we know today. [01:09:44] Speaker B: Right. Well, anyway, I don't want to take away from him too much, but the big thing he's known. Right. Obviously, is the two big things he's known for. I guess he's known for Fantastic Four. Right. But I would argue the two big things he's known for are X Men and Superman. [01:10:07] Speaker A: Okay. [01:10:07] Speaker B: Right. [01:10:08] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:10:09] Speaker B: If you're saying, what are the two pinnacle pieces of his career, one is X Men and one is Superman. And Superman was an abject failure. [01:10:18] Speaker A: But the X Men, it's up there with everything else. [01:10:22] Speaker B: Yeah, but he was drawing somebody else's creations. Right, right. So, yeah, I don't know. And again, I don't want to pick, like, if I got the opportunity to hang out and talk to John, I'm always say his name wrong. John Beerne. John Byrne. Right. It's not Byron, it's Byrne. Right. So if I got the opportunity to talk to John Byrne, right. First I would say, why did you destroy the legion of superheroes? And then the second thing I would say is, dude, you're amazing. Right. Let's talk comics history. Because just because I don't like something somebody did, and I'm making the argument for Cochrane's contributions here. I don't want to diminish Byrne's history in comics. Right. But what I'm trying to pump up is Dave Cochrane's contribution to both of these things and how, I think, underappreciated Cochrane is compared to, say, a John Byrne who got the big contract. And it's like, the guy that came after the guy that made the cool thing is the one that got the recognition. And that's always been weird to me. [01:11:26] Speaker A: It just seems like that's always the case in every situation, be it comics, be it corporate world. It's always the person that's coming in afterwards that gets the notoriety, the recognition for the thing that was done before by somebody else that they're like, oh, who is doing it now? It's you. And that person's like, it's not me. But sure. They're like, yeah, never the person that's doing the thing, but they're the person that's in the shoes. And that's sad on two levels. It's sad for the person that did the work that didn't get recognized, and it's sad that the person that got recognized didn't do the work and now has to be like, oh, yeah. And they know that it wasn't their contribution that got them this thing, because they're getting all the accolades for something that they had nothing to do with. [01:12:26] Speaker B: Now, let's give John Byrne his due. I keep saying he's tracing Cochrane, but as an artist in his own right, he was able to draw those. You know, it's not him. I want to give the man some credit, too, but the stylization, like, if you go back to that splash page, a lot of the stylization of the costumes is not there in the burn run. [01:12:47] Speaker A: Yeah, that's true. [01:12:49] Speaker B: You lose a lot of those points of the costumes. [01:12:52] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:12:54] Speaker B: They're a weaker rendition, especially storms. [01:12:58] Speaker A: Again, like you said, there are things that he did that were very notable that we don't. And we don't get those jump off points later on for other things. So, I mean, applaud him for what he did do. [01:13:10] Speaker B: Good job. Yeah. Well, and I would think, too, after the two years on the book that had. Right. Like, I'm sure that Claremont had enough power to get to pick who he wanted on the book. Would. Yeah, I would think so. Claremont's like, I want that. Right. So there is that take away. I don't want to take away from. Diminish his career, but I am trying to pump up Cochrane's career and just make the argument, know, the reason this book is what it is was because of. [01:13:42] Speaker A: Right. Right. [01:13:43] Speaker B: And we can get into story and next episode, we'll get into the story matter. Right. That shows us more of what Len Wean contributed, writing the story and how he gave Claremont the jumping off point to get the X Men where they know. I also wonder in some strange way, too, like, if Len Wean had stayed at Marvel, would he have just kept X Men? [01:14:09] Speaker A: I think if Len. We stayed at Marvel, we would have had a different X Men run than what Chris Claremont delivered. Because we wouldn't have a Chris Claremont run. Right. It would have been a Len Weane run all the way through, which would. [01:14:25] Speaker B: Have been, very interestingly. [01:14:29] Speaker A: Would have. It would have been a different run altogether. It would have been very different. [01:14:33] Speaker B: And when you see some of the panels we're going to mention next episode, you're going to not want the Len Wean run. You're going to want the Claremont run. [01:14:41] Speaker A: Are you, though? [01:14:42] Speaker B: I don't know. I think so. [01:14:44] Speaker A: Are you? [01:14:45] Speaker B: I think so. How about we just leave it at that? [01:14:47] Speaker A: Leave it at that. But honestly, I feel like with the build up of all this, this book, I'll save it for the next issue. I'll save it for the next episode. Damn it. [01:15:03] Speaker B: Well, this is the first time in a long time we've split a book over two episodes and talked for two episodes worth of material on the first quarter of a book. [01:15:12] Speaker A: It is such a big book, people. That's why it's a yearly read. [01:15:17] Speaker B: And I said we wouldn't overanalyze this book like everybody else, but we clearly are. But hopefully you're having fun with this. I'm going to say, too, I'll grab my other two and give you the references later. But first, get the life and art of Dave Cochrane by Glenn Catigan, even if you should be able to get the PDF version, too. And by the way, I went to go back and get destroyer duck. If you saw Greg open his destroyer duck, so good on the video, it's out of print now. I can't buy myself another one. [01:15:46] Speaker A: Ha. It's mine. [01:15:50] Speaker B: I know. I was like, damn. Yeah, I know. I was like, sorry. [01:16:02] Speaker A: Thank you so much. [01:16:03] Speaker B: Yeah, you now have. I wonder if I can get it on Amazon. I haven't looked there. [01:16:08] Speaker A: Oh, that's terrible. [01:16:09] Speaker B: But it's out of print on tomorrow's site, so congratulations. You have such a good. That's all. I mean, obviously, we were at the retro Emporium in Kent, Washington, so go there. If you're in the Tacoma area and you want to learn some jiu jitsu, visit our friend, the jiu jitsu lawyer, Paul Boudreaux, at certified martial arts. And you have a book that's for. [01:16:35] Speaker A: Sale, absolute Zeros camp launch pad, coming out in March. So hit up all your spots for book pre orders, be it Amazon, Barnes and noble, or your local comic book store. And get those pre orders in, because every pre order counts, and we are in that time frame to get those pre orders in. So do it and jump on it. And as Dan will say, dan. [01:17:00] Speaker B: I mean, of course the book comes if you buy the hardcover. It comes with an MxPX CD, and it smells like vanilla cupcakes. [01:17:06] Speaker A: There you go. I can't guarantee that you'll get either of those things, but if you do show up at the store or at the retro Moriam or at a convention or something like that, where I will be at and you do bring a copy of the book and a copy of MxPx CD, I will sign it for you. The CD that is. [01:17:30] Speaker B: Yeah. So there you go. [01:17:32] Speaker A: It's a ridiculous thing, but I know somebody's going to do it. Just like that time. Just like that time with the other CD. That's too weird. Too weird. [01:17:44] Speaker B: I mean, I would definitely recommend that. Why wouldn't you? [01:17:49] Speaker A: I don't know, man. I don't know. Odd things. Od things. I can't wait till we cover chapter two for this because it's so good. [01:18:03] Speaker B: Yeah, I can't wait either. I mean, it's going to be fantastic. We're going to cover all the chapters next. So are we? [01:18:09] Speaker A: I don't think we can. There's going to be so much to talk about. [01:18:12] Speaker B: Well, it's a new year. It's a new start. We got in some X Men and Greg got to read his book. So. Yeah, we're there. And we look forward to talking with you again in a week and. Yeah. Thanks. We love you. [01:18:28] Speaker A: Talk to you later. [01:18:30] Speaker B: Yeah. Bye.