X-Men Monday #60 – Jordan D. White Gives Update on 'X of Swords'

AIPT: In the past, you’ve talked about how beneficial the lead time on House of X and Powers of X was and how you’ve been trying to achieve something similar with X of Swords. Has this downtime had any positive effects on the stories that have been delayed? Has it allowed for any additions or revisions to improve quality?

Jordan: Yes! Without going too much into it, yes, it certainly has given us more time to make sure X of Swords is the best story possible. But we did also take the opportunity to make it a bigger story. I’m pretty sure when we first announced it, we said how many chapters it will be. It’s going to be more chapters than that now. Originally, every book of X of Swords was going to be out in July. Now it’s going to take more than a month to tell this story, but I think it’s very good and everybody working on it is very excited for it.

The first issue is totally drawn and mostly colored. Every person who sees the art is blown away. Pepe Larraz is so good. He’s so good. And because this is what I like to call a proper X-Men-style crossover with it hitting every book, we’ve got a ton of great artists working on it. But as a result, we’ve had to share Pepe’s art with a lot of people and they’re all like, “Oh my God, that’s so amazing, this guy’s the best!” It’s going to be a cool story and it’s going to have a lot of beautiful art.

AIPT: So with all the delays, how far ahead on the books are you now?

Jordan: Well, not as far ahead as we could have been because we did take the opportunity to double our efforts on this rather than moving forward faster. We’ve put more into X of Swords now than we would have been able to before. What we had planned to do and what we’ll end up doing–there’s a world of difference between them and I think it’s an improvement.

This is a terrible catastrophe the entire world has taken on, and there’s not a lot we can do to help the world but do what we do the best we can–make the best X-Men stories we can so people who pick up these stories, in these terrible times, can enjoy them and go, “Yeah, this was worth my time and money in this crazy world we’re struggling through.” And I think it will be.

AIPT: OK, it’s safe to say X-Fans are starved for some news. Marvel Editor-in-Chief C.B. Cebulski recently revealed a teaser image for X of Swords: Creation #1. What’s that?

Jordan: It’s the launch issue. It’s chapter one of the entire story. I won’t say the names but there are three one-shots spaced at the beginning, middle and end of the story. The issues of our ongoing series are set in between the first and second and then second and third one-shots. That’s the physical structure of it.

So Creation is chapter one and I’m not going to say what the other chapters are. You’ll find out when you see how many chapters there are. Some people have asked if Creation is like an alpha issue. Yes, but first I think that name’s been used a lot–alpha, omega. We have three, so what do you call the other? But we went with another approach to naming ours, and I think it works well for what we have planned.

AIPT: Last one. A couple of chapters into X of Swords, which X-Men character will everyone be talking about?

Jordan: A couple chapters in… what X-Character… well, depending on how you define “couple,” I think there’s a good chance it’s Storm.