Steve Foxe Talks "Dead X-Men"

Steve Foxe: Let’s see, that covers all the D-words in the headline except…oh yeah, Dead X-Men. This bad boy won’t debut until the end of the month, but I’m writing a four-issue mini-series spinning out of Kieron Gillen and RB Silva’s Rise of the Powers Of X, one of the epic bookends to the long-running Krakoan saga. The cast was briefly a bit of a secret, but a poorly kept one: Dazzler, Prodigy, Frenzy, Jubilee, and Cannonball, the newly elected X-Men who died at this summer’s Hellfire Gala, are back in a time-and-space-spanning adventure.

There’s very little I can reveal about this book just yet, but I take writing these five (along with our other two primary cast members, Rachel Summers and [redacted]) as a serious responsibility. Besides being some of my personal favorite mutants (DAZZLER), this is the team-that-almost-wasn’t. While the book was already planned and started before readers reacted to their shocking deaths, seeing the passion and interest X-fans had in seeing these five as X-Men lit a fire under all of us. I got a taste of writing them all alongside Steph Williams and Noemi Vittori in their X-Men Unlimited shorts, but the tone is vastly different—and the stakes much higher—in Dead X-Men. I’ve described the book as my chance to channel Claremont and Cockrum and I’m sticking to that vague-yet-accurate statement for now.

What I can say, though, is that the art team on the book is BONKERS. In addition to main covers and stunning new costumes designed by Lucas Werneck, we’ve got eight (!) artists contributing to our four issues. It’s an ambitious plan and I didn’t think our editor superstars Jordan White and Lauren Amaro would want to wrangle all of these moving pieces, but it’s worked out, knock on wood, exactly as I hoped.

My Dark X-Men collaborator Jonas Scharf kicks us off, with Jean Grey’s Bernard Chang appearing in every issue and Astonishing Iceman’s Vincenzo Carratù doing the bulk of #1. Fan-favorite Peter V. Nguyen (who contributed a Wolverine backup) and my X-Men Unlimited partner Guillermo Sanna join us for #2, before Lynne Yoshii (also X-Men Unlimited), Javier Pina (X-Men), and David Baldeon (X-Factor) loop in for #3. Bringing us home on #4 are David, Vincenzo, and Bernard. Frank Martin colors the whole thing, and it’s been a huge thrill seeing his unifying take on these very different artists. This was an extremely rad instance of everyone we asked and hoped for lining up, and it’s making for a really heartfelt tribute to the Krakoan era as a whole.