Saturday, February 11, 2012

Uncanny X-Men #7 Preview + Kieron Gillen's Interview

Uncanny X-Men #7
Written by: Kieron Gillen
Pencils and Cover by: Greg Land

The Story:
• Tabula Rasa Part 3. The secrets of the evolutionary jungle are revealed, as the X-Men face the Immortal Man, with the help of a brand new ally!

In Stores: February 15, 2012





Newsarama: To stay on the Psylocke subject, you're using her in a much more integral role than you have in the past. Obviously, it's a natural choice given her part in the X-Force story, but what have you liked about exploring that character further — and her interactions with the rest of the team?

Kieron Gillen: Using her actually has a couple of useful, contradictory reasons. For people who read X-Force, they're in the position they know that Psylocke is lying — so you get a sort of dramatic irony response from the book. For the people who don't read X-Force, they basically take position of the X-Men trying to decode the mystery, and Magneto's probing of Psylocke provides particularly natural exposition.

The fact the emotional connection is so strong is something that really attracted to me. Being involved in the destruction of a town is a huge thing, and I wanted to dwell on how that actually impacts her. Since destruction is so common in superhero comics, we can end up skating over what it really means, but I wanted to put her face to face with the family of the people in the town and bring it home.

I also love playing with a character with a secret — and someone with power over her, in the form of Magneto. That's just great drama. Power, responsibility, corruption, ends-justifying-means, etc. These are all stuff that's bubbling under the surface with the book.

4 comments:

FSaker said...

Judging from his comments, it looks like Psylocke's presence in UXM was thought exclusively for this arc; I guess she'll (unfortunately) be out of this book's main cast after issue #8.

Anyway, I'm very curious about Gillen's plans for UXM. Especially to find out if he's telling the truth when he says that his plots were leading towards AvX since he got Fraction's place in this book.

Francis said...

Remender tweeted the end of Tabula Rasa was terrific... i trust that man, just hope Betsy will play major role as much as she's around. Btw Gillen > Fraction

Blu Berri said...

You dunno if she'll really be out. Betsy was brought in to the Extinction team because they needed a replacement telepath and isn't Emma still missing an arm?

FSaker said...

Yeah, but Emma won't be out forever. She's still featured in the first page (the one where it is told what happened last issue and the pictures and names of the main characters), yet Psylocke isn't there. Therefore, I still think she'll be out of Extinction Team by the end of this arc.

Plus, thanks to that picture showing what we should expect for the first year of the new Uncanny X-Men book, we can see Emma almost kissing Namor, and she has both arms back.

I would really prefer that she could stay, of course (after all, Gillen's issues are great - except for Land's "art", although even he is improving a little -, while even good artists can't seem to save Gischler's book). But I don't think she will.