The geek world shuddered when Marvel ditched Uncanny X-Men’s numbering and relaunched with a brand new one after the Schism event. If you’ve been reading Kieron Gillen’s new Uncanny you know why – it’s a very different book because of Cyclops’ mission – to create an Extinction team to maintain peace and protect mutants through a show of power. Captain America demonstrates his own show of force when he arrives on Utopia in Avengers Vs. X-Men #1.
“I’ll be entirely candid here: my entire run has been conceived in order to build towards AvX. I knew that was coming, and I wanted to do everything I could to increase its importance for it. You get people saying how they hate their favorite books derailed for a crossover, and I wanted to avoid that. AvX is the logical endpoint of huge chunks of what I’m doing. I sort of call the process “Steering into a crossover.” I’ve done it with most of my Marvel work — in that if you know something enormous is on the horizon, your story best veer in its direction otherwise it ends up feeling false when you do a story which does tie in. If you’re writing a shared universe book, you want it to help the book rather than hurt it. ” Gillen told Comics Newsarama in their exclusive interview.
“So, yes, it’s no accident that final arc is a team-up to defeat a string of world-level threats. It’s about seeing them together one final time before it all goes bad. It’s also about delineating the fundamental difference between the two groups. And part of me is always trying to at assume some people are only reading my book. I even try to assume that people have only read my book ever, so may not even be aware who the Avengers are. In that case, if they’re going to go to war shortly, I want to introduce them into the narrative before it happens.”
For Gillen’s entire interview here’s the Comics Newsarama link.