Academy X: New X-Men Appreciation 2022

[Kingdom X]

Their Tumblr has a lot of behind the scenes details. A few highlights include:

• Luna DePaula was going to be a long-term romantic interest for Karma, and would have a story about her unsupportive parents, and how she changed her name in honor of the woman who took her in when her parents kicked her out.
• They wanted to do minis for all the squads, not just Hellions. They weren't fully realized yet, but the Paragons would have gone to Nova Roma, and DJ would fall in love with a girl. (This one seems to have been deleted or something because I can't find it.) Alpha Squadron would have been the ones to find Northstar's body, and would go up against Hydra and the Hand. Corsairs would go into space.
• Kingmaker would come back for revenge.
• They toyed with James Keller being a "passing" mutant who hid his powers.
• Julian/Sofia were envisioned as endgame, while Noriko/Prodigy might not have lasted beyond their teen years.
• Julian would get the Phoenix Force, and would eventually take the codename Scion.
• Laurie's father was a mutant supremacist, and would have a story where he manipulated a bunch of students onto his side.
• This arc would be "huge" for Laurie and would lead to a big confrontation between them, and she would have been the one to save the day against him. She'd finally stop being afraid of her powers, and would learn to use her powers strategically.
• Also, she and Cecily would have an adventure together.
• Josh would join Garrison's side, but Kevin would talk him out of it and save him.
• As the kids go out into the field, David would be against it and pushed for everyone to stay students, rather than active heroes. Eventually he was gonna be “the guy in the Chair” for the kids who did adventure, but whenever he would get on the field, he'd be "like a machine:" very precise, and hard to hit.
• For Noriko, Wallflower's dad would help her learn to control her powers so she wouldn't need her Gauntlets most of the time. This would make her blind to his bad side. But she would be instrumental in convincing others to turn against him once she realizes what's up, taking on something of a leadership role.
• Her infamous fight with Dust would have lead to more development, with them eventually becoming good friends.
• Kevin and Cecily would get together.
• Kevin would have learned to kill specific cells and cause slower decay, or paralyze limbs (albeit Josh would still be able to heal the damage.) So he would be able to cause pain without killing, and possibly even cure cancer.
• Tag backstory, mentioned below.

Speaking of their Tumblr, we got some juicy Tag lore!

• He's from Puerto Rico and was always treated like an immigrant by others, despite being an American citizen. He felt somewhere in between.
• He from a broken or neglectful home.
• Because of the above points, he always didn't have a good sense of who he was.
• The idea was that he had no real sense of family, and possibly no sense of identity outside of his friends and being an Xavier student.
• "One of the reasons we had Brian be with Cessily in the aftermath scenes of the final issue of the Hellions mini was to subtly set up that his situation and hers were similar."
• Julian would notice Brian's issues and try to do something about it. This would have lead to Brian reconnecting with his parents, whom he hadn’t been home since coming to Xavier’s.
• This would all lead him towards figuring himself and his powers out.
• They weren't planning for Tag to fall in love with Julian, but it was "100% on [their] list of possibilities."

Omg we.were.ROBBBED!!!! I'm glad there was confirmation of the plot with Laurie's dad since that seemed like the biggest cliffhanger and it's cool that some of these plots (including Tag having a crash on a cocky telekinetic) were alluded to in the House of M tie-ins. Is there any tea as to why Marvel let them go? Did they think Kyle & Yost were a better fit for the Decimation story or was Marvel going to switch writers anyway?

They talk about some of their future plans on their Tumblr, or what they can recall of them. And there was a podcast interview more recently for their Dragon Age work where they talked a bit about Academy X. I don't remember a lot of interviews happening at the time, though. I commiserated with them at SDCC a couple of times, and one bit that I remember was that they'd intended for Josh to go dark side. I think that stuck with me because that's the opposite direction most stories take the healer type characters in.

I did find this one chat transcript that mentions Josh becoming a full-blown villain, while Kevin became a hero. It seems like they weren't married to the idea since they liked Josh so much. https://www.cbr.com/cbr-chat-transcr...hristina-weir/