Duna Haller
Mutant Watch started in late May as a live panel each 2 weeks to explore social issues and wide commentary through X-Men and mutant related comics, with our first two shows being on The Mutant Metaphor and Gender & Sexuality.
After that first Pride themed show, we invited Rhayne from Carefree Black Nerd for a second run, talking about some of our favorite LGBT+ X-Men related runs (including Iceman by Sina Grace, Astonishing X-Men by Marjorie Liu or Generation X (2017) by Christina Strain and Almicar Pinna), the case for Bling!, Darkveil and other underused characters, the role of authors on putting LGBT themes on the page, fandom, and even our own pitches for an all-LGBT mutant book, including Gabriel’s young mutants activist team and Rhayne’s found family story.
Getting further into X-Men fandom, we brought Dylan and Regina from the podcast House of X, a branch of the facebook group of the same name. We chatted about the formation and growth of House of X, the struggle for a more inclusive and anti-bigotry fandom, why we connect with X-Men comics, and what we want to see more on both the comics and the fandom.
We invited our own Cody White, the best content manager ever, for a show on Editorial On The X-Men, from its inception and initial failure to all the reinventions that happened, including Giant Size X-Men, the influential editorial work of Ann Nocenti, X-Men (1991) and the massive 90s, Joe Quesada editorial era, and everything else that has turned it into the franchise we love today.
On our show Disability On The X-Men with Patti from @MutantMusings we started a very wide-reaching convo talking about some of our favorite disabled characters and their storylines, like Hellion, Karma, Nocturne or Legion, as well as talking about the evasiveness of disability representation and the overarching ghost of trauma that mutants face. Somehow, we had a lot of fun with all of this, not always based on irony!
We also invited Sandy Jimenez this December (with Rhayne coming back as a surprise) to talk about Social Commentary on the X-Men more broadly, from the powerful messages on humanizing mutanthood to stories like the Genosha or Legacy Virus arcs, God Loves, Man Kills, Heroes For Hope Starring The X-Men… to other forms of media like The Animated Series, and always back at to what these stories tell us about the issues in the world that surrounds us.
During our run so far we’ve had Gabriel, Travis, Matt and Duna as regulars on the show, alongside other voices from inside Comic-Watch.com, as well as the music created by Eric Calderone for our intro and outro clips, and the behind-the-scenes work of Comic Watch’s graphic designer Derbs. You can check the rest of our videos on this playlist, which includes videos on villainy, X-Factor, crossovers, Age of Apocalypse, vampires and more. For the 2021 to come, we promise more interesting themes, way more guests and surprises you really can’t imagine 😉