Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Gillen Preps "Uncanny X-Men" for Earth's Mightiest Battle

CBR: When Kieron Gillen kicked off this new volume of "Uncanny X-Men" he brought together Cyclops; Storm; Emma Frost; Magneto; Namor; Colossus who had recently become the Juggernaut, the powerful avatar of the evil entity known as Cytorrak; Colossus' sister Magick; the mutant messiah Hope; and the robotic being known as Danger to form his "Extinction Team." In the series' first arc Emma Frost sustained a serious injury, and while she recuperates Psylocke has taken her place in the field.

"I wanted to take Emma off the table for a couple of reasons. First was the physicality of it. We're a book where if someone gets seriously hurt they're going to spend some time recuperating. So she's temporarily off the team and she was their telepath," Gillen told CBR News. "One of the things we X-writers talk about is how we want a natural connectivity between our books. 'Uncanny X-Force' had been kind of its own thing for its entire run, but with 'The Dark Angel Saga' there were all these ideas that were developed that we can fold back into our books. Jason Aaron has been doing some things with characters over in 'Wolverine & the X-Men' and I wanted to explore 'Tabula Rasa,' the strange land that was created in the middle of Montana during 'The Dark Angel Saga.' That idea really excited me. Plus we have Psylocke's emotional attachment to the events that occurred at Tabula Rasa and that led to her being brought in as well. There were all these necessary things that brought our British ninja into this situation."

Gillen has enjoyed writing Psylocke and feels the character fit organically into the stories he's telling in "Uncanny X-Men." "If you think about it she's also a character in an emotionally extreme situation because she can't really tell anyone about what happened and this is literally hours after 'The Dark Angel Saga.' Basically she went with the team to drop Angel off at their X-Cave. Then she went back to Utopia and was like, 'Okay there's this place, Tabula Rasa, I don't know what caused it, but we've really got to go in and make sure people are okay.' This is her basically tidying up X-Force's mess and it fits her job as one of Cyclops' security personnel. When we placed her on Scott's side this was one of the things we were thinking of," Gillen explained. "So it's all very natural because she's got both mental and physical abilities. There's all these different telepaths among the X-Men, but she's the most physical of them. Plus I got to write a real interesting relationship between her and Magneto since he's the only one of Scott's X-Men who knows about X-Force. I'm also looking forward to using Psylocke in 'AvX' as well."

1 comment:

Eduardo said...

An interesting relationship between Betsy and Magneto?? Uh oh..........
Well, let´s wait and see.