82 – Birds and Boys

Art by David Wynne.   In which Louise Simonson’s New Mutants run gets off to a rough start; drugs are not a reliable way to impress your space girlfriend; Magma gets a character arc; Tarot’s powers are kind of iffy; it’ll take more than a few illegal fish to stop Magik; and Bird Brain thoroughly fails to live up to his potential. X-PLAINED: Sunspot’s brushes with villainy The de-aging of the New Mutants New Mutants #55-58 A memorable dress Raek A cautionary tale The New Mutants as a Saturday morning cartoon Bird Boy / Bird Brain June Brigman A romantic dilemma Several alternative foci for Tarot’s powers Redemption and humanization of villains in X-books Undignified birds The best and worst of Bret Blevins Non-comics writers we’d like to see write X-books Other teen time travelers we’d add to All-New X-Men NEXT WEEK: Live in Las Vegas! You can find a visual companion to this episode on our blog! Find us on iTunes or Stitcher! Rachel and Miles X-Plain the X-Men is 100% ad-free and listener supported. If you want to help support the podcast–and unlock more cool stuff–you can do that right here! We’ll have prints of this week’s illustration up at our shop later this week. As always, you can contact David Wynne to inquire after the original!