Interviews

LWW: How much choice did you have when selecting your Uncanny X-Men team?

I couldn’t have any of the Astonishing X-Men to be part of my core team because Joss had plans and big storylines for them. It’ll probably be different after Joss [Whedon] & [John] Cassaday leave but you could use those characters here and there, use Beast in the science lab or the med lab or have Cyclops bursting in when you need him to yell at Professor X or Havok but they aren’t your main characters.

I chose the ones that I thought would be a cool and fun team to use. I also came up with a storyline that took them all away from earth because I also … it’s that same thing of I’m doing one of a large number of books and I needed to get used to writing those characters and that team mentality and I needed to get away from the rest of the X-universe so that I could figure out how this works and what does and doesn’t work about it.

All episodic science fiction is on the job training as you figure out who these characters are, you learn a little more every time you write them as scenes with them work or don’t work and you have to go back and figure out ‘why doesn’t this work? What does this character really want to say here instead?’ but one thing I’ve found with X-Men is that there’s so many characters that you can go six issues and have a character in every issue and have them barely have any dialogue throughout any of the six issues because it’s the X-Men and you kinda have to have some action in there and you want to show them using their powers. I got away with one issue of this twelve issue arc where I don’t think there’s any action but most of them have action and even in that one issue someone got laid so it’s just a different kind of action.

For me to evaluate if I wanted to do this job for more than one storyline I felt the way to do that, with Civil War coming up and everything, I wanted to do something that could at least feel like it was self-contained within what I was doing. And now that I’ve figured it out, I’m doing the next storyline after that with Salvadore Larroca doing the art.

That’s a five part story that’s about what’s happened to the Morlocks since M-Day. It’s got the extremists and it’s about the various factions. Most of them have lost their powers but then there’s a core group of them that didn’t who are sort of an extremist cult; then there’s the rest of them who lost their powers who are a different kind of cult. I realised that one of the things that’s really cool about the X-Men that I hadn’t really tapped into yet was that the X-Men is like a superhero comic with a bunch of metaphors, like the whole Mutie thing, and as a kid it drove me up the wall because I was like ‘how’s being a mutant any different than being a superhero? Why aren’t they hanging The Falcon or Spider-Man? How do they know Spider-Man’s not a mutant?’ That just drove me crazy, that these guys were running around in costumes are mutants but these guys running around in costumes are superheroes; but I realize now, working on the book, that that’s one of the cool things about the X-Men, that outsider, outcast thing and how that makes them feel. That’s actually a plus with the X-Men, as opposed to the minus it was when I was a kid. I wanted to do that and I decided to try that with the Morlock story and use the Morlocks as a metaphor for religious extremism, which I think is at such a height around America and the Middle East and I just wanted the X-Men to punch it, or optic blast it, if you will. That’s going to be a lot of fun.

Will we see a mix of depowered Morlocks as well as these powered ones?

We’ll see … I think all of them that still have their powers. Caliban is in it, and he brings the X-Men into the story. The main X-Men characters in the story are Caliban and Warpath and Nightcrawler and one other character that I don’t want to say because it will spoil the ending of the Shi’ar storyline.

Is Callisto still acting as leader of the Morlocks?

Callisto is not in there, as a result of what happened in Son of M. She got her powers back from Quicksilver and went insane and is now in a coma somewhere. I just had to deal with someone getting out of a coma so I’m going to stay away from that. It was hard enough to bring D’Ken out of a coma and have him take over the Shi’ar.

Is that how Storm comes into the book then, given she’s the Morlocks leader?

Storm’s called in by Caliban because she’s somebody that the Morlocks will listen to, or so he thinks, and things go from bad to worse at that point. I felt like it’s been a couple of years since Storm has been in the X-Men and in Uncanny and I thought just because she’s Queen of Wakanda doesn’t mean she can’t be in X-Men if they need her for a couple of days.

Which has always been a joy of the Marvel Universe, the popping inbetween books every now and then.

Exactly, exactly, that was the thing too. I just thought it’s great that they had Storm marry Black Panther and that was a really cool event and everything but she’s one of the heavy hitters, she was the leader of the X-Men; just because Wolverine’s in the New Avengers doesn’t mean he can’t be in the X-Men. When I was talking to [New Avengers writer Brian Michael] Bendis the other night, I was giving him a rundown of some upcoming stuff and he went ‘wait, Wolverine! He’s in New Avengers” – yeah, right …

Care to mention a few of the Morlocks that we’ll see in it, other than Caliban?

I don’t wanna ruin it … we see the roachy guy that Geoff Johns created …

Oh, Litterbug?

Yea, Litterbug; and what’s her name – there’s one of them that has this crazy power where when she opens her mouth another mouth comes out and bites you, that’s horrifying, and when I saw the page of her using her powers, I almost vomited; and Leech is there. I don’t wanna ruin the big bad, so I’m not gonna say.

I gotta say, just the mention of Morlocks and you got me

Wait until you see the pages, they’re sick

I loved the idea of … having grown up with the idea that the mutants are the outcasts, that then there are this whole group of Morlocks who are the outcasts of the outcasts.

I remember when I got to that point I was 15or 16 and starting to get tired of Uncanny, to the point where I was getting sick of these giant thought balloons and stories that never seemed to end and I remember thinking it was insanely cool to have this new group of mutants and Storm went down and kicked the hell out of Callisto in front of the group and stabbed her in the heart – it was so hardcore and then they just left them there and went off. They used to have one scene where Storm was standing there yelling at them “I’m your leader” and I thought that was crazy.

That’s the one of the things I thought was interesting about the ‘no more mutants’ thing – because it did get to the point where there were so many mutants that it became ‘What’s your mutant power? Oh, I have five nostrils’ and there’s Mutant Town and it became so uninteresting to be a mutant, it was like everybody’s a mutant and I really liked the idea of there being two to four hundred or however many there are now, so when you meet a new one it’s like a totally big deal, or when you run into Morlocks who still have there powers it’s cool because you have all the other Morlocks who don’t have their powers and they’re essentially homeless people who now don’t even know how to panhandle properly because they’re used to using their powers for that. You’ve got this whole generation of helpless ex-mutants and I thought that was really cool.

I haven’t read it myself, but apparently Wizard printed that Magneto is putting in an appearance in your first Uncanny arc after the X-Men return to earth. What's he been up to since Son of M?

They misunderstood me, I think. But yeah, it's part of the larger story. The Morlocks are looking for him, basically, but whether they find him or not is the question.

There are persistent rumours of Rachel, Marvel Girl, staying out in space and maybe getting her own mini-series or something at the end of the Shi’ar arc. Is this something you can comment on?

Wait … rumours about Rachel doing what?

Staying out in space, not coming back with the team, getting her own mini set out in space

I don’t want to talk about who’s coming back and who’s not coming back but some of them aren’t coming back. Some of the characters who are in this storyline – the last five or six issues – don’t live through it and … the last two issues are pretty much a non-stop battle, which has been a lot of fun to fight. There’s some really evil stuff that goes on and I think that people are going to be sorta shocked. There’s a storyline that’s left hanging at the end of it all – I tie up as much as I can but this was part of a story … The Rise & Fall of the Shi’ar Empire was kinda the sequel to that … and there’s room for another sequel after that, a ‘what happens next?’. Everything is shaken up and it leaves a whole new status quo out there in outer space and my main goal for the whole Shi’ar storyline was to de-sissify the Shi’ar. I thought they started out as this really badass group and the Imperial Guard were like this evil Legion of Super-Heroes … all that stuff was really cool because they were the bad guys; but then the minute D’Ken goes insane and falls into a coma and Lilandra becomes the Emperor, then they’re like nice and you can’t go from Caligula to nice. I wanted to see more of the Caligula-style Shi’ar where you’re worried they’re going to come to Earth.

There’s some of them not coming back and Rachel might be one of them.

Does that mean those characters will, in effect, be in limbo?

Yes. They won’t be in Uncanny X-Men for a while.

Can I mention - without saying whom – that the team will be gaining a new member when they return to Earth?

Sure. Although it’s less a new member and more a new friend to hang out with.

A question about Darwin – in a lot of ways he still feels a blank in terms of personality, he hasn’t had many character beats yet. How would you describe his character, beyond his loyalty to Xavier?

He’s still really forming. He’s a hard character to write in some ways – like I said, with an ensemble cast it’s so hard to give any character enough room to be who they want to be – he’s such an unformed character still because his powers are so weird, and they’re so reactive, that I gotta admit, even though I created him he’s the hardest character to write for me, of all the Uncanny characters just because he’s such a student, and one of the things that was cool about bringing him along in the first place was that it allows a lot of exposition that explains the Shi’ar history without having to have panels of exposition speaking directly to the reader. I thought he was a character that … every time I write him and try to figure how to use him in a cool way I think ‘this guys really hard to write, why did I come up with this character?’

His basic thing has been that he wants to prove himself and he didn’t like that Professor X was being so protective of him, and Professor X was being really protective of him because of what happened to the rest of his team. He’s the last survivor of the secret X-Men team and Professor X doesn’t want anything to happen to him even though he’s the hardest mutant to have anything happen to outside of X-23 and Wolverine. He’s an interesting character to write and he’s starting to come into his own as he goes off to try and save Professor X by stowing away on the ship of the Shi’ar who captured him. I thought that was really good, when he was hanging on to the edge of the ship and you see him trying to figure how to help save the guy, and of course things are going to go from bad to worse with that. He also came along to try and be the voice of reason to Vulcan, and as we find out Vulcan isn’t one to listen to the voice of reason. Vulcan has this twisted idea that Darwin is the closest thing he has to a friend so there’s some interesting stuff coming up between the two of them.

Will Professor X [off the record spoilers removed]?  

Off the record?  

Oh, you’re mean  

Off the record, [off the record spoilers removed]  

[distressed voice] Why?  

Professor X [off the record spoilers removed]  

But I can’t say any of that?  

No ,no ,no, please don’t do that.

Is there any chance that we might see characters like Sway & Petra again in the regular Marvel Universe?

I guess there’s always a chance. It seemed like we should kill at least two of them, and since we killed the women … I realized that later, we killed both the women; but the only way Vulcan could survive was with Darwin. I remember Mike Marts saying later that we should really bring this Sway character back and I was like ‘How are we going to do that?’ and he’s like ‘she’s a time mutant – somebody take a raft out to where Krakoa used to be and finds a little ripple in time and reaches in to it and grabs her’. That’s both good and bad. If someone else wants to do that at some point, fine, I’ve got more than enough characters to deal with. Obviously none of us at Marvel comics are too worried about cheapening the death of characters by bringing them back later – which is a standard thing with pulp fiction and goes back to Sherlock Homes. If it’s good enough for [Sir Arthur] Conan Doyle it’s good enough for Bucky.

I think it’s also, have you got a good enough story to merit bringing that about, and if the story’s good enough, do it …

… and it’s if the characters still got stories that can be told, that need to be told.

but I’m really fond of the kill/not kill thing – I’ve done that with almost every character I’ve worked on. I did it with Foggy, I did it with the Red Skull, I sort of did it with Bucky. The only ones I’ve actually killed to date are Nomad and Banshee, everyone else has been fake killed, and they fall for it every time. [laughs]

Coming soon in Part 3: Ed Brubaker discussed the ending of Civil War, his plans for Daredevil and Captain America, and much more.