Episode Details

Drop him a line!

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

X-PLAINED:

• Bessie the Hellcow
• Spider-Man: Mutant Agenda (the newspaper strip storyline)
• Spider-Man: Mutant Agenda (the comic book miniseries)
• Spider-Man: Mutant Agenda (the cartoon episodes)
• Four-color hoards
• Three-panel newspaper comic structure
• Sunday strips (and their Mark Trail deceptions)
• Hero Jaws – a breakfast-based theory
• Spider-Man (Peter Parker)
• The Brand Corporation
• The Beast (Henry McCoy)
• Narratively convenient Spider Sense
• Hobgoblin (Jason Macendale Jr.)
• Goblin gliders
• Picket signs (*air horn sound*)
• Finger blasters (heh)
• Laser cages
• Arcade’s superpower flowcharts
• Mutants: newspaper versus comic continuity
• Coming home to the 90s
• Lisa’s favorite X-Man
• Beast’s versatile character design
• Spider-to-X ratios
• Dark, tortured heroes
• Herbert Landon’s selective memory
• Confirmation bias
• Anti-mutant cancer goo
• Ironic reversals
• Wolverine, the most marketable mutant
• Evil British accents
• The most adaptable Spider-Man / X-Men crossovers
• The X-Men and the newspaper funnies

NEXT EPISODE: X-Factor mourns and moves on.

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