Tuesday Q&A: Rick Remender

Marvel.com: We caught up with the busy Remender and piled on the questions until we learned all we could about his plans for Avengers and X-Men alike.

Marvel.com: Segueing over to the X-side of the fence, what can you say about the new member joining X-Force in UNCANNY X-FORCE #27 and #28?

Remender: Well it’s something that we saw Grant Morrison touch upon in his last arc, with the evolution of E.V.A. becoming her own person, and I would put a big Spoiler Warning over this: If you’ve read UNCANNY X-FORCE #27, then you know that Fantomex takes the hit. It was something that Grant had set up as happening in his future story and I thought that it would be nice to respect that and actually show it happen. Beyond that, I also wanted Fantomex to take the hit because this is going to be a very Wolverine-centric arc. All the characters have had a lot of spotlight time in this, but Wolverine has not had a lot of personal stuff to deal with. And here he is now where the methodology of X-Force and what they’ve done with Evan, and then Fantomex cloning and growing a new Evan, have left Wolverine in a bit of a spot where he’s got this student of his who’s Apocalypse. And this is because of Fantomex, and now Fantomex is not there. Fantomex is off the picture so he’s dumped this in Wolverine’s lap to deal with.

Beyond that, we’ve revealed that the new leader of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants is Daken, and this is somebody who’s got a lot of resentment against his father, as well as members like Sabretooth and Mystique, and they’ve taken Evan and they plan on using The Shadow King to warp the kid’s mind to use him as their own personal Apocalypse. So the evolution of E.V.A. comes out of the death of Fantomex and her character will be developed as we move forward.

Marvel.com: What makes them the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants? Is revenge their basic mission?

Remender: Well I like the idea of just leaning into the evil aspect of it, and it is revenge, and power. They don’t have any relatable motives other than revenge and power, and I like the simplicity of that. They’ve all got personal contacts, every member of the Brotherhood has a personal grudge against one of the members of the X-Force, and their goal is to basically take this Apocalypse [clone] and to use him to kill them; when you’ve got your own pet Apocalypse nobody can really come messing with you all that much.

You’ve also got in Daken somebody who’s been leaning toward becoming a bad guy. Going back to his origin and being raised by Romulus and who he is, he sees his father as a fraud. He sees his father as a charlatan. This guy is a savage who kills and he dresses up in frilly super hero costumes to make it okay, and he sees that as weakness. He’s leaning completely into his savage nature, but bubbling underneath that is a kid who sees his dad has a school to help mutants, who has taken in people like Quentin Quire and this kid Evan who is Apocalypse, but he didn’t get an invitation to come join. His father has never extended a hand to him to come be a part of the school or to learn to be a better man. He’s given him a lot of passes. For how bad Daken is Wolverine always seems to give him a pass, but he never offered that inclusion into his world. So I guess the theme that I’m exploring there is how far a son will go to earn his father’s respect, even going so far as to kill him to earn it.

Marvel.com: A lot of evil’s going on with you! Masters of Evil, Brotherhood of Evil Mutants…any team-up between those two groups coming?

Remender: That’s definitely not going to happen now, but there is the [upcoming] UNCANNY AVENGERS and my SECRET AVENGERS. They cross pollinate a bit. You’ve got things like Father who was introduced in X-Force, Fantomex’s mother and Psylocke’s dad who are involved with Father in creating the Descendants so there is interconnectivity there.

Marvel.com: What is the “Final Execution” as referred to in September’s UNCANNY X-FORCE #31?

Remender: Well, I don’t want to say who all is going to be a part of being executed. It’s a big arc for Wolverine, and it’s something that [editor] Nick Lowe and I spent a lot of time talking about on how we can actually incite change, to grow him, to develop him in a way that’s maybe we haven’t seen in a while. That is where UNCANNY X-FORCE then bleeds over into UNCANNY AVENGERS. Those two books have a lot of connective tissue. I would say in UNCANNY AVENGERS, 50% stems from AvX and 50% stems from the events of the “Final Execution” arc in UNCANNY X-FORCE.

Wolverine’s state of mind, who he is, where he’s at, and what his purpose is in the UNCANNY AVENGERS is very clearly defined in the events of both books. So it’s something that sort of naturally grew. The idea for UNCANNY AVENGERS came to me from all of that, from “Oh, well this and this and this makes sense if you do this.” So the events of “Final Execution” are going to shatter a lot of lives, and I’m getting to the point of what I’ve been doing with the nature/nurture debate and all of the father and son stuff that we’ve been seeing throughout the series. It gets to the point of how it affects these characters moving forward in a way that helps grow them so that they’re not in any way stagnant.

Marvel.com: Is there an inclination for you, having two titles like SECRET AVENGERS and UNCANNY X-FORCE, to draw common threads between them?

Remender: You want to feel like these people share a universe, and I work really closely with Kieron Gillen and Jason Aaron to make our X-books have those threads that continue one through the other. I think it’s important to try and do that when you can if there [are] natural places for it.

But the interconnectivity shouldn’t feel like you have to read one to get the other. I always try to make sure that things are defined enough in their own books. If you didn’t read UNCANNY X-FORCE and you didn’t read the Deathlok arc and get to know Father or see Lady Deathstrike in #5.1 and get an idea for the coming robot revolution she was talking about, that stuff will be completely defined in SECRET AVENGERS. So you don’t have to read that. But if you do read it, you’ll get to see these characters bouncing around the universe a little bit and it makes them feel more cohesive, I think.