AIPT: Welcome back to X-Men Monday, Jordan! Let’s start with Jean’s green dress. Just kidding. X-Factor, we’re starting with X-Factor! The fan-favorite series wasn’t in Marvel’s July solicitations, and X-Fans Jake, Jay Wagner and Mark Floor all asked about its status. So, what can you tell us about X-Factor‘s fate?
Jordan: I don’t want to announce anything ahead of time, but you will see what is going on with X-Factor in a soon-to-be-made announcement. So it’s probably not what everyone is most fearing, but I think it is something that you guys are not quite expecting yet. So we’ll see.
AIPT: Fair enough! Speaking of X-Factor, we now know that Polaris won the X-Men Election. But essentially, you also just stealth market-tested several other mutants who X-Fans clearly want to see more of. Is it safe to assume interest in using characters like Banshee, Tempo and Marrow among the X-Creators is higher than ever coming out of the X-Men Election?
Jordan: Yeah. So, this is the first time I’ve done an interview since the X-Men Election was over and revealed, as well as the big piece that people didn’t know about — Gerry and Pepe’s book. So I’ll start by giving you a little peek behind the curtain on that. First of all, let me emphasize that this was 100% real because I know there are folks who still are skeptical. “Oh, they were rigging it,” or “They knew this would happen.” No, we didn’t. When I went to Gerry, we had this plan. There were a lot of plans. We batted around various ideas for half a second. We thought, “Should we let people pick the entire team?” And then we ended up going no — for various reasons.
AIPT: [Laughs] Yeah, that would have been bad.
Jordan: But we liked the idea of them picking the last member. So we talked to Gerry and said, “Let’s come up with a list of 10 characters, any of whom you’d be happy to have on the team.” So we threw names out and a bunch of people suggested names. I think Leah suggested Polaris now that I mention it, but everybody was suggesting names. Gerry was like, “Yes, no, yes, no” to various ones. And we ended up with that list of 10 characters, and he had preferences over who he hoped it would be, but he was prepared and happy to write any of those folks.
And one of the things I said to him was, “Now, Gerry, don’t think about this too much, because if you do, you’re going to end up coming up with great ideas for every character or for a bunch of the characters that are not going to get picked. So don’t think too hard on it. Let’s just let this happen.” And for the most part, he did, but he did think of a few things. So, you actually will see a couple of those characters in various places. You know what, I’ll just say, at least a couple of them are going to show up in Marauders, because Gerry had more ideas for some of them.
I’m pretty sure Gerry and I both voted for the same person in the election, which was Tempo. First of all, I really like time powers, even though I do have very strong opinions on how they should work and end up arguing with my writers about them. I still really liked them. I liked the idea of having time powers and a character who’s only appeared a few times, but not as much as any other character on the list. I think she’s the character with the fewest appearances of anybody on the list. So kind of going in and being able to have more freedom to flesh her out and establish her more sounded great. But then again, I’m not disappointed. It was very interesting to see how it played out.
AIPT: Well, that’s a good transition to a question I got from an X-Fan claiming to be Jordan D. Lite. Other Jordan asked, what campaign staff tried to cheat the most in the X-Men Election? Were there shenanigans?
Jordan: Oh, there were major shenanigans. Not internally, but amongst the fans, there were major major shenanigans.
This election was interfered with — let’s say that our agencies at Marvel were able to suss out that interference and account for it. We were able to take out the hundreds of thousands of falsely made votes. Let me start by saying if we had not, Polaris would not have won. It’d be a character who I think you’d be quite surprised about. It was mostly due to the incredibly huge amounts of
votes coming from Eastern Europe, one IP address for this character. I don’t want to reveal who though. I don’t feel like I should. But here’s the other thing — it wasn’t the only one. There were a number of characters who people made attempts to rig the vote in favor of.
It was interesting to see what affected it and why. Now I know a lot of people will say or have said — and maybe they’re right.
I think probably the reason Polaris won was because of TV fans because of The Gifted, and that’s probably true. And I will say, is that bad? I can’t say it’s bad. We opened it to the public. We opened it to all fans and those are fans too. And then I know people will say “No, but they’re not going to read the comics.” That might be the case. It doesn’t matter. Gerry’s still into it. We’re going to write good comics for it. It’s going to be awesome.
And I’ll let you in on a secret, we’re planning to do this again. So you’ll have another chance and it probably won’t be the same characters. We’ll see, maybe some of them will be there, maybe some of them won’t. What’s funny is I think Polaris is the oldest character on the list? No, I think Banshee appeared before Polaris, but that means it did come down to the two oldest characters around the longest.
Polaris is a character who’s been around a long time and has a lot of fans. And I know that means people again have said, “Well, obviously they knew Polaris was going to win.” She’s been around the longest and therefore has had the most opportunity to gain fans. But that doesn’t mean she’s more popular, you know? There are folks on this list who, you know, have a lot of fans. I mean, again, a lot of us thought Sunspot was going to win. Who did I think was going to win? I’m trying to remember — it might’ve been Polaris that I thought was going to win, but I definitely thought Sunspot had a good shot. We did intentionally mess with people by putting both Sunspot and Cannonball on there. And I will say, man, Cannonball had a bad showing. He was very far down the list.
https://aiptcomics.com/2021/05/03/x-...hite-election/