Interviews

Ed Brubaker

Ian Murphy talks to Ed Brubaker, the current writer of Uncanny X-Men, Daredevil, Captain America and more. They discuss his Marvel Icon book Criminal and DC work such as Gotham Central and Catwoman.

LWW: Hi Ed, how’s it going?

EB: I’m exhausted, I barely got any sleep last night. It’s an on and off problem, I get really … I work in the evenings sometimes and I have a lot of a really hard time going to sleep afterwards because my head’s still buzzing.

How do you deal with writing so many books at the same time?

I have trouble sleeping!

For years now I’ve been writing three to five books a month; generally as long as I give myself a day a week to not get in bad shape with the layouts and outlines and the flowchart of where things are at, I’m fine, I can just write a comic every week, sometimes a little more than a comic every week.

One of the things I’ve found with Criminal is that now I’m the publisher too and there’s all kinds of other concerns such as printing costs, where we’re printing it, production, all these other things that go into it that have nothing to do with sitting down and writing a book. That’s taking more time than I’d imagined, that’s a little frustrating, especially since it ‘s an independent book and Criminal is never going to sell Daredevil numbers, but I make time and I really don’t want to do anything else other than rent a movie or read a book. It’s really fun to sit down and create stories.

You have one of those jobs that so many people would love to have

Exactly, it’s hard to complain about deadlines when you’re getting paid well to write what people are actually reading – a few months after you write it, it’s published. A few of my friends are novelists who are working on something for six months or a year and it comes out two years later and it barely sells; I have friends who are in TV and in film and sometimes they’ll write something that never comes out, or they’ll write something and by the time it comes out their name’s either off of it or what it is, they wish their name was off of it. So even when I write an issue of Captain America or Uncanny X-Men, it’s nothing really but what I intended to be and it’s printed and a few months later it’s out there. It’s a pretty satisfying job if you can get it.

And that means that feedback comes through so much quicker too, from readers and customers.

You know, I’m of two minds on that because the only people who really give us feedback quickly are more fanatic – and I don’t want to blast them – and how many people is that exactly? When something’s selling 100,000 copies and there’s like 50 people online raising hell, does that really make a difference, does that mean people are really that upset’- well, no that means that a few people get really upset.

So I’m of two minds about it – I’m totally used to going online when a book comes out and seeing what people are saying on the various review boards and the message board threads where folk are talking about what comics they’ve bought, and I’m always a little irritated if my book isn’t being talked about by Wednesday night and then I realize that I have a stack of books I bought at the store this week and I haven’t even looked at them, so maybe people have lives!

Still, at some point every month I wish for the days when I didn’t have a computer, when I wrote on a typewriter and faxed my scripts in. I remember the first time, when Larry Young, of all people, told me that there was a place online that was reviewing comic books and they’d reviewed some of mine and I was like “Really? There’s like a website that reviews comics? Wow’. That changed everything.

How do you feel about the sales for Criminal, are they roughly what you were expecting?

They’re better than I was expecting initially, our idea of where we debut … we debuted about 10,000 higher than that. I think we’re doing respectably for an independent, non-superhero book. I would of course like for us to be selling to more people, but the first issue is sold out and we’re about to put the fifth issue to press and it’s the last part of the storyline.

The trade paperback and issue #6 come out in May and I think that’s the next chance we have to pull more new readers. We’re really gonna give that a big push and try and get some of those … I’ve been hearing from a lot of stores who sell out the first day, and a lot of readers who are trying to find it and haven’t been able to find it and right now they’re waiting for the next jumping-on point, so I’m hoping that we’ll stabilize the in high teens, low twenties area and I think we can survive for a long while if we stay around that level.

Because we’re doing it all ourselves and we’re handling everything, I’ve got a foreign sales contract with Delcourt and they’re selling it all over Europe, and I’m negotiating a deal with a other foreign publisher for the UK market, and there’s some of that stuff coming in that’s making additional revenue that way, and of course there’s Hollywood interest and things like that – if there’s movie money starts happening then sales on the comic become less of a survival thing.

We’re still at the point where I think we could sell somewhere between two and five thousand more a month if more stores would look at what they were actually selling and go ‘you know what, I could probably sell five more of those’. There’s just a bunch of stores that order only for subscription on a lot of books.

It’s a mature readers type book and that’s harder to get a lot of stores to carry. We had to move from one printer to another because we had nudity and swearing in the book. I was like ‘we have nudity?’ and then I realized we have one panel of partial nudity

Shocking …

and it wasn’t even in a sexual context.

If I understand correctly, each story arc of Criminal will be self-contained?

Yeah, they tie into each other and the characters who star in one are background characters in other ones, and they all have little bits and pieces of a story that forms a cohesive backstory for these characters and the links between them. It’s much more like a series of novels that are all about these people who all knew each other as teenagers and came apart and came back together in a way.

Leo is the star of the first storyline, and at the end of the first storyline the way he’s left is [off the record spoiler removed] and the next time we see him is issue #7, I think, and he’s more of a supporting character in the second storyline.

The main character in the second storyline is this guy Tracy Lawless who is from a family that’s been referred to throughout the first storyline – Leo’s best friend from childhood was Ricky Lawless, and he mentions Ricky Lawless’ brother who went away and joined the military in issue #5, it’s mentioned early on that Ricky Lawless died, there’s little bits and pieces like that. If you read them all, they fit together like a puzzle, but at the same time issue #6 – if you haven’t read issues #1-5 it’s basically like a first issue to you.

I was inspired by Elmore Leonard and Richard Starke and a lot of these writers who write books that have the same character reoccurring but each book stands on their own. I really wanted to do a comic book like that, and Sin Citywas always a little bit like that, but I hate to compare Criminal to Sin Citybecause I don’t want to appear to be a Sin City knock off, but at the same time I think that what’s really cool about Sin City is that the city became the main character. For ours, it’s really the mood is the character, and the bar that they all hang out at. I like the idea of creating a universe of noir characters who all at some point take centre stage to tell a different kind of noir story.

Did you already have the concept for Criminal in your back pocket, waiting for the opportunity to use it, or was it something that you came up with when the opportunity to do a book for the Marvel Icons imprint came along?

It was more that I had a bunch of ideas for crime stories – the first storyline inCriminal began life as a pitch to a European publisher for a series of crime graphic novels. Then Sean & I were figuring out, after Sleeper, what do we want to do next and how do we want to do it, and I just thought, it would be great if there was a book that was everything I wanted to do in crime comics under one umbrella title. I had all sorts of different ideas that I wanted to do but I didn’t want to have this character who had lived ten different types of noir story, I thought that was unrealistic. I wanted to be able to create a whole bunch of characters who had different motivations and different histories.

I started thinking, what if I did a book set in the same world, and the characters all knew each other, and the mood and the storylines would coalesce where you learned bits and pieces of each characters back story. You learn a major secret in issue #5 that lets you know more about a character who will appear in the next storyline; and through that storyline you get bits and pieces of his history and if we get that far, when we get to the sixth storyline we actually tell the story of the main characters when they were teenagers and part of the story’s about their parents who were a gang of criminals, and then the other part of the story is about them and how the two plot lines connect.

It organically came together once I started thinking of doing a book like that, linking all these stories together. It all takes place in the same sort of fictionalized world, like the city that they live in is never named. The areas around the city that they go to are named really plainly and vaguely. In the second story they’re planning a heist in a place called Centre City, which is basically like saying it’s in Springfield, and I suppose it could be anywhere.

There’s an old Ryan O’Neal movie called The Driver, made in the early 1970s, one of Walter Hill’s first movies, and it’s just a bout a guy who’s the getaway driver and you ask yourself ‘what city is this’ and you realise that it’s everywhere – it’s filmed partially in Chicago, partially in San Francisco, partially in LA, anywhere they had a cool moment to have a car chase scene they just edited it in, and they never named the city, and they never named the main character, he’s just ‘The Driver’, and Bruce Dern, who’s the bad guy, ‘cause he’s the cop, he’s just known as ‘The Cop’, and I like the idea.

The few times that we make a reference to the city … in issue #3, I think … there’s a moment where Leo drives past a sign on the way back to the city and you can’t see the top word, it just says ‘something City’. I know the name of the city – if we ever have to name it, it’s Bay City, which is what Raymond Chandler referred to Santa Monica as. I just liked the idea of … Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald and all those guys made fictional cities for their detectives to work in and I thought that was kind of cool and a little nod to Chandler with Bay City, but a lot of it is based on San Francisco, where I lived for a long time.

I first started reading you with Catwoman and then Gotham Central, before going back to read Sleeper. You’ve done quite a lot of work for DC and other publishers, and given that, how does it feel to suddenly be lauded as the next big thing at Marvel?

Pretty good (laughs).

I started in comics in the 1980s. I remember when Eddie Campbell picked up the award for From Hell for Best Graphic novel or something, and he said ‘oh boy, overnight success after 25 years’ and it feels a little bit like that. I think all the work I did at DC helped me gain a level of confidence and proficiency in what I do that when I got to Marvel … I grew up reading Marvel, I didn’t grow up reading DC other than the odd Batman comic or Jonah Hex or some of the weirder war stuff.

I didn’t start reading DC until I was a fan of Warrior magazine and following Alan Moore and I was like ‘okay, well, I’m going to start reading Swamp Thingand then through that I cam to some older DC stuff … but I’ve never had the affection for DC characters that I had for Marvel growing up – my first comics were Captain America, Iron Fist, Spider-Man and things like that, those were always the ones that were closest to my heart, and when I read DC that didn’t feel like Marvel books.

I was kind of a comics omnivore but the only real DC books that I’ve really had any true affection for and that I’ll buy to this day are Jimmy Olsen/Lois Lanecomics. I’ve never been able to buy into Superman but I love Jimmy Olsen/Lois Lane comics because they’re so ridiculous.

There’s this really great episode of Jimmy Olsen where Clark doesn’t have time into his Superman outfit and just flies up into the sky and saves a ‘plane. It’s the only time ever when Superman is too slow to change into his own costume, flying back down with his hat still on. Jimmy sees him and he thinks ‘oh no, Jimmy just recognized me as Clarke, he’ll know I’m Superman. So when Jimmy lands he runs over and goes “I know you’re … “ and he sees Clark has these giant wings from some Mayan exhibit he’s visited and he says “Jimmy, you’re never gonna believe it, these Mayan wings really work, I can fly!”. Jimmy’s immediately all “I wanna try them” and Clark hadn’t thought of that. The rest of the story is Superman following Jimmy about and using his super breath to convince Jimmy those wings really work, and he keeps doing things – after a day or so, when he realises Jimmy’s not going to get sick of flying – he keeps doing things like trying to blow him into live volcanoes, tries to blow him into the middle of a gunfight, just to let him know how dangerous it is to be able to fly. Things like that are hysterical and I have complete affection for to this day.

I think there’s really cool things at DC. Batman Year One is still one of the greatest superhero stories, ever, there’s some great characters at DC. I loved the Teen Titans as a kid, that was one of my few books that I really loved, and I loved the Mike Grell era of Legion of Super-Heroes. I go back to that and the anatomy on the characters is so weird, they all have calves on their arms, but as a kid I couldn’t get enough of that stuff. That was my teenage years, and they were all about the kids. I was always a big Bucky fan so I always liked the teen sidekick stuff.

It was fairly easy for me – I remember writing my first issue of Captain Americaand getting the pages in the mail from Steve Epting and when I opened those first two pages I was so blown away by ‘I’m doing Captain America, I got a new number one book and I’ve got this great artist, this is gonna be a really big deal’ – I could feel it, that it was going to be different from being one of five people writing a Batman comic or doing books at DC that people would say ‘this is one of the best comics DC is publishing’ but sell for something like … with Catwoman, it was always frustrating for me that it was hovering in the level of the thirty thousands when we had launched so well and I just thought people love this book but there’s only so many people who will love it, because it’s Catwoman. I get to do the exact same kind of stories and do them on Daredevil instead and we got thirty thousand more readers.

If you look at what I did on Catwoman it was much more like a Marvel book, much more inspired by Batman Year One which was Frank [Miller] coming off being a Marvel writer and doing to Batman what he was doing to Daredevil. The Catwoman stuff was inspired by that and a lot of people also told me thatCatwoman felt like both a Marvel book and kinda like an independent comic – there were issues that were just characters talking, no action or anything, and I really like that. That’s something that I think you get from Marvel, it’s much easier to do on a lot of Marvel books. You’d have whole issues of Fantastic Four when I was a kid that were just about Ben Grimm being depressed and going to Yancy Street.

It was weird … I read a couple of hundred issues of X-Men before I started onUncanny [X-Men] and there were issues of the Byrne and Claremont run that had just three pages of action – I remember them as being action packed but they weren’t, they were six to nine panels a page, mostly the characters talking and doing things and having enormous thought balloons about their phobias – often in the midst of a fight scene they’re going ‘I hope I don’t get captured in that tiny cage, I’m claustrophobic, I remember that day when I found out I was claustrophobic so many years ago. I can’t believe I’m thinking of this right now’. Reading those thought balloons … it underscores why I’m glad we don’t do thought balloons any more.

I loved Gotham Central, for a long time that was my favourite comic. Looking back at your work for DC now that there’s a little distance, what’s your favourite thing that you wrote for DC?

There’s one issue of Batman that I’m really fond of that Sean Phillips drew, the one with the detective who investigated the murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents. The first 18 issues of Catwoman I’m really fond of, up to the stuff I did with Cameron, and the Javier Pulido arc is the best stuff I ever did on Catwoman – such a hard story and then a three issue look at these characters and what happened to them afterwards. I thought was really rare to be able to put across in a comic and Javier’s art was so out there and arty that it was shocking to me that they let us do it.

Scene of the Crime I’m really fond of, I really like the Joker collection The Man Who Laughs – I should say a one-shot – that I did with Doug Moenke, that’s been out of print for a while, that came out a couple of years ago. I was really happy with that. That was the only joker story I ever did. Gotham Central was a labour of love for all of us, it’s something I look fondly back on. They stumbled so many times with that book, it could have been a much bigger success than it was. It was never to the point that they talked about canceling it but we always felt a certain kind of ‘why aren’t we reaching more people?’

It took them forever to bring out the first trade paperback – I think we were on issue #18 or #19 before they put out the collection of #1-5, and by that point Michael [Lark] & Greg [Rucka] had already won the Eisner Award for the second storyline! I just thought that DC didn’t know how to handle the book, because it wasn’t a DC proper book and it wasn’t a Vertigo book and because of that I felt no-one knew how to deal with it. I’d have people within the company telling me it was their favourite book and I’m like ‘well then why don’t you promote it? Why are we waiting for trade paperbacks?’ to the point where by the time the third trade paperback came out the book was done, and that trade should have come out two months after the story ended. That just drove me crazy. And they genuinely did love it, too, they weren’t lying.

I remember when the people in marketing told me that they’d read the first issue and it was one of their favourite comics that DC had published in years and I said ‘oh, are we gonna get the cover of the Previews catalogue then? ‘cause we could really use it’ and they said ‘oh no, Aquaman’s getting that. Aquaman’s tenth series … Aquaman’s only going to sell as well as Aquaman ever sells, but that’s the way marketing works – they always put the money in the stuff that’s already more guaranteed to sell. They rarely put marketing money into the stuff where there’s risk. I’m excited to see they’re putting money into a push for the new Minx line that Vertigo’s doing and I think that’s a really good idea because there’s no guarantee that that stuff will make money and you’ve got to get the word out about it if you want to. There are a fair few things I did at DC that I don’t look back at fondly.

Being in that Batman office when I was … I got to learn how to do the monthly comics drive, but I think that’s probably the weakest stuff I did overall and I think that came from me mentally not being able to get over the fact that I was doing one of three Batman books that came out every month and there were all these other anciliary Batman books coming out and I didn’t feel that I could make it mine. It was always ‘what if I use this bad guy and he’s using the same bad guy that month?’ Once I got Catwoman and Gotham Central I felt that those were ours and we could make those books what we wanted them to be without worrying anyone else’s books. When we were working on Gotham Central we did what we wanted to do, we didn’t worry whether someone was using Joker or the Mad Hatter that month.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Callisto still acting as leader of the Morlocks?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, Litterbug?

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

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

Wait until you see the pages, they’re sick

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wait … rumours about Rachel doing what?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will Professor X [off the record spoilers removed]?

Off the record?

Oh, you’re mean

Off the record, [off the record spoilers removed]

[distressed voice] Why?

Professor X [off the record spoilers removed]

But I can’t say any of that?

No, no, no, please don’t do that.

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

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

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

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

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

LWW: I’m at such a point with comics that I don’t believe characters are dead, but you had me convinced with Foggy! You had me absolutely convinced.

ED: How could I kill Foggy Nelson? He’s like the heart of the book. I’d have to be crazy.

Well, you know, the new writer comes along, you just don’t know.

And that’s why I did it that issue, that first issue. I needed Matt to be driven even more insane in prison by making him think Foggy’s dead. Right there in print, the last line of the issue is Matt thinking ‘his heart is still beating’, so it was a blatant clue that he wasn’t dead. That’s what I’ve found with mystery writing, the more blatant you put the clue the less people see it. We never showed Foggy’s body, it was always just … Dakota North even said ‘in the ambulance they said they’d stabilized him’, it was all right there.

And I wanted that moment when he pulls that sort of Henry Hill moment from the end of Goodfellas when he opens the door in witness protection and picks up the paper … I knew that even though the mystery of who the other Daredevil was had gotten out I was just really relieved that the real mystery that I’d been sitting on, that I really cared about … I didn’t care if people knew that it was Danny Rand, I’d rather they didn’t but that didn’t bug me as much as if it had been revealed that Foggy wasn’t actually dead, that would have bugged me. I was relieved that there was some other thing that folks thought was more important than it really was.

That was just an amazing thing to read for the first time on the page, as well. I kind of pick and choose my spoilers, and that was one of those thing where I read it and thought ‘I’m so glad I hadn’t read that anywhere else, I’m so glad I had that experience of turning the page and dropping my jaw.

I never read solicits for comics that I’m following. It always amazes me that people do. Or read spoilers online, or in gossip columns. I remember a while back something got leaked – it might have been who was Ronin or who was in the Daredevil suit – and someone said ‘where do I get my Rich Johnston was right T-Shirt?’ and I said it’s not like Rich guessed it, someone leaked to Rich what the story is. That’s like if you’re on the way to see the Sixth Sense and someone who’d seen it already goes ‘oh yeah, Bruce Willis is a ghost.’ Is that person right? And that was my point – spoiling storylines is not gossip. Gossip is The Boys is getting cancelled, that’s gossip, stuff behind the scenes. Stuff that happens in the comics, that’s fiction. You don’t ruin people’s fiction. That just drives me crazy.

You never see [New York Post & former Fox News gossip columnist] Liz Smith go ’and Oceans 11 is about a heist’. She tells you who George Clooney’s dating, not what the storyline of his next movie is and what the twist at the end is. Revealing that there’s a new Captain Marvel book spinning out of Civil War, that’s gossip. That doesn’t ruin anything. Saying ‘they’re bringing back Uncle Ben’ isn’t gossip, unless it doesn’t happen, and then it is; and I’m pretty sure it’s not happening. I hope not! Is nothing sacred???

With regard to Bucky and Captain America, how much of what’s happened with Winter Soldier was planned out, at least just in your head, before the first issue of Cap came out?

Oh, all of it. My whole pitch for Captain America was a rough outline for the first two years of storylines, well, the first year and where we could go from there. Most of it centered around bringing back Bucky and how bringing back Bucky made sense – the whole outline of why we had never seen him before and what they’d been doing with him, how he comes back and how he gets his memories back and what would happen from that point on, how he wouldn’t just immediately become a member of the Avengers or something and be this tortured Marvel character.

That’s why I liked the idea of bringing him back, he’s one of the ultimate Stan Lee-esque characters, real feet of clay, tortured about his past kind of guy. When I came up with a way to actually bring him back that made sense and played into the military black ops direction that the book was going in, I really knew that this was actually going to work. Of course, I had doubts right up to the minute that issue #6 was actually published … ‘Are we breaking the cardinal rule here? Is this going to be the end of my career?’ Instead it was the thing that made me.

What’s interesting is that the sales on Captain America were consistently rising a little every month, even before Civil War

Cap and Daredevil, for a series of months, were going up almost consistently a thousand or two every month. It was pretty weird, and after that to do the threeCivil War issues which jumped up to 90,000 or so – that was pretty big, and Cap #25 will probably do even more because it’s so big and getting a real publicity push from Marvel. That’s something that can only really happen because of Civil War – I was building up to this thing and I couldn’t figure out a way to do it and then when they sat down at the meeting and told me all the ideas for Civil War I just thought ‘that’s great’, I’ll push this thing up a bit that I was going to do at issue #28 or so and do it at #25 and then this gives me a whole new door to open on how to move various plotlines along and make a big splash with Cap again after having been out for a few years, and keep some of those Civil War readers around.

I was wondering if Civil War had forced you to change your plans for the title at all

It didn’t force me to change anything, it forced me to change the timing of one thing a little, but as I said, I’m pretty happy about that now. The other great thing about Civil War was that because of the Civil War delays and Cap getting delayed by several months I was able to slide in the Winter Soldier special that I’d been wanting to do.

Cap, Daredevil, Iron Fist – all characters who are against registration

Fuck registration.

Did you have a hand in that?

I hadn’t really thought about it. Daredevil, of course, would be, because of what happened to him, getting outed in the press and everything. WithDaredevil, Matt Murdock was out of the country for a the months of Civil War and they had Danny Rand running around in the Daredevilcostume in Civil War so that predicated that he would be anti-registration because he’s on Cap’s side in Civil War. That was really all decided for me, but I agree that they’d all be anti that.

How much control, if any, do you have of Bucky’s future appearances? Is there any kind of policy on that?

Yeah. Pretty much nobody uses him without me saying it’s okay. At this point he’s my guy, he’s my baby and Jeph Loeb is using him for his … he’s doing a series of specials that follows Civil War and Bucky is in one of those with Wolverine. That ties in really well with how Daniel Way used him and ties in with Cap #25 and stuff. That was all cleared with him and I gave him copious notes as to what his attitudes would be and how to write the character. It’s not like I’m wielding an iron fist over him but at the same time he’s not joining theNew Avengers – unless he’s the new Ronin, and I’m not sure about that. [New Avengers writer Brian Michael] Bendis won’t tell me! I believe he’s not joining the New Avengers but … if I would trust anybody to use him without my say so it would be Bendis. But nobody wants to ruin the story that I’ve got going and Tom [Brevoort] is very protective of Winter Soldier and Bucky and what I’ve got going on in Cap.

When you’ve got a book like Cap that’s selling better than Cap’s sold for along time, that’s got critical acclaim, everything seems to be going so well for it, how tempting is it to avoid shaking up the status quo?

Not very much actually – after a couple of years you wanna shake things up. I’ve had ideas in my head for each storyline building up the one that comes before it, to the point where we end up with Cap #50 having completed a trail that began in Cap #1 really – I’ve kind of modeled it, in a way, after the way Bendis & Maleev did Daredevil, where I felt that every storyline was organically flowing into the next storyline and I liked that they weren’t just doing a six issue storyline and not following up anything from the previous one. I like that old school of dangling plot threads, I like … it’s one of the things that I miss about comics from the 70s is all the dangling plot threads from back then.

What are the chances that we might so someone else wearing a Captain America costume in the future?

I think fairly slim. I’m sure that people want that to be a rumour that’s going around, that someone else is going to be Captain America, but as far as I know there’s not going to be anyone else running around in a Captain America costume in the Captain America comic itself. I know that there’s a sort of twisted bastardized version of the Captain America costume happening in one of my friends’ comics. I don’t want to ruin any of the post-Civil War stuff but Captain America the comic will not be about anyone else putting on the Captain America costume. Unless it’s Bucky [laughs evily].

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Callisto still acting as leader of the Morlocks?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, Litterbug?

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

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

Wait until you see the pages, they’re sick

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wait … rumours about Rachel doing what?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will Professor X [off the record spoilers removed]?

Off the record?

Oh, you’re mean

Off the record, [off the record spoilers removed]

[distressed voice] Why?

Professor X [off the record spoilers removed]

But I can’t say any of that?

No, no, no, please don’t do that.

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

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

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

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

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

LWW: I’m at such a point with comics that I don’t believe characters are dead, but you had me convinced with Foggy! You had me absolutely convinced.

ED: How could I kill Foggy Nelson? He’s like the heart of the book. I’d have to be crazy.

Well, you know, the new writer comes along, you just don’t know.

And that’s why I did it that issue, that first issue. I needed Matt to be driven even more insane in prison by making him think Foggy’s dead. Right there in print, the last line of the issue is Matt thinking ‘his heart is still beating’, so it was a blatant clue that he wasn’t dead. That’s what I’ve found with mystery writing, the more blatant you put the clue the less people see it. We never showed Foggy’s body, it was always just … Dakota North even said ‘in the ambulance they said they’d stabilized him’, it was all right there.

And I wanted that moment when he pulls that sort of Henry Hill moment from the end of Goodfellas when he opens the door in witness protection and picks up the paper … I knew that even though the mystery of who the other Daredevil was had gotten out I was just really relieved that the real mystery that I’d been sitting on, that I really cared about … I didn’t care if people knew that it was Danny Rand, I’d rather they didn’t but that didn’t bug me as much as if it had been revealed that Foggy wasn’t actually dead, that would have bugged me. I was relieved that there was some other thing that folks thought was more important than it really was.

That was just an amazing thing to read for the first time on the page, as well. I kind of pick and choose my spoilers, and that was one of those thing where I read it and thought ‘I’m so glad I hadn’t read that anywhere else, I’m so glad I had that experience of turning the page and dropping my jaw.

I never read solicits for comics that I’m following. It always amazes me that people do. Or read spoilers online, or in gossip columns. I remember a while back something got leaked – it might have been who was Ronin or who was in the Daredevil suit – and someone said ‘where do I get my Rich Johnston was right T-Shirt?’ and I said it’s not like Rich guessed it, someone leaked to Rich what the story is. That’s like if you’re on the way to see the Sixth Sense and someone who’d seen it already goes ‘oh yeah, Bruce Willis is a ghost.’ Is that person right? And that was my point – spoiling storylines is not gossip. Gossip is The Boys is getting cancelled, that’s gossip, stuff behind the scenes. Stuff that happens in the comics, that’s fiction. You don’t ruin people’s fiction. That just drives me crazy.

You never see [New York Post & former Fox News gossip columnist] Liz Smith go ’and Oceans 11 is about a heist’. She tells you who George Clooney’s dating, not what the storyline of his next movie is and what the twist at the end is. Revealing that there’s a new Captain Marvel book spinning out of Civil War, that’s gossip. That doesn’t ruin anything. Saying ‘they’re bringing back Uncle Ben’ isn’t gossip, unless it doesn’t happen, and then it is; and I’m pretty sure it’s not happening. I hope not! Is nothing sacred???

With regard to Bucky and Captain America, how much of what’s happened with Winter Soldier was planned out, at least just in your head, before the first issue of Cap came out?

Oh, all of it. My whole pitch for Captain America was a rough outline for the first two years of storylines, well, the first year and where we could go from there. Most of it centered around bringing back Bucky and how bringing back Bucky made sense – the whole outline of why we had never seen him before and what they’d been doing with him, how he comes back and how he gets his memories back and what would happen from that point on, how he wouldn’t just immediately become a member of the Avengers or something and be this tortured Marvel character.

That’s why I liked the idea of bringing him back, he’s one of the ultimate Stan Lee-esque characters, real feet of clay, tortured about his past kind of guy. When I came up with a way to actually bring him back that made sense and played into the military black ops direction that the book was going in, I really knew that this was actually going to work. Of course, I had doubts right up to the minute that issue #6 was actually published … ‘Are we breaking the cardinal rule here? Is this going to be the end of my career?’ Instead it was the thing that made me.

What’s interesting is that the sales on Captain America were consistently rising a little every month, even before Civil War

Cap and Daredevil, for a series of months, were going up almost consistently a thousand or two every month. It was pretty weird, and after that to do the threeCivil War issues which jumped up to 90,000 or so – that was pretty big, and Cap #25 will probably do even more because it’s so big and getting a real publicity push from Marvel. That’s something that can only really happen because of Civil War – I was building up to this thing and I couldn’t figure out a way to do it and then when they sat down at the meeting and told me all the ideas for Civil War I just thought ‘that’s great’, I’ll push this thing up a bit that I was going to do at issue #28 or so and do it at #25 and then this gives me a whole new door to open on how to move various plotlines along and make a big splash with Cap again after having been out for a few years, and keep some of those Civil War readers around.

I was wondering if Civil War had forced you to change your plans for the title at all

It didn’t force me to change anything, it forced me to change the timing of one thing a little, but as I said, I’m pretty happy about that now. The other great thing about Civil War was that because of the Civil War delays and Cap getting delayed by several months I was able to slide in the Winter Soldier special that I’d been wanting to do.

Cap, Daredevil, Iron Fist – all characters who are against registration

Fuck registration.

Did you have a hand in that?

I hadn’t really thought about it. Daredevil, of course, would be, because of what happened to him, getting outed in the press and everything. WithDaredevil, Matt Murdock was out of the country for a the months of Civil War and they had Danny Rand running around in the Daredevil costume in Civil War so that predicated that he would be anti-registration because he’s on Cap’s side in Civil War. That was really all decided for me, but I agree that they’d all be anti that.

How much control, if any, do you have of Bucky’s future appearances? Is there any kind of policy on that?

Yeah. Pretty much nobody uses him without me saying it’s okay. At this point he’s my guy, he’s my baby and Jeph Loeb is using him for his … he’s doing a series of specials that follows Civil War and Bucky is in one of those with Wolverine. That ties in really well with how Daniel Way used him and ties in with Cap #25 and stuff. That was all cleared with him and I gave him copious notes as to what his attitudes would be and how to write the character. It’s not like I’m wielding an iron fist over him but at the same time he’s not joining theNew Avengers – unless he’s the new Ronin, and I’m not sure about that. [New Avengers writer Brian Michael] Bendis won’t tell me! I believe he’s not joining the New Avengers but … if I would trust anybody to use him without my say so it would be Bendis. But nobody wants to ruin the story that I’ve got going and Tom [Brevoort] is very protective of Winter Soldier and Bucky and what I’ve got going on in Cap.

When you’ve got a book like Cap that’s selling better than Cap’s sold for along time, that’s got critical acclaim, everything seems to be going so well for it, how tempting is it to avoid shaking up the status quo?

Not very much actually – after a couple of years you wanna shake things up. I’ve had ideas in my head for each storyline building up the one that comes before it, to the point where we end up with Cap #50 having completed a trail that began in Cap #1 really – I’ve kind of modeled it, in a way, after the way Bendis & Maleev did Daredevil, where I felt that every storyline was organically flowing into the next storyline and I liked that they weren’t just doing a six issue storyline and not following up anything from the previous one. I like that old school of dangling plot threads, I like … it’s one of the things that I miss about comics from the 70s is all the dangling plot threads from back then.

What are the chances that we might so someone else wearing a Captain Americacostume in the future?

I think fairly slim. I’m sure that people want that to be a rumour that’s going around, that someone else is going to be Captain America, but as far as I know there’s not going to be anyone else running around in a Captain Americacostume in the Captain America comic itself. I know that there’s a sort of twisted bastardized version of the Captain America costume happening in one of my friends’ comics. I don’t want to ruin any of the post-Civil War stuff butCaptain America the comic will not be about anyone else putting on theCaptain America costume. Unless it’s Bucky [laughs evily].

Don’t do this to me!!!

Captain America, the comic, do you always see it as being Steve Rogers as Captain America centric?

I actually view it as an ensemble cast in a way, it focuses more on Steve but Sharon Carter, The Falcon, Nick Fury, Bucky, all these other characters help paint the stories and Cap is really more the focal point of it, and Steve Rogers and who he is and what he stands for is pretty much what the next story is all about. The first story was all about Bucky, the second storyline was all about the Red Skull and what he’s up to and willing to do, the next big storyline is all about Steve Rogers and who he is and why he’s Captain America and why he became the guy that he did. Those are just the underlying themes to a bunch of superhero stories.

Do you expect Steve will be part of that cast?

Why does everyone think Captain America’s gonna die? Everybody’s like, ‘he’s gonna die at the end of Civil War’. Everyone has said, ‘he’s not gonna die at the end of Civil War.’

But wait until you see Captain America #25 – some shocking stuff happens, some pretty twisted stuff. Nobody’s really pointed out that in issue #22 … I think it was #22 … it was revealed that Sharon Carter’s being mind-fucked by the Red Skull and Doctor Faustus so there’s some bad stuff gearing up to happen pretty soon and the Red Skull has been hatching a plot for the last year or so that he’s getting ready to spring and Civil War is the perfect distraction for him. The rollercoaster ride is not over yet.

That’s one thing that’s struck me about Civil War that we’ve not really seen – while the heroes are busy fighting each other, you just know that the big bad guys are thing …

… yeah, what’s Doctor Doom doing right now? If I was the Fantastic Fourwriter I would have just done six issues about Doctor Doom, and let all the FF stuff be taken care of in Civil War. That was my one frustration with Civil War– Mark [Millar]’s doing all the big Cap Civil War action moments [in the Civil War mini-series], Brian’s doing all the big Cap Civil War emotional moments [in New Avengers], and I’m doing Captain America – what do I do? That’s why I decided to focus on the side characters and how this is affecting all of them, and then focus on Cap in the last issue, focus on Cap hunting the Red Skull and then set up everything for everything that’s coming afterwards – use Civil War as my platform to show everyone how cool the book is.

I think that’s one of the reasons that the Captain America issues have been some of the more successful Civil War tie-ins. They’ve managed to keep the sense of telling a regular story.

They really are all stand-alone issues that … if you’ve been reading Captain Americathey tie into everything that’s gone before, but if you were just picking those up because of the Civil War tie-in it gave you a pretty good idea of what the Cap book is about while not conflicting with Civil War. No offence to any of the other books, but when you’re doing a tie-in to a big event like that, nothing important to the big event is going to happen anywhere outside the event itself. When you see Captain Americacaptured by Heroes for Hireyou know that’s not going to be referenced in the actual Civil War, so what’s the point? ‘Oh wow they captured Cap in Heroes For Hire, I wonder how that’s going to affect Civil War?’ Well, guess what? Not at all.

I’ve got a soft spot for Diamondback, any chance of seeing her and the BAD Girls the pages of your Captain America?

Yea, there’s a chance. But I don’t have a soft spot for Diamondback.

Fair enough.

I don’t mind Diamondback, but I always thought she was too much like Catwoman and I thought it was stupid that she threw diamonds that were filled with gas and she had high heels. I liked some of the stuff with her and Cap during the [Mark] Gruenwald era – but my favourite stuff in the Gruenwald era is up until Cap #350, that’s the meat of the Gruenwald era.

Daredevil is my favourite comics character, period. Part of the fascination for me is the contradiction of being an honest lawyer by day and vigilante by night …

Yeah, he’s an honest guy, but he has a lot of issues with the truth. I mean, what he needs to do to be able to sleep at night is to lie to his father and break the promise that he made. And so he puts on a costume to do it as if that’s going to make it okay.

How do you think that Matt manages to live with that contradiction? Is that something you’ll be exploring?

I’ll explore it some degree – in a way it’s what the book has always been about and it’s key to why Bendis and a lot of other people have always said that Matt is an incredibly selfish person because – regardless of how you want to look at it – he makes decisions that hurts the people around him, he makes decisions that are antithetical to promises he made to people – he ruined Heather Glenn’s life, broke up with her on the ‘phone after making her sign her company away … He does these things and he tortures himself about it like a good Catholic would but then he lets himself off the hook which is another thing that most Catholics do. He thinks, ‘maybe this new girl is my second chance’ – when it’s like his 12th second chance.

I think that at heart he’s a really good guy but he’s got an intense desire for justice because he feels so much injustice was done to him as a child when his father was killed and in his heart he’s obsessed with that and he can’t stop being Daredevil. One of the interesting things that Kevin Smith did was when he had that scene when Karen Page told him that no matter what happens, you should never stop doing this and I thought ‘that’s interesting, because I don’t think he ever could, even if he wanted to, because it’s a compulsion, and that’s another thing that makes it … Daredevil’s a lot different to Batman. They have their similarities in that they’re driven for justice, but Batman is so much more methodical about it, where Daredevilis so much more about gut instinct. He can be with his family and friends and want to stay there and be happy in that world, but the minute that everybody else goes to sleep Matt puts on a costume and leaps off the rooftops looking for somebody to punch out because he’s hearing everything around him all the time, and he’s hearing all the time how awful people are. Whenever you think about how unjust … because there’s so many bad people in the world doing bad things all the time.

He’s the protector of his neighbourhood. He’s a real conflicted character and I think that’s why him being a catholic actually works. No-one’s more conflicted than people who are raised Catholic.

Now Daredevil’s headed back to New York. Will you be trying to put the secret identity genie back in the bottle?

It can never go all the way back, but in issue #93 … the end of issue #92 was with the death of the FBI Director guy, leaving a suicide note claiming that Matt Murdock was framed. A lot of people will believe that Matt Murdock isDaredevil, and a lot of other people will believe it was a conspiracy, especially with the whole Civil War thing going on. There’ll be a certain element – the average man on the street – that may or may not believe it but there’ll be some people who say ‘that man was totally set up, look at him, he’s blind’ and there’ll be at least some doubt, which is kind of where it was before in some ways. You can never completely cork that bottle, because it was splashed all over the tabloids and he was thrown in jail. The closest you can get to it is that legally no-one’s going after him for it; there’s now legally not a good case against him anymore. I felt that’s what I needed to be able to accomplish. Brian [Michael Bendis] took it as far as he could take it. Then I got to turn the car over one more time and take it to the next logical extreme, which was to throw him in jail and have him actually have to face the consequences of what happens when everyone knows you’re Daredevil; then the next couple of years on the book are how do you get your life back, what do you do? Sacrifices will have to be made, and at what cost to get his life back? What will he pay for trying to get that life back, trying to still be Daredevil? It’s an open secret at this point that he’s Daredevil.

It’s really just closing a door on a topic for a while – who wants every single issue to be about the exact same thing? It’s always amazing to me that fans want one thing, and then you give it to them and they complain that you gave it to them and that you should do something else instead.

What other Daredevil villains can we look forward to seeing?

Definitely the Gladiator, and I’m trying to get my hands on Ox, actually.

Ah, The Enforcers

What was the name of that group he was a part of …

The Enforcers

The Enforcers, right, I’m thinking of creating a new Enforcers group and using The Ox and a couple of other people. There’s a gang war brewing afterDaredevil #93 because of what happens with The Kingpin. But I don’t want to be revealing anything. I’m introducing a thing in Hell’s Kitchen where somebody is trying to take over Hell’s Kitchen and I don’t want to reveal who that is because that’s a big secret. It’s someone I’ve been dropping hints about since the beginning of the second arc, when Matt was running about in Europe. Matt’s life is not going to get much easier just because he’s not in prison anymore.

Good. He’s one of those heroes who, as a reader, you love seeing put through the wringer, who can really take it and soak it up.

With Civil War you’ve been able to have your books slide around it and deal with it without being completely sidetracked by it; with the big X-book crossover, Uncanny’s going to be in the centre of that. How do you feel about the fact that you’re writing chunks, chapters of a larger story, rather than a story that’s all yours.

It’s kinda like working on a TV show, I think. We were out a couple of weeks ago in New York and planned out the entire event. I got to have a big hand in the structure of it and in ensuring that what was happening in my issues was the kind of thing I wanted to write. It’s one of those things where I’m really happy with it. I left for the airport sharing a cab with Mike Carey, Christopher Yost and Craig Kyle and I couldn’t believe how excited we all were about this thing.

I went in thinking ‘crossovers, I don’t know …’ and I came out thinking ‘wow this is awesome!’ What we get out of it afterwards is even more awesome, which is kind of how I feel about Civil War – the war itself is a huge slam bang superhero fight, but everything that you get after Civil War is over … that to me is the pay-off.

Civil War is making a truckload of money and Mark Millar’s can buy ten more houses but what’s excited me about Civil War from the beginning is … I know what’s happening with Spider-Man, I know what’s happening with the Avengers, I know what’s happening with Cap, I know what’s happening with Iron Man … and all of that stuff is much more interesting than what we were doing before Civil War; and we have a ton of new people looking at this stuff because of Civil War. All these books get to do some really cool stuff because of the way Civil War ends. Civil War’s a very clean earthquake and it’s like this earthquake happened – and this is what happens afterwards.

Speaking of crossovers, which characters are you looking forward to writing in the crossover that you don’t normally get the chance to write, and what about those characters most appeals to you?

Emma Frost is a favorite of mine that I haven’t really been able to write yet, and as funny as it is to say, Wolverine. I’ve been looking to do more Wolverine since he was barely in Deadly Genesis. And I wanted to use Angel inUncanny, but couldn’t figure a reason to bring him into space, you know what I mean?

Mike Carey mentioned in our recent interview with him that he’s using Exodus, starting with X-Men Annual #1, and that he loves the Messianic aspects of him and how that relates to Magneto and his vision for mutantkind. You talked earlier about a faction of Morlocks being a parallel for religious extremism. Is your story also leading in to the crossover? Will the Morlocks play a significant part in the crossover?

Not necessarily, no. I’m pretty sure the Morlocks story will tie itself off in my 5 issue arc. But the themes of Mike’s arc and mine both tie closely together, and that’s not an accident. But I can’t say anything more than.

Litterbug is an interesting Morlock to pick up on. Geoff Johns’ Morlocksmini was set outside of continuity, on a significantly different Earth. Is the 616 Litterbug much different to Geoff Johns’ Litterbug? What about the character appealed to you?

No, it’s basically the same character. I just really liked his look, and the idea that he’s this really smart guy, a genuis, who’s basically turned into a giant cockroach. I’m trying to play up the horrific angle of the Morlocks where I can.

The X-Men seem to have a shortage of major villains compared with, say, The Avengers. Why do you think new enemies find it hard to take with readers? If – and I know this is a big if – Vulcan’s to be a long-time thorn in the X-Men’s side, what will make him stick where so many others have come and gone?

God, I don’t know. I don’t think any villain that’s a classic that anyone knew would be a classic when they were created. It’s all a crapshoot.

Some quick word association – what first comes to mind?

Morlocks - Grim, vomit.

Caliban - Caliban

Marrow - Yuck

Lilandra - Helen of Troy

The Phoenix Force - Scary, confusing.

Karen Page - Heathcliff and Cathie

Milla - An accident waiting to happen, disguised as a life raft

The Black Widow (Natasha Romanov) - Sexy

Colossus - uhh….

Uncanny X-Men #500 - Oh shit.  That’s coming up, isn’t it?

If there was a sudden shift at Marvel and they said to you that you could only continue writing of the books you currently write, and no others, which book would you choose?

I have to quit all my other books? In that case I’m writing my lawyer, not a comic. Honestly, I couldn’t choose at this point. It would be easier for them to rip Uncannyfrom my hands than any other at this point, just because I think I have a much bigger attachment to Daredevil, Captain America and Iron Fist, but they’re going to have to kill me to get any of my books away from me at this point.