Introductions with Chapman

Welcome to SubteXtMen, listener! We hope you survive the experience!

Listen in to the introductory episode of SubteXtMen, the podcast focusing on Marvel's merry mutants and their adventures in the literary world. Join your host, Chapman Blake, as they tell you about themselves and what you can expect from the show going forward. Learn a little about their history with both comics & the X-Men!

Transcript

Show Start

Chapman 0:24

Hello there, and welcome to Subtext Met, a podcast focusing on Marvel's merry mutants and their adventures in the literary world. I'm your host, Chapman Blake, and you're listening to Episode Zero, or the introduction or QA of sorts. Today, instead of a book, we'll be covering myself, as well as the structure of the show, and why it's here, and like I said, a few questions.

The Basics

Chapman 0:45

So what about me? Well, I was born on May 12th, 1999, to a mom, dad, and older brother. I grew up in DFW, it's Dallas Fort Worth, and bopped around cities between the Metroplex growing up, and my first great love was theater. I began doing theater in 2006 after my mom convinced me and my brother to do a camp, and I continued doing it for a little over a decade past that. Began working professionally for a few years, starting in 2017, and I and by 2018 I was off to college to get a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Musical Theater from Missouri State up in Springfield. Now at this point in my theater career, I have entered a stage that I lovingly call semi-retirement, and there's a large number of reasons for that. But the biggest reason was something I didn't realize was also shaping my life the whole time. In 2021, I used some of the resources at my school and actually got an autism diagnosis for the first time in my life, which like I said explains quite a lot. And I should throw in a disclaimer here, this is not to say that acting with autism is impossible. In fact, the field could use more autistic actors. It's just that my personal journey with acting, as well as my personal journey with autism, didn't really line up. But

Superheroes, the X-Men & Me

Chapman 1:51

in terms of this podcast, the most important part of my personal history is what is my relationship with superheroes, comics, and specifically the X-Men. If you were doing the math on my birthday there, then you know that I grew up in the post-90s comics bust, uh pre-MCU era for most of my early childhood, which gave me a very unique perspective on comics. At that time, the stores that are still around are very bare bones, they're catering to very specific arcs that are a little bit older for me, things like Astonishing X-Men or Civil War, even the uh the dawn of the ultimate universe a few years prior.

Chapman 2:21

And at the same time in the box office, you know, the movies of that era pre-MCU are also aimed at that older crowd. You know, with the exception of that first Fantastic Four duology, and I was a little too young for things like the Blade Trilogy or the Rainy Spider-Man, uh, even Norton's Hulk or that first Iron Man movie, were just a little bit out of my range when they were first coming out. But that's not to say that superheroes were absent from my life. There were tons of shows on TV at the time that were superhero adjacent, I absolutely loved. Things like The Second Generation of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Ben 10, and even all the amazing DC shows at the time like Teen Titans, Static Shock, The Batman, Batman Brave and the Bold, even Crypto the Superdog, one of my favorites. But in terms of Marvel shows, I'm in this weird gap where I'm too young for things like X-Men Evolution, but I'm too old for things like Superhero Squad.

Chapman 3:09

And so my first big introduction to the Marvel Superhero Canon, and specifically the X-Men, was actually through my other big love, uh, at the time, and still today, video games. At some point I picked up Marvel Ultimate Alliance from my local blockbuster. And for those of you who don't know, the plot is pretty simple. You're fighting Masters of Evil and Doctor Doom in various locales, and if you complete the side objectives at the end, in the epilogue, you will get various scenes of how you've saved Atlantis or you've rescued New York. That is, except for the X-Men's level. It's set in Mephisto's lair, where he has kidnapped Gene Grey and Nightcrawler, holding them hostage, and at one point you have to choose which one you save and which one is cast into the lava. I didn't really know anything about these two characters, but as a young boy I thought, well, one of them is a girl who seems kinda cool, but one of them is a cool blue guy with a tail who can supposedly teleport, and maybe I'll get to play as him, and he's got swords. That seems like the the option for me. So I went ahead and picked Kurt. At the time I also vaguely knew of Jean's psionic powers and telekinesis, so I thought, you know, she could probably save herself. She seems pretty powerful, she's apparently the phoenix sometimes, so she should be okay. What I didn't realize is that Jean could not save herself as she was not the Phoenix yet, she's cast into lava, and subsequently, the Dark Phoenix saga occurs in the epilogue, devastating the X-Men. Of course, if you do choose to save Gene and let Nightcrawler perish, then Mystique, in an act of revenge, executes the Days of Future Past plan, kills Senator Kelly, and the X-Men are, of course, left devastated.

Chapman 4:43

At this point, I'm fascinated by these characters, because out of all the wonderful endings that I'm trying to save, being a hardcore completionist when it comes to these things, I couldn't figure out how to save the X-Men. On top of that, I now have this snippet of a Dark Phoenix saga that I'm seeing this epilogue, and I'm fascinated with this new Gene Grey character who would turn on her friends, and it's and it launches me into my first uh special interest period with the X-Men. At this point, I'm stumbling onto any fan sites that I can find in my nasciant internet using days, and really just learning code names, learning relationships, learning power sets, getting these vague snippets of they run this team, they fought so-and-so, and not really understanding where these characters were being talked about, what these comics were, where I could find them, just kind of learning about them from this sort of cerebro-like download into my brain. This all then finally leads to me discovering the X-Men trilogy and ordering it through Netflix in the mail to watch with my family. Funnily enough, I had actually caught the mystique infiltration scene on cable when I was flipping channels one day, and for a little while definitely thought that aliens were real, so that was relieving to learn that that was actually just a scene from a movie that I now love. But I still to this day adore that at first trilogy. Even as messy as all of it is, I still think that Nightcrawler opening in the White House in X2 and also that opening of with Angel and Last Stand are both stick with me to this day as sort of key pivotal X-Men moments in my mind.

Chapman 6:12

However, my obsession with the movies was cut short a bit, because my parents didn't really think that X-Men Origins Wolverine was a great idea for a 10-year-old's birthday party, despite my desperate pleas. So unfortunately, you know, my relationship with the movies was cut short there. I did jump back in for first class, which I do still love despite its flaws as well, but I soon fell off afterwards knowing that I was missing sort of these Wolverine installments in between, and so for a while my relationship with the X-Men kind of waned from there. And honestly, my relationship with the X-Men probably would have petered out from there completely, if it hadn't been for finding Wolverine the X-Men in reruns a couple years after it premiered. Somehow I completely missed the original debut, but around 12 or so I ended up going back and watching the whole series, or season I should say. And at that point I really solidified my love for the characters. I found sort of more resources that had expanded in the years since I had last looked into the characters, I learned a little bit more about each character's relationships, I found out more about the different story arcs. Without ever somehow getting into the comics, I really ended up finding an affection for these characters.

Chapman 7:20

Fast forward into sort of my early teen years and my special interests shift over to things like Batman with the Arkham series, even comics like Walking Dead as the show starts to blow up. And at this point, I'm only really buying comics from Barnes and Noble. Like I said, I didn't really understand how comic shops worked because of my lack of knowledge of them, my lack of familiarity. So I would get things like Hush or the Walking Dead trade paperbacks, just from a regular bookstore. Soon afterwards, though, I'm entering my official teen years, I'm hitting that I'm too cool for comics phase that some people get. And this is also at the same time where the MCU is really exploding in the mainstream, so it kind of this push and pull of everyone's getting into this thing that I think I've outgrown, you know, classic teen stuff. So once again, superheroes kind of went on to the back burner. I would go to the occasional MCU showing with friends, but at that point it took till my freshman year of college to really kind of rediscover that love once again.

Chapman 8:18

I was needing to find ways to fill my time between classes and rehearsals, find things to do when my friends were in class, and I saw in the app store that Marvel had done a whole bunch of updates on Marvel Unlimited. At this point, the only single issue that I ever read was actually Gail Simone's Secret Six through the Comixology app on my iPod Touch. So I was vaguely familiar and also knew that I hated reading it on such a small screen. But with this iPad for class, with the new updates, I figured might as well give it a go. I've always liked the X-Men. I've never really read any of their comics, but I am that completionist at heart, so let's start the beginning. So I cracked open X-Men number one from 1963 as my very first comic, and it was doozy. I wasn't discouraged though, I knew I was getting into some wacky older comics, and I chugged along from there up till about the first 20 issues, but then college life kicked in full swing and my read-through kind of fell to the wayside for a while, until COVID. It was halfway through my sophomore year, and I was immediately switched to all online classes, had a whole bunch of time on my hands, and I decided, you know what, let's pick this back up. I'd been using comic book readingorders.com to hit the main beats, but I also knew myself, knew I would probably want to read it all someday if I enjoyed it, so I started using Crushing Crisis's X-Men Reading Order, and I started chugging along.

Chapman 9:38

At this point, I'm now in the middle of the Civil War era in 2006, with well over 4,000 issues read, and at the same time I'm also sprinkling in the other forms of media as I watch them with my partner. We're in the middle of the animated series, but we've watched things like the first two X-Men trilogies. I myself went back and watched Pride of the X-Men and Generation X, and while I'm by no means done, I've obviously enjoyed it quite a bit to keep

Journey into X-Fandom

Chapman 10:01

going. My journey into the X-Men fandom started soon afterwards. For the first couple years, I was reading the comics only, but I was eventually pulled towards the podcasting space, as I needed more things to fill my time during self-employment, and that led me down the pretty typical chain for a lot of people, you know, Jay & Miles first, as it's one of the most popular, and then into obviously so many other wonderful podcasts. I eventually answered a call for guest pitches for one of my favorites, Oh Gosh, Oh Golly Oh Wow, exploring Excalibur, and that sort of started my X-Men podcasting journey. From there, I guested on things like Graymalkin Lane. You can hear me regularly in the show reads over there as Sebastian Shaw as we enter into the Phoenix and Dark Phoenix saga, and I also got my X-Men Horoscope read on the wonderful show of the same name, and I also got the chance to meet a lot of these connections in person at the Uncanny Experience, which by that point, you know, I'd already caught the podcasting bug, so paired with all these wonderful opportunities, it uh really lit a fire under me to get this thing going and uh throw my hat in the ring. Now

Why Books?

Chapman 11:01

one of the big questions for the show is why books? They weren't the initial idea, although I'm saving some of those ideas for later, just in case we decide to do some spin-off shows. But I knew from theater that the best approach for longevity was going to be to find my niche. I saw that a lot of podcasts were focusing very much on obviously the comics, as well as the different media, and sometimes even the physical merch and one or two of the books themselves, but very few had fully devoted themselves to any of the many, many novelizations and adaptations of the X-Men that are out there. And so I hope this can act as a way to sort of bring these stories to the forefront that are often overlooked. Yes, they do get releases, yes, they do get audiobooks from time to time, but the conversation around them is often very limited, and so I hope to kind of push that exploration. Now I think one of the wonderful things about fandom is the amount of resources that we create for each other, for folks trying to explore the space, for fans trying to dig into the weeds of their favorite fandoms. And so I hope to join the uh the ranks of these podcasts and these resources that I've mentioned that work to sort of take a very corporatized IP and expand the ways that we can interact with it, expand the longevity of some of these stories, the conversations around them, and also work to elevate the analysis we lend towards these stories. In a time in which media literacy is declining, and for some folks the curtains being blue means they're just blue. I do think it's always important to shine a light on the deeper meanings that these stories can have and the ways that individual interpretations work to expand that

What Do I Mean by Subtext?

Chapman 12:34

for everyone. Now, a couple what questions. First off, what do I mean by subtext? On its surface, subtext is going to be the underlying meaning of the text. It's the elements that are implied rather than openly stated. And I think the one that comes to mind for all of us that are familiar with the X-Men is of course the mean metaphor. It's arguably the thing that draws the most of us to X-Men, because it is that sort of symbol that we can all adopt into various identities, you know, whether Stan and Jack intended it or not. And so it's obviously something that's going to be at the forefront of the show as we approach it, almost on a story-by-story basis, because given the nature of various writers, I'm sure as we've all seen, the mute metaphor is very elastic. In a lot of ways, that elasticity is both its greatest strength and greatest weakness. You know, it's something that can be very divisive in elements of the fandom, but I think that is because of its fluidity. That is obviously not the only piece of subtext that we will be talking about. There's plenty of other angles that we'll explore in the show, like the interplay of relationships and histories of the characters, the expressions of power and their outcomes, the ways characters are adapted and expanded for the novel format, the real-world histories that impact the story, and of course, a little bit of headcanon.

Headcanon

Chapman 13:45

My take on headcanon comes from two main sources. The first is more recent, and it is Dr. Chris Maverick's framework of comics as a modern mythology, sort of in the ways that we utilize them for archetypes, for morality lessons, and also the ways in which we all have different interpretations of those characters based on the exposure and the culture of our own personal lives and how they impacted them. For example, just like some towns would venerate certain Greek gods, while others would despise them, depending on the legends that they would focus on, people who are familiar with Cyclops from the movies may view him as a stick in the mud, while folks who are familiar with the comics see more of his wild streak.

Chapman 14:25

All of that, however, ties into my other main focus, which is my theater background. A lot of my favorite parts of theater were the prep work. As much as I loved performing on stage, the day one of rehearsals where everyone is sitting down with their interpretations of the script, their ideas for their character, blending that together through the director's vision, I think is one of my favorite parts of the theatrical process, and it's also a part that is replicated pretty much every time a creative team picks up these stories. Just like the scripts that we use in theater, the characters that are picked up by these creative teams are both somewhat set in stone, but also every interpretation is going to be new and different. The creative teams are going to present different things as they've decided with their editor, and in both mediums, you also have the addition of the audience's perspective and their interpretations of your work. In both mediums, there are opportunities for returning to older touchstones, maybe in the ways that the characters were first depicted, but also expanding the ways that we can think of the characters and adding more dimensions.

Chapman 15:24

And certainly there are famous productions that we can look back to with well-documented representations of what the of the choices they made. But in comics, we're given the unique perspective of being able to hunt down pretty much everything, especially for the big two. And that becomes its own game in and of itself. Like I said, that day one prep work is some of my favorite stuff. So going through and looking at these characters' entire histories also plays into that same muscle for me. One of my teachers in college showed us a wonderful exercise where when you're given a character, you go through the script and you write down everything that your character says, everything that other characters say about you, things that are implied about your character, and you, from your character's perspective, decide what is true, what is not true, what is exaggerations, what is lies, and you build your character from the text that is in front of you, but with a different interpretation on what that text might be than the original author might have thought, especially if you are taking that character in new directions.

Chapman 16:24

So when approaching the full continuity of these characters, I try to keep that in mind. Granted, to the degree that it was possible in the year that the stories were written. And it isn't some sort of, oh, everything must fit, but like I said, using that trick of unreliable narrators, of character interpretation, of folks just potentially straight up lying and it not being stated, all of that kind of synthesizes into its own way of looking at the timeline rather than some sort of fanbro driven, I have to make everything fit. Kind of makes it a little bit more fluid, which I think is a little bit more fun, and a little bit easier with something that has been and is a little bit easier with stories that have had the baton passed on them as many times as

What is the Show Gonna Look Like?

Chapman 17:02

these have. And of course, we have a final question in what are the episodes going to look like? Well, think of it as three different types of episodes. The first is when we start a book, I'll cover a few chapters at a time per episode. We'll discuss the plot as well as my takes on the subtext. Then, once we finish a book, we'll have what I call a book club episode, where I'll invite some guests on and get their takes, as well as discussing a sort of denouement for the book, if you will. We'll cover the books in chronological release order, starting back in the 70s. But given that Marvel still currently releases books to this day, I figured it'd be a shame to let those go unaddressed. So our third type of episode, the interview, will be just that. Interviews with authors for upcoming or recently released books in the Marvel Canon, interviews with authors of non-fiction books that feature the X-Men as a topic, or the central thesis, and, given availability, interviews with authors of our previously covered novels.

Closing Statements

Chapman 17:58

Well, that should cover just about any questions you have going into the show. Our first book that we'll cover is Marvel novel series number nine, The Marvel Superheroes, specifically Mary Joe Duffy's story, Children of the Atom. I'll be joined by friends from the Gray malkin Lane podcast, including host Chad Anderson. Thank you for your time this week, and I'll see you next time.

Credits

Chapman 18:20

Thank you for listening to another episode of the SubteXtMen Podcast. I'm your host and producer, Chapman Blake, with graphic design by Seth Christian Martel. You can connect with the podcast on social media at SubteXtMen Pod. Don't forget to rate and review wherever you're listening. If you'd like to read along with the show, be sure to utilize your local library, book exchange, or use good store. First and foremost.

End Theme

Chapman 18:46

We'll see you next time on SubteXtMen!