Exiles Vol. 7 A Blink in Time with Case Aiken
We’re back with another episode of Trade School! This time, we’re talking about Exiles Vol. 7: A Blink in Time! Our host this week is Case Aiken!
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Edited by Case Aiken
Scored by Bret Eagleston
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Outline
Introduction to Trade School and Host Case Aiken (00:00 - 00:30)
Introduction to the Certain Point of View's Trade School podcast, a show focusing on comic book trade paperbacks meaningful to the hosts.
Case Aiken welcomes listeners and sets the episode focus on the "Exiles" comic book series from the early 2000s.
Overview of Exiles Series and Specific Focus on Volume 7: A Blink in Time (00:30 - 01:24)
Discussion centers on the Marvel comic "Exiles," described as a superhero version of Sliders led by the character Blink from Age of Apocalypse.
Case notes multiple volumes of Exiles, emphasizing volume seven as a favorite despite being penned by Chuck Austin, a writer with mixed reception.
Chuck Austin’s Role and Impact on Exiles (01:24 - 02:30)
Austin is described as an infamous X-Men writer with controversial work history, but credited with delivering a strong conclusion to his run in Exiles.
The series is praised for mixing characters across realities with evolving team rosters.
Premise and Team Dynamics of Exiles (02:30 - 04:00)
Explanation of the team comprising superheroes from different realities, dealing with interdimensional crises.
Blink and Morph, characters from Age of Apocalypse, are highlighted as core members.
Opening Storyline: Weapon X Team and King Hyperion Introduction (04:00 - 04:40)
Introduction of the Weapon X spin-off, a lethal subgroup including a version of Hyperion (a Marvel Superman analog), who turns out to be an evil "King Hyperion," setting a dark tone for the arc.
Hyperion, along with Carol Danvers (Ms. Marvel) and a Carnage-possessed Spider-Man, dominate a world after wiping out local threats such as Magneto and Wolverine in brutal fashion.
Weapon X’s Ruthlessness and Key Conflicts (04:40 - 06:00)
Hyperion, along with Carol Danvers (Ms. Marvel) and a Carnage-possessed Spider-Man, dominate a world after wiping out local threats such as Magneto and Wolverine in brutal fashion.
The Exiles face a severe mission where only six of their original team of twelve can survive following assault from Weapon X forces on a contested reality, highlighting the risk and intensity.
Return of Blink to Exiles and Mimic’s Guilt (06:00 - 06:44)
Blink rejoins after leaving earlier, returning post a tragedy where Mimic accidentally kills Sunfire while possessed by the Brood parasite.
Mimic struggles with guilt and darker motivations.
High Stakes Conflict and Team Purge (06:44 - 07:00)
The Exiles face a severe mission where only six of their original team of twelve can survive following assault from Weapon X forces on a contested reality, highlighting the risk and intensity.
Description of the battle with King Hyperion, highlighting inventive use of powers — Gambit’s sword kills Hyperion from within, and Blink’s teleportation shines.
Climactic Battle and Creative Use of Powers (07:00 - 09:40)
Description of the battle with King Hyperion, highlighting inventive use of powers — Gambit’s sword kills Hyperion from within, and Blink’s teleportation shines.
Art by Jim Calafiore receives high praise for action sequences and growth over the series run.
Reflection on Exiles Series and Chris Claremont’s Subsequent Run (09:40 - 11:20)
The volume is recognized as an excellent entry point and peak of the original Exiles series.
Claremont’s later take is critiqued as less successful, reverting to typical X-Men formula.
Promotion of Certain Point of View’s Podcast Network and Other Shows (11:20 - 12:50)
Case encourages listeners to explore other comic-related shows on the Certain POV network, including his own show Men of Steel.
Social media handles and engagement details are shared.
Announcement of The Word From Tomorrow Podcast (12:50 - 13:28)
Introduction of a new podcast hosted by Case Aiken and Keith Letinen about Transmetropolitan, diving into its prescient themes reflecting contemporary societal and political issues.
Transcription
00:00
Welcome to Certain Point of View's Trade School, where each episode a different host talks about a comic book trade paperback that they loved and why they love it. Hey, everyone, I'm Case Aiken. And yeah, I'm back here on Trade School talking about a comic book that I like because, well, you know, that's kind of the point of this show. Trade School is a show about discussing comic books that mean something to you. And I want to talk about a series I really loved, and I'm going to talk about one of my favorite volumes from it, and it's going to be a weird one to talk about because there's so many strange parts about this choice. But yeah, I just wanted to talk about Exiles, specifically the series that ran in the early 2000s. There have been many volumes of Exiles over the years.
00:46
It's a name that Marvel has tried to use for various things. I think I first became aware of it as a property back when it was being used for the Ultraverse stuff that was going on in the early 90s. But. But I want to talk about the early 2000s series where it was basically Sliders, but with superheroes led by Blink from Age of Apocalypse. And I want to talk about specifically volume seven, A Blink in Time. And this is a really weird volume to talk about because it's one of my favorite arcs in the series, but it's also by one of the writers I don't care for that much. It's by Chuck Austin.
01:25
Chuck Austin is an infamous X Men writer who didn't do a great job when he was doing the X Men books at the same time that he was working on Exiles. And there's several arcs in his run on Exiles that I'm not a huge fan of, but God damn, did he hit it out of the park when he left the book. He did a fantastic job just wrapping up this series, Not. Not the series as a whole, but just wrapping up his. His time on the series in. In a really fantastic way. And I want to talk about that for a minute here. So Exiles as a book was, like I said, it was Sliders, but with superheroes. The idea was we have a team of superheroes, mostly X Men related characters, but that. That kind of changed over time.
02:11
The roster mixed up a lot. We're going to have a team of superheroes from all different realities, and they are going to travel around different realities dealing with different. Different crises. And it was a fun excuse to bring back Blink from Age of Apocalypse, who was an incredibly popular breakout character from that book or from that series of books, and to pair her up with a version of Morph, who also was from Age of Apocalypse. But this version that we get in the actual book just looks like the one from Age of Apocalypse. It's actually a different character. And to throw in all kinds of crazy concepts for characters into a book and to take all these what ifs that Marvel loves to do and to present an ongoing story with them. And Exiles was just a great goddamn book.
03:00
It started off with Judd Winick on it, and right from the get go, we get a loss on the team. And every arc, there's some sort of big shakeup that occurs. That's not to say there's no status quo, but there's some kind of big shakeup. And eventually the character of Blink, who had been the leader of the team, is allowed to go home. And for a period of time, were looking at a book that didn't feature our lead. We saw all these other characters running around. Mostly Mimic was the viewpoint character at that point, and we got to see a really cool arc with him. But that is all coming to a head here in Volume seven. We open with a story from Weapon X. Weapon X is the alternate team of Exiles that are made up of more like, lethal characters.
03:46
They're the killers, and they have butted heads with the Exiles in the past, but in theory are on the same team. Like, they're. They're on a shared mission with them. It's just. They're the Wetworks team. And so Weapon X, we open with them getting a new member. We. We know that they get new members pretty frequently. Yeah. So they had just replaced Storm and they replace it with a version of Hyperion. And this Hyperion appears to be the one that we know from the Squadron Supreme. He is, you know, just aesthetically speaking, but it's very quickly revealed that he is not. And we get this very cool story of Hyperion, who is a Superman analog. He is a character who is. He's supposed to be a version of Superman for Marvel.
04:33
And we get this awesome sequence of him slowly figuring out the circumstances that he's got in terms of being on the Exiles, or rather on Weapon X and deciding that he can basically take over this whole situation because this is actually a really bad Hyperion. It's actually the worst Hyperion that we have seen in comics to date there. I believe he's called King Hyperion. When. When he shows up. This is a version that took over his world and laid it to waste and had been ruling A smoldering crater that had been ripped apart by nuclear war before he got brought over to Weapon X. And so he quickly. He hooks up with a version of Ms. Marvel, Carol Danvers. Ms. Marvel. Not. Not Comic Con.
05:19
So he hooks up with Carol Danvers, he destroys Vision, and he leads the rest of the team in taking out Magneto of. Of this world that they're. They're on. And there's a really cool sequence where after he just disposes of Wolverine with no problem, Magneto says that he's going to freeze the iron in Hyperion's blood. And Hyperion says that I am not from this world. I'm not. Or I'm not from this Earth, I'm not from any Earth, and I have no iron in my blood. And at which point he flies Magneto into and incinerates him. And it's a really cool scene. And then we cut back to the Exiles, and the Exiles are also dealing with some really bad business. Blink has been returned to the team now, but it's in the wake of Sunfire being killed by Mimic by accident.
06:06
Mimic had been possessed by the Brood, and Mimic, who is a mutant whose power is that he can replicate other powers, has been functioning as the team Superman up until this point. But he's been getting increasingly dark as the missions have been getting harder and harder for him. He's been forced to confront people that he called friends in his home reality and in often cases, murder his friends. And this has really warped him. And finally, the Brood incident really pushes him too far. So Blink has returned to the team. Mimic, having been cured of the Brood infestation, is now racked with guilt, and.
06:44
And the rest of the team is furious at Mimic when they get teleported to this world that the other team that Weapon X has taken over, Weapon X has traveled from world to world and finally settled one that they just are going to squat on. And so they come to this world, and now King Hyperion, along with Carol Danvers and with a version of Spider man who is possessed by the Carnage symbiote, have become the dominant power ruling over this world, waiting for something to come dethrone them to change the circumstances. And we get the Exiles and they get a mission which is that only six of them can be left alive. And so that's gonna go poorly for everyone involved. And it's a really cool arc. They have to take on a Superman and have to deal with him.
07:39
The way they ultimately get the kill shot is just so damn cool. It's a Great moment. A version of Gambit who gets to take a. A sword and plunge it into an open wound in Hyperion and then explode him from the inside. It's super cool. Blink gets some really nice teleportation effects to use against Hyperion during the fight. Like I said, the. The actual sequence is incredible. The art by Jim Calafiore is incredible throughout this whole book. He. He started off a little bit rougher. Like he wasn't my favorite artist at the early age period of Exiles, but by the end of the book he's easily one of my favorite artists in. In comics. By that point he has done. He has grown so much over the course of the Exiles run.
08:25
And by volume seven he's really firing on all cylinders showing this epic like, clash between this like ragtag group of. Of dimensional misfits against, you know, Superman and Captain Marvel. Like that's, you know, not a threat that I would want to take on at any point. And here we go here. Here we have this awesome story dealing with betrayals with. With rocky relationships between different teams and just really cool action beats. Like those moments that are just, you know, exactly what comic book fans are looking for. Like cool ways to use superpowers and creative methods. Like that's. That's what this book is full of. And it's a fantastic entry in the Exile story.
09:12
Like, I would recommend the entirety of Exiles as a whole, but if you're just going to read one volume, this is a really good one and you can pick up most of the relationships pretty well. Even though this is sort of the conclusion of Chuck Austin's run on the book, it is a really solid one that really just caught my attention. I think this is the point where I became a regular subscriber to it. Like a month to month subscriber as opposed to picking up trades every now and then. And I just can't speak enough about just how amazing this total arc is. It shows what the danger of a scary powerful Superman who is amoral can be even in a world dense with superheroes. And it goes so far as to show, you know, a.
10:02
A great rivalry between mimic who has power for power, a match for Hyperion, but nowhere near the category. His. His scale of power is so much weaker. We. We get to see all. All these other characters doing really creative moves to deal with Hyperion and to deal with Carol Danvers. It's just. It's a really fun arc with great action, great suspense. You know, they win. It's a comic book. They win against Hyperion, but it's a really hard fought win. There's a, there's a lot of casualties in it. I mean when I say they get down to 6, they started with 12. Just frame of reference there. So that should tell you how huge the stakes are for this battle. But yeah, it's a great book as a whole. I love the run of Exiles, pretty much the entire run of this 2000 series.
10:55
It loses steam at the very end when it goes on its world tour and when it gets handed off to Chris Claremont who kind of doesn't know what to do with Exiles, like he just turns it into another Claremont x Men book. But yeah, it's a fantastic book that I just couldn't help but recommend and I would highly say that you should check it out and then you should check out other stuff that we've got going on@ certainpov.com we've got a great network of shows that are doing all kinds of cool stuff. And so if you like these kind of comic book recommendations, there's tons of comic book podcasts on our network that I want to recommend to you. You can check out Long Live the Legion or we have Issues or Men of Steel, which is my show.
11:38
We are doing tons of cool comic book material on certain pov and if this is the kind of thing that you like, I would highly encourage you to check out the rest of our network and check out the stuff I'm working on. You can find me on most social media platform Aiken except for Instagram where I'm holding on 4 dear life to my aim screen name from high school which was quetzalcoatl5q u e t Z A L C o a T L5 but aside from that, you know, just I'm so thankful that you're here. I'm so thankful the series is going. We're 15 episodes in now and it's just incredible that we are getting these submissions and getting so much output from people talking about books that they really have passion for.
12:21
And so on that note, I really hope you enjoyed this ramble about a very cool comic. I hope you check it out and I hope you have a great week and then just happy reading. The world is getting stranger every day and somehow Trans Metropolitan saw nearly all of it coming. From weaponized misinformation to political theater to tech that reshapes our lives faster than we can process, the series future feels uncomfortably familiar. The Word From Tomorrow is a new read along podcast digging into that uncanny prescience. Hosted by Case Aiken and Keith Letinen, each episode welcomes a guest to explore how Warren Ellis and Derek Robertson's dystopian satire mirrors the world we're living in now. Across 10 episodes, we walk through the entire series, its politics, its media chaos, its dark humor, and the way it continues to hit with starling clarity.
13:14
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