Creating new mutants is hard. For every Gambit, there’s a Maggot. Brian Michael Bendis took on the challenge of writing the X-Men just when the mutant race is booming again with new mutants.
Cyclops, Magneto, Emma Frost and Magik have been recruiting new Children of the Atom for his revolution in All-New X-Men. We’ve met healer Christopher Muse, time manipulator Eva Bell and shape-changer Benjamin Deeds. The teens are now at the covert Charles Xavier School.
Ahead of next week’s Uncanny X-Men #1 Bendis talked about the new recruits on Marvel.com. Eva, Benjamin and Christopher’s lives have suddenly changed but they’ll be looking back.
“They’ll be doing that right away. “Can I go get my stuff? Can I go talk to my mom?” A lot of Australians seem to be very happy that Eva’s from Australia. I wasn’t aware that there was such a dearth of Australian heroes. I got so much happy mail and tweets from Australian people. We will be going back to the Gold Coast in issues #2 and #3 of UNCANNY X-MEN to find out what the deal with Eva is. I like Eva a lot. I like writing her a lot. For people who liked Jessica Jones and Maria Hill, I think they’re going to get a kick of out of Eva and where’s she coming from. She has a very unique power that will cause a lot of trouble for her and the X-Men.”
Bendis confirms these new mutants are college age kids and hints at one’s power signature:
“They’re mostly in college. There’s a new one who’s young and scared out of his mind. He’s the version of mutant that I imagine if you were an X-Men fan for real, and the X-Men came and got you, you’d never stop [expletive] your pants. He has these cool powers that manifest these solid gold balls that fly out of him and smash the [expletive] out of everything and then disappear. We’re going to look at that and find out how he does that too.
This rebirth of “new” new mutants comes as the X-Men celebrate their 50th Anniversary. I enjoyed how Bendis compares the supergroup of comics to rock stars:
“There’s a group dynamic that’s holding them together. It’s a very prickly dynamic held together by an ideal. The ideal is that this race has to survive. We almost died out and there were only a couple hundred of us left. We have a chance now and we just need to hold it together. Otherwise, every punch we’ve taken and mistake we’ve made will be for nothing. All we’ve fought for and all the mistakes won’t matter.
I look at it like a rock band. If they can just hold it together for a summer, they’ll make a million dollars. It’s like Guns ‘N Roses. They just can’t get it together. They can’t get on stage together. If they got it together, they’d be the biggest band in the world. They just hate each other so much they can’t do it. This group is obviously not in that situation and Cyclops is not Axl Rose. Some people might think he is, but he’s not. I see it that way. If these guys can just hold it together, they’ll have such a great thing here. If they can get over their issues, they can do something really special. I think that idea is something a lot of people can relate to. It’s a little different from where the X-Men have been before. I think the X-Men need to be in a different place from where they were before.The X-Men need to get over all their personal [expletive] to save their race. It’s such a great, noble cause. It’s worth Cyclops taking all the [expletive] in the world from Logan and everyone else to do this right. It will be worth it if he can save these kids.All of this is building up to next fall when we have the 50th Anniversary of X-Men. I tweeted that the other day. Nick Lowe, myself, and Jason have gotten together and started to craft a very large, very X-Men related celebration that we think is worthy of this anniversary. That’s coming fast and furious and we’re very excited about that.”
For the entire interview here’s the Marvel.com link.
Uncanny X-Men #1 by Bendis and Chris Bachalo hits next week!
By Editor