Interviews

LWW: Are you all recovered after your long plane journey?

MC: Yeah, pretty much. It was tiring, but I had the whole of Saturday to veg out and get myself back up to speed.

Can you just give me a second Ian? [aside: The chicken will be ready at about twenty past seven, could you put … we’ll have it with a little pasta] Sorry, go ahead Ian.

So how intimidated did you feel when you first offered the job of writing X-Men?

My first response was ‘ this has to be some kind of a joke’, it came so much out of left field; obviously I was already doing stuff for Marvel but I wasn’t doing any monthlies. I’d done a couple of fill-in jobs and one mini-series. So that was my first response, utter disbelief. When I got over that, yes, it was quite scary, and immensely exciting because I’ve always been a big fan of the franchise and I’ve followed it intermittently ever since Chris Claremont revamped the X-Men back in the 1970s. It was scary and exciting in equal measure.

What was your biggest concern in terms of making the book a success?

I wanted to choose the right team. I wanted to make sure that I had a team that worked, both in terms of the internal dynamic and, just as importantly, in terms of my ability to voice the characters. I went out of my way to choose characters who I could do interesting things with and who I could write and voice convincingly.

Seven issues into your run now, how are you enjoying it?

An awful lot. It’s great. It’s a pure adrenaline rush. I think it’s hard to say which of X-Men and Ultimate Fantastic Four I enjoy more, they’re both such fantastic books. I sit down to rough out the scripts with a feeling of anticipation and excitement – it’s not like working, it’s not like working for a living at all.

The fan reaction has generally been really positive. Knowing how difficult X-fans can be to please, were you surprised by that?

Yes I was, and hugely relieved. I’ve had this conversation with a couple of other writers … I’m aware that when you take over a book that’s been written for as long as X-Men has, and is as popular – and I’m talking about the whole line – every character you use, every character you bring in, there’s going to be a contingent of people who have an enormous emotional investment in that character. There’s that line from WB Yeats ‘tread softly because you tread on my dreams’. There’s a sense that the materials you’re using are immensely important to a lot of people. I think you have to bear that in mind, you have to have that at the front of your mind when you write – which is not to say that you try to preserve the status quo or you don’t do things just because you know they’ll be unpopular with some parts of the audience, but you need to be aware that there is that emotional investment and therefore everything you do is going to be watched very very closely by a large group of people and is going to matter to them a lot. I’ve tried very hard to address fans’ concerns courteously and with due consideration when people post on my blog and so on. I try to engage in as open and honest a dialogue as I can.

In terms of plotting and scripting, are things roughly playing out as you expected them to when you started writing X-Men?

Yes and no. There are always a few curveballs, certain things – you’ll suddenly get a call from one of the editorial team saying ‘you need to be aware that such-and-such is happening in Wolverine, so you can do this but you have to do it in a slightly different way’, or ‘this character’s going to be somewhere else at that time’, or whatever, so it’s not all plain sailing. But in broad terms, what I’ve wanted to do in the first year, I’ve been able to do. I always intended to do one longer arc and then two shorter arcs, which would bring us up to [issue number] 200 and bring us to an interesting place; and then in #200 everything explodes and it’s all up for grabs.

When I think of milestone issues, I often think of birthdays and the ways different people approach them. Were you mindful of #200 being a milestone issue or was it just another year older, just another issue?

It was something that I realised very quickly, that if I started with #188 then my first anniversary was gonna be this huge milestone issue and I was already asking myself, where do I want to be when that happens? I had a couple of early discussions with Michael Marts, who was the editor when I came onboard, about whether we’d be able to make it a larger than usual issue, and what we might do with the extra page count. What else would be happening in the line at that time, and so on.

The timing has been serendipitous because we’re building towards this big crossover event which will actually happen towards the tail end of this year, by which time we’ll be on issue #205, so what we were able to do was to start planting seeds and to use 200 and the arc that launches in 200 to really set things up for that, to really start the balls moving for that.

A lot of the speculation around #200 is that Sinister will be the big villain – is that something you could confirm or deny?

I couldn’t possibly comment; but I will say that there are some familiar faces from a long time back coming into that crossover, and coming into the arc that starts with 200, but the core situation is something totally new.

The constant speculation as to who’s joining or leaving the team, who the next villain will be etc. – does that ever become an irritation? Does the speculation create am extra pressure on you to bring your best game, knowing that people are so interested and excited and talking so much about what’s going to happen?

No, it’s not an irritation. I sometimes feel bad when fans ask me a direct question and I have to duck it and say I can’t comment on that. And then again I sometimes feel an uneasiness if I do reply to a question and then I think ‘no, I shouldn’t have said that, I shouldn’t have given that away’. Sometimes I say too much and then worry about it. It’s a tension between satisfying readers’ curiosity and keeping up the anticipation, because the anticipation is part of the pleasure.

I think the speculation does bring an extra pressure but at times like this, when I’ve just come back from the summit and I know how things are gonna shape up over the next year and I know there’s all this incredible stuff about to happen, I can absolutely relate to what that guy from Pixar said – it feels like you’re throwing a big party and hundreds of thousands of people are going to come, and only you know what’s on the menu.

I know I can’t expect you to name names but is it true that the next Astonishing X-Men writer was at the summit?

Again, I can’t confirm or deny that but there was somebody at the conference who is a writer, is not currently writing any of the X-books, and is gonna have a role. I can’t say more than that, sorry

Astonishing X-Men isn’t down for being part of the crossover as such, but will the Astonishing team still feature?

Yes, they will, very much so.

One thing I can tell you, structurally, which is very interesting and hasn’t been done before, is that there’s gonna be a prologue to the whole story, and it will be handled in an interesting and, I think, unique way, so that thematically certain beats are going to be hit and it’s not going to be quite in the way you’d expect, like a freestanding title, it’s going to be slightly different.

And that prologue, is that the story you’ll be running from X-Men #200, or a stand-alone issue or a mini?

It’s something different. There is definitely a sense in which the X-Men arc #200 to #203 definitely feeds directly into the situation in the crossover, but the prologue is something different.

How difficult is it to imagine moving from being the sole writer of a book to being one of four writers working on a bigger story? This is your first big crossover – how do you feel about it, going into it?

It’s potentially a nightmare. The possible ramifications are awful if communications get screwed up. I went into the summit with some misgivings about how it might be handled but it was clear that Axel [Alonso] knew what he was doing and that the X-Men editorial team had already anticipated this problem and had solutions to hand. We all came away – I think the most significant thing I can say is that at some point during the two days every writer in the room went ‘I can’t wait to write this’.

I think what gives me confidence is that I can see that the people who are in charge of it know what they are doing, and I think from that point of view that we’re all in good hands. I think also, having read the big X-Men crossovers of the 80s and 90s I came in with some very strong opinions about what we should do and what we shouldn’t do, about how it could possibly go wrong, and certain kinds of approaches that we should avoid; so although I am a virgin in the sense that I’ve never been part of one of these events before I don’t feel out of my depth.

You mentioned on your blog that the Sentinels that are ‘guarding’ the X-Mansion will be dealt with as a side plot; could you give us any hint as to what kind of plot that might involve?

I will say that they feature not as one of the key factions, the key players in the story, but there is a moment when they come in on a tangent and you think ‘Yes!’ and you see a connection that hasn’t been apparent before. One of the beauties of this crossover is that because we started talking about this in June, we – all the X-writers - knew certain things that were going to happen and, whether consciously or unconsciously, we’ve all been dropping in little hints and setting up elements that are going to be used. We’ve got a lot of the pieces in place for this story and it will seem so organic when it happens.

Gambit will be back after issue #200 – are there any other old friends that we can look forward to seeing again?

Yes, definitely. The Beaubier twins will be playing a part. You already asked about the Astonishing team, they will be there. There’ll be some pretty amazing villains from a while back as well as some new characters. I think it’s got all of my favourite characters in it but as with all the crossover events that actually work, at the heart of it is a very simple idea. It’s not like a baroque monstrosity that spills out in all directions. It’s a very tight and focused story that just has a lot of elements feeding into it.

With Gambit, are we thinking about Sunfire as well?

Sunfire will also be there, but Gambit’s role is larger than Sunfire’s. More significant things will happen to Gambit.

The Annual is fast approaching now – whose idea was it to do a X-Men annual?

I think it was Mike Marts, or possibly someone higher up in the chain of command, but it was Mike who approached me. I went away and chewed over what we could do in it and then we talked and compared notes and we thought of a way that the annual could be yet another beat on the way to the big story. There’s a revelation in the annual about M-Day, DeciMation, in a way bringing to the fore a question that should perhaps have been asked sooner, and giving an answer to it, and that answer starts a whole lot of other things happening.

Was this a story that you already had in mind that you wanted to tell, or something that you had specifically in mind for the annual?

It was a combination of the two. The role that the twins play, the Beaubier twins … one of the threads in the story is trying to cure Northstar and Aurora from the mind manipulation that Northstar in particular has been exposed to and in Aurora’s case, the psychotic breakdown she’s had; that was something that I always wanted to do because having used them simply as cat’s pawns and bad guys in the Supernova storyline I was left without the space to take their story forward and I knew that at some point I had to go back and do that, I didn’t want to leave them there in limbo.

The other plot thread, about Exodus and the Acolytes, that was something I pitched to Mike there and then.

Where have the Beaubiers been since the Supernova arc?

They’ve been at the mansion, they’ve been under sedation. They can’t be allowed to wake up or be free for a moment because being speedsters a moment can be a couple of hours to them, they can cause a vast amount of havoc in a very short amount of time. So the X-Men have had this problem of how to deal with people who are basically bombs, grenades, potentially very dangerous indeed, and at the same time their friends, team-mates, comrades, and they can’t be left to rot; and so Rogue and Cable and Emma Frost have come up with a possible way of dealing with the situation and that’s what the annual shows us.

It seemed to me that Northstar really blossomed when he became a X-man and that his character really blossomed for the first time since the early days of Alpha Flight.

I think that’s fair to say

Do you have any interest, somewhere down the line, in writing Northstar as a X-man?

Yes. Very much so. I like Northstar a lot. I like both of the Beaubier twins. I liked some of the things that were happening with Aurora in Weapon X and I think she’s potentially a very interesting character as well, so I’d be happy to have either or both of the Beaubier twins as part of my regular cast.

The return of Exodus – what was it about the character that made you want to bring him back?

This is going to sound incredibly shallow and trivial, but one of the things I like about him is his name, and the religious overtones that it intentionally conveys. I don’t know whether it’s ever been explicitly stated but in the annual I have him saying that ‘when Magneto baptised me I ceased to be a man, I became an idea. I am the setting out and the going forth, I am the road that leads to salvation’. The name, from the Old Testament, about the wanderings in the wilderness and the finding of the Promised Land, that is exactly the ideal he wants to embody for mutantkind, the taking of mutants out from among their enemies and bringing them into a place of their own.

The idea that ‘I embody’ and ‘I represent’ – I like that kind of Messianic madness that he has about him. In a way, Cable has that too. Cable has no limit to his ambitions, he thinks he can save the world single-handed. If you’re prepared to go to any lengths to realise your dream then there’s almost no distinction between heroes and villains at that stage.

What’s Exodus’ current agenda, and what ways does he have in mind to achieve those goals?

I don’t want to answer the second part of that question, but the agenda is the same as it ever was – mutant separatism and the salvation of mutantkind, bearing in mind that he’s now dealing with a mutantkind of fewer than 200.

The preview art shows to be what looks like Cargill, Tempo and Random by his side – is there anyone else that we can expect to see allied with him?

Not in the annual, but you will be seeing them again soon, and when we see them they will be in bigger company.

The preview pages show Rogue & Mystique aboard a SHIELD Helicarrier – are they there as guests or prisoners?

Initially as guests, but things don’t go according to plan.

Coming back to your previous question, Ian, there is one other character, one other villain, if you like, that we see in the annual, who doesn’t come in until the very last page, and it’s very much a teaser for the next story so I won’t tell you who they are. It will be a big moment when you see this character. ... ...