Interviews

In some ways, Rogue’s really had centre-stage thus far. What made you want her to be the focal figure?

I just love her, I love the character. I love the tensions in her, I love her directness and her wildness and I love that when she is played like that she is someone who will do anything. As Cyclops says, you can’t second-guess her. I’ve made this point in previous interviews about the passion in her being held and restrained because she can’t touch people, which is a nice beat – but it’s more than that. It’s a sense of boundless energy and total unpredictability and non-conformity. It’s a very attractive package.

I love the ins and outs of the Rogue-Mystique relationship, too. I thought having both of them on the team would allow us to do some very cool things.

It’s great to see more ‘minor’ characters like Karima and Lady Mastermind brought back. Karima hasn’t really had much in the way of character beats just yet – is she someone you’ve got long-term plans for?

Yes, but probably not what you’d expect. There’s something fairly earth-shaking happening to her shortly. She has a very big role to play in Primary Infection, she plays a very active role in the very next issue that comes out, and in the post-#200 arc something unexpected is going to happen to Karima.

Lady Mastermind was a really quite obscure character to pull out for your run – what made you think of her?

It comes down to looking for characters who I thought I could voice. I thought it would be nice to have a totally amoral, cheerfully ruthless borderline psychopath character on the team. She’s kind of like … I don’t know who to compare her to …

Emma Frost?

Yes … there are similarities, aren’t there? Yes, that’ll do nicely. I needed someone who was that dangerous and that brittle.

What would you say to critics who think that she’s pretty much just Emma Frost-lite? What do you think the distinctions are?

She’s not the intellectual powerhouse that Emma is. There’s a kind of shallowness and vanity and also a … almost a pettiness about her. We see her in #194 taking some pretty awful revenge on people who have not directly done anything to harm her but are part of the machine that harmed her. There’s a literal-mindedness and directness to her that’s almost like a playground bully’s logic. I think Emma is much more subtle.

Cable’s the character on your team who’s got his own book, albeit shared with Deadpool. Has that shared ownership of the character created any difficulties in writing him?

No, not at all. We’ve got an arc coming up that takes the team to Cable’s Providence and I’ve used one or two of the characters from Fabian’s cast. I’d have liked to have used more actually and made it more of an informal crossover between the two books but the problem with that is that Deadpool is such a unique, such a strong flavour that when you bring him in he changes everything around him and the story you want to tell gets skewed in a Deadpool direction; but what we have got coming up in #197-199 is a story that changes Cable’s status in a way that will play out in the Cable and Deadpool book as well.

Does that mean he’ll be leaving the X-Men team?

No, but there are big changes there for the character and some of them are surprising changes. Fabian [Nicieza] is very much onboard and we set the whole thing up together.

As far as the X-Men are concerned, The Children (the new set of villains from the Supernovas arc) are out of the way and dealt with – so is Sabretooth planning on sticking around?

As far as the X-Men are concerned, yes, the Children are history. We know that’s not true, of course. As for Sabretooth, watch this space. Sabretooth is hugely involved in Primary Infection, he’s central to the way the story plays out. In Condition Critical, the #197-199 arc, we’ll see some surprises that will bring him to a crisis point, a climactic and decisive point.

The last page of Supernovas returned to The Children and showed that they’re very much still around, very much still a threat and planning on coming back stronger. Roughly how long do we have to wait until we see that?

That will probably be more than a year because the crossover runs through until January 2008. It won’t be until after that that we see The Children again.

X-history is littered with different groups of villains that appear once or twice and then quickly fade into history – The Neo and Gene Nation, for example. Are you thinking that this is a group that will be able to stick around for the longer haul and if so how do you factor that into your writing?

I would like them to stick around for the long haul and I’ve already got some ideas for how to use them in interesting and unexpected ways when they next show up that won’t just be Supernovas Redux.

I think the characters that have staying power are the ones that have a psychological simplicity. My favourite X-Men villain, although he’s currently not available for use, is Magneto because it’s a simple power that he uses in lots of complex, spectacular and surprising ways because he’s an arch manipulator and he’s as clever as Xavier. It’s the intelligence and will that makes him awesome, as much as the magnetism.

So what I need to do when The Children do make their return is to build up the characters that I want to re-use and let readers inside their heads a bit more.

You’ve said on your blog that there will be major changes to your line-up in the coming year, and I know you can’t say too much about that but rumour has it that Marvel Girl (Rachel Grey) will be leaving the Uncanny team sometime soon and if the opportunity came up to include her on your team, is she someone you’d like to give time to?

Yes, I like Rachel a lot. I haven’t heard that rumour but I do know that not all of that team are coming home. I’d love to write Rachel, I’d like to write Colossus, I’d be happy to write Nightcrawler, I think there are a lot of cool characters on the other teams.

You mentioned Colossus being a member of the Uncanny team on your blog, which at first seemed like a simple oversight, and then here you are again linking the character and the team. Are you trying to tell us something about Colossus' future?

No, that was just me typing stuff up while I was still jet-lagged.  You'll notice that in the same blog entry I turned Marrow into Maggott...

Speaking of characters that you’d like to write, it’s not gone un-noticed that Beast has cropped up a fair bit as a supportive character. Is he someone that you’d like to add to your line-up?

Oh, yes, I love - I’m a great Beast fan.

And how do you feel about his counterpart, McCoy, Dark Beast?

I’ve always had a yen to bring them together again, to have some kind of situation where they have to work together to achieve some kind of goal; but for now it’s just an idea, there are no firm plans.

When we talked before about your team you said that Rogue-Iceman-Cannonball formed the ‘stable triangle’ of the team. How many of those three do you expect to stay on the team following the crossover?

At least two, at least two.

Thinking of Sam and Bobby, we’ve seen a special relationship between the two of them – is that something you’d like to take somewhere? How do you feel about the frequently discussed, often quite heated debate about Iceman’s sexuality?

I think it’s an interesting topic … how can I put this … I’ve got plans for Bobby which conflict with him coming out as gay. I do think he probably is a character who … you know the theory that everyone is basically bisexual, and social pressures force you to come down on one side or the other? I do see Bobby as someone who’s probably polymorphously perverse and turned on by … by …

Most things?

Most thing, yes! It’s kind of like an unspoken beat, really. There’s never been a story thread exploring it but some of the decisions Iceman has made about his love life have almost seemed to push him that way but then he’s always pulled back. I know the scene people are referencing here, when Sam carries Bobby to the infirmary – so you’ve got one guy holding another guy naked in his arms. But that follows directly on from the immensely erotic kiss of life that Mystique gives Bobby. I think it’s cool to think of Bobby as someone who’s capable of being attracted to men and women, but it’s the Bobby-Mystique thing I’m more interested in right now.

As soon as you said there was going to be romantic developments with Mystique it put ideas into my mind. I like the idea of Iceman being this kind of closet bisexual that readers know more about than anyone else, more than his team-mates. I imagine the kind of scene where you’ve got Iceman leaving the bedroom and there’s Mystique in bed, laying there in a male form – something like that, that’s a subtle Easter Egg.

[laughs agreeably] That would be a very interesting scene to write.

I wrote a second kiss for Iceman yesterday and I think it’s a great moment.

What does Mystique see in Bobby?

I can’t answer that without giving away too much of an insight into Mystique’s current state of mind. At the moment you’re going to have to speculate as to what the answer to that question is. It’s very much a Mrs. Robinson/Benjamin Braddock thing, isn’t it, because she’s 100 or so years older than him and she’s an immensely experienced older woman; and of course she’s had a lesbian relationship on her own terms. They’re both really interesting characters from a psycho-sexual point of view.

In some ways that’s the most fascinating aspect of Mystique. Here’s this woman who can look like anything and anyone – how does that affect her as a person, how does that affect her identity?

I think … she says this in Condition Critical, the relationship I had with Destiny was the most important relationship in my life and I had a period after she died when I really wasn’t together at all, I was driven more or less insane by it. I think a part of what’s at issue here is that her shapeshifting leads to an amorphous, unstable personality. She is a scary and fascinating figure because she is so unstable and unpredictable, almost pathologically so.

I imagine that that’s part of how she’s ended up using such extremes of violence and aggression at times, that sense of losing your own identity by shifting into different forms for long periods of time must, I imagine, be confusing and make it hard to hold on to your own identity, certainties and values.

Absolutely, which is why I think we can still believe that she loves Rogue despite the fact that she stabbed her in the stomach and very nearly killed her.

This is going back to Muir Island, when she killed Moira MacTaggart. Brian K. Vaughan suggested in his Mystique solo book that it wasn’t the real Mystique who did those things. Do you have an opinion on that?

I think it was, but maybe it’s not something that she’d want to acknowledge. Some things are easier to deny than to face up to.

Are we going to see, given that kind of history, more tensions around Mystique being with the X-Men; we’ve seen it with Sabretooth, with Wolverine saying ‘what’s this guy doing here?!!’, are we going to see more of that with Mystique?

We are. There are gonna be some quite amazing developments, both in the post-#200 arc and in the crossover itself, both to do with Mystique and the Mystique-Rogue relationship.

I know from before that one character you’d like to write is Psylocke; other than her, ignoring whether they’re available, dead, depowered etc, what one character would you most like to add to your team?

Northstar.

If we can touch on Crossing Midnight – it’s another stylistic departure for you. How knowledgeable were you about Shinto before writing the book?

Not very. I’m a tourist. Really. It comes from casual reading, watching a lot of Japanese movies, reading a lot of Japanese Manga, and the research I did for the series, so it’s all second-hand knowledge. It’s not in-depth, it’s a riff on Eastern ideas which I haven’t grown up with. I’d be the first to admit that my knowledge is superficial.

Have you had any feedback from Japanese readers or Shinto followers?

Only from a couple of Japanese friends who aren’t the slightest bit religious; but then I think it’s fair to say that the core ideas in Crossing Midnight are folk beliefs which are woven into Shinto in much the same way as Christianity took onboard a lot of Pagan beliefs and then transformed them slightly and gave them back. The yokai are almost like… I don’t know, leprechauns or fairies or something. And the kami are halfway between that status and the status of gods.

Setting the book in Nagasaki is something that really interests me. In choosing that city as your location, was it that the city itself is different to most anywhere else in the world, given it suffered a nuclear strike, and special because of that, or because the inhabitants, the people themselves who rebuilt the city and survived all that that made it special?

The main psychological importance of Nagasaki, the thing that clinched it was not so much the atomic bomb as the open port aspect, the fact that they were the ones who said we’ll let Europeans not just trade here but live here and worship here, that presents an incredible openness. Then you get the tragedy of what happened during the second World War. It was both of those two things, but more the first than the second.

How important is the setting of Nagasaki to the story from hereon in?

It’s really important in terms of the characters’ psychology. The setting shifts to Tokyo for the third arc and we’ll stay in Tokyo for a little while after that.

You’ve got hardcover graphic novel God Save The Queen about to come out and the mini-series Faker, you’re writing Ultimate Fantastic Four as well as X-Men and have all kinds of other projects on the go, including your novels – I’m amazed at how much you’re writing. How do you find the time to do it all?

Clones.

It surprises me too. I think part of it is that I’m immensely insecure and driven by neurotic anxieties. When I stop working, I worry, and I have to pick something up again and start. It’s not easy for me to rest.

How do you keep track of where you’re at with all the different projects?

I’d like to say it’s because I have a tidy and methodical mind, but I don’t. I ricochet around like a maniac. I do have a fairly capacious mind, when I was younger I effectively had a photographic memory, I could recite very very long tracts of prose and poetry word for word after reading them just once or twice, so not photographic but close. I don’t have that anymore but I still have a retentive memory and I can keep a lot straight in my mind at any one time. It’s that, more than my organisational skills.

Given that you work over such diverse genres, it’s hard to imagine you tied to one publisher who would satisfy your creative desires. What, if anything, would tempt you into an exclusive contract?

A financial consideration wouldn’t interest me, unless it really was shedloads of money, but if it came down to ‘and you can write this book’ and it was a book that I’d love to write, something like that, yeah, I could see myself doing that. Most exclusives are only for two or three years, so it’s not like you’re getting married, you’re just committing yourself for a certain length of time.

Thinking outside of the X-Men and the Fantastic Four, are there any other Marvel characters that you’d particularly like to write?

I’ve always had a yen to write a Doctor Strange story. I think that would be fun to do. When I wrote Spellbinders, the magical teens book, I was stealing a lot of riffs from the early Ditko Doctor Strange – showing magical spells in a visual way not a verbal way. You don’t have characters uttering spells, you just see things happening around their hands. [Spellbinders artist] Mike Perkins and I developed this system whereby each spell had it’s own sigil so you could tell exactly what each character was doing by the kind of magic circle that appears around their hands, which is a very Ditko sort of riff.

Spider-Man. I think everyone has a Spider-Man story inside them, the same as everyone has a Batman story in them. I would love to write Spider-Man.

Why do you think it’s been so hard for Doctor Strange to maintain his own title?

I think he’s a bit of an anomaly in the Marvel Universe. He works best when you do really odd things with him, like when Steve Gerber was writing him in Defenders. There were some lovely things happening there; and I remember in his own series there was one time when they brought the Lovecraftian gods, the Cthulhu pantheon, into it. I liked that very much, Doctor strange vs. these strange elder gods.

You can’t have Doctor Strange fighting against costumed villains and make it stick. It’s just a little bit silly. You’ve got to give him his own kind of antagonists. It’s difficult to integrate him into the Marvel Universe and keep his mystique.

So how do you feel about him being on the New Avengers team?

I haven’t read it yet, but it could well work given the creative talent that’s on that book.

Given that there’s been more momentum behind Doctor Strange recently, with his role in The Illuminati and the Brian K. Vaughan mini, do you think there could be a revival of his own book?

I would hope so, yes, and I would love to be involved in the process. I think he’s a great character.