DF Interview: Christos Gage unleashes a team of Wolverines who snikt their way through the Multiverse in ‘Weapon X-Men’

By Byron Brewer

In Original X-Men, you saw the Phoenix recruit the young X-Men to fix yet another time-displaced disaster. But now the threat is deadlier than ever… and it's time to call in the X-Men's big gun. He's the best there is at what he does, in every universe he does it in… and this job is too big for just one of him. Wolverines from across the Multiverse converge to take on a foe even the Phoenix fears! But with friends like Zombie Wolverine, who needs enemies?

Writer Christos Gage and artist Yildiray Çinar kick off a 4-issue action-packed epic at the House of Ideas: Weapon X-Men! Christos Gage writing means me reading… AND interviewing! Here’s what the scribe told me.

Byron Brewer: Chris, this is quite the unusual situation (not unknown when dealing with the X-Men franchise): You wrote a one-shot called The Original X-Men and now you have a limited series spinning out of that work, Weapon X-Men. You are following story after story without a feature title. Cool! So how did this very unusual writing opportunity come about?

Christos Gage: Hey, when I get a fun gig I don’t ask a lot of questions! Editor Sarah Brunstad approached me about writing these books, with the idea that the one-shot would lead to the mini from the start. The idea was always that the one-shot would involve the original X-Men, then lead to a miniseries involving X-characters from various realities, a bit like the old Exiles title. I think she thought of me because I have a reputation for knowing a lot about Marvel history… and once she was kind enough to juggle the schedule a bit so I could make the timing work, I was on board! We talked about different ideas of who could be on the multiverse-spanning team, and ultimately the concept of a team of Wolverines was just too much fun to resist.

Byron: Writing Wolverine is a bucket list item for anyone, but how do you create a book with multiple versions of the same character and yet give them (or at least some) unique voices for the reader?

Christos Gage: It’s about which versions you pick. There are certain things they all have in common, of course. But Old Man Logan is haunted by the memory of killing his fellow X-Men while in the grip of an illusion, while Earth X Logan is…well, he’s just really given up and let himself go. And Zombie Wolverine is just really, really hungry. By the way, I was a little worried that Zombie Wolverine would get old after a while, but he became my favorite character to write. He tries, he really does. He just wishes everyone could get past the whole “eating human flesh” thing. Then there’s the grizzled warrior, Weapon X from the Age of Apocalypse, who is a seasoned leader but is watching his world end, and his polar opposite in our brand new character, Jane Howlett, a female Wolverine with bone claws from the year 1909, who is pretty inexperienced for a Wolverine and literally has her whole life ahead of her…potentially a very long life. So it's not as hard to make them stand out as it would be as if you had, say, five haunted, brooding Logans from dystopian futures.

Byron: Can you recap The Original X-Men here and tell us how this LS spins out of a situation from that one-shot?

Christos Gage: Well, I encourage folks to pick it up and read it for themselves if possible…the art by Greg Land, Jay Leisten and Frank D’Armata is too pretty to miss! But for those who can’t, spoilers lurk ahead:

In the Original X-Men one-shot, the original five X-Men were plucked out of their timeline circa X-Men #23 by an alternate Phoenix. This is an older Jean Grey from a world where the Phoenix Force asked her consent to join with her and together they brought peace and safety to her world. But she has detected a grave threat to the multiverse: another version of herself from a world where Jean Grey had used the power of the Phoenix to enable her and her fellow original X-Men to conquer Earth and rule it. Phoenix herself was afraid to confront that Jean directly lest she steal the Phoenix Force from her. Her only hope was that the young X-Men could make the older versions of themselves see how they’d lost their way. The original X-Men confronted their older selves starting with Iceman and Angel and succeeded in making them understand they’d betrayed their ideals…and also that their Jean had “influenced” them along the way. Together they united the other adult team members and confronted Jean only to realize that she never really had the Phoenix Force at all. The persona of Jean Grey had been subsumed years earlier when she responded to the horror of seeing Magneto kill Professor X by shutting down Magneto’s mind. But what really happened in response to that traumatic event was the dark side of Magneto’s mind joined with the dark side of Jean’s persona to create Onslaught! In the present day, Onslaught materialized and nearly killed all the X-Men until the real Jean awoke and, even as Onslaught absorbed the mental energy of every being on Earth to make itself all-powerful, she channeled their minds to fight back, knowing the psychic feedback would destroy the world, but would deny Onslaught the power it sought. Phoenix teleported the original X-Men out at the last moment and returned them to their timeline (after removing their memories of the tragic event, at their request) before we saw that she also had Age of Apocalypse Wolverine with her, to find the weakened but still living Onslaught wherever it had hidden in the multiverse and prevent this from happening again. And they do that starting in WEAPON X-MEN #1 by assembling a team of Logans!

Byron: Tell readers some of the more familiar multiversal Wolverine variants who will be starring in this series. Will the 616 iteration of Logan be in the mix?

Christos Gage: No. For the purposes of our story, it felt like the team needed to be made up of Wolverines who were flawed somehow. Either they come from a reality that was dystopian in some way, or in Jane’s case she’s pretty inexperienced, or in Zombie Wolverine’s case he’s, y’know, dead. So I shied away from Wolverines who were strong leaders, or had their act together. The team is made up of Zombie Wolverine, Age of Apocalypse Wolverine (also known as Weapon X), Old Man Logan, Earth X Wolverine (whose healing factor seems to be malfunctioning so he’s gotten old and fat, something I couldn’t possibly relate to), and Jane Howlett in her comics debut!

Byron: Can you give us any clue at all about what the Phoenix-feared threat will be that the Wolverines will be facing?

Christos Gage: Those who have read the Original X-Men one-shot will already have a pretty strong suspicion, and they’d be right. It’s Onslaught from that book, who survived the battle that destroyed that world and fled into the multiverse. Now Onslaught – who in this reality was not the combined dark sides of Magneto and Professor X, but rather Magneto and Jean Grey – is amassing great power again and threatening other worlds. It’ll take the best there is at what they do to stop another world-ending apocalypse…or several!

Byron: Please introduce the readers to the Marvel Multiverse’s newest Wolvie, Jane Howlett! Who is she and what can she do? Did you and artist Yildiray Çinar create her?

Christos Gage: Yes, we did! It’s kind of funny how she came about. Initially I was tossing out the most random, bizarre ideas for variant Wolverines I could think of, and I suggested Scared Victorian Boy Wolverine from Astonishing X-Men. But Sarah, our editor, correctly pointed out that he’d kind of be a one note joke and wouldn’t really sustain a whole miniseries. Of course I realized she was right, but that got me thinking about a different kind of Victorian Wolverine. One that comes from a classic What If setup: What If Wolverine hadn’t fled his childhood home? And what if he was a she? That was a time when women didn’t have the right to vote, so being from the aristocracy wasn’t as privileged a position as it would have been for a man. So what we have is a young woman with the same sullen, contrary disposition we associate with Wolverine, but some of the trappings of polite society, even as she rebels against them. Kind of Lara Croft meets Wolverine, if you will. She’s been tremendous fun to write, and luckily Yildiray designed her look before the first issue script was locked, so she was completely visualized in time for the design to inform all the writing. I love the way he incorporated classic Wolverine colors and other design elements into what isn’t really a superhero costume but is still a distinctive look. And people already seem excited about Jane, so I hope they fall in love with her as much as I have!

Byron: Talk about the awesome art of Yildiray Çinar.

Christos Gage: He is so amazing. I’ve compared him to George Perez in terms of his storytelling, and that’s not a compliment I’d throw around lightly, as George was one of my all-time favorites. But Yildiray has two of the same rare and impressive qualities George Perez blew me away with: one, he can handle a large cast of characters while giving literally every single one, from the leads to the background figures, their own distinctive looks and personalities… and in our book, several of those characters are literally the same person! The other talent is character acting. It’s so clear what the characters are thinking and feeling that I often find myself cutting dialogue because it’s redundant… you already know the character feels that way from the look on their face. And that’s really hard to do on a five-panel page when there are multiple characters in each panel… and again, even more so when most of them are short, hairy Canadians! Oh, and Yildiray is terrific at action scenes. It all adds up to being able to do a lot on the page. We tried to give each issue an epic scale. If you’ve ever finished an issue of a comic and said, “wait a minute, nothing happened!” I promise that won’t be the case with Weapon X-Men.

Byron: Chris, what other projects do you have coming our way that you can discuss?

Christos Gage: I think that’s it at the moment! I’m doing quite a bit of video game work currently and as you probably know that involves both a great deal of secrecy and long lead time, so unfortunately I have to be rather enigmatic. But hey, in the meantime you get all the Wolverines you can handle! What’s not to love?

Dynamic Forces would like to thank Christos Gage for taking time out of his busy schedule to answer our questions. Weapon X-Men #1 from Marvel Comics is slated to be on sale March 6!

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