Marvel Knights is back in a big way! First with Spider-Man and now the X-Men. The revived line pairs independent creators with Marvel’s biggest icons for exciting new kinds of stories.
Wolverine, Rogue and Kitty Pryde star in Marvel Knights: X-Men by Brahm Revel and Cris Peter. The first issue arrives Wednesday with mutants and murder in a small town.
“I can’t tell you too much because the story is somewhat of a mystery,” Revel tells Marvel.com. “Or rather each of these two young girls [is a mystery]. I knew coming in that I wanted to invent some new characters that were blank slates and didn’t have immense histories from living in the Marvel Universe for 50 years. And since the Phoenix Force had recently been dispersed and new mutants have been popping up again, this story fit well within the current continuity. I’ll you this, they’re both young girls in bad situations and each has chosen a different way to use their new powers to deal with their problems.”
“It all starts with a murder,” Revel reveals. “The death of a mutant hangs over the story until the very end. But it’s not really a murder mystery so much as a story about how your past can come back to haunt you, and how little things that seem inconsequential can spiral out of control and have huge ramifications down the line. When you’re a teenager you lack the experience to understand that the choices you make have consequences. When you add super powers into the mix, the consequences get magnified even more. And this is exactly the reason the world needs the X-Men, to ease the passage of young mutants into adulthood.”
Revel told Marvel.com why these mutant heroes made the cut for his 5-part limited series:
“Well Wolverine was a given,” Revel says. “If I’m gonna do an X-Men story, I’m putting Wolverine in it. And as I said above, this is a story about how the past can come back to haunt you, so Wolverine made sense because he is a character with a checkered past. He’s a killer and has rage issues, yet he still identifies himself as a good guy. At a certain point he has to reconcile these two opposing identities.
“Likewise, Rogue started out as a bad guy. It was only after she absorbed Ms. Marvel’s powers and psyche that she sought out Professor X’s help. I think this still drives Rogue’s psychology to this very day. Until she could completely control them, her own powers were seen as a curse and it was her adopted powers that were seen as a blessing. It begs the question, if she had never got into that altercation with Ms. Marvel, would she still have become a ‘good guy?’
“And I wanted to use Kitty because of her long standing relationship with Wolverine. She used to be like a daughter to him, but now she’s grown up. Not too long ago she was the teenager that the X-Men were recruiting and now she’s running the school. I thought she could represent someone who’s made a successful journey through the gauntlet of adolescence to adulthood, and how her and Wolverine’s relationship has had to evolve as that’s happened.”
Marvel Knights: X-Men #1 arrives Wednesday. Hulk will star in new Marvel Knights imprint limited series later on.
By Editor