Interviews

Craig Kyle

Ian Murphy talks to the co-writer of New X-Men about the big changes made when taking over the book, and how they approached their biggest comics gig to date.

LWW: Was it difficult for you to come on to a book likeNew X-Men that was so closely tied in peoples minds to the previous writers, the creators of most of the cast?

CK: I’d say it was harder on the fans than Chris [Co-writer Christopher Yost) & I. The wonderful thing about comics is that people follow them for various reasons. They follow them because they love creative teams, they follow them because they love artists, they love characters, they love different kinds of stories. There's a lot of different reasons why an audience stays with a book or goes to it in the first place, and this was a series that had a really dedicated fan-base, and I respect that, and Chris does too, of course.

What Marvel wanted to do was to really … DeciMation was about to begin,House Of M was just wrapping up, and they just wanted to take the book in a different direction, I think to bring it closer to what a lot of the other X-books were offering, which was a lot of action, a lot of adventure, a lot of darkness surrounding mutants in a world that fears and hates them and that's the kind of stuff that Chris & I really love. We love putting wonderful characters up against horrible, unspeakable dangers because we think in those kind of moments and situations you get to see the best of who these guys are.

We looked at the cast, we thought they were incredible, we thought these characters could easily be the New Mutants today, the New Mutants I grew up with and fell in love with, that Chris loves so much – we both just gush about those years in the 80s when the New Mutants were there, and we really wanted to bring back that feel. It was a … re-birth is painful [laughs]. I’d say the characters in the book had it worse, then the fans who really enjoyed the teen social drama of the series – and we never wanted to remove that and lose sight of that, but this first year for us, when we first came on, was like … we were smashing what we didn’t want to deal with, what we didn’t want to keep, and we wanted to rebuild it after that, and I think a lot of people who are very angry have come around and said ‘you know what, they don’t kill in every issue – close, but …’ – and we do care about the interaction, we do care about having quiet scenes and fond and fun exchanges. It’s not just about death and destruction for us, we just needed to shake things up before we could get it back to a place where we thought the book could really thrive.

How did working on X-Men Evolution prepare you for writing a book likeNew X-Men ?

Going back to the original fans of the series, I think they all wish it had prepared us a lot more because that’s the kind of storylines that I think mirror the book before we came onboard, and they’re wonderful. We did that show and I’m very proud of that show – before Chris & I ever wrote for it I was the creative exec. for Marvel that oversaw the project, working with Greg Johnson, and it was a really fun way to re-invent the X-Men, put them in a situation that was relateable to the young audience we were aiming for, and … it was a great reinvention.

Was it a classic? Not quite. Every season we were getting closer and closer to what the real hardcore fans wanted to see and I think in the last couple of seasons we really hit a beautiful middle ground, but I think working on moving picture does a lot for you to help tell good stories in comics because if you think about an entire story from every second that would move through a television show or a film or what have you … what you do in a comic is just find the hot moment, the ones that matter. You can lose the walking up to the door and reaching for the knob and instead you enter right as the door’s opening into the room and right into the action. You learn what’s fat and doesn’t really play well in comics, just focus on the important stuff that matters just to tell this story in 22 pages.

Chris and I tend to run a little long on the page count because we try to say less and I think some fans, their biggest complaint is that it’s a fast read – Chris and I, we really want the artist to be able to do their job, which is to bring that mood, that emotion, stage it so beautifully, we give them enough so they get what the meaning of each scene, what the meaning of each panel is, we don’t say ‘there’s a glass right in the foreground covered in fingerprints, there’s a lace …’ … it’s amazing the writers who can visualise every panel down to which way the woodgrain panelling is going, that’s incredible. We just, we err on the side of less and if the artist has questions we’re there to give more.

For Chris & I it’s really about getting honest communication between characters and really letting the artist bring that emotion out through beautiful visuals – and we’ve been very fortunate with incredible talents, so I guess my short answer is – I’m sorry, I’m very long-winded, I can’t help it, ask anybody – working in movies helps you tell a fluid story. That’s not to say guys who started in comics aren’t incredibly talented but for me, I think I would have had a terrible time coming in cold and learning the business of how to write without some experience in a different medium. Geoff Johns, he’s a guy who can give you a rich read but it doesn’t feel like a novel. I’m envious of guys like that; Chris & I just have a different way of telling a story.

This was your first gig on a monthly comic, right?

Our first comic was the origin of X-23 mini-series, Innocence Lost . They’re connected because we were three or four issues in on the mini when Dan Buckley and Joe Quesada came to Chris and I and said ‘all this stuff’s happening in the X-Universe, we think you’ve got a feel for this kind of storytelling, what do you guys think of trying to add a little of that to what’s going on in New X-Men ?’ and at the time they were also thinking that a way to give the series a shot in the arm was to bring X-23 into that book.

I’ve got a bit of a grasp on the character right now and Chris has been wonderful to work with me to keep her as safe as I possibly can. I think Joe Quesada did a tremendous job writing her in her first appearance with Josh Middleton doing the most beautiful artwork on her – I say that as I stare at the original artwork of the cover on my wall – so for me it was important to follow her journey a little longer because I wanted to give her a good base in comics before I handed her off to other people.

She’s not mine, she’s wholly Marvel’s, I really have very little say as to what happens with her, but I … I know she’s a clone but to me she’s so much more. I think a lot of fans would say she’s a different creature to Logan. She’s almost like a What if?’ – what if Logan had been this, had not escaped, had been raised in this programme, had never been shown kindness or love or compassion or found Xavier’s institute, what if he’d always been a weapon and known nothing else, what would his life be?

At the time Logan didn’t have his memories back so she was someone who when she closes her eyes is faced with every face of every person she’s ever killed, the horrors of that – to me that’s a lot of baggage. Wolverine has in some ways got it easy in not knowing those people, not seeing the faces of the people you’ve killed, that’s a big ‘get out of jail free’ in that it allows you to choose another direction whereas she’s always haunted by that stuff and I don’t know if she’ll ever be human. I know that’s what she wants out of life. In all honesty, everyone who loves and cares about her tells her she’s not a weapon but I don’t know if that’s true.

She was really a celebration of a perfected ideal, Logan, Wolverine, so when I made her for Evolution … Marvel wanted to see more wolverine in the series but she became a solution to the problem because wolverine was an adult and the kids were much younger than him and you couldn’t just say Season 2 ended with him as an adult, Season 3 here he is with the kids, young, it just would have been horrible.

As you labour over that problem, the thing I kept facing was that I’m not going to make this thing better, I’m not going to be able to further perfect what was done so well and made such a hugely popular character. Looking into his past there was a way to simply re-create him. Basically every time his story took a right, I made a left. He’s older than anybody knows, she’s just a kid; he’s a man, she’s a woman; he escaped, she didn’t; he was dragged somewhere further on in his life, she was raised there … it was simply that a yes was a no for me and at the end you had a very different kind of character and she’s not a feral, not a beast, not a savage monster like that, she’s really a robot. She’s got programming and she executes that programming and she has a leash on her that Wolverine thankfully doesn’t, this trigger set which causes her to kill – it is a bit of a feral rage but it really is an instinctual uncontrollable blood rage that’s attached to this chemical and it basically assured that anyone was put in front of her, she’d kill, and that happened to her mother, it happened to her sensei, and it happened to anyone she loved because the facility refuses to let her move on and develop into a unique individual. As far as they’re concerned, she’s just property.

All of that kind of stuff that we did in X-23 was something that I guess Marvel thought would be interesting to weave into New X-Men and you’ve seen the kind of destructive results of our … all Chris & I ever say is that we’re just not kind and loving gods, we may care for these characters but we don’t promise a sweet loving existence, that’s for sure. Is that about the longest answer you’ve been given for a question?

Oh, not at all, I had Peter David last week [both laugh]

Peter David’s great, Chris & I met him for the first time just a couple of months ago in New York for the X-summit and he was great. He was quite a hoot.

What kind of preparation did you do in advance of writing your first issue of New X-Men ?

We had to figure out who we were dealing with, who was in the cast, get a sense of their personalities and really … first and foremost we made a hit list – who do we like, who do we not, who do we want to work with and what do we think would make the most cohesive team? The first plan was ‘thin the herd’ – for us it was too many heads to worry about and to make sure that blue kid #7 was running in the background so you see they’re still alive, so for us … the world had changed, it was gonna be a different place, the world was 99.9% less mutants.

As far as we could tell, if there was ever a time for villains and humanity to unite it was now, and we need to quarter up the kids who weren’t ready for it, who would suffer heavy losses but who would in the end rise above the destruction and war headed right for their front door, so we ended up with a core group.

We also wanted to bring them together because having two lead teams didn’t allow enough conflict within the group so if you picked some of the bad guys, more of them than the good kids, and fuse them into one team then you’ve already got problems among the team because they don’t like each other and they’re forced together, so it just allowed more interaction, more anger, more emotion, and so for us it was a pretty easy choice.

We also wanted someone so that if you through someone at the audience, they knew right away who they were looking at – that’s Rockslide, that’s Surge, that’s X-23, they all have a pretty unique look and feel. Some people were thrilled with the choices, some people hated it, and what we love is that everyone despised Rockslide – they couldn’t hate a character more, unless it was X-23 – and we loved that, we loved that they hated Rockslide. “How could get rid of blah Wallflower and keep Rockslide?” – you could feel the heat as soon as you turned the computer on. We didn’t care. We really had no attachment to her so the anger, the venom, the ‘and DJ!’ … I’m sorry, we weren’t feeling it; although we loved the passion people had for these characters it wasn’t going to sway us on who we kept and not, and really the triumph for this book – and I think Chris would agree – is that we have so many people now that love Rockslide. This really goes to Chris’ credit – he does a lot of Rockslide’s moments. He’s just this great dim-witted piece of rock and people love him, he’s so stupid and he’s so funny and he breaks up the most intense moments with a line or a gag and for us it’s just he’s a great breath in the trauma that’s in every issue that we put out there and again, that’s really all Chris.

I focus more on the Emma Frost’s, the Stryker’s, the dark gnarly stuff, the funerals. I kind of like the … that’s where I thrive, the darker, more emotional stuff. Chris has got this great flair for humour and fun and big action and that’s why together we work really well for a balanced story, that I think you’ll see more of as we move into the next year. It’s been great. We love our choices. We love that David’s on the team and he has no powers, we think he’s more interesting without them – at the end of the day we didn’t think his powers were all that great, y’know? – and again, this is just our opinion.

The last thing we want to sound like is ‘we didn’t like what the previous team did’. They wouldn’t have had that hardcore fanbase if they hadn’t brought so much to the series. It’s different to what we’re bringing to the title but I hope, I think we have kept a lot of the fans and the ones who wanted a little more [Beverly Hills] 9021X, that’s always a piece of what we’re doing but it’s not the focus. To us, yes, it’s a teen drama, but they’re X-Men first and foremost.

Having made those decisions about the cast members you were keeping and killing … were you then prepared for the strength of the upset that the massacre caused?

[pause] Yes … well, yea … I think the first couple of issues went pretty smooth and then when they could see the tide turning, that it wasn’t as light as … I think everyone gave us the first issue because it was crazy, the first day of decimation, the day after the end of House Of M , but I guess some people started to sense the wind shifting, and we knew … we knew if we’re mad now, they’re really going to be mad this issue, and then it was a bit of a rollercoaster, and then Wither ate it and oh boy, and then … the only point that was frustrating was that at a certain point people started to ignore the story and they’d only focus on the kids who were no longer in the series, and there really was a point to it all. We really were mapping everything we think … this is a major event in X-history, and it’s was really trying to restore Stryker to that great place Claremont put him at at the beginning of his life as a character – he has such a wonderful motivation, this righteous man of God, and then Nimrod and his past was our future and we couldn’t see that story until now because we’d not even reached that point … we had these things that we were really trying to bring to all the new fans, and show that these kids were worthy of these stories and that it didn’t have to be Cyclops and the core guys fromUncanny and Astonishing .

Did we lose any sleep over it? No. It was frustrating at times, when some of the loudest fans would only focus on some of the roster losses and not the story we put forward, but, again those same events earned us a fanbase that’s just as loyal as the previous team had and for that we’re grateful because they had to fight pretty hard against their peers on the internet, which we kind of avoid because we’re always drowned out.

I can see some of their frustration and understand why it takes a long time to get over, in the sense that if you’ve had a big loss in your family, in your personal life, when Christmas comes around and everyone’s together again, especially the first Christmas after the bereavement, that’s when you really notice who’s not there.

It’s interesting you bring that connection. It’s a two-fold answer for me. I’m a huge Colossus fan. When I started reading comics he was my favourite, from the first time I picked up an X-Men book, which was my first comic ever, and I just loved that character and I was enraged when someone killed him. It didn’t matter that he was saving all these lives, I just didn’t care about that, this is Colossus, he’s … it’s my favourite character, and I was angry; but then I was thrilled when Joss Whedon then found a way to bring him back and I would say to anyone that’s upset that any of these characters are gone now, this is the Marvel Universe, this is comics, people do walk off death like a Charley horse, and it only takes the right guy, the right gal, the right people to come back, find that story and find a way to bring them back in. To me, we took them out but if somewhere else down the line someone else come sin and says ‘you know what, we can bring them back just like this’ … that’s what I say to them. Be angry at us, because we’re the ones that took them out, but I don’t ever see this as the end of the line for anybody. Very few characters don’t make it back.

Well, that’s true, but it’s much more likely to happen to Colossus than it is to DJ or Network.

That’s true, but in fairness what I would say is if they don’t make it back, besides some people who just had a deep love for the character, for whatever reason, maybe they weren’t absolutely necessary; and again, maybe that’s not fair for me to say but I would say if they’re meant to come back they will, if they’re not then I guess you get to stay angry at us.

We had a funny experience, we put this character, Nezhno in the book, and the stories started to move in a direction that meant we couldn’t use him as we had planned initially, so he’s still floating around there, and we do have plans for the guy, but there are some people who did Top 10 list of ‘whose your favourite New X-Men ?’ – and in fairness we eliminated a lot of characters and if they did a Top 27 they’d probably be short – but he ended up making it on some people’s Top 10 and I don’t think he’d even said a word yet so it is amazing how some characters even at a glance make a connection with the fans and I think that was the case for some of these guys. There’s a really hardcore fanbase for Preview and I don’t know if she ever said anything, but people love what they love, right?

Chris & I have worked real hard on this upcoming storyline – The Quest For Magik – and Chris has taken on the bulk of the writing chores on this one, I worked with him on the plot and the story, but I needed to take little bit of a break because my animation duties are so heavy right now I can’t give it my full attention, and we’re trying to wrap up X-23: Target X so right now the two books have been a real struggle for me so I’m taking a break for Magik and coming in right after that. That’s a storyline that will allow us to bring some of those second-tier characters into the mix. They’ve kind of had to wait their time and allow us to focus on the kids that we picked in the first place and I think you’re gonna be thrilled because none of them die, I’ll tell you that now. There’s a spoiler alert [laughs], none of the kids die – at least in these next four issues – and we really found a neat way to use them. We have some great ideas for some of them, some of the characters that people just can’t say enough about. I think you’re going to be thrilled.

There’s more great things coming. The first couple of scripts are in and Chris is doing a great job of bringing in the fun, that great character stuff that he’s done in so many of our issues. I think it’s going to be fantastic, and having Skottie Young come onboard brings a nice new energy to it, where [series artists] Paco and Juan did a fantastic job on the series, it’s gonna be great, I think those that have hung out are really gonna enjoy this next ride.

One last question about the bus deaths – looking back, is there anyone that you think ‘maybe I should have just written them out instead of killing them off’?

[sighs] I guess… I have to … I just, I … I wanna be the guys who say ‘we thought about it, we were wrong’, we don’t feel that way. Chris & I, we really don’t rush into our decisions – although I’m sure people would disagree – but we don’t, we really thought about it, who’s great? Who’s exciting, who’s got a wonderful personality or a great backstory or just kick-ass powers and we really made some great choices and … the question we have posed many time son message boards when we just can’t take it any more is ‘okay, I’m gonna name three, you name ten more and we’ll undo it all’ – and you can’t. I think it’s DJ, Wallflower, Icarus, Tag and …

Rubbermaid … [pause] Dryad …

Very nice.

But most of them were un-named characters in the first place, weren’t they?

That’s the thing, you can’t tell me Skull Boy #9 … don’t tell me he had potential. I could say that about that couch, someday that couch could become sentient and kill the X-Men, I don’t know, but I don’t wanna hear that. What I’ve got to do is, who matters right now, who could matter more, who can go on to something fantastic. I don’t want to figure out how to give characters the potential that you see because you see them in nine panels over 30 issues. Chris & I really scrutinise our decisions, we labour over these scripts. Chris is incredibly fast, he’s a brilliantly fast writer, I’m envious of how quickly he can turn out pages. He’s really remarkable, I can’t say enough about that; whereas when I get into a den … it’s literally like trying to digest knives for me, I go ‘I don’t know!!’, I go back, rip out a panel, put it back in, then I flip the two, and I’ll write three pages forward, go back, read it again … it’s really a painful painful process for me. I love it, it’s a great feeling when I hit ‘send’ on the e-mail, but together we don’t let anything slide. He questions my decisions, I question his, and that’s why I really think we bring together a nice rounded story because it should be the best of both of us. Anything that’s not so great that I’m putting out there, he’s calling me on and vice versa.

We’re thrilled with the decisions that we made. There are probably 20 people out there that are still mad, and they’ll stay mad, and I get it, because they loved the old team, they loved the old series, and we’re never gonna deliver that and that’s totally cool. What’s important is that those people then follow that team and keep supporting them and be there for them and Chris & I would love the same kind of support.

We hope that when we move on to another title that the people who love the kind of stories that we’ve done here follow us on to the next thing because New X-Men is not X-23 and X-23 is not gonna be what we do next. We really just wanna bring whatever we feel will do the most for the characters and the story and the world that we’ve been given and what we hope is … ‘you know, they did the same thing in the first year of New X-Men , they’re gonna destroy this’ – we just don’t want that feeling; and that’s why we think it’s okay if you say we loved X-23 but we just don’t get New X-Men . That’s okay, it’s a very different book. If we had these kids going through torturous murder on a daily basis that X-23′s going through – not that it doesn’t have some of that pain – well, forget it, we’d be down to one character. It might be Anole but … we really try to bring whatever kind of voice is right for each property. If we don’t do that then we really shouldn’t be having these gigs, and Marvel’s been very supportive, they are trying to find some great new projects for us – there are some things on the table that have been discussed, and who knows how it’s gonna pan out – they’ve been awesome to us.

We’re just two fanboys who do this out of passion. We both have full-time animation jobs that keep our families fed but this is something that is more special than those and … all I can say is that in the most fanboyish ways, and I mean that with all the respect I can possibly give it. We’re the same kids that collected comics at 12 and 10 years old and still get giddy when we see the artist doing sketches and we still have books that we give our friends and for us, we’re still those guys.

That’s why this is so awesome, you’re allowed so much freedom and if it doesn’t work, it’s only on you and if people don’t like it there’s no-one else to blame because no-one was saying ‘don’t do this, don’t do that’. They give you so much freedom in these worlds, if it doesn’t connect with audience, it’s your fault, it’s nobody else’s fault. Chris & I love that challenge, we love that freedom. In our day jobs we normally aren’t given that – not to poo-poo animation for children, it’s amazing, but it does need to be created for that audience so it’s not about doing Afro-Samurai for ages 6-11. That’s an amazing project, but that’s definitely where it belongs, after ten o’clock, for adults. When you’re doing stuff for kids you want that series that they’re gonna look back on and go ‘when I was a kid I loved that series’ and so it has to be appropriate for them. Hopefully it’s entertaining for everyone, for all the family, but … we’re just used to writing our stories, like in Evolution , for an age appropriate younger audience, so comics for us is a nice little break.

One of the things that I appreciate that you’ve brought to New X-Men is that … well, I loved New Mutants first time around, in the 80s, and I’ve always enjoyed those kind of teen team comics, but as superhero comics in general have got darker it felt to me that it was ready for the teen team comics to grow up as well … it’s a dangerous world and these are inexperienced kids playing an adults game and sometimes there are going to be horrible consequences to that. I’m reminded in some ways of The Walking Dead , and Robert Kirkman’s approach to that which is to say actually, any member of the cast could die at any time because these are ordinary people in a horrible situation in which anything can happen and none of them are safe. Is that how you approach New X-Men ?

Yeah, you know, in the beginning it really is. We still have that mentality to be honest, like I said, in The Quest For Magik everybody’s safe but I can’t tell you after that if anybody is, and I guess … it’s tough. In many ways it can make for an exciting and engaging story.

There’s a series that was on HBO for years called Oz . It’s a really dark and gritty series and had some of the best character development I’ve ever seen on television and it would just turn my stomach because I don’t know if the guy I love comes out of this episode. It was brutal, but I had to watch, God forbid I didn’t watch that one and I lost it and I didn’t see what happened; so there was that element to where you’ve got invested fans, you got to see these guys go from a lawyer to a murdered to a victimised subservient of a Nazi in jail … there were characters that just went back and forth and this jagged path and it was just incredible how well it was done and how quickly it was done and Chris & I saw that for this book – they’ve had such a safe world, they’ve had a few fights in their lives, the X-Men have always been there to clean up their mess if it got out of hand – no! No more! Forget it.

If you’re gonna come out there, you’re gonna collect heads, you want the X-Men gone, you hit them where it hurts, you take out those children, you kill the ones who are not ready to defend themselves yet and you get them now because if you let them grow, let them train, let them get strong, we’re gonna have another Wolverine, another Emma Frost, another Cyclops, another Jean Grey. You can’t let that happen. You must kill the children while you have a chance; and so they were the targets; and as much as it’s hurt and as much as people – and some people may have felt that they could have pushed back harder, there’s just no way. You had death at the door of the mansion and the ones protecting them did a bad job.

So for us, yea, it raised the stakes, it torments the kids. I’m very proud of the funeral issue, when the bus strike happened and you got to see where these kids were mentally. Here they are at the grave of one of their friends and where they are is not here, not now, saying goodbye, all they are is in that war, that fiery wreckage where their friends are surrounding them, on the ground, in pieces. It was hell, and they were changed forever in that moment, and I think a lot of them are still in that place.

Now you can’t have every issue where they just sit in their rooms whimpering but that’s part of their lives now. What they’ve seen has changed them forever, it’s changed their attitude towards their leaders in the school – they’re much more hardened, they’re not as trustful, they’re not as ready to just follow the rules as they’re handed to them. They’re like ‘look what happened to us. Fuck this, you don’t know best.’, excuse my language. ‘Forget it, you didn’t keep us safe, you don’t know best’; and they ended up saving a very important X-character, which is Forge, and they did that by themselves.

We absolutely wanted to bring in that feeling of ‘it’s never safe’, but as time goes on we want these kids to have moments of life and have some fun, have some love. That’s why when we had David and Surge together – I think up until our run they had had a little bit of romance here and there but it was never really consummated but for us it was like forget this – life’s too short. These guys are teenagers in the middle of a firefight, please, let’s be honest teens here and get down to it. They’re doing what teens do, especially in a heightened existence where it’s all or nothing and it could be over in an instant. We really want this very hot world where it’s love, hate, anger, war, passion – we want to keep it at the height of a person’s existence so that it’s always engaging, on many levels, whether it be fun or romance or addiction or what have you. Your love for New Mutants ? We share that. You look at the early adventures of those kids and they weren’t ready for it – neither are these guys.

LWW: I love that you’ve kept David [Alledyne] around, as a depowered student, I particularly liked the Doug Ramsey reference. Do you have any plans to give cameos of small moments to any of the other depowered students, particularly those who have left the school?

CK: We have stories mapped right up until the crossover. At this stage I don’t see too many more of the depowered students coming into play yet. It’s tough to say, in the crystal ball, what we have planned for this series or ourselves after the big crossover. Whatever lends itself to a good story or makes the most sense for us will do. Just like we focused on our core group of kids, focusing on David as a depowered kid makes him special … if we were to bring anyone else in I don’t think we’d have them stay long because we don’t want to pull that light off of David. He’s such a great guy, he just proves that the training he received as an X-man and who he is as a character stands … it puts him in a place where he can sit alongside his team-mates and do a great job. Not yet, maybe, but David’s our guy for the moment.

Will Illyana – any version of Illyana – be joining the New X-Men team at the end of the The Quest For Magik storyline?

I don’t want to give away too much and I think it would be unfair to … although Chris and I have knocked it out, I really look upon this as Chris’ chance to do some of his own stuff without me meddling in how some of these pages will turn and how some of these stories will happen, so I don’t wanna betray him on this one. All I can tell you, being an old fan of comics and loving those old stories, we hope it’s a story that resonates with guys like us, gals like us, that it has great meaning to long-time fans and that people who have been following our book see it as a story that they really wouldn’t have seen coming down the pipeline given what we’ve done so far. It has a wonderful heart at it’s core – and that’s what we talked about when we started doing this series, how do we make this an emotional story. He had some of the epic elements to it in place in his mind and I said ‘what are people gonna really care about here? What’s the journey that makes this such an engaging, moving story, and I think that it has that now.

Having a character like Illyana as the object of desire and pulling our kids into a fight that may not be theirs but one which they’ve been handed either way is gonna make for a beautiful story, and I am so excited for what is gonna happen to some of the second-tier kids. Pixie, Anole, some of these guys are going to have moments that I think even their hardcore fans won’t see coming and haven’t been expecting and I imagine the majority will love it, some won’t, but all I can tell you is it’s not going to disappoint. The talents involved with this book are incredible, and it’s a great turning point, it’s a great new chapter in their existence and I’m really excited for everyone to get into it, it’s gonna be great.

What would you say to fans of Illyana who are little worried that the introduction of any character of that name won’t live up to their affection for and memories of Illyana Rasputin?

I think what’s fair to say is that you could put ten fans of any character together in a room and you could please two of them whole-heartedly, irritate three or four completely, and then find shades of emotions in-between both of those for the rest. For me – and this is the way Chris & I approach all of our work, whether it’s animation or comics – what’s important is identifying the essence of the character, what do we see as the elements that make them loved or hated or so important to the fans, and we do our best to celebrate those elements. You’re never gonna nail it for everybody.

You could read ten different breakdowns on what’s great about a character, and none of them would be the same, so all we ever try to do is get close enough and look to ourselves at what love, what do we care about, what do we think will be meaningful, and then shoot from the hip, because if you start to scrutinise yourself and listen to the internet too closely you all of a sudden become petrified and can’t move and can’t make a choice, it happens to everyone from greats like Sam Raimi to poor schleps like us and you just can’t do that. If you’re moved by it, if you’re passionate about it, if you’re excited by it … Chris and I both believe it’s going to have that same connection with the fans; not all of them, that’s never the goal, but as many as you can get. That’s what I would say to anybody out there: move yourself and that should translate to a wider audience.

The Illyana that we’re going to see … how is she different or similar to the Illyana that we’ve known before?

Again, I can’t get into that too much … all I can say is that the Illyana that Chris & I think about, care about, is the one that we all grew up with, the one that Colossus loves more than anything else in this world. That is the character that we care for. That’s about the best I can give you as to the kind of version of her or the direction that we thought about when moving into the story.

When I think about Illyana, I immediately think about Belasco, who to my mind is one of the most under-utilised villains that Marvel has. Any sign of Belasco?

[laughs] I’d say you should definitely look into this chapter of New X-men . I think you’ll be very very pleased [laughs] hopefully Chris won’t club me for saying that [laughs harder].

After this we’re moving towards the big X-book crossover. I know there’s a limit as to how much you can say about that … but are you looking forward to getting the chance to write some of the other X-characters?

I tell ya, Chris & I are really excited because we came in right after the last big crossover [ House Of M ], so had missed out on that first opportunity for the books to intermix. That was kind of a bummer. It was a good time for us to come in but we would have loved to have been part of an ‘everybody in the mix’ storyline.

It was a fantastic meeting in New York. With as many characters as all four of these books share and the kind of ideas that the editors had in mind and that the creators were bringing forth, it was a little crazy on day one, and I think we had had 12 or 15 huge sheets of paper that we had put on the wall and were starting to hammer out the details and map this monster of a story out. We went home that first day and went ‘brrrrrh, I don’t know if we’re gonna get out of this thing [laughs] ‘cause we’re not making a lot of headway – and then day two came and it just clicked; slow-burning in the beginning but it was amazing how stories started to dovetail into others and characters that were established in all the books were starting to have similar goals in mind yet their paths would cross in destructive and massively conflicting ways, both on the sides of villainy and on the side of heroics. I was amazed, I could not believe how much ground we had covered in that second day, and by day three it was really dotting is and crossing ts. It was exceptional.

What Chris & I wanted to see when we walked out of there was … we wanted to know that it was gonna matter and it was gonna make some change and not just feel like if you didn’t read it in all honesty if you read the issues after it’s not going to have any influence; and it was great. To Joe Quesada and Alex Alonso’s credit – and that’s not to take anything away from the other editors in the room – they really wanted to redefine the X-universe, get in there, make some changes, give it some life, a new direction … now that reformation was settling down … if the books deliver the way we’ve discussed, this is gonna be a hell of a ride for everybody. There’s going to be some wonderful mixing and matching of characters and teams, and when it’s other, things will be different. Not in such a way that you’re not gonna get the books anymore, but in a refreshing and exciting way. I think it’s gonna be a lot of fun getting there. There’s so many wonderful things I wish I could tell you about, but someone up above would beat me up if I did.

I appreciate that … in terms of characters that are on the other X-teams, are there any in particular that you’re looking forward to writing?

Some stuff that I’m anxious to see is some interaction between Wolverine and X-23 – I’m obviously incredibly biased in that way – for me that’s a very unfinished chapter of her existence and I’m really looking forward to them having some time together. His life has changed a lot in the last couple of years in comics, I don’t know what that’s gonna do to that exchange when it gets to happen. I’m anxious for them to have some time together when they can bear soul as much as possible, being who they are. That’s what I’m looking forward to, which is a very personal stake. There’s lots of other stuff I’m looking forward to ,bigger event stuff, some action elements that are going to be incredible and some of the emotional stuff that’s gonna happen in other books – I can’t wait to see how it happens, there are some incredible opportunities for wonderful emotional moments between all kinds of characters, between hero and hero, hero and villain, villain and villain, it’s gonna be exciting.

So any characters, so many storylines, so many things moving already in a certain direction, to have those weave together, make sense, improve and mean something, that’s not easy and we didn’t have a ton of time to bring all those pieces together but with the editors in that room and Joe [Quesada] involved at every stage and all of us working together, it just came together. It was not easy, but I have all the faith in the world that this thing is gonna deliver.

Might we see another Anole-Northstar moment?

Y’know … I guess I can safely say … I don’t think that’s on the cards right now. Those kids are gonna play a part in that but I’d say the core group of our kids will be far more in focus than some of the secondary kids. I’m not saying Anole will stay where he currently resides as far as rank in our title, but I wouldn’t say all 27 of the kids that still remain are going to share equal spotlight in this coming event. It’s our core seven and probably a couple of others as well.

Having just had the issue with Selene and Wither … how long do you plan to keep us waiting before we see them again?

That’s a great question and it’s something we’ve talked a lot about, having set this in motion. We’re mapped up to the crossover. Whether or not we even get to see a peak of them, I don’t know, there might be a chance between Magikand the crossover to see a little bit of that but it’s too tough to say at this point, because if it’s going to be a part of anything, it needs to matter, it needs to be given the proper amount of time. We’re anxious to get there, it just depends on how everything moves to the event and where we stand at the end of the event – that’s gonna be the next year, what do wanna do, what’s the plan for us, for the title, I think when we get closer to the end of the crossover we’ll have a better sense of when that will come to life, but we do have plans.

With Nimrod, Stryker & Selene … they’re all classic X-Men villains. Are there any plans for any New X-Men specific villains to be developed?

I think there may be elements that can be woven into the Selene arc that we have loose ideas for, but for us trying to make these kids matter in the eyes of comics fans who don’t read the book or don’t care about the book, or who, for whatever reasons, got out of the book, we thought the way you give them some validity is have them face foes the X-Men themselves have struggled with or not defeated, and that gives them some credibility. For right now we’re focusing on bringing the bigger threats of the Marvel Universe against these kids. Once they’ve really proven themselves we’ll worry about bringing in someone who’s unique to them and their situation.

Thinking of the core cast you’re working with, have you consciously tried to make Julian a bit more likeable?

Well, who doesn’t love that gruff hardened exterior, the scoundrel who in all honesty is not as tough as he or she would claim to be; to me those are the most endearing characters. Chris is a big Cyclops fan, he loves the boy scout, for me … I prefer the scoundrel – not Wolverine, but the flag-weaver doesn’t do it for me all the time. I prefer my Emma Frost to my Jean Grey any day of the week, to me it’s a much more complex character.

I’m not putting down Chris’ taste, it’s just he likes these heroes through and through and I respect that but I celebrate the scoundrels with morals – I’ll kill this guy and this guy and this guy, but not her. I’ll steal from these people and not them. I like that, to me that’s a much more interesting kind of character. I liked Julian’s attitude and his rudeness and his edge and his fiery temper, but when Chris & I were talking we said there has to be more to him than that, there has to be a reason why he’s this way and why he’s so angry and it can’t just be that he’s a bad guy. We have some thoughts on that, we haven’t been able to get into it as fully as we planned but this is an ongoing story. We love his connection with X-23. We still think he’s a prick but we believe he has reasons behind it, valid or not, he does have reasons why he’s the way he is, and to me I think that translates into him being a little more likeable because he’s not just a jerk, he has moments where he’s actually nice too.

The way his powers have been increased – did you feel the need for the team to have more of a powerhouse on it?

We had some things in mind when we moved forward, and then as they evolved pieces fell into place and came together and that moment with Julian really happened because when they lost Tag … when that bus strike happened, they were unable to save their friends and Rockslide froze. They had really failed everyone – themselves, their friends – and in this final fight they had to get to a place where no matter what happened they weren’t gonna make the same mistakes.

Rockslide believed he was giving his life when he jumped in the way of that beam by Nimrod – he was fortunate not to die – he did what he did thinking he wasn’t going to make it. Julian wasn’t going to put one more of his friends – even someone he’s barely got to know – in the ground. That was over for him, that wasn’t gonna happen, so for me and for Chris it was about having them fail in so many ways and giving them an opportunity to do it one more time and no matter what they took they were willing to make whatever sacrifices were necessary and that’s why Julian went the route he did. I think he’s gonna shrivel now, his abilities, he’s not quite ready for this power, but just like Rockslide he made that decision knowing that it was a risk, but one he was willing to take. It wasn’t to make him more powerful, it was to further his character.

When New X-Men: Academy X first started there was a real sense of rivalry between Julian & Nori. Do you feel they’ve moved to a position of mutual respect now?

Yes and no, I think there’s definitely more respect between them but Julian doesn’t quite respect surge’s authority or the need to answer to her, and she … Nori doesn’t take that well, and she shouldn’t, at the end of the day she’s the boss and Julian should listen. They’re still working that stuff out. I think there’s a little bit of that Jack & Sawyer thing going on – they can work together very well if they do, but they still struggle to find an even ground to work together on. They’re far from buddies, for sure. That’s the thing, we hope no-one gets too comfortable.

I think one of the best duos right now – and again this goes back to Chris and how well he’s handled these two characters and their moments together – is Anole and Rockslide. They’re hilarious together, and the mutual disrespect they show for each other is fantastic. They both give it to each other and it’s great, I just love it. Secretly, yea, they like each other but they would never, never let anyone know that they’re friends because it would be bad for both of them, and I love it, I just love it, they’re just so crabby to each other and it always makes for a great scene. There’s a lot more of that to come and you can look definitely look forward to more of that in the Magik arc, too. It’s such a great duo and Chris has a great sense of how they should be together and sound.

Given that Santo’s a bit of a bully, why does Cessily admire him so much?

I think he’s just that dumb lummox, if he knew better he’d probably act better, but he doesn’t, he’s just so stupid and we have to take that into consideration. He’s never been unkind to her, y’know, if there’s anyone besides Hellion that he really cares for, it’s Cess, and she loves that, and that’s why she will stick up for him. She’d smack him if he’s being rude but she’d also attack anyone who’d ever challenge him because she knows there’s sweetness in him, it’s always in her direction, so … what are you gonna do? He’s never shown her an unkind moment, so how can you hate him? He’s not an unkind person; yea, he’s a dick, but he’s not a bad person so that’s what’s good about Santo – a little bit like Hellion but not to that degree. He plays rough and tough and yes he’s strong but he’s just a big dummy and he’s one of our favourites. We love that guy, we loved him before anyone else did, and we love that people have come around to the guy because we always felt that for him, we always felt he could be a breakthrough favourite, and I love that those two characters have this sweetness between them. How can you hate someone that loves you so much?

It seems like it’s Cessily’s turn to be put through the mill now …

[laughs loud] Everybody’s in a line, dude, she just happened to jump to the front

How are we going to see Santo react to that?

I think you know that everyone’s anxious to get home; sadly they’re going to be late, in many ways, but … y’know, I think that’s more of a long-term question, how’s it going to affect her, how’s it going to affect him, what’s it going to do to her after it’s over. Just like the attack on the bus, it’s not going to be all seen right away, I think it’s something that’s going to be a wound that’s not going to heal for her and a character like Santo who can come up to you and talk feelings, y’know, so even if he had it in his heart to try, I don’t even know if he’d know how to approach that issue. I see them as an ongoing storyline and something that will evolve with time.

I wouldn’t say you’re going to see a lot of reaction from Santo right away. I think it’s something that as cess processes what she’s been through, the misery and the pain – she’s getting a taste of what X-23′s been through her entire life, and that’s going to be an eye-opening thing for her, too that’s really going to affect their relationship, now that she has had just a small taste of the horrors X-23 only knew as her life, it’s gonna change her.

Are we going to see The Purifiers, with this story, start to develop as a long-running threat for the New X-men?

I can assure you you have not seen the last of The Purifiers. They are still on God’s mission and they will not stop until the last one is in the ground. There are many many battles to fight and, unfortunately, some sooner than later.

My favourite character in the book, by far, is Anole, I love him

[laughs joyously] Wow, you have to start the fanclub because I assure you, you have about a thousand strong out there waiting to join you.

Yea [chuckles]. Given that until recently he’s had only a small role in the book, what do you make of his huge popularity.

I don’t know why you’re asking me, I should ask you, why do you love this guy? Chris & I are still trying to figure this out ourselves. He’s had maybe 5 pages of comics in thirty-something issues. What is it about him that you love?

It’s partly that he’s that sensitive guy, that sensitive kid who’s stood slightly aside from things a lot of the time and is discovering sarcasm, and that takes me back to high school, and he’s got a great visual and look, he can be really cutely drawn – there are some agonising moments, because when he looks sad, your heart breaks.

So you like the emotional angles? I agree with that. Ask my wife, I’m the one who cries at movies, she doesn’t, I say she’s dead inside …

My wife would say the same thing [both laugh]

It’s pathetic, I’m watching American Idol and they’re having a girl call her family saying she snuck out to go and audition and I’m ‘oh no, here it comes’ – I’m a sap, I can’t even watch Extreme Home Makeover anymore because I can’t stand the last ten minutes [vigorous laughter from both] so I can definitely connect with that. I think some of it is that there aren’t a lot of great gay superheroes out there and I think people love the fact that he is and that he’s part of a team and I think that’s wonderful. I would tell anybody, I don’t care if a character’s gay or straight, they’ve gotta be good, it can’t be their sexual orientation … where they lie as far as romantic connections to other people … it’s part of who they are but it shouldn’t be why they’re popular, in my view. That’s my opinion.

For someone who’d like to look for characters like myself in comics, I can see that, but as far as Chris & I are concerned that’s not a good enough reason for him to be popular, so we want to make that kid shine, we want him to be special in our eyes, we want him to have many wonderful qualities as well as being a cool gay character in comics. So for a long time Chris & I have been trying to figure what to do with him, what do we do to make him someone we’re more excited to draw, to write, and to tell a good story about. I think we did it and I think you’re going to see this in the coming arc with Magik and … you may go ‘what did you do? You ruined … AHH!’ but I can assure of this – we’re not gonna kill the kid.

We want him to be exciting, we want him to be cool, we want everyone to root for him, we don’t want one group to scream louder than the other, we want everyone to celebrate him together. He’s everyone’s hero, but then again we love that there’s a part of his sexuality that brings in a new fanbase to him but what we really want him to be a wonderful character, we want everyone to love him. I think we’ve found that. He had a nice base to start and I think we found a way to elevate him a little bit more and make him someone that anyone who loves a good young hero can get behind … but who knows – and there’ll be plenty of Rockslide problems down the road – but we’re excited about him. If I’m excited about two characters in the coming months, it’s him and Pixie.

You say Anole has a fanbase as a gay superhero, but he’s not out in the comic, is he?

I guess not, officially, but Chris & I look at it this way: if you have a gay friend that’s largely true to themselves, you usually get a sense that that’s who they are – and we’re not talking any particular stereotype here but if people are more comfortable with themselves they may not have come out and said ‘this is what I am, this is who I am, deal with it or not’.

We thought about that, like that moment, if we wanted to make more of it, and we have some thoughts on it but for us … we’re not ignoring the fact, we absolutely are aware of it and it’s nice, it’s refreshing, it’s unique to this kid and we know that, but we don’t want to just be the straight guys handling the gay kid, forcing him into some ridiculous scenario where we’re writing painful scenes between him and his father … we just want to do him justice. When, if we hit that issue, we want to do it right, y’know? [ Young Avengers writer Allen] Heinberg did such an awesome job of writing characters who are gay, straight and everything in-between and I love it – it’s respectful, it’s cool, it’s fun, it’s not too safe, it’s very natural, and that’s what Chris & I want to do.

We think we can write any character – black, white, gay, straight, transsexual, you name it, and we can do it honestly through just trying to connect with a human emotion, a human being, and that’s what matters, not saying it’s more authentic because I share this trait or that trait with the character. If you can connect them on a human level and express that in a way that we all believe is honest, sincere and emotional, then we’ve done our job. I just don’t believe you need to fall into any of the same categories as your cast to do them justice; but if we’re going to do that issue, and we’ve talked about it, we want to do it in a way that feels right. We don’t want it to become a mockery, we just want to do it right for him. He deserves it as a character, he deserves that respect; and when I say respect I don’t mean like it’s going to be this Hallmark movie of the week, it just needs to be appropriate for him and we need to be proud of it, that’s all.

I hate PC, I think it’s destroyed the English language, it’s destroyed communication, you have to be so careful what you say these days it’s disgusting so to me it’s like … I just don’t worry about those kind things when we tell a story, we just want to be truthful. We don’t want to be not offensive – if you’re offended, good for you, don’t read this. To me, we just want to get it right, not deliberately make it so you can read it in some 5 th grade classroom.

The concern for me is … I want to see diversity in comics, I’m excited to see a variety of good gay characters in comics … and the concern in my mind is … outside of print, different creators have said he’s gay, we know that, but not everyone reads interviews and the internet. My concern is you can reach a point where you have someone like Northstar who after the early 90s, after he’s come out, gets his own mini-series. No mention of it and he’s right back in the closet, y’know? My concern is that if nothing’s put in print then it’s easy for another writer who has a different agenda to come on down the line, brush over everything that’s gone before and suddenly Anole’s being written in a different direction and it’s ‘you thought you knew him? You thought you had that feeling about your friend? You thought you knew something about them that they’d not actually said? Well, this time you were wrong’.

I think you’re right, I think if the issue is brought up in that way – and who can forget the 90s? – Northstar was on the cover, he was screaming, it sold 2 million copies and then yea, it kinda went away. I think if you’re going to handle that issue and say we’re gonna bring him out, this is gonna be a storyline, like anything else you do it’s … it may be a weird example but when [Brian Michael] Bendis brought Daredevil out and said ‘look, this is who I am, I’m Matt Murdock’, he had to deal with years of what comes with that kind of announcement. It’s not a perfect analogy, but the idea being if you’re gonna approach that as a story, that Anole’s gonna reveal to his friends, openly, just so everybody gets it – I’m sure Rockslide has no idea yet, ‘cause some will know, some won’t, Rockslide will probably still not figure it out when he says it to his face – but if you’re going to handle that issue, if you bring it up then you’ve gotta know that that’s an ongoing part of that character’s life, so I agree.

When and if we decide to bring that piece of the story out and tell that story, it needs to be ongoing, like any thread that we would tell. The only thing we would also be careful of is that we wouldn’t want this to be a comic book where the issues we are covering outshadow the stories we’re trying to tell for everybody else. That would be my concern. It’s a team book, you don’t want anyone going ‘ugh that’s that story with the gay kid’, you don’t want anything to take away from all the others and their sagas and their stories and their pain and Anole is going to have a very tough road ahead. It’s never easy for a kid in that situation, in a world that has come a long way but has a much further way to go. It’s an important story to do and it handle right and in a balanced way that doesn’t take over the book. All of those things are thought about when we talk about writing Anole.

In the medium to long-term, would you like to see Anole become part of the New X-Men team proper?

I’d like to, he’s been someone we’ve talked about every issue since we started. We couldn’t get our head around why he should be part of the team before that and I think we are getting closer to that reasoning as we move forward. We’re getting closer to that place every issue, and the Magik arc is gonna decide a lot.

Now, Dust, who I think is another great character but someone who’s waiting for her moment to shine and for her full personality to come through. How much thought have you had to put into accurately depicting her faith?

Early on in our series it was really important for us to show her doing her daily prayers, to show her speaking to God when the children were killed, having her moment with X-23, trying to explain faith to her when she has no understanding of that. I’m sure in her past she’s worn a burka and killed those in Dusts’ country but she has no understanding of the higher meaning of faith and religion and so we’ve tried to find those opportunities to investigate the wonderful wonderful character that Grant Morrison created.

Even though we cut our team back, there’s only so much time in every issue to let everyone have a moment to shine and be a part of the story. We definitely want to do more with her, but as of right now Cess has shifted into the front place, I think the next storyline’s gonna take our core kids but some of the B-team move up front … all in good time. We love her, we think she’s spectacular, and it’s just … we try to pepper in those moments, where appropriate, and she has a fantastic backstory that we would love to investigate, it just depend son what else is going on in the stories we’re telling now and how things move because, inevitably, as you start moving into a series and tell stories things you thought about early on tend to fall away and other stories begin to be inspired by work you’ve already put into the book and that’s happened in a couple of places and in that case you’ve got to do what’s best for the series and what people are going to enjoy the most. We have to make choices as we go on some issues and with Dust we’ll have to see what feels right and what opportunities come up as the issues move on.

She’s close to being invulnerable in her sand form – does that make her difficult to write in combat scenes?

The tough thing is, we actually had her maim and kill some people when The Purifiers struck the Mansion, and that really affected her. She’s somewhere between the idea of ‘God – Allah – gave me these gifts’ and ‘I used these gifts to kill’. She’s tormented by that decision and some of the things that Chris & I talked about are how would a look inward to what she did and the actions she’s taken compared to X-23. Here she is, she took lives to save her friends, from people who would have killed them – and tried – and X-23 has killed because she told to and programmed to, she’s killed absolutely everything because she was forced to, so X-23 looks back and she sees a pile of bodies, she doesn’t see a few lives she’s had to take, and she has horrible horrible guilt over it, so again, that’s being able to put two characters together and see what happens when those issues are debated because if Dust can’t get over what she’s done, how can X-23 get over the gravity of what she’s done, the acts she’s committed in her life.

I think we need to be careful with how we use Dust because we can’t make her a murderer anymore, and her powers are deadly – she pulls the skin off of bones, so we’re being very mindful of how we use her and what she goes up against and depending on the forces the New X-Men face it may allow her to push harder with those abilities where if she was facing humans or ‘standard’ mutants she might be a little more apprehensive. It’s tricky from many angles, not just from a powers standpoint but from a spiritual standpoint and how she looks at the acts she commits with those abilities.

You’ve talked about how we’re going to see some of the second tier characters get some page time and a little action. We’ve talked about Anole, Pixie – who else will be getting their moment?

Pretty much all of the kids. I’m not going to say that they’re all going to speak or all have going to have spectacular moments in the coming stories, but I’d say all of the New X-Men kids – not just the core team and the two we’ve talked about – will have page time in the coming arc, and most likely have some moments in the crossover. They won’t all have huge speaking roles and stop rogue creatures or what have you, but I think everyone will have some face time in this Magik arc, for sure, and of those second-tier characters some will be play a much larger role than other.

But you don’t want to tell me who?

[laughs] I want to tell you who, but this is Chris’ story. I think Nezhno gets a line … all I can tell you is they’re all gonna play a part, I can’t get into specifics … I may lose a partner after this … [off the record spoiler removed]. It will be great. Everyone’s gonna get a moment if we can possibly give them one, that was always the plan with this one, to look around the house and see who have we dealt with, who’s still hanging out, who didn’t get on that bus [evil cackle] … you’ll be seeing them all.

Do you have any particular favourites amongst that second tier?

[Pause] Pixie

What in particular appeals to you about her?

I guess I could say very little right now, but I have a feeling that’s gonna change [long, enthusiastic laughter]. If there’s any one of the second tier that I’m excited about, it’s Pixie. I look at her and I see a wealth of opportunity, so let me be the fan of the internet for a moment and yell ‘she has so much potential’. Let’s just see how this all shakes out. Coming soon: join us for Part 3 to discuss why the original New Mutants left the book, Craig’s long-term plans, and learn the unexpected link – in his head at least – between Dust and Mercury.

LWW: In the very long-term, which of your characters do you think are most likely to become fully-fledged X-Men?

CK: X-23 already had a romp in Uncanny , she’s kind of already been an upper classman. I don’t think she’s going anywhere, I think she’ll be in X-Men sooner or later and I almost feel like she’s already have that opportunity and she kinda went down to help this book and help these kids although age and emotion-wise I think she’s better suited for the New X-Men I think she is a X-Man at this point.

I think Surge deserves it, I think Hellion deserves it. As I think about it, I think all the kids we’re focussing on deserve it, I think they all deserve that respect, and I think the others can get there too. If you told me I had to make Wallflower an X-Men I just don’t think I could, I don’t think I could get my head around it. For me, she did nothing for me, she literally was a Wallflower, Tag, no, nuh-uh, never. DJ – unless a rave broke out, why?

Ohhhhhh, that’s harsh. [Disapproving] Ohhhhhhh

[laughs] I gotta be honest, this is why we made our choices.

Dazzler’s managed perfectly fine.

[laughs] You’re all ‘you killed these characters, you don’t care about who made them’ first off it’s not my responsibility to care about anyone except the characters we’re writing, but people disregard the fact that we held on to so many of the other characters that were created by the previous creative team. We did that because we think they’re awesome, so I make no apologies about saying that there were ones we didn’t care about, and [laughs] we rode them on a bus and blew them up, it’s done, but we love these others that we’re focusing on.

We’re trying to make these others everyone else’s favourites. So you don’t like it? So you disagree? I killed ‘em. Oh well. But the ones we love, we’re doing great things with. If they move forward, if they keep growing beyond the work Chris and I are doing today, I think it’s only a testament to where they began, with their creators, where we’ve kept pushing them along, and that they always had the potential to be spectacular, so I think any of the guys on our team deserve to be full-fledged X-Men.

I think it’s going to be tough for them all to make it, I think if I had to put money on the table who has the best chance, I think Cess has a great chance, I think Dust has a great chance and I think … Hellion’s tough, I think his character’s there but I think his powers are pretty common place and that’s what worries me with him. Surge, I think she’s got a great look and a good attitude but again I don’t know if she’s got a power so unique that she can just transcend characters that have similar attributes. Rockslide, as much as we love him, does he have a chance? I don’t know, I dunno. I think if he does he could be that guy who would be the first red coat on a new team, he could be easily killed. It’s just tough, I don’t know, but I think Cess and Dust have the best chance of all the old characters that we came in on because they’re both very unique, very cool, and there’s nothing else like them out there right now, so they’ve both got a very good chance, I think.

When I look back through the different generations of training classes – New Mutants, X-Force, Generation X – why do you think so few of the characters have successfully graduated to the senior teams?

Brrrrrrrrh. This is where you’ve got to be careful what you say so you’re not poo-pooing other people’s work. This is just one guy’s opinion, but a lot of them – not great; and the other side is, if they didn’t connect with the more current creators out there doing stuff, they don’t stand a chance. I’d love to write a New Mutants book, so would Chris, why? Because we love those characters, we love those old guys, it would be great to do a series of those old guys brought back together after all these years apart and try and put it back together – and how do you, so much has happened to these kids, they’re just not the kids they were when they started. When you look at these stories, all these ongoing threads, so whatever happened to them definitely didn’t end in the pages of New Mutants , there’s a lot more story to tell, but our passion for them is what we believe makes them valuable now, and of course like you, many share that opinion.

The problem is that a lot of the people I think you’re talking about don’t matter to enough people or to the people who could keep them alive and important. It all comes down to personal taste, but if I was excited about them we would find a way to put them in a book and do something with them and hopefully light a fire under them and get people excited about them. That’s the trick. If it matters to the right people – and by right I mean the people making comics – then they’ve got a chance to keep going. I’ll read books but if I don’t see characters I love, it may have a X in the title but I don’t see the characters I care about so for me it’s not necessarily a X-book. It’s tricky. I don’t know if there’s enough people that read our kids to give them the validity they’re gonna need to move on to a X-Men or an Uncanny .

As far as Chris and I are concerned, hey, they are X-Men. It says New X-Menon the title, as far as I can read, that’s X-Men, they’re X-Men. They may suck, they may stumble and fumble all the way to the finish line but they’re X-Men and they’re gonna do the job, it may just not be as pretty as what the Astonishing X-Men might do. So for us, they’re X-Men, we don’t need to seeUncanny or anything about ‘X-Men’ for them to matter and we’ll kick their ass all the way to get them there and we’ll continue to do so.

You get these die-hard fans who say ‘who’s gonna make it? Who’s gonna move on?’ and if you want that for them then you don’t respect them enough to say [getting enthusiastic] they’re X-Men now. I’m not saying they’re good, I’m just saying they’re X-Men. We’d rather have the B-team because it’s a lot more fun to write the unpolished heroes than the ones who nail it every time.

Given your love for the first generation of New Mutants and that so many of them turned up as teachers at the Institute for this generation, are we going to see more of those teachers involved in the stories, even in cameos?

This is a personal taste thing, it’s my opinion, I don’t like them as teachers, I don’t want them as teachers. It’s kinda like the Batman Beyond series – I’m a huge Bruce Timm fan, but I never liked the idea of Bruce Wayne teaching a younger Batman. To me, Bruce Wayne’s Batman, I don’t want to see him in the role of teacher. Return of The Joker is one of my favourite direct to DVDs ever, I’m not saying this stuff isn’t good, it was great, all I’m saying is for my personal preference, I don’t like seeing my heroes instructing someone else. Having these guys as teachers – although it’s an interesting role for them I want them to be X-Men, I want them to be New Mutants again, I want them to be heroes, I want them to be in the action, not in the classroom.

Where I want to see them is back in costume, put back together, dealing with whatever issues have been created in the years since all of that, and have them put the pieces together and be a team again. What unresolved issues are waiting for them to reunite so they can be dealt with? To me that’s much more exciting than ‘when I was a kid I couldn’t control my powers’ – that’s the way I look at it. It makes them too old and too darn stuff for me, when in all honesty they’re pretty close in age because kids age so slow in comics. I’d rather them be heroes again rather than instructors, and that’s why I’m not crazy about the X-Men being instructors either. ‘You’re an X-Man, what are you doing, shouldn’t you be saving someone, not teaching class? Don’t waste your time on me, I’ll get it’. We also use the other X-Men sparingly – Emma’s great for us, Scott’s great for us, but they bring a great conflict to the whole group and a whole new level of interaction. They’re not just ‘and in today’s class’ – and who wants that? And people do, so when I say that I’m only speaking for me. As far as I’m concerned, these heroes should be in costumes and doing what they do and the less time they spend in the classroom, the better.

The frustration is for me that those characters aren’t in other books and things aren’t going off for them, and those short scenes, those occasional pages are proof that they’re not forgotten, whether they’re in costume or not, and encourage the hope that they’ll get their day in the sun again, but I agree, I’d rather see them in costume, having adventures …

… and we agree, hence the Magik arc. We want to see these characters do something that matters, so if we’re gonna do something we’re gonna bring them in and I assure you, she’s not coming to teach them algebra. Chris & I share your frustration 100% and this is how we’re gonna try and get the moments that you’re gonna enjoy.

In terms of the art, we’ve got Nico [Henrichon] coming on for The Quest For Magik and then Skottie Young. Is Skottie going to be the new regular artist?

From my understanding, I believe that’s the case. Once we’ve gone throughMagik – and Skottie’s a mad genius, I worked with him briefly in animation, he did some concept stuff for us a couple of years back, that guy … obviously animation’s my main business and he has that beautiful fluid style where these still images look like they’re moving on the page, I love that … I love his style.

The four covers that he’s doing for this arc, after the kick-off issue, all connect in one beautiful layout that’s just breathtaking. It’s just unbelievable, I’ve never seen anything like it. Chris tried to buy the whole lot, God bless him – Skottie’s keeping them. I told him he’d be insane if he didn’t. It’s incredible and I think it’s reflective of the kind of stuff we’re going to see from Skottie, which is not to say that what Nico is bringing forward … I mean, our book is taking a turn that no-one saw coming ands visually it is just stunning, it is … I read Pride of Baghdad, thought it was a great read but a beautiful beautiful book and to get him for this one issue – which is so appropriate given the content – there are panels that are just … I tell you … they’re moving. We got a recent batch that I think you’re gonna enjoy immensely, on a personal level. I tell you, this is really fun time.

Don’t think for a second that we’re not sad to see Paco [Medina, penciller] and Juan [Vlasco, inker] move on from the title, because they’ve been so wonderful for us, they’ve done so many wonderful stories for us, that funeral scene that Paco did for our kids is one that I’ll never forget in comics, so beautiful, so wonderfully done, so moving, but … we’ve been really blessed, we started with Mark Brooks, then Paco and now we’ve moved on to Skottie and I think everybody’s upped their game when they’ve come on to the title. I really hope Skottie’s the regular artist on the title, I think there’s a good chance he might be, but in this business you don’t want to jinx it, so I’ll put it out there that I hope and I think Chris hopes … and his style is gonna match what’s coming beautifully. It’s gonna be really exciting, what he’s doing.

When I talked to Ed Brubaker recently, he said his original plan was to sign on for a year of Uncanny and review his options then. He’s doing more, fine. One of the things that I’ve got out of talking to you is the sense of longer-term plans in mind. You never know how long anything’s going to last in comics, but given the opportunity, how long do you and Chris imagine you’d enjoy staying on this book?

Ahhh …. Brrrrh … Here’s the thing: Chris & I have precious little time to dedicate to comics because we have really really involved day jobs. I have 9mm projects in various stages of development, production or post-production. Right now is a real crunch time because I have a lot of things in the scripting phase which demands a lot of my time, a lot in the development stage, so it’s long long days and long hours, and I have a daughter who was born just ten months ago and a wife that would like to see me on occasion. She’s happy with the cheques, but once in a while she’d like to remember what I look like; and Craig has a young son and a baby on the way and he’s story editing a new series for us so we have these huge huge lives that we have to manage, as many do, and we want to put our best into comics, so emotionally we’d love to keep writing these kids of quite a while, they are a lot of fun and we’ve put a lot into them, you do get attached, you do want to see them keep growing and developing; we also want to find the best opportunities for us, selfishly.

If you can do a title that can bring a wider fanbase, try some things that we haven’t been able to do in New X-Men that would be better for another series, we would seriously look at that. That’s never to say we don’t care about the fans who have been so great with us, and we don’t care about the kids we’ve invested so much in, but if a great opportunity came up, with so little time and energy to put into projects, we’d always look at whatever the best thing was on the table.

We’ve put some great time in here. The plan was, originally, to do a year, and Marvel said ‘how about another?’ and we were well, you know what, absolutely, we love this book, it’s great, and we also knew we’d left a lot of wreckage in our path – we came in, killed off these kids, tore up they’re house and left, it would be like ‘wow, don’t invite those guys back’. This is our year to mend all the destruction. The year after this would probably be okay, they’ve really come along way now, they can be really active heroes, they’ve established themselves. What you also look at is that at the end of the year, after the end of the crossover, that’s a point where, who knows? That’s a point where we can definitely go forward, because we’ve laid so many seeds for the future and we have plans if that’s the way it falls.

Should Marvel call us and say hey, this has been a great ride, would you like to do this with this artist and this team, we’d think about that because we wanna reach more fans, try more things. Spider-Man would be fun, Fantastic Four would be fun, although my heart will always be deepest rooted in the X-Men universe. We have many stories inside of us that we’d love to tell. It just depends. It would be an honour for us to keep telling these stories, to keep following these kids, to keep doing great things with the series but it would be great to try other characters and go into other worlds and explore other options. We’re just Marvel fans, we’ll take any sandbox that sounds like fun. The future’s wide open for us.

If I could just close with a quick bit of word association?

Illyana – oh, you’re tricky [laughs] … ahhhhhhhh … there’s an answer I do want to give, but I can’t.

Go on, give it, [laughs] give it!!

No … we’re having a great time but we’re gonna hang up and I have to go back to my real life and there I have to deal with Chris Yost and I’m not doing it [much laughter]

You know you want to! [gales of laughter]

[long pause] … … …. Object of desire

Match – [chuckles] Rockslide, but I have to explain why. There’s a scene Chris wrote a couple of issues ago where they’re interviewing the kids to see if they can be good enough to come to the main roster and he was “So Match, if we were in a dark environment could you blow out your head “ … it was such a weird moment because we don’t know what Match does really. We’re gonna get into that coming up soon, he’s someone you’ll see more of in the Magik arc too, but I just look at him and go ‘what do you do again?’ – I just don’t understand how he works in a room. How do you watch TV with the kid, how do you have furniture, he’s puzzling to me. The reason I say Rockslide is Rockslide handles my confusion as best as anyone else.

Kitty Pryde – Astonishing. [Astonishing X-Men writer Joss] Whedon really celebrated her in all the wonderful ways. She’s truly a great hero and she’s also such a flawed person and I love it and I think she’s the X-Man who reminds me the most of the kids in our book so I love her, I think she’s fantastic. It’s obvious that Whedon feels the same way, it’s awesome to see what he’s done with her. I love her and I would love to write her.

DeciMation – About time. That was long overdue. X-Men … if we were all Grant Morrison we could keep having a whirlwind, with billions of mutants, but we’re not all Grant Morrison so for those of us with lesser skills it’s nice to have more conflict, less obstacles and less mutants to save the day so, ah, it was a great decision, in my opinion.

Trance – Yeaaaaa … I’m drawing a blank on Trance. Trance has little to no meaning for me right now.

Colossus – The best. He is the ideal hero for me. He has the power, but all heart, he’s perfect. My favourite.

Young Avengers – [long pause] … wonderful. I think Heinberg succeeded where we have tried and had some success. I think he brought something new to the world that was celebrated by both young fans and old fans and it’s quite a triumph. To him I just tip my hat, he did a wonderful job on that series.

Dani Moonstar – Missed, deeply missed. She didn’t belong where we needed to go right now, but she’s definitely missed – and not in a negative way. We care about her and wish there was a role for her in our story, but she isn’t. She’s missed by us.

Julian – Second favourite after X-23 [laughs]. I love Julian, I think he’s my favourite character on the team. I love that boy, I think he’s great.

Emma Frost – Wonderous, she’s fantastic. The best X-Man we’ve got right now. For all the reasons I love Julian, I love her ten times more. She is, in my mind, perfection – dark, twisted, evil, wicked, reborn in a hero’s costume but still has all the darkness that she possessed when she was a villain – absolute perfection.

Loa – aaaaAAHHHH! [dramatic pause] … Dead Man Walking.

Karma – Her too … I wish she was a part of something. She’s not one of the ones I look at as the same level of some of the New Mutants. I love her, but she’s not someone I think of as fondly as Moonstar and Cannonball and Warlock, who I love. Cypher I don’t miss. Magik, of course. She’s part of the collective but not someone that I long to work with as an individual.

Elixir – He is key and his story has just begun. As far as we’re concerned, what we’ve done with him so far is simply the beginning – you just wait. He’s a good kid, he’s set himself on a path he’s definitely not prepared for.

Without asking you to be critical of other books, do you have a favourite X-Men team book – which one are you most enjoying at the moment?

It’s so tough because I think there’s a nice uniqueness between all of the books at the moment, they all kinda fill a different category, y’know? X-Factor is a title that I never thought I’d be able to celebrate, and that’s not knocking Peter David in anyway – Multiple Man’s not someone who does anything for me – but I tried it and I love it, I just loved it, and it just surprised the hell out of me. So from a uniqueness quality standpoint … I love Mike Carey’s X-Men , c’mon, it’s Uncanny , I love the stuff that Brubaker’s doing and how he built into this story with the Deadly Genesis storyline, and it’s Joss Whedon and he had me after the first six.

Some of those other ones we’re just kinda ‘gimmes’. Peter David’s team was for me was like I don’t see the draw – yea, I like Wolfsbane, but not enough to read the book. Multiple Man does nothing for me. The way he’s handling that character and the way he’s handling this series, it’s such a refreshing new element to the X-universe. I love it. I gotta say, just from what I expected to what I’ve been given, that book is great, I can’t say enough good things about it. All the rest are what I expected, and I mean that in the highest regard. C’mon, these are great characters with great guys behind them. I was surprised and delighted that Peter David could find ways for me to like characters that I’ve never … that I wasn’t crazy about. It’s especially a credit to him and so X-Factor would be my answer on that.

Fantastic. Craig, it’s been a pleasure, thank you very much and thanks for your patience with me.

I’m so sorry to eat up so much of your time. I’m a fanboy and I love talking about this stuff and it’s nice to spend time with someone like yourself who loves comics just as much. I just hope you enjoy what we do. I know Chris couldn’t be on this call to talk about it but he’s really putting his heart into this coming arc and I think it just kicks serious ass and I hope you love it and I think after talking to you that you’re gonna be thrilled so we should connect as friends on a social call when it’s all wrapped up because I’d love for him to hear your feedback on that run, okay?

Cool, we’ll do that.

Well, thank you so much, you have a wonderful weekend okay?