The Mutantmaniacs

Posted By: Peter DavidPosted On:

digresssmlOriginally published May 13, 1994, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1069

The strange things that come about on computer nets.

On Usenet, speculation was rife that Marvel’s mutant books would reveal the existence of a third Summers brother, to join Scott (Cyclops) and Alex (Havok) Summers. A joke was subsequently made that perhaps the new sibling might actually be a Summers sister and that, in a bizarre twist, the Summers sister was Rogue. This, in turn, led an individual called “The Vodkinator” to suggest an opening a la Steven Spielberg’s Animaniacs, with Cyclops, Havok and Rogue taking the place of Wakko, Yakko, and Dot (the Warner brothers and Warner sister, the series’ protagonists.)

This, in turn, led net frequenter Tom Galloway to write an entire take-off on the theme of Animaniacs. He then showed it to me, and once I picked myself off the floor, I cajoled Arne Starr into doing an appropriate illustration. And here we go:

Steven Spielberg and Stan Lee Present:


It’s time for Mu-tant-man-i-acs

And we’re angsting to the max

So just sit back and relax

We’ll retcon ’til you collapse

We’re Mu-tant-man-i-acs.

Come join the Summers Brothers

And the Summers sister Rogue

Just for fun we listen to the CDs of the Pogues

They lock us in the mansion whenever we get caught

But Creed breaks loose…

And then vamoose…

And now you know the plot.

We’re Mu-tant-man-i-acs

Rogue is cute and Havok blasts

Cyclops angsts about the past

While Xavier thinks so fast

We’re Mu-tant-man-i-acs.

Meet Lobdell and the Bob, who want to rule the X-Books line

New Mutants flock together, Jubilee will start to whine

Lockheed chases Kitty, while Bishop sees a sign

The writers flipped, we have no plot, our sales are in decline.

We’re Mu-tant-man-i-acs

We have work-for-hire contracts

We’re angsting to the max

There’s X-Factor on the racks.

We’re Mu-tant-man-ee

Totally insane-y

Here’s the show’s namey

Scottie loves Jeannie

Mu-tant-man-ee-acs!

Those are the facts!

(Peter David, writer of stuff, figures he should mention that the aforementioned term “retcon” is a popular phrase that is short for “retroactive continuity,” to describe stories wherein past events are reordered, reconstructed, or flat-out ignored in order to fit new needs.)


27 comments on “The Mutantmaniacs”

  1. On Usenet, speculation was rife that Marvel’s mutant books would reveal the existence of a third Summers brother, to join Scott (Cyclops) and Alex (Havok) Summers.
    .
    Well, it only took another +10 years for that third brother to be retconned into existence. Small consolation?

  3. Was the term “retcon” so new in 1991 that PAD needed to explain its meaning? Interesting, if so.

    1. The generally accepted etymology is that Roy Thomas first used the term “retroactive continuity”, but Damian Cugley, in a Usenet post on rec.arts.comics, first abbreviated it to “retcon”. It then both got an expanded definition (Thomas originally meant it to apply only to events added to a character’s otherwise intact past, while r.a.c. used it for that, “everything you knew was wrong”, and flat out no explanation changes in characters’ pasts) and heavy initial usage in r.a.c., then spreading out into the rest of the geeky world.

  4. My favorite line was:
    .
    ‘We’ll retcon ’til you collapse”
    .
    I believe Claremont had Gambit as the third brother on his X-Men: The End trilogy of mini-series before the introduction of Vulcan on the in-continuity books.

    1. That was my favorite line too.

      Forgot about the Gambit thing, it read like fanfic so I’ve mostly forgotten the entire thing.

      Funny thing is, there was a third Summers brother revealed back in the 90s… it just got ignored by everybody, including the guy that wrote it. Adam X, unfortunately known as X-Treme back then, was the son of Emperor D’Ken and whatshername, the mother of Alex and Scott. That’s the implication anyway, but since it was never followed up on it was dropped.

      And the fact I remember all that says a lot about me

      1. “…unfortunately known as X-Treme…”
        .
        Wow, that sounds so… Liefield. ’95 was the year I went to college and stop buying comics for financial reasons until 2002. I never even heard of Adam X.

    2. Re: “We’ll retcon ’til you collapse”; whaddya expect from the only two-time keeper of the Canonical X-Plot Dangler List? Which, I believe at Claremont’s high (or low) point hit around 300 open plot points.

  6. Ðámņ you, Peter, that’s gonna be stuck in my head for _days!_ I knew there was a reason I call you my Evil Twin… (laughing hysterically)
    .
    I gotta share this on Facebook.

  7. Interesting how speculation about a third Summers sibling was floated about on Usenet in 1994, twelve years before Vulcan first appeared. Did Ed Brubaker, who created Vulcan, ever use Usenet, and perhaps got the idea from it, or was it entirely independent of it?

    3. Chicken Boo is not a mutant, he is a sword wielding immortal.

      Highlander Boo: The Chickening

  10. Now that I’ve thought about this a bit, it’s occured to me that you could do a really exhaustive list of Good Idea/Bad Idea for the X-Men.

  11. Madrox #1: You know what I’ve always liked about you’re a gumshoe.
    Madrox #2: I’m a gumshoe?
    Madrox #1: Yeah, a real private .
    Madrox #2: Are you calling me a Dat’s it!

  12. Now we just need the live-action comedy with Ryan Stiles and Pinky and Jason Alexander as the Brain. You know you’d watch it too. (The tragedy is that we’re far more likely to get a sequel to GROWN-UPS first.)

  13. The Summers family tree is one of the most convoluted in comics history.

    Cyclops and Havok and Vulcan are known to be full brothers. Adam X may be their 1/2 Shi’ar brother through their mother. Gambit may be a full brother or a half brother, likely through either an affair on the part of Christopher Summers or genetic engineering by Mr. Sinister.

    Additionally, after Christopher Summers became Corsair, he and Hapzibah were lovers for at least one or two decades. If their species are interfertile, they may well have had children. Of course, as Corsair never told Scott or Alex about any alien siblings, this would be one heck of a retcon.

    Heck, if you look several generations up the Summers family tree, you’ll find that Amanda “Black Womb” Mueller had both a son (who was Corsair’s grandfather) and a telepathic daugter by the name of Gloria DAYNE Fontanelle. If you want to do a bit more tenuous retconning, you could wonder if Gloria had a kid with Magneto and then used her powers to erase his memories of the event. If so, then Lorna DANE and ZalaDANE could both be related to the Summers brothers, which would mean that Havok may be dating his own distant cousin. Bwa Ha Ha!

    1. You’re forgetting all the family members introduced in Cable. Not to mention Nate Grey and Rachel. And Rachel’s children with Franklin Richards.

      Didn’t Fabian Nicieza once admit that Mr. Sinister’s comment about ‘your brothers’ was actually the result of a typo but enough letter writers wrote in commenting on it and asking who it was that they sort of ran with it?

      1. I wonder if that explanation from Fabian was before or after the interview I read with him where he said he didn’t remember it clearly and thought Sinister was f-ing with them.

      2. Well, I was mainly limiting things to siblings, with some examples of how things could theoretically get even more complex.

        Also, I distinctly recall that, in the comic where Mr. Sinister made the ‘brothers’ comment, he was immediately called on it and answered that he must have misspoken. This suggests to me that he actually was hinting at one or more unknown brothers.

  14. Wow, that was a great pick me up thanks. The best part was mistaking Havok for Rogue on the top right image and then after asking who’s that on the bottom, reminding myself that Dot/Rogue is always on the bottom of the Animaniacs image.

  15. To revisit the “retcon” subject briefly, I’d never heard it until reading one of my *favorite* comics of all time,
    “Spider-Man 2099 meets Spider-Man”. It was written by —aww..how’d ya know? Now that I am familiar with the term retcon, I appreciate the joke used by Peter in said book.
    “I call them retcon bombs,” said the 23rd Century style Hobgoblin. “They’ll blast you out of the timestream. It’ll be as though you never existed!”
    Sadly, it seems both Pete Parker and MJ’s marriage took a recton bomb later. Criminey.

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