The 1000th Story

·58 min·5 clips

Zack and Adam announce they are ranking their 1000th X-Men story, questioning if anyone should ever read that many comics.

A thousand X-Men stories. Adam and Zach hit the milestone sounding proud, alarmed, and maybe a little trapped by the thing they built. Nobody really wants the math, so of course they try it anyway. Thousands of individual issues get estimated, doubted, and folded back into the ritual. Instead of treating the landmark like a trophy ceremony, they use it to re-litigate old X-Men judgments. House of X sits high. Kitty Pride and Wolverine, Psylocke, Wolverine 159 to 161, and World Tomorrow become coordinates on their enormous homemade map. Then X-Men Gold wanders in and makes everything fussier. The fight becomes whether the story belongs near X-Men Gold 30 or closer to the first three issues of X-Men Gold. Standards get absurdly precise. Toil in Trouble, the Secret Empire arc of X-Men Blue, X-Men Green, and Gambit and Bishop's Sons of the Atom all get dragged in as test cases. The funny part is the procedure. They are not only deciding whether something is bad. They are sorting the value of different kinds of bad. X-Men Green gets credit because, even when it fails hard, Zach thinks it is at least trying to be something. That is very Battle Of The Atom: serious enough to matter, silly enough to mock, and so dense that every comparison brings baggage. Patreon business shows up late. Five bucks can buy a bespoke episode, War Wolves get teased, possible returning guests hover nearby, and everyone gets out alive. Barely.

As heard by us

A thousand-story milestone turns into a loose, funny argument about where one X-Men story belongs.

The episode treats a milestone as a live test of how X-Men ranking actually works. Adam and Zach mark their one thousandth X-Men story by trying to place it inside a long-running list already crowded with arcs, one-shots, and plenty of bookkeeping.

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Why you'd press play

You want a thousand-story X-Men ranking to turn into an affectionate argument about where the messy ones belong.

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