Originally Posted by
Joe Casey
All this talk about Stacy X, and she hasn't even shown up in the run yet...
Keep in mind, this was the early days of the Jemas/Quesada era -- sometimes affectionately referred to as NuMarvel -- and there was a feeling in the air that we could push the envelope a little bit, in terms of content.
There was only one creative meeting -- which we referred to as the "X-summit" -- before the launch. It was me, Grant, Frank Quitely and Ian Churchill in NYC at the Marvel offices. Aside from the requisite WIZARD Magazine interview and photo shoot we did for PR purposes, I was never clear on why we were even *having* this get-together. But we made the most of it, bombing around Manhattan in the freezing cold and slipping away from our Marvel handlers so we could, y'know, actually talk about stuff.
Ending up in the hotel bar, things got a little strange. Grant already had his first year pretty much mapped out. I was still figuring things out (one could argue that I never *did* figure things out). But the ideas were still flying. During the conversation, the idea for the X-Ranch -- a mutant brothel -- formed in my fevered brain and when I brought it up, the response from my fellow creators was enthusiastic. Mainly because they thought I'd never go through with it. That was all the ammo I needed. It was like a dare... take the weirdest idea and actually write it into the top-selling franchise. I knew I was in a unique position where our editors weren't going to put up any significant roadblocks to our ideas. Keep in mind, we were fully entrenched in the "writer-driven" era of mainstream comics, so we had a lot of power (much more so than any wrtiers at Marvel or DC have now). So I never thought twice about what was "appropriate" vs. what was "inappropriate". I just went for it.
But I can tell you, it was never about being *sexually* provocative. The X-Ranch as a concept and Stacy X as a character were meant to evoke a much bigger idea...