Dead X-Men #4 Preview

Dead X-Men #4

Writer: Steve Foxe

Art by: Vincenzo Carratu, Bernard Chang, David Baldeon

The Story: Everything ends! Prodigy, Dazzler, Frenzy, Cannonball and Jubilee have gone farther and have risked more than any X-Men team before. Now, at the end of everything, the final fate of Krakoa rests on these five mutants. Will the Dead X-Men save the seed of the future…or kill it before it can even be planted? Rated T+

In Shops: Apr 17, 2024

 

Dead X-Men #3 Art

Dead X-Men #3 Spoilers

Spoilers: Rachel sends the X-Men to Moira's ninth life, directly into Apocalypse-9's throne room. En Sabah Nur-9 recognizes them as visitors from another reality and dispatches a host of Archangel drones to attack. The X-Men signal Rachel to get them out. Back in the White Hot Room, the X-Men explain that they accidentally gave Cyborg Moira the ability to jump to Moira-Prime's past lives. Now that Cyborg Moira is altering events, they need to track her down before she ruins Xavier's mission. After much discussion about the mission's viability, Rachel decides to fling them back and forth until they hit the correct timeline where Cyborg Moira is. The X-Men deduce that the Cyborg's goal is to reach Moira-Prime's first life. Mother Righteous tries to tempt Rachel by offering help, but Rachel rejects her. Rachel then sends the X-Men to a past life of Moira-Prime.

Meanwhile, Cyborg Moira travels to Moira-Prime's tenth, third, second, fourth, and sixth lives, interfering and altering events.

Moira's Fifth Life: In this life, Charles and Moira established Faraway, a secluded mutant nation and technological utopia. It became a target for Sentinels, and Moira-5 fell into a coma due to an injury. While Beast-5 and Dr. Cecilia Reyes-5 examine comatose Moira-5, Faraway's systems detect the arriving X-Men. They are approached by the X-Men-5 from the fifth life: Psylocke-5, the leader, her husband Cyclops-5, Wolfsbane-5, Banshee-5, and Sway-5. Since the Sentinel attack occurred only a week ago, Psylocke-5 orders an attack on the strangers. Dazzler subdues Banshee-5, Cyclops-5 overcomes Jubilee, and Cannonball incapacitates Wolfsbane-5 but is quickly defeated by Sway-5. Frenzy tries to reason with Psylocke-5, who prefers not to take risks and to attack first. Frenzy asks Braddock-5 to read her mind when Cyborg Moira arrives in the fifth life, using her M Weapon to unleash a powerful blast against both groups of X-Men.

Dead X-Men #3 Teaser

Meet tomorrow the X-Men from Moira's Fifth Life:

Psylocke, her husband Cyclops, Banshee, Wolfsbane, and Sway.

X-Men Monday #238 – Steve Foxe Discusses ‘Dead X-Men’ #1

AiPT!: This week, writer Steve Foxe is back to dig into X-Fans’ questions about the first issue of Dead X-Men — featuring the reborn team of X-Men that never got a chance to shine… until now!

AIPT: What you could tease about Betsy’s role in Dead X-Men, which we knew expanded (or was the expansion in X-Men Unlimited)?

Steve: Please see that meme of the little girl saying “Why not both?” Betsy’s not a core cast member of Dead — you’ll see a LOT more of her in Unlimited — but Lucas Werneck’s killer cover to Dead X-Men #3 already revealed that we’ll see a certain Ms. Braddock popping up in the pages of Dead, too. As an extra tease for the very dedicated Betsy fans, I’ll say David Baldeon’s take on her is so good.

AIPT: What can you share about how Rachel’s role in this story came to be? Was her inclusion your choice, or did Kieron Gillen plan to incorporate her into Rise of the Powers of X from the start?

Steve: Rachel’s role was actually one of the coolest and most natural evolutions of this project. I’ve been lucky to work very closely with Kieron while developing Dead X-Men, and he’s been wildly generous in playing back and forth to make sure our book works and complements Rise and X-Men Forever as best as it can.

Early on, before Steve Orlando and I got the offer to work on X-Men Unlimited throughout the spring, I had my eye on Captain Britain and Rachel Summers, since I knew my good friend Tini Howard was wrapping up her long and awesome run of Betsy-focused books. It felt wrong to let Betsy and Rachel slip out of the spotlight for this final stretch of the Krakoan era, but they weren’t naturally fitting into anyone else’s plans.

When the plot of Dead X-Men started to come into focus, I suggested one or both as additions to the cast and, over a few months of planning and writing, Kieron and I ended up making Rachel incredibly central to both of our books. She’s really the tether from Dead to Rise in more ways than one, and I really dig how organically that came about as we both refined our plots. Massive thanks to Kieron for being such a wonderful collaborator and guide.

Dead X-Men #1 Spoilers

Spoilers: During a discussion between Charles Xavier and Rachel Summers, they tackle the challenge of assembling a team for a mission  involving the complicated timelines created by Sinister's cloning technology. Xavier outlines a plan to engage Moira in her tenth life before her powers surfaced, underscoring the urgency of pinpointing the specific date, time, and location of this critical event. Charles raises concerns about Rachel's chosen mutants, expecting her to nominate Betsy for leadership. Rachel defends her choices, emphasizing the need for precision in navigating Moira's complex mind across various timelines. She opposes involving Betsy, believing Moira has psychic defenses against powerhouses. Rachel highlights Prodigy's passive psychic absorption, a crucial asset for subtly accessing information from Moira's well-guarded mind.

Cryptid Creator Corner Podcast Chats with Steve Foxe

Cryptid Creator Corner Introduces Dead X-Men: We’re at the end of the Krakoan Age and beginning a new era with these two intertwining series The Fall of the House of X and the Rise of the Hours of X and enter the Dead X-Men where the new X-Men candidates, Cannonball, Jubilee, Dazzler, Frenzy, and Prodigy, who were killed by the ultimate Nimrod Power Bomb during the Hellfire Gala. They were recruited by Professor X for a secret mission and bouncing around different key temporal locations and realities past in an attempt to find a solution that just might reverse the fate of Krakoa and things that happened.

Steve Foxe about Dead X-Men: As you’ll see in Rise of Powers of X, Xavier actually recruits a small team himself and that includes Rachel Summers and Rachel’s in charge of this aspect of the mission. So, it’s Rachel who decides these five mutants are the ones who should be doing. So, she’s kind of the sixth dead X-Men even though there’s no dying involved at her path.

This [Dead X-Men] is pretty tightly interwoven with Rise of the Powers of X to the point where you will see exact scenes reflected in both, working so closely with Kieran throughout this has been really amazing. He’s a creator I look up to so much. So, it’s been very surreal these last couple months to be working so closely with him to determine how this is going to fit into Rise of the Powers of X. And he’s been so generous in reflecting plotlines and building things back and forth. I mean, even Rachel’s role in his book ended up changing when I had strong feelings about how I wanted to deploy her here. And as much as every other time I say, you don’t have to read the larger event, you can just read this. You should probably be reading both. These are some big concepts. What I can promise is that you’re going to get very character-focused work in Dead X Man. It’s really about celebrating these five and Rachel. Rachel to a lesser extent because she didn’t get squished by Nimrod. It’s about celebrating these five. It’s about celebrating the Krakoan era and looking back on it.

Steve Foxe about X-Men Infinity Unlimited: Starting in January, we are doing an arc that will actually continue all the way till summer. So rather than doing short stories, we’re actually doing one continuous story. Betsy is involved, Betsy Braddock, Captain Britain; Thunderbird, who Steve [Orlando]’s done a lot of work with is involved, and also some other fun characters are going to get looped into that; Danni Moonstar, who was just in Realm of X. So very excited to be on that. That will actually, by the end, be the longest single X-Men story I’ve worked on, because if you count the Unlimited pages, it kind of equals out to almost seven issues. So very excited to be on that with Steve, and we’re working with Phil Sevy, who’s the artist of the X-Men Unlimited arc that’s currently running, and Nick Roche, who’s done X-Men Unlimited in the past. So, they’re going to alternate on and off, and we’re going to be on that through the summer.

Steve Foxe about future projects: I actually do have a couple other even mutant related things I haven’t been announced yet. The best way I can tease that, I’ll say blue, and I’ll say purple. And that’s all I can reveal for now.

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.

Steve Foxe Talks "Dead X-Men" and their Secret Mission

Newsarama: There are big changes coming to the X-Men line in 2024, as mutantkind heads toward a new era in the wake of the fall of Krakoa. Along the way, writer Steve Foxe and a whole host of artists are introducing the Dead X-Men, a group of mutants who were killed in the fall of Krakoa, but who are now resurrected and uniting as a team.

What's it like putting together an X-Men team that doesn't revolve around the main cast of core X-Men characters? What's your philosophy with this line-up?

Foxe: The fun thing about these five is that, with the exception of Prodigy, they've all served as main-team (or close enough) X-Men before, so we've seen how they fit into an established team dynamic. But there's no elder statesman X-Man here - no Cyclops or Jean or Logan to call the shots - so this is our chance to see them on an even playing field together. I'd say Frenzy naturally falls into a “leader” position more than the others, but no one's a slack-off on this squad.

Frenzy is the steady, level-headed, driven natural leader. Jubilee brings the spunk and fire. Prodigy is the team's heart as much as its brain. Cannonball is a hero to his core, selfless and courageous. And Dazzler is a bit of a wildcard - she surprised me at times.

The one member of the team not revealed on any covers yet is Rachel Summers, most recently known as Askani. I have to choose my words carefully here so as not to spoil Kieron Gillen's intricate plans in Rise of the Powers of X and X-Men Forever, but Rachel was tasked by Xavier with putting together a team to boldly go where no mutants have gone before, and she's guiding them from afar. She's a bit like M from James Bond, if M was psychic and her head was on fire.

And of course Rachel is dating Betsy Braddock, who makes a dramatic entrance on our just-revealed third cover, wearing a costume I know a lot of Betsy fans have been eager to see back in action. My lips are sealed beyond that, but hey, we aim to please when we can!

Lucas Werneck Delights Fans with Betsy Braddock Sketch

Lucas Werneck's cover for Dead X Men #3 featuring Betsy Braddock in the fan-favorite "Disassembled" costume caused a frenzy among fans, earning widespread acclaim. Overwhelmed by the support, Werneck shared a quick sketch of Betsy in a revamped attire as a thank-you gesture, igniting further excitement among fans.

Werneck also shared the Dead X-Men #3 cover without the trade dress. Check it out:

X-Solicits: Betsy Braddock Returns in 'Dead X-Men' for Fall of X!

Marvel.com: In Jonathan Hickman’s HOUSE OF X and POWERS OF X, the dawn of Krakoa ushered in a revolutionary period of X-Men comic book storytelling. Now, the Krakoan age comes crashing down and the current group of X-creators are making sure it goes out on a high note! Betsy Braddock assists a group of fallen X-Men on their desperate mission in DEAD X-MEN!

 

DEAD X-MEN #3 (OF 4)

Written by STEVE FOXE

Art by LYNNE YOSHII, BERNARD CHANG, JAVIER PINA & DAVID BALDEÓN

Cover by LUCAS WERNECK

On Sale 3/13

Far, faraway! Rachel Summers recruited the Dead X-Men for a seemingly impossible mission…and now they’re about to discover the REAL reason behind their task. As the walls of reality start to bend, will anyone survive the revelation?!