Playback:stl: Starting
in January, Cullen Bunn has teamed up with artist Greg Land to navigate the new
Uncanny X-Men lineup consisting of Magneto, Sabretooth, Archangel, M, Psylocke,
Fantomex, and Mystique. Choosing to continue the Uncanny X-Men title and then
give it to a team that consists of the less-than-nice mutants in the Marvel
universe was, in my opinion, a bold move, and the first issue of Uncanny X-Men
definitely delivers on the hard image that Bunn describes during our
conversation
PLAYBACK:stl: Having come back into comics a year or
so ago, it was mind-blowing, to me, that Magneto had his own solo title. How
difficult has it been to write Magneto in a group title after writing him as a
solo title?
Bunn: It is definitely a change of pace to write Magneto as
part of an ensemble cast. For 21 issues, he was my sole focus in a book that I
intentionally left most guest stars out of. It would have been easy to bring in
guests that had shared a spotlight with Magneto, but I wanted it to be very,
very focused on him. So, it is—I don’t want to say it’s been a challenge, but
there has definitely been some adjustment needed because my tendency, still, is
to want this to be a Magneto book and I need to rein that in a bit to make sure
that I’m giving all the other characters some time to shine as well. So when
people read Uncanny X-Men, I think it feels like there will be moments that
feel like they’re still reading a Magneto solo book, but at the same time I
hope there will be moments where they will see Psylocke get as much attention,
and Monet get as much attention, and Sabretooth get as much attention—they’ll
come at different times in the book. I have to focus on giving all of these
characters their moments to shine.
You definitely have quite the ensemble here.
Yeah, it’s a weird group.
All of these characters aren’t good guys—they have
their occasional moments. How difficult is it to navigate those shades of grey
when you’re planning out the things they’re going to be dealing with?
The shades of grey weren’t that difficult for me. I
have a mission statement in mind for these characters that will be revealed in
the next five to six issues. I’m more focused on adhering to that mission
statement and giving these characters a goal that they can be focused on, and they’re
going to handle it in the way they handle things. It may be a little more
hardline than you’re used to with Uncanny X-Men. Within the team, we have
different opinions on how things should be handled: some characters are more
merciless than others and will cause friction in the group, and that’s fun to
play with. In the end, it’s not that difficult because I have the mission
statement in mind. This is a tough group of characters, so finding things that
are going to challenge them, that’s a little more difficult. Any one of those
characters is probably a formidable opponent in any situation, so when you put
them all together, they’re a pretty tough group of hardasses.
For sure. I remember reading the names of all the
mutants under this title and thinking, “What is that going to look like?”
To some degree, some of the team will be formed right
off the bat, in the first issue. We’ve seen all of these characters together,
but the way the rest of the team comes together will be a little different and
will not be immediate. You won’t open the first issue and see all seven of
these characters working together in the beginning. In the first issue, we’re
going to see a few of them who have started working together, and then other
characters will be sort of fed into the series—and in ways that people will not
expect.
This seems to be a trend across the All-New
All-Different teams: the team is on the cover, but not necessarily in the first
issue.
Definitely. I know that in Extraordinary X-Men, that
first arc is all about that team coming together and in All-New X-Men, it’s a
little different—the team is together, but we’re still seeing that team coming
up with their driving force. Then, in Uncanny, we’re seeing the team together
and how the other characters come in. It’s not going to be a typical
recruitment drive.
I don’t see that working very well.
Right.
Do you feel like there’s an extra set of pressure for
delivery when writing under the Uncanny X-Men title because that is the
flagship X-Men title?
Yeah. It’s kind of intimidating and I’m honored to be
a part of Uncanny X-Men because it was important to me when I was growing up
and is important to me now, as far as superhero comics are concerned. There was
a lot of discussion on titles for this book and it was always going to be an
X-Men title, although a lot of people said that it was obviously an X-Force
book – and that’s not the case. I think once you see the team in action and see
the adventures they’re going on that it’s a different kind of book than what
you’ve seen with X-Force in the past. It was always going to be X-Men, but we
went back and forth with the adjectives and what the final title would be, and
I was really pushing and hoping for Uncanny X-Men. I’m super excited that’s the
case.
Yeah, I imagine that must be really awesome. Did you
always want to be a comic book writer when you grew up?
I always wanted to tell stories, since I was very
young. I wish I still had the comic book I drew about monsters attacking cities
when I was pre-kindergarten. I remember working on this comic.
Wow.
I’ve been writing since I was very young. When I was
in fourth and fifth grade, I did a comic that came out weekly that I wrote and
drew, and it was sort of a science fiction/superhero comic. That I wrote for a
couple of years and would handout to my friends, and yeah—I’ve loved comics.
So, yeah, I guess you could say that it’s something that has been with me since
forever.
That is so awesome. So Magneto’s been through a lot
lately, from what I’ve been able to read in the X-Men storylines. How do you
see this new team interacting with the other X-Men teams in a crossover
situation with the All-New All-Different roster shake-ups?
Well, if they were to crossover, I think it would be a
very volatile meeting. It’s tough and you will see, within my first arc, what
some of the other X-Men teams think about what Magneto is doing. I wouldn’t
call it a team-to-team meeting, but the readers will get a view of what the
other X-Men think and really what sets this team apart from them. But, if we
got into a crossover event, I think—at least with some members of the other
teams—I think it would be pretty volatile. But with that said, I think even
within the Uncanny X-Men team itself, some of the members are going to be
pretty volatile with each other. When you look at a character like Psylocke and
Sabretooth, one of their first encounters involved Sabretooth trying to
viciously kill Psylocke. So I think there are histories between these
characters and they’re definitely not a group that that is going to be doing
trust falls with each other.
[laughs.]
There’s definitely some animosity between these
characters. We’ve got Sabretooth and Psylocke, and Psylocke and Fantomex also
have some kind of history between them that’s not going to make them best
friends anytime soon. Mystique is a whole ‘nother hornet’s nest that is going
to be jumping right into the mix of it. So, this team’s got to survive each
other first, and then maybe they can encounter some of the other teams.
Yeah, I feel like Magneto, Sabretooth, Mystique, and
Fantomex would work okay together, but then you chose to throw Psylocke in
there and then—
Psylocke and Monet both seem sort of out of place in
this group.
For sure.
Keep in mind that eight months have passed in the
comic book world since the last storyline. The entire Marvel universe is
jumping eight months into the future. So, a lot of what’s happened in that
eight months will inform why this team is willing to work together. What I
think is interesting about it, is that Sabretooth is the moral compass of the
team, as much as he’s been one of the most ghastly villains in the Marvel
Universe. A couple months ago, through some magical act, he was inverted so
that his personality switched and now he’s sort of on a quest for redemption,
and now he’s definitely the guy who’s like, “No, no, let’s not kill anybody.”
So Sabretooth might be trying to calm some of these other members down.
That’s going to be really interesting to read.
Yeah, it’s a strange setup, when you think about it.
Sabretooth might be the most heroic of these characters.
You’re definitely in trouble if Sabretooth is your
moral compass.
Right, right.
So, do you feel like, as a writer, it’s difficult to
jump around between all of these titles? You’ve written Sinestro, Magneto, and
some Deadpool, and now Drax, as well. These are all very different characters.
It can get a little dicey, every now and again. I
think when I was writing the Magneto solo and the Sinestro solo it was the most
difficult. I always had to keep my eye on the prize and do whatever I could to
make these two books as different as possible. Sometimes it got really weird—it
was never intentional, but there were things that were similar. I had an arc
where Magneto was dealing with Polaris, his daughter, and there’s a lot of
father-daughter tension between the two, but in Sinestro, Sinestro has been
dealing with his daughter since the first issue and there’s some tension
between the two of them, too. So, I had to, in some cases, lean into the
differences between the two characters a little more and a little harder than I
would have normally. For the most part, it’s nice to work on these different
stories. When working on a story like Uncanny X-Men that has a serious
plotline, it’s nice to go to a book like Drax, where we kind of rely on some
humor and a big sense of fun in that series. Switching between the books can be
a good palette cleanser. Or, if I get stuck on a storyline for a Deadpool story,
switching gears and working on the Uncanny X-Men storyline will sometimes
loosen up those roadblocks.
That makes sense. On an unrelated note, who is your
favorite mutant?
[Laughs.] My favorite mutant would have to be Rachel
Grey. She’s been around for quite a while now, but she’s not an A-Lister, I
guess. I like her backstory, where she first appeared kind of knocked me on my
butt because it was an interesting story. She’s from the future where mutants
have been enslaved and all but completely slaughtered, and she’s come back in
time. She just has such a crazy backstory. She’s a super interesting character
to me, so she’s probably my favorite X-Man and then maybe Nightcrawler, as a
close second. And that was tough for me, when I was putting together my team. I
definitely wanted to put Rachel Grey on the team and I had some ideas for doing
so, but in the end I decided that I’d be better off saving that character until
the moment’s right to bring her into the book, instead of trying to force the
story to work around her. That’s not to say I won’t ever get my moment to have
Rachel Grey as a member of the Uncanny X-Men because, you know, the X-Men have
a long history of the team going through lots and lots of changes—the team is
definitely fluid. While I have stories that I want to tell with all of the
characters that are on the team right now, I want to honor that tradition of a
fluid team roster.
As someone who dabbles in fanfiction, I feel like it’s
always a struggle to write things that involve Jean Grey, who is my favorite
mutant. Do you feel like you could comfortably write Rachel?
That is the toughest part. You have to separate the
fan and the writer. I think I could because I’m always kind of—this is going to
sound terrible: I’m always cruelest to the characters I like the most. So the
biggest danger is that Rachel would just be tormented.
[laughs] Well, that’s kind of a Grey tradition.
That’s true. In some ways, if she were to join the
team, I’d have the same kind of challenge that I have with Magneto. Personally,
I’d want it to be The Rachel Grey Show, but I would have to make sure that I
didn’t turn it into a book that was solely about Rachel Grey.
That would be an interesting book.
I went through a lot of teams when I was planning this
book. I basically listed every mutant character in a notebook and then started
putting together teams that might be interesting. At one point, I had Rachel
Grey and Nate Grey on the same team—alternate timeline members of the Grey
family—and I may have even had Cable on that team. So, it was like the
Grey-family X-Men.
[laughs] At that point, you may as well add Bendis’
Jean Grey, just to be good.
Right? There were some very strange team formations
that I wanted to make work and to some degree, just because I’m a fan of those
characters. But, again, I had to force myself to focus on the team that would
tell the best story, for now.
Great, now I’m going to be watching for Rachel Grey.
I know, right? When’s she showing up?
Alright, last question: what is your favorite part
about being a comic book author?
Well, writing can be a very solitary job and it can be
very lonely, but there’s a couple of benefits that comics, in particular, give
to the writer. One is that it is a very collaborative project: you’re working
with an editor, an artist, a color artist, a letterer who is lettering the
books, and you’re working with a lot of other people so you don’t necessarily
feel like you’re working in a vacuum. The other part, from a completely
ego-selfish position, is that there is a sense of immediate gratification: I
finish a comic and in a couple of months it’s out on the shelf, and readers are
reading it. That’s not something you get when you’re writing, for instance, a
novel that can take years to come out. In this case, I write a comic and it
comes out, and readers are interacting with me and people are telling me what
they think, and there’s something very satisfying about that for me. | Catherine Bathe
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