I was thrilled to see two New Mutants in the lineup of the upcoming Avengers relaunch. Jonathan Hickman welcomes Cannonball and Sunspot to his massive roster that’s still be revealed. Marvel Executive Editor Tom Brevoort tells Comics Newsarama why Sam and Roberto are on board.
“The real answer to that is at least trifold. We’ve talked about this a little bit going into Marvel NOW! — we’re making a concerted effort to erase the invisible fence that exists around the world of X-Men. By the nature of those books, and it goes back 20-25 years at this point, the X-Men, while they exist in the Marvel Universe proper, tend to sit in their own corner a lot. We’re actively looking not to make everything the same, but to erase those boundaries; erase that feeling that it’s strange or weird when an X-Men character shows up in a non-X-Men book, and vice versa.
In the same sort of way that in the adjectiveless X-Men book they’ve been doing a lot of work to try and get the X-Men out interacting with other heroes in the Marvel Universe, and fighting villains that are not just the same core of X-Men mutant villains that they’ve always battled, we’re going to be trying to do the same sort of thing in a more global sense. It’s not like we’re going to be forcing X-Men or X-Men villains into Spider-Man, or whatever, but we’re trying to make it a little easier if there’s a Spider-Man story to be told that involves some aspect of the X-Men, for people to feel like, “Yeah, that’s easy.” It’s like using anybody else. It’s all one place and one Marvel Universe. So the fact that we’re bringing in some other characters from that corner just serves to underline and reinforce that a little bit.
It also sort of shows that the movement taken in Uncanny Avengers and the motivation for that team is not simply a token outreach. The impel that will drive the world to have a more comingled Avengers and mutant and non-mutant set-up is not limited to one crew of folks. Plus, as usual, we wanted to bring some new faces in. Jonathan wanted to bring in characters that he was interested in and likes, and he really loves Cannonball and Sunspot. It’s good to have some relatively younger characters in the Avengers mix, that always makes for a good dynamic. They are a good two-hander comedy act in the way of Ben and Johnny or Ben and Spidey over in the FF books. It just puts them on a different playing level. Plus, they’re storied enough characters now — they go back to 1982 — that they feel legitimate as Avengers. It’s a funny thing, and I really didn’t codify it even for myself quite until Brian was doing New Avengers, but once characters have been around in the Marvel Universe a certain amount of time — it’s a vague amount, there’s no set time, it’s just a feeling — you put them in the Avengers, and they feel legitimate. Luke Cage being an Avenger, nobody really blinked at that. He goes back to the ’70s, he’s a quote-unquote “real” Marvel character. He’s not a Johnny Come Lately or a fly-by-night or a new fangled idea. He’s real Marvel. Spider-Woman is real Marvel. Iron Fist is real Marvel. And at this point, Cannonball and Sunspot are real Marvel. You see them there, and you go, “It’s interesting, it’s different, it’s odd, I’m not used to seeing them hanging out with those people” — but they don’t feel like they haven’t earned their place. They’re still youthful characters in relation to the other characters around them, but they’re storied enough that you can look at them standing in the midst of all of those other guys and go, “Yeah, OK, I buy it.”
Brevoort addresses concerns over the blending of X-Men and Avengers.
“First of all, I think the fear that having mutant characters appearing in Avengers or other books is going to water everything down or destroy the X-Men is a baseless fear. It’s a fear that stems from literally just fear itself. “You’re going to break this thing that I love by mixing it up with this other stuff that I don’t care as much about.”
“The premise of X-Men is that it’s a book about a demographic. It’s a book about these people, and their struggle of their existence. They wake up at a certain point and they have wings, or they have fur all over their bodies, and they have to deal with that, and adjust to that, and that’s the world they live in. In the same sort of way that Spider-Man being on the Avengers didn’t mean the average Spider-Man adventure was about him rocketing to the moon to fight cosmic bad guys over the Infinity Gauntlet, having X-Men in the Avengers doesn’t mean that every X-Men story is now going to be an Avengers story.
“In some ways, it may hopefully mean the focus of X-Men stories can be more concretely about what that series is about, what that premise is, and the ongoing soap opera of those character relationships, and dealing with one another, and dealing with being part of this particular minority who’s hated and feared by a world that doesn’t understand them. Those themes always work for the X-Men, and they’re really the heart of the X-Men. The fact that the X-books sort of became segregated; that I don’t think had anything really to do with the heart of their appeal. That was just something that happened, and then everybody kind of got used to it, and it’s “the way things are, therefore, it’s the way we like it.” But I don’t believe there’s any real relationship between the books staying to themselves, and that is why people like them. I think people liked them why they didn’t, I think people liked it was just one comic book, and it was just done really well, and people dug the characters and dug the conflicts that they were doing through — and the soap opera, and the romance, and the life or death struggles. I think all of that stuff can, should, and hopefully will be maintained on the X-books going forward. Certainly Brian’s not coming on X-Men to take a half-hearted stab at doing great X-Men stories.”
I have posted before that New Mutants are like the Teen Titans and Cannonball is like Nightwing. In the real world these younger heroes would take on the leadership roles and become the big iconic heroes of their respective universes.
This is comic books – Cyclops, Storm or Wolverine will always be the X-Men leader so I’m excited to see Sam shine as one of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes and represent the mutant race on the Avengers.
By Editor