A Dark Utopia for the X-Men

IGN: Matt Fraction chats about the upcoming Uncanny X-Men/Dark Avengers crossover known as Utopia, as well as the sad state of Tony Stark's life. Click on the link to read the rest of the interview. Very cool stuff about Utopia!

IGN: Uncanny #511 came out last week, and the cover was pretty blatantly teasing the return of Jean Grey. Did you enjoy being able to pull the wool over readers' eyes for a while?
Fraction: You know, I always feel bad for outright lying. [laughs] I just hope people were entertained. The real misdirect was so we could bring Psylocke back. I hope people were at least surprised by that. I think there was profound meaning in Jean's death, and I'm not looking to bring her back.

IGN: As you mentioned, the character who did make her return this month was Psylocke. What made you want to bring her back?
Fraction: The team is pretty masculine, and we were looking for ways to bulk up the females on the team. I think she's a great, interesting character, and what we've done with her kind of synthesizes her two histories into one person. That'll give us some cool places to go with her character in the next year. It's not quite the same Psylocke everyone has seen before. Her power-set is a little bit different. Her personality is a little bit different. She's these two synthesized Psylockes as one with bits of each combined into this one person. And she's cool. She's got a great power-set and a cool costume. She's a super-powerful woman, and we don't get enough of those.

IGN: And she's a ninja. You can't really go wrong with that.
Fraction: And she's a ninja. And Asian. So it's win-win-win. Psychic ninja! Who doesn't want to write about a psychic ninja?

IGN: Is she going to be playing a big role in the series right away?
Fraction: She plays a big role in issue #512. She also shows up in X-Men/Dark Avengers and going forward. I'm looking forward to her being a member of the team.

IGN: What can you reveal about #512?
Fraction: I've been really happy with the book so far, and I've been having a great time. I think both #512 and Utopia are the two best stories I've done so far. #512 is a standalone issue. It's a fun time-travel story about the X-Club. Mutants have been around for hundreds of thousands of years, but as a racial addition to the planet's human birth rate, mutants are a little more than a hundred years old. We've often called Namor the first mutant. But he was really sort of the first mutant of the popular wave. Where the mutant birth curve really started to skyrocket was around Namor's time.

And this is a story about the X-Club traveling back about 100 years to investigate a pair of humans about to have a child that will be a mutant. In trying to investigate the mystery of M-Day and how to reverse it, they quite literally find themselves searching for the origin of the species. They're trying to figure out what it is about these parents. Why them – why mutants? And it's fun. Yanick Paquette's art is amazing. The colors are beautiful. I'm so, so proud of how the issue came out. It's a lot of fun. Like I said, it's a self-contained, done-in-one, 34-page adventure.