In "The World Outside," I examine comic books showing up in outside media, like TV shows, sports, novels and films.

Today, we look at how the Phalanx Covenant played a role in the old 1990s sitcom, Boy Meets World!

I recently did a whole bit on the Phalanx Covenant as part of my "Look Back" feature (you can check it out here). But anyhow, the whole thing kicked off with Uncanny X-Men #316 (by Scott Lobdell, Joe Madureira, Dan Green and Terry Austin)...

Banshee returned to the X-Men after being away for a while (mostly due to him recovering from having his jaw broken by a brainwashed Gambit in the initial storyline in the 1991 launch of the second X-Men ongoing series), only for him to realize that the other X-Men were all acting rather peculiar...

In a great scene, Banshee uses the X-Men's computer to learn the shocking truth of just how many X-Men are actually on the premises...

The X-Men had also been keeping Sabretooth prisoner for a while at that point (because, you know, they don't care about stuff like "due process" or whatever, they have their own laws. The law of Xavier!), so Banshee rescued the only other humans in the mansion, which were Sabretooth, Emma Frost and Jubilee, and the whole group escaped...

But before he left, he learned that these shape-shifting aliens (called the Phalanx) were trying to find a new generation of young mutants, so Banshee decided that his ragtag team was going to find those mutants first...

That was his quest, or his odyssey, if you would.

That choice of words was no accident.

The very first time I did an installment of The World Outside, it was about the use of Dark Knight Returns on the recent Disney Channel sitcom, Girl Meets World. That episode, though, was an homage to a scene that occurred many years earlier on Boy Meets World (the show that Girl Meets World was based on).

Boy Meets World launched in 1993. It ran for seven seasons.

In season two, the main characters (Cory Matthews, his best friend, Shawn Hunter, and Cory's love interest, Topanga Lawrence), go to high school (Cory's older brother, Eric, is already in high school).

A new addition to the cast in Season 2 was Jonathan Turner. He was a young "cool" teacher who would contrast with Mister Feeny, the older, less "cool" principal of the school (and Cory's former teacher during middle school and Cory's next door neighbor)...

Mister Turner's first lesson in the first episode of Season 2 is to teach his students The Odyssey...

However, he ends up seeing that Cory has a copy of Uncanny X-Men #316 (the non-foil cover) and he uses it to springboard a compare and contrast between The Odyssey and the X-Men.

I sincerely doubt that it was intentional that the particular issue that they chose matched up pretty darn well, but hey, maybe it was on purpose!

If anyone has a suggestion for an interesting time when a comic book ended up getting featured in a TV show, music video, novel, etc., drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!