Tom Brevoort Describes Every New X-Book

[Luckystar.]

This is from the Homo Superior Podcast: Creator Crush

This is a quick transcription. Please excuse any mistakes.

X-MEN

X-Men is the strike team. Depending on how you look at it, depending on what character you ask, it's either a militia or cops. They're the team that goes out into the world to do what you might think of as classic X-Men business, but they are very still mutant-oriented, which is to say, kind of the three things that are on their to-do list at any given day are:

1) If a new mutant signal shows up on Cerebro, they've got the last Cerebro in existence, they go out, find that person, hopefully bring them into the fold, hopefully try to teach them what being a mutant is and entering into this culture and learning how to do better with the gifts that they've been given.

2) If mutants are being downtrodden somewhere, they're gonna go and kick some ass and keep that from happening.

And 3) If mutants are acting poorly somewhere, they're gonna go out and kick some ass and keep that from happening. But it's very, it's very mutant-centric. That's the beat. The analogy that I use is if Doctor Octopus was doing something, was robbing a bank two states over, that's not their problem. They're not gonna go to that probably. If Doctor Octopus was robbing a bank in their backyard, absolutely, they'd go punch him in the nose. But they're not. That's not what they're paying attention to. That's not their gig. Their gig is the mutant beat, mutant activities, and so forth. That book, tonally just because of Jed, it probably owes a little bit more to the Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely in terms of approach and style than the other books. It's not exactly what Grant and Quitely did, but if you read our first issue, and you'll see there's a couple of things visually that harken back, and, certainly, some of the characters harken back a little bit. And that's just clearly was a run that Jed really clicked to when it was coming out, and so he pulls a bunch of inspiration from that.

UNCANNY X-MEN

Uncanny X-Men, I always use the same phrase, which is outlaw heroes, and the Uncanny X-Men are basically centered around Rogue. In a world where all of the typical, obvious, past natural leader figures of mutantkind and of the X-Men are not really on the playing field anymore, Rogue, through a set of circumstances, has the realization that somebody has to keep the metaphorical dream of Professor X alive, and so that's what the Uncanny X-Men are. They're the X-Men as superheroes. They're out there, doing the sort of thing that classically a Professor X's X-Men would do, which is if Doctor Octopus was robbing a bank two states away, they would go out and fight him as well. They're on the fringes. They're not appointed by anybody. They're feared and hated, and so they are outlaw heroes. But they go out, fight the good fight, try to put forward a good face on mutantdom, and show their worth by being heroes.

Tonally, probably the closest thing is the Australian Outback X-Men days, if you think of that. And they're situated down in New Orleans. They're living in a big old antediluvian house owned by this family that has history with Gambit. And I think of it as sort of the opposite of the X-Mansion because it's barely got running water. And they've built, like, a makeshift danger room out in the woods out back with logs and engine blocks and things. They'll also have, and we haven't talked about this too much, but there'll be an influx of new characters here. There'll be four new, totally new, never-before-seen X-characters showing up here who'll be important and who'll be a driver of the thing as well.

It's got the most, particularly in the umbra of '97, the most classic-looking X-Men team. You stand them up, and it's Rogue, Gambit, Jubilee, Nightcrawler, Wolverine. Yeah. What you think of as the most classic X-Men, which, again, I know some X-readers have felt like, oh, we're just going back and doing the same '80s or '90s stories again." And the answer to that is no. No, we're not, but we're certainly drawing a certain amount of inspiration from that. And if X-Men '97 has taught us anything, it's that people really like those characters and wanna see them doing stuff. So we're gonna do that.

EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN

Exceptional X-Men is sort of like the third leg on the stool of what X-Men is about, and that is, X-Men as a school. School for Young Mutants, School for Superheroes. And it's a much more grounded, ground-level book, at least to start with. It's the ultimate Spider-Man of the X-Men books. It centers around Kate Pryde. It operates out of Chicago, and when we first tune in to what's going on there, Kate, in the aftermath of the Orchis war and the dissolution of Krakoa and so forth, kind of woke up the morning after that war was done and looked in the mirror and went, "I don't really like who I've become. I don't like all the things that I've been doing, and this is a bad environment for me, and I wanna get out." And so she's gone back to Chicago and left a mutant life completely behind. She's rooming with a friend that she knew from Stevie Hunter's dance class years ago. She's worked at a day job, at a bistro, and she is out. She is not getting involved in all this stuff. For all that, living in the world and living in Chicago, you can't help but have some sense of what the feeling is towards mutants and what's swirling around, good and bad. And that's it. So Kate's ready to live an ordinary life and deal with her sort of PTSD, but she ends up having a chance run-in with another young mutant who's in trouble.

And when push comes to shove, she can't help but get involved and help pull that character out of trouble. And from that point on, that character, like, dogs her. Like, "You know, you're the one who can show me what this is all about and teach me how to do it and what it is, and I really need your help." Inevitably, eventually, you know, she comes to the conclusion that, much as Professor X and the X-Men did for her when she was 13 years old and having headaches and phase them through the floor and stuff and didn't know what this was, these kids need somebody to teach them and train them about this and to do it in such a way that it won't effectively turn them into child soldiers, which is kind of what happened to Kitty across the long arc of history. And then Emma Frost shows up. And Emma goes, "Darling, I see you're training young mutants here. Relax. I've got it. You go back to your little life. This is my beat. I know how to do this."

So the driving engine of the book, really, as much as anything, is the Kate/Emma relationship as they both have different perspectives and different points of view. And for all that they've been friendly in recent years, they have a lot of history where they're not really all that friendly with one another. And then here too, we'll have a crew of new young, perspective X-Men mutant characters, who you will meet for the first time. And a couple of other familiar faces from the past will start showing up as we get a little deeper in.

X-FORCE

X-Force, in terms of description, is probably closest to Warren Ellis' Planetary. On the surface, it looks like a typical X-Force team, traditionally defined as the X-Men's kill squad. I'm kind of of the belief that the X-Men shouldn't have a kill squad, you know, for all that, our good guys go to Wolverine and say, "Hey, we need you to get a bunch of guys to, like, kill a bunch of people so our hands are clean and we could pretend to be moral while knowing about it and sanctioning it." That doesn't make any sense to me. Anyway, X-Force is centered around Forge. Forge has had a vision, and it's caused him to build something. The thing he's built predicts fracture points, moments and places in the world where a crisis is going to occur if something isn't done. Forge has assembled X-Force as the machine to deal with those crises. So the membership, who's in it, what they do, how they do it, is all built almost on an unconscious level because it's an outgrowth of Forge's maker power to put together the right elements to deal with the situation.

We'll also, fairly routinely in that book, have extra characters as guest stars and hangers-on in the way that Deadpool is in the first issue. But, you know, there's a larger thing going on. In that "Planetary" sense, not only are Forge and the X-Force characters getting involved in all these weird happenings around the world, but they begin to suss out the pattern behind them Da Vinci Code style. There's something bigger brewing behind all of that that we will slowly peel the onion layers back from and get to. But it's, you know, like, literally, they don't have headquarters. Their headquarters is a self-repairing Blackbird that they fly around on. They don't do wheels down unless something's going on. They're just on the go constantly.

[Luckystar.]

Part 2

NYX

NYX is not a team book, first of all, for all that it's got a bunch of identifiable mutant characters in it. It's about, in the broadest sense, with Krakoa no more, there are thousands of mutants that have to, like it or not, reintegrate back into the world around them.

And so there's suddenly a huge influx of effectively immigrants and refugees. Some of whom were born in the US, some of whom renounced their United States citizenship to become a citizen of Krakoa, and now that doesn't look like the smartest decision in the world, but who are trying to find a place for themselves and a culture for themselves in Manhattan, in the heart of the city. And so, we have at least 5 recognizable X-characters, and each of the first five issues focuses from the point of view and the take from of one of them. So Kamala Khan, Laura Kinney, Sophie Cuckoo, Anole, and Prodigy who are all there, whose lives, and paths intersect and overlap in different ways. But it's as much as anything about community building, it's very much about the interaction of mutants and mutant culture, and regular old human culture, Chinese culture, Italian culture, and how that all works.

PHOENIX

Phoenix is kind of what it says on the label. Without getting into too many specifics because some of it impinges on the close of the Krakoa story, Jean Grey is Phoenix again, and in fact has always been Phoenix. I won't get into it here because we'll probably try to put it in the comics at some point, but I have a whole unified field theory about the Jean Grey and Scott Summers relationship that I think makes a lot of sense of a lot of choices that were just creative choices that were made by different creators pulling in different directions, but that once you sort of look at them through this lens, you can kinda go, "Oh, that kind of makes sense." But, anyway, Jean is now the Phoenix. The Phoenix is a cosmic entity, and it's got stuff it needs to do. So this is the cosmic book. This is Jean in space, in the cosmos, dealing with galactic level threats and big, cosmic stuff on a scale that we haven't typically seen that character involved in. So she's out of remote.

For those that are wondering and are concerned, because she's Phoenix, she and Cyclops are still married and they still regularly have telepathic contact with one another even across the light years. It's almost like a regular phone call every Saturday or whatever. But the relationship is really like when you have 2 partners and one has to go off to war or go off to serve, and that's the way it is. One's at home and that's Cyclops, and one's out taken care of the duties of the cosmos, and that is Phoenix. So that'll be a big book because the cosmos is our canvas, and we'll be seeing a lot of pieces from the cosmic end of the scale as guest characters and villains and things beyond even just the characters that you would typically think of for the X-Men. So, yeah, we'll do Starjammers, and we'll do Imperial Guard, but we'll also do, I guess, Nova at this point has been on X-Men Red so much he might as well be a mutant. We'll do Guardians of the Galaxy stuff. We'll do stuff from gods. We'll do stuff from all that other stuff is all fodder for for this book. But it's Jean being big and awesome.

[Luckystar.]

Part 3

STORM

Obviously, Storm is a solo character title, and we'll position that character in what I hope is a good and effective place within the cosmology of mutantkind and the X-Men in this new world.

She ended up being a difficult character at first because as we laid out the 3 X-Men books, we kinda realized that if you put her on any of those teams, she takes over the team. She's got such a gravity to her as a character that if she's standing next to Rogue or she's standing next to Cyclops or Kitty, I'm sorry, they're not in charge anymore. It's her.

So, we're gonna lean into Storm as a solo character on the same kind of level as an Iron Man or a Captain America or Spider Man or Daredevil or whatever and see if we can make that go.

WOLVERINE

Wolverine will have a new creative team and will have a new vector that I don't wanna talk about yet because we haven't announced it. You know, but, you know, the idea that there's a Wolverine solo book at this point since there's been one since, like, 1988 is the least surprising thing about this X Men launch. But it'll be good.

It's got a great writer and a great artist on it. They've got a really good hook and a really imaginative interesting new, new villain, new antagonist to put Wolverine up against. We'll find Logan in an interesting circumstance at the outset. Other characters will come in and out of that series as necessary, including 1 or 2 that have long, strong associations and connections with Logan, and that'll be a Wolverine solo title where he'll carry the lead.

X-FACTOR

X-Factor, which you'll I think you'll be hearing stuff about next week. So by the time I don't know how quickly this is gonna go up. So you may have heard about it already. So my reticence to tell you things will feel out of date, but so be it. X-Factor is another team concept. It is fairly classic, although not necessarily in the way that people think. Yeah. I think when you hear about what the book is, you'll go, "Oh, okay. I get that now, and I kinda get why that's X-Factor." But it's not necessarily the most immediate, like, I say X-Factor to you and you go, "Oh, it's like this version or that version." But you'll hear some more details about that soon.

[NearlyEnough]

Storm


wolverine


x-factor

What he said about Storm is bs of the highest caliber, Storm has followed Scott’s lead before, the extinction team was HIS team, the person everyone thinks of when you say “X-Men leader” is Cyclops not Storm.

If she’s gonna be written like a Mary Sue I hope she doesn’t interact with the X-Men whatsoever.

[MVComics]

wolverine

Hmmm. sounds interesting tbh. When I think of good writers right now, I'm thinking of donny cates, PKJ, ewing, etc but lets see

[Devaishwarya]

X-Force sounds new and quite original conceptually. And I love that.

Storm seems to be the most experimental and expansive...because of the character. Much like IM, SM and CA, she can really accomplish great, long-lasting things with the right creative team supporting. I LOVE they've taken her away from being centralised in the X-Men world.

Phoenix reads like a huge cosmic tapestry of wonder...I'm actually piqued (I may have to re-consider this).

X-Factor feels quite grounded but in a very good way...I need to see the creatives, though.

[ChronoRogue]

Thank you for the write-up!

So if I was to break up the concepts into an D&D style

Neutral: X-Men, focused on mutant-threats mainly
Chaotic: Uncanny X-Men, outlaws that try to be superheroes
Lawful: X-Factor, from the description it's a government sanctioned team

With Exceptional, NYX and X-Force mostly keeping to themselves.

Completely guessing, but getting the feeling X-Factor and X-Men might clash.

[sbp1972]

Regarding Uncanny and Exceptional: I get the easy "we need a new character to provide the introductory POC", but... you have approximately 1,000,000,000 x-characters lying around. Why do you need to be introducing yet more brand new characters? What is the likelihood that any of them become more than just more background noise?

[ChronoRogue]

Regarding Uncanny and Exceptional: I get the easy "we need a new character to provide the introductory POC", but... you have approximately 1,000,000,000 x-characters lying around. Why do you need to be introducing yet more brand new characters? What is the likelihood that any of them become more than just more background noise?

I don't get Exceptional's choices, but for Uncanny since it's supposed to be Southern Gothic Horror I'm hoping they're not meant to be long-term characters and are more important for selling the atmosphere through narrative plot points whether that be mystery, tragedy or as a civilian mutant supportive character. It's the one case where I'll forgive introducing new characters if we're not really meant to get attached to them for longer than the book itself or expect them to be the next generation of mutant heroes.

Kinda the way Jumbo Carnation was used during Krakoa or human allies tend to be.

[RAWRlrus]

Sucks that it seems like they'll be ignoring the recent friendship Kate and Emma have had in Exceptional. I know its early, but I'm not really liking how Brevoort's era is heading.

[Mungho]

Edit: Sorry, weird joke and not related to the thread

[Jackraow21]

Okay, so tonally Uncanny is going for Outback era, which is dope.

Can't wait to find out who else is on this squad.

[Hi-Fi]

Uncanny is clearly the book for me. Outback run feeling? Some of my favorite characters? Gorgeous art and promised sexy and spooky times? Yeah, I'm there.

I love Morrison's run, but I'm not feeling X-Men's line-up. I'll read it, because Mackay is good.

I'm kinda sold on Extraordinary now. I don't know, there's something appealing about it. Kate and Emma are fun and messy together, and Stevie Hunter might drop in, so yeah.

Absolutely no interest in Phoenix, but cool about the Starjammers, I guess.

X-Force sounds like fun!

NYX I'm really curious about. Hopefully we get to check with a lot of NXM characters.

What he said about Storm is bs of the highest caliber, Storm has followed Scott’s lead before, the extinction team was HIS team, the person everyone thinks of when you say “X-Men leader” is Cyclops not Storm.

If she’s gonna be written like a Mary Sue I hope she doesn’t interact with the X-Men whatsoever.

Storm under Cyclops leadership on the Extinction team was severely underdeveloped. Outside of a few good lines and some fun showings, there was no character arc for her in that book.

That said, if he really wanted, Brevoort could have created a team book for Storm to lead, so this whole "she would overpower a team book" talk is kinda wut?

[TheRealWashout]

Sucks that it seems like they'll be ignoring the recent friendship Kate and Emma have had in Exceptional. I know its early, but I'm not really liking how Brevoort's era is heading.

The Krakoan era mostly ignored characters' pre-existing relationships, so there's precedence for it. I don't actually think that's happening here though. Brevoort has shown that he is not interested in ignoring anything that came before.

[NearlyEnough]

Uncanny is clearly the book for me. Outback run feeling? Some of my favorite characters? Gorgeous art and promised sexy and spooky times? Yeah, I'm there.

I love Morrison's run, but I'm not feeling X-Men's line-up. I'll read it, because Mackay is good.

I'm kinda sold on Extraordinary now. I don't know, there's something appealing about it. Kate and Emma are fun and messy together, and Stevie Hunter might drop in, so yeah.

Absolutely no interest in Phoenix, but cool about the Starjammers, I guess.

X-Force sounds like fun!

NYX I'm really curious about. Hopefully we get to check with a lot of NXM characters.


Storm under Cyclops leadership on the Extinction team was severely underdeveloped. Outside of a few good lines and some fun showings, there was no character arc for her in that book.

That said, if he really wanted, Brevoort could have created a team book for Storm to lead, so this whole "she would overpower a team book" talk is kinda wut?

Only someone who dislikes Cyclops would say something like that which is worrying.