Troubled X-Men relationships

Colossus’ resurrection awoke forgotten feelings in Kitty Pryde in Joss Whedon and Marc Guggenheim’s X-Men runs, while Nightcrawler was torn between Amanda Sefton and Bloody Bess in Claremont’s Nightcrawler series.

After Grant Morrison’s New X-Men run ended in 2004, TV-series creator Joss Whedon – most notable of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame – was ready to continue writing stories with Cyclops, Emma Frost, Wolverine and Beast as the core characters, but in a brand-new volume of the Astonishing X-Men. And instead of Jean Grey, Joss Whedon brought Kitty Pride onboard. Then, in the first storyarc in Astonishing X-Men vol. 3 #1-6, Colossus was brought back from the dead to join the cast. Whedon also created the new mutants Blindfold and Armor.

The series was published bi-monthly to allow artist John Cassaday to draw the entire Josh Whedon run which ended with Astonishing X-Men vol. 3 #24 and Giant-Size Astonishing X-Men #1 in 2008. Like Grant Morrison before him, Joss Whedon came in with a Manifesto, outlining 24-odd issues of Astonishing X-Men. “This is what he’s going to do and basically what he did with a couple of tweaks along the way,” to quote Chris Claremont about Morrison’s run.

One of the things that came along to demand a tweak was the 2005 House of M limited series written by Brian Michael Bendis that reduced the world’s mutant population to 198. “I had pitched my arcs out before House of M was created and there was some dissonance reading them,” Joss Whedon revealed at a 2006 press conference. “I was like, ‘I don’t know if the things I will be referring to will matter as much to people.’ That’s part of why I’ve got such an internalized story. I’ve sort of removed myself so that I don’t clash with what’s going on. In a way, I’ve just kind of avoided the issue because, as I said, I’ve had these things worked out well in advance.”

“Basically, the biggest thing that I had to replace was Nick Fury with Maria Hill because Nick Fury’s gone underground,” Whedon continued. “He was going to be, not a huge part, but a part of the thing. There’s a scene between Abigail Brand – who’s very much a player, particularly in the second arc – and Maria Hill would have been Nick.”

“I want somebody who starts at issue #1 of Astonishing to get to issue #24 without having to make a huge calibration if they don’t know House of M.”

Fans disgruntled with Danger AI story arc
At the press conference, Marvel’s Director of Marketing John Dokes said: “I think Joss’ name (…) is really selling this book as well as the art by Cassaday. We’re looking for this book to win a lot of awards outside the comic industry as well as inside. It’s just been great (…) getting press out there about Joss and the X-Men.”

“Well, I had an interesting time with my second arc with Danger. It was not as well received as the first arc,” Joss Whedon admitted to the press. In the second arc in Astonishing X-Men vol. 3 #7-12, the X-Men’s danger room became the sentient being Danger. “A lot of people loved it; a lot of people really didn’t. While there are things in it that I think worked beautifully and stuff that I’m enormously proud of, it was interesting to look at it with a critical eye and ask, ‘What did I not give the X-Men audience?’”

“It’s similar to what I learned on Buffy the soap opera,” Whedon answered his own question. “The character stuff is much more important than the ideas I have in my head about the nature of reality and the artificial intelligence run. There was stuff in there I think was fascinating, but ultimately what people want is the X-Men. (…) Again, a lot of fans were like, ‘Fascinating concept, but where’s Scott and Emma kissing?’”

“I had planned to bring the Vision into the Danger arc since he would obviously relate to that whole concept, but then I was told he would be a disembodied voice by the time my issue came out, so it’s complicated.”

However, part of the negative fan reaction to the Danger story arc was also that fans had seen it done before when the X-Men books were relaunched in 1998 with Uncanny X-Men #360 and X-Men vol. 2 #80. Back then, writers Steve Seagle and Joe Kelly had Cerebro, the X-Men’s mutant detector, become a sentient being and an adversary to the X-Men. But, granted, Joss Whedon might not have known about that storyline, but editor Mike Marts ought to have.

Whedon tribute to Claremont and Smith’s Brood saga
At the press conference, Joss Whedon revealed he started following X-Men with #98 in 1976. “I was there for Cockrum just turning out the epic in a huge way, then Byrne stepping in and blowing our socks off. I stayed with it for a long while – for me it was a long while. I sort of disappeared a little bit before Byrne did. And I’m not mentioning who the writers were because they were all Claremont. I happened to pick it up right when Paul Smith came on board, right before “Live Free Or Die” at the end of the Brood saga which is, to me, one of the most important issues I’ve ever read, which is just the issue of them waiting to basically die (in Uncanny X-Men #165) before the big epic (in Uncanny X-Men #166). To me, there’s more Buffy in that than any comic I know because it’s just them talking about who they are and religion and sex. I was just blown away that you could do that with a comic, and I just love Paul Smith’s pencils.”

“Paul’s contribution to the X-Men is sort of immeasurable,” Chris Claremont pointed out in Comics Creators On X-Men. “I think that by this time John and Dave and I had established a safe baseline of about 275,000 copies per issue. Paul came in and within eight months we were selling 400,000 copies an issue. That was the most phenomenal year!”

In an interview that is sadly no longer on the Internet, Joss Whedon singled out the scene of Colossus and Kitty Pryde kissing in Uncanny X-Men #165 from 1983 as mind-blowing, so when he did his own take on the X-Men in space for the finale of his Astonishing X-Men vol. 3 run, he had Kitty Pryde and Colossus have sex in #21-22 before the climax of his Breakworld saga – akin to the Brood saga.

“So, I read that era pretty much until right when Romita took over in the middle of an issue which is the end of the Madelyne Pryor/Mastermind – is she really back? – saga,” Whedon continued at the press conference. “Then I was gone to a faraway land until Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely brought me back. I can’t stress enough, and I don’t think it’s been stressed enough, what an amazing run they had on that book. (…) The Morrison era was for me what absolutely brought me back to the X-Men and he gave me so much rich stuff to draw off of. It’s been a big banquet. Those are really my defining eras.”

Joss Whedon ended his run in 2008 by breaking Colossus’ heart as Kitty Pryde got lost in space in an extraterrestrial bullet that writer Matt Fraction had Magneto bring back in Uncanny X-Men #522 in 2010.

In 2023, Chris Claremont told Near Mint Condition: “I will confess that part of me is thinking if I ever was given carte blanche again I would go back and there is Kitty stuck in the bullet just flying through space and open it with: She’s trying to hold on to her sanity and that’s when Lockheed catches up with her and melts her out of the bullet which is the good news. The bad news is apparently the bullet’s gone extraterrestrial. And she has no idea where she is and Lockheed, in a sense, has no idea where they are. And how the heck do you get home? That instance can be summed up by ‘Anything Captain Marvel can do, Pryde can do better.’”

Claremont’s Nightcrawler: An X-Men Legacy
When Chris Claremont’s out-of-continuity X-Men Forever series ended in 2011, he didn’t write anything X-related again until 2014 where a new X-Men Legacy series was announced. According to Marvel Previews, it would focus on Nightcrawler and Wolverine: “Newly returned from the afterlife, veteran X-Man Kurt Wagner finds himself in a world that’s a far cry from the one he left: Professor X is dead, Cyclops is on the run, and the X-Men are divided. But determined not to let his new lease on life go to waste, Nightcrawler hits the road alongside Wolverine, eager to right some wrongs and safeguard the future mutant kind.”

“When the book was going to be a new volume of X-Men Legacy, it originally was envisioned as more of a team-up title,” Claremont told Comic Book Resources. “Since then, it’s evolved out of that into its own named title. Since this is a Nightcrawler series, the focus is far more exclusively on Nightcrawler.”

When Nightcrawler vol. 4 started coming out, plenty of X-Men guest-starred as Nightcrawler became a teacher at Wolverine’s Jean Grey School, though. By Nightcrawler vol. 4 #7, it was Wolverine’s turn to be the X-Man who was dead for a while. Jean Grey was also dead at the time, but Nightcrawler vol. 4 #7 only referenced her original death in Uncanny X-Men #137, not her second death in New X-Men #150, making it like her resurrection in X-Factor #1 never happened.

Nightcrawler had died in X-Force vol. 3 #26 written by Craig Kyle and Chris Yost during the X-Men: Second Coming crossover in 2010. He was brought back to life in Amazing X-Men #1-5 written by Jason Aaron in 2014 after which he got to star in this new Nightcrawler series.

As an aftereffect of having escaped Heaven, Nightcrawler couldn't die. He had a near-death experience in Nightcrawler vol. 4 #10 and later, in X-Men: Gold vol. 2 #8 and 17-18 written by Marc Guggenheim, Nightcrawler survived death again because Heaven wouldn't take him back, rendering him virtually unkillable. This seemed reminiscent of Claremont's plotline for Dazzler in his 2006 New Excalibur series, but her inability to die remains unexplained as detailed in The All-Different X-Men Went To Australia chapter here on the Secrets Behind The X-Men blog. Nightcrawler's "immortality" seems to have been forgotten about too, though.

Wolverine and Jean Grey in Heaven
“Doing the Nightcrawler miniseries, the X-Men had just gone up to Heaven,” Chris Claremont told a Near Mint Condition X-Mas Edition. “A) There IS Heaven and B) rescued him and brought him back to Earth. Now, he’s a practicing Roman-Catholic. Now he knows for a fact what the church teaches on faith and that drives him crazy. (…) Faith is not relevant anymore. ‘Oh, okay there is Heaven just like there is Congress.’ You don’t believe in it. It simply is.”

“So, six issues into the series, Wolverine is killed,” Claremont continued. “So, we have to have a one-issue memorial. I said, ‘Okay. Got the idea.’ So, I was gonna have Kurt go around and collect the team, and they’d all go on the top of the hill overlooking the mansion, light a fire and start telling Wolverine stories - short stories, three pagers that have been in the barn for decades - and just have a little fun. I figured I’d do about four or five of them. And hopefully gradually as the reader goes through the issue, you’d realize that each of the storytellers has one sort of kinda maybe unique thing in common. We’re talking Colossus, we’re talking Kitty, we’re talking Betsy. They’ve all died and they’ve all been resurrected. And so, the end of the story: Rachel, being a teenage brat, says, ‘Okay, time to have a raffle: How long until it’s Logan’s turn? We all died. We got better. Now it’s his turn. Whaddaya think? A year? A week? Fifty issues?’ And Kurt says, ‘No, no, no, no, no. You don’t wanna go there.’ And she’s going, ‘Why?’ And he asks, ‘Come on. you’re not thinking this through. Where is Wolverine?’ ‘He’s in Heaven.’ ‘Right. And who’s up there with him?’ And they all look kinda confused for a minute. And then suddenly the penny drops. ‘Oooh.’ *Which one of you idiots wants to go up there and tell the redhead we’re taking her boytoy back to Earth? Because he’s up there, Jean’s up there - this is their dream come true. Do you wanna break it up? Do you wanna get Phoenix mad at you?’ And that’s the punchline. They all figure, 'Ha! No, we don’t. We’ll let fate take its hand.’ And the editor felt this was an inappropriate story.”

Instead, the editor Daniel Ketchum had Marguerite Bennett plot the Wolverine memorial issue in Nightcrawler vol. 4 #7 which Chris Claremont then scripted.

 

Nightcrawler’s girl dilemma
In Nightcrawler vol. 4 #5-6 and 8-12, Nightcrawler came up against the Crimson Pirates whom Chris Claremont had introduced in Uncanny X-Men #384 and 385 and X-Men vol. 2 #104 in 2000. They were working for the slaver Tullamore Voge same as then, but there was no mention of the unresolved subplot from X-Men vol. 2 #104 about Voge keeping Nightcrawler’s old flame Princess Kymri from Excalibur #16-17 in 1989 enslaved as one of his Hounds, although the Hounds did appear in Nightcrawler vol. 4 #11-12. Apparently, Claremont felt he had closed out that old piece of X-Men continuity in X-Men: The End Book One #3 back in 2004, in which Nightcrawler had saved and married Kymri in a future. Now readers got closure to Tullamore Voge’s slave market operation.

Nightcrawler’s love in Nightcrawler vol. 4 was his old girlfriend, Amanda Sefton, but she got stuck in Heaven in Nightcrawler vol. 4 #4. “The thing with Nightcrawler is he can be totally conflicted,” Chris Claremont told Near Mint Condition. “I mean, the woman he loves, Amanda Sefton, what is she? She’s a demon sorceress. But she’s a hero, except there is a problem: She’s not the only person he loves. Because I introduced Bloody Bess. I guess one could call her the Betsy Braddock of Earth One. But more importantly, she’s a stone psychotic killer, but Nightcrawler loves her just as passionately as Amanda. Talk about a conflict.”

The Crimson Pirates member Bloody Bess had a voice that sounded familiar to Nightcrawler when they met in #6, but it was never revealed where he knew it from despite her sticking around for the rest of the series as a love interest for Nightcrawler. Possibly it was just that she was Betsy Braddock from another dimension, but that fact wasn’t revealed in the story.

“When I was writing this whole situation, Amanda was up in Heaven defending the forces of good against the forces of evil, so that left an opening for Bess,” Claremont continued to Near Mint Condition. “This is something I played with in Todd Nauck’s and my Nightcrawler series. What do you do if you find a person that you love and she’s a psychotic killer? She’ll do hero things every now and then, but at bedrock she’s crazy. Issue #12 has a discussion to that effect where Psylocke, or Betsy, (and Rachel Summers) are talking to him about it: What are you gonna do?’ And he says, ‘I have no idea. But I can’t just walk away.’ So, I kinda like that potential conflict simply because he’s a hero. He takes it seriously, so, ‘If my girlfriend is a psychotic killer, I got to find a way to either get her off the dark side or bring her to justice, but I still love her.’”

However, it never came to Nightcrawler having to choose or anything, because Nightcrawler vol. 4 got cancelled with #12, ending with Nightcrawler thinking “we’ll see what happens next” in his love life.

Abandoned ideas for Nightcrawler
Chris Claremont told Comic Book Resources that he had been wary of planning too far ahead on the Nightcrawler series: “I have some thoughts, but I’m waiting until I get a more definitive word before I actually go hog wild on it. There have been too many cases where I plan out two to three years of continuity and then walk into an editor’s office, and they decide they need a change for what they consider the good of the book or the good of the line that invalidates the whole lot. I suppose experience is a cruel teacher and this time I’m inclined to take slightly more restrained steps.”

“If the series does continue, I think it would be fun to do an Excalibur non-reunion reunion,” Claremont added. “It would be fun to do Kurt retracing some old steps and discovering that there are some elements of the reality around him that aren’t as specific as he once thought. And obviously at some point in time, he’s got to deal with the fact that his mom (Mystique) is not a nice person and is working with Sabretooth.”

When asked by Near Mint Condition if he had planned to bring Amanda Sefton back in the Nightcrawler series, Claremont answered: “Yeah! That was the whole point. It’s like, Kurt - much to his embarrassment - you know, he loves Amanda with all his heart, passionately. But she’s fighting to defend Heaven from the forces of evil and he’s still on Earth. They have a chemistry and yes, she is psychotic and she is evil and she is dangerous, but he can’t help himself. And she can’t either.”

After Nightcrawler vol. 4 ended in 2015, it would take until 2018 before Claremont wrote anything X-related again.

Classic X-Men with a Claremont taste
In 2017, the creator of the DC Universe TV-series Arrow, Marc Guggenheim, was brought in for yet another X-Men relaunch, beginning with X-Men: Prime #1 and continuing into a bi-weekly X-Men: Gold vol. 2 series that would last for 36 issues, ending in 2018 before Jonathan Hickman came onboard and moved the X-Men from the Xavier Institute to Krakoa. Guggenheim’s run was “conceived as a love letter” to Chris Claremont’s classic run on Uncanny X-Men which for Guggenheim had begun with #139 where Kitty Pryde joined the team. This he revealed in an afterword to the final issue of X-Men: Gold vol. 2. So, like Joss Whedon had done, Marc Guggenheim put Kitty Pryde front and center as leader of the Gold team.

“I suspect Joss and I have something in common: We both have huge crushes on Kitty Pryde and great affection for the character,” Guggenheim told ComicsXF. “My point of inspiration here is John Byrne’s run on Fantastic Four. What I admired was him using the back-to-basics approach as a Trojan Horse to introduce new and interesting concepts. (…) Going backward to go forward, retrenching the book in a classic, nostalgic style and using that as a foundation to build and add new elements. (…) It’s totally a balance. There are some readers who will crave new ideas, which they should because books should constantly be evolving, but at the same time you have a lot of readers who don’t want too much change – they are nostalgic for the characters as they remember them.”

“The issues I’ve been re-reading the most are the first Claremont run and the Joss Whedon run. That being said, I am a fan of the Joe Kelly/Steve Seagle years as well as Scott Lobdell’s work and Matt Fraction’s work,” he continued. In his own run, Kitty Pryde would lead a team of Storm, Colossus, Nightcrawler, Old Man Logan (an elder Wolverine from a future reality come back in time to replace the temporarily dead Wolverine) and Rachel Summers, the latter now codenamed Prestige.

“I love Forge and I just turned in some outlines that have him involved, but the outlines haven’t been approved yet, so wait and see,” Guggenheim told Comicbook.com. Apparently, those outlines weren't approved because Forge didn’t appear in the series.

Kitty Pryde's three Peters
Kitty Pryde was coming in from appearing as Peter Quill a.k.a. Star-Lord’s love interest in Guardians of the Galaxy by Brian Michael Bendis, but Marc Guggenheim stated to Comicbook that he was starting X-Men: Gold with “a pretty clean slate. I’m definitely not looking to continue any storylines. It really was designed so that you should be able to have not read X-Men for a number of years, or at all, and hit the ground running with issue one.”

Now Kitty Pryde was back on a team of X-Men that had her past lover from Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men run, Peter Rasputin a.k.a. Colossus, on it. “Honestly, I would say it’s going to be awkward,” Guggenheim told Comicbook. “There’s a lot of water under the bridge with these two characters and it’s one of the things I was most excited about when coming on to the book. I knew I wanted Kitty because she’s my favorite X-Man, but once you sort of have Kitty, I really, really want to have Peter in the book as well so that I could play that romantic tension and that complex romantic history. We’ll see where things lead.”

Things led all the way to the altar before Kitty had a change of heart in X-Men: Gold vol. 2 #30, but not before an X-Men: The Wedding Special was released in 2018 featuring a story by the Nightcrawler vol. 4 team of Chris Claremont and Todd Nauck.

Claremont’s story in X-Men: The Wedding Special was about Kitty Pryde reflecting on her life and the men in her life after Colossus broke her heart back in Uncanny X-Men #183 in 1984 by telling her he had fallen in love with the alien Zsaji during the Secret Wars. However, Claremont conveniently left out Pete Wisdom which Kitty Pryde got involved with while Warren Ellis wrote Excalibur #83-103. The couple even had their own 3-issue limited series, Pryde and Wisdom, in 1996.

Chris Claremont told Cartoonist Kayfabe: “I was never more upset than I was when Warren Ellis wanted to have Kitty and Pete Wisdom have shenanigans and was told that was not possible; she’s barely 16. Even in England, that’s illegal. At which point we suddenly discovered that she’s now in her early middle-twenties.”

“I was so pissed off that Kitty had suddenly become 23 so she could jump into bed with Pete Wisdom,” Claremont reminisced to Near Mint Condition. “Aside from the fact that if you age Kitty 5-6 years, then you gotta age everybody 5-6 years. Which means Franklin (Richards) is now in middle school. And if you haven’t done that, Marvel continuity goes out the window.”

“What pissed me off the most was all the stories that could have been told about her growing up suddenly being cast away just so she could have a fuck with Pete Wisdom? Eeew!” Claremont added to Cartoonist Kayfabe. “And the fact that we’ll never be able to see the moment where she actually loses it. Who is it with? Pete Wisdom? Eeew! And when I came back, being an arrogant prat, I figured, I got her in this four-part crossover with Wolverine (in Wolverine vol. 2 #125-128 from 1998). I’ll establish she’s 16. Well, that didn’t work. We got more mail saying, ‘How could you do this? How can she be 16 here and fucking Pete Wisdom there?’”

“At which point I said, ‘Okay fine. I can’t fix it. We’re stuck with this.” Claremont concluded to Near Mint Condition.

To be fair, Claremont also left out Star-Lord, just writing about characters from his own stories in X-Men: The Wedding Special, like Alasdhair Kinross from the 1999 X-Men: True Friends 3-issue miniseries.

Sources:
Cartoonist Kayfabe: Chris Claremont Talks Comics, YouTube, 2021

Comic Book Resources: John Whedon On His Return to Astonishing X-Men, 19 January 2006
Tom DeFalco: Comics Creators On X-Men, Titan Books, April 2006
Zachary Jenkins: Marc Guggenheim Is Going Backward To Move Forward With X-Men Gold, ComicsXF, 5 April 2017
Jamie Lovett: Setting The New X-Men Gold Standard With Marc Guggenheim, Comicbook.com, 5 September 2017
Near Mint Condition: Chris Claremont Interview! YouTube, 22 September 2020
Near Mint Condition: Chris Claremont Interview! X-Mas Edition! YouTube, 17 December 2020
Near Mint Condition: Chris Claremont 2023 Interview! YouTube, 14 December 2023
Near Mint Condition: Chris Claremont Interview! YouTube, 2023
Dave Richards: Claremont Bamfs Back To The X-Men With Nightcrawler, Comic Book Resources, 20 March 2024

X-Men deaths devalued by resurrection

Grant Morrison and Chuck Austen’s simultaneous New X-Men and Uncanny X-Men runs offered a big unsolved mystery surrounding a Magneto impostor’s death and some abandoned plots.

When the new Editor-In-Chief of Marvel Comics, Joe Quesada, moved Chris Claremont from writing Uncanny X-Men and X-Men vol. 2 to writing X-Treme X-Men instead in 2001, former X-Men writer Scott Lobdell was brought back in to write both Uncanny X-Men and X-Men vol. 2 for a few months before the brand new writers’ runs could get started. Besides finding a cure for the Legacy Virus in Uncanny X-Men #390, Scott Lobdell also brought readers up to speed about Kitty Pryde in X-Men vol. 2 #110 and made good on his old idea of having Northstar become an X-Man in Uncanny X-Men #392. And finally, he ended the threat of Magneto as ruler of Genosha by having Wolverine stab Magneto in X-Men vol. 2 #113. With these loose ends settled, the stage was set for Grant Morrison starting as writer with X-Men vol. 2 #114 and in honor of the occasion, the series was retitled New X-Men for the duration of his run which lasted until New X-Men #154 in 2004.

“I was thinking of everything that had been done before and trying to do an updated version of it,” Grant Morrison admitted in Comics Creators On X-Men. His run was inspired by the classic X-Men stories Chris Claremont made with Dave Cockrum and John Byrne. Morrison practically used the same chronological order as they had for appearances by the Sentinels, the Shi’Ar with Princess Lilandra and her Imperial Guard, Jean Grey becoming Phoenix, the Hellfire Club, Days Of Future Past, Magneto and even some new mutants thrown in as he gave it all his own modern spin. And when he seemingly killed Magneto off again in New X-Men #150, it happened almost exactly as in X-Men vol. 2 #113, only this time Magneto lost his head. How for subsequent writers to bring the X-Men’s archvillain back from that?

Magneto posed as Xorn or was it vice versa?
“I remember the Neal Adams run on X-Men, the one that ended with Magneto in the Savage Land,” Grant Morrison told Comics Creators On X-Men. “We had this white-haired guy walking around for the whole issue (in X-Men #62) and then we discovered he was Magneto. It was one of the greatest reveals in the history of comics. When I took over the book, I wanted to do a basic cliffhanger like the Neal Adams one, where you suddenly realize that this character you’ve known all along is actually a master villain.”

Grant Morrison’s Magneto story became that he had infiltrated the X-Men by posing as Xorn, a mutant the X-Men liberated from a prison in China in New X-Men Annual 2001. In New X-Men #146, Xorn revealed himself as Magneto, saying he built that prison himself to complete the ruse. In #147, Magneto explained to one of his followers that Xorn wasn’t real, but a role he had played. Now he was Magneto.

However, when Magneto was on the verge of defeat by the X-Men in #150, he reverted to the role of Xorn, with Xorn finally insisting that he wasn’t Xorn, but Magneto before he then killed Phoenix and got killed himself by Wolverine. Now, no one stays dead in the Marvel Universe, and with the identity problems Magneto had suffered at the end, Grant Morrison had left a door for subsequent writers to revive him. Chuck Austen, who had been writing Uncanny X-Men while Morrison wrote New X-Men, moved over to New X-Men to pick up the pieces. New X-Men became X-Men vol. 2 again with #157 and Austen got the dubious honor of solving the Magneto/Xorn mess. Who had impersonated who?

It gets even more convoluted
“Originally, (in Uncanny X-Men #442-443) Wolverine climbed up to the top of the Magneto sculpture and pissed on it, but they wouldn’t let me do it. It was a little too far, really (… but) Wolverine would be so angry because Magneto murdered our God Queen Jean Grey,” Chuck Austen told Power Of X-Men. “(Editor) Mike (Marts) and I talked about it. He said, ‘Well, you know, something else that people always wanna see is a great funeral, so let’s have all the mutants show up on Genosha to have a funeral for Magneto.’ And my conversation with Mike wound up being the conversation between Xavier and Wolverine where I was saying, ‘You know what, dude, what Grant did is turn Magneto into Osama Bin Laden. He killed all of these people. He flipped a bridge. He did all of this crazy stuff. People died left and right. That’s horrific.’ (…) Mike said, ‘Let’s discuss this and we’ll get back to you.’ So, the decision was to take Xorn back the other way and make it so that he was never really Magneto - he was Xorn. He said, ‘How would you do that?’ I said, ‘Well, Xorn is supposed to have a star for a brain, maybe he had a twin brother who had a black hole for a brain?’ So, that’s kind of what we did. So that way Xorn was actually the mass murderer who killed all of those people.”

Austen’s team of X-Men went to China in X-Men vol. 2 #157-160 and encountered the twin Xorn, Shen Xorn. In X-Men vol. 2 #162, Emma Frost ascertained that Shen Xorn had a twin brother, Kuan-Yin Xorn whose body Magneto had appropriated for his last stand against the X-Men. This would explain why Magneto had trouble separating himself from his Xorn masquerade at the end, assuming Kuan-Yin Xorn’s mind was still in his body, vying for control with the possessor, Magneto.

However, Chuck Austen didn’t leave it at that but also suggested that the Magneto who had appropriated Kuan-Yi Xorn’s now dead body, wasn’t the real Magneto. Shen Xorn sensed a hateful and malevolent presence within the X-Men’s midst who was “seeking to turn others” against them. So, now Kuan-Yi Xorn had been brainwashed by this evil presence to think he was Magneto, and his identity problems at the end must have then been attempts to fight the brainwashing before he got killed by Wolverine.

Was Xorn controlled by Cassandra Nova?
Havok was dating the Xavier Institute for Higher Learning’s school nurse Annie who had a son named Carter. When Annie and Carter left the school in X-Men vol. 2 #164, Carter had an imaginary friend riding along in the car. The friend was a “she” only Carter could see, and most likely this was the evil presence Shen Xorn had sensed among the X-Men and who had turned Kuan-Yin Xorn into thinking he was Magneto.

Many readers assumed that Carter’s imaginary friend, “the evil presence”, was Professor X’s evil twin Cassandra Nova. “It was actually what I intended, and she had been drawn in there fully - there wasn’t just the eyes. They thought about it more after they got it and took out most of the rest of her,” Chuck Austen told Power Of X-Men. “It’s funny, because she was not there originally. Originally, Carter was in the back, sort of air-juggling metallic objects, the idea being that he had Magneto’s powers - something in that direction. Mike (Marts) and I talked about it, and he said, ‘Well, you know we wanna kinda bring Cassandra Nova back at some point because she’s such a great villain. How about instead of doing that, we have Carter sitting on one side and Cassandra Nova as a kind of a ghost is sitting next to him?’ And I said, ‘Look, they’re your characters, I’m leaving the book. You can do whatever you want.’ He said, ‘Yeah, let’s do that.’ I saw the artwork. (Artist) Sal (Larroca) had put her fully in, in the seat. She was sitting there with this really evil, sinister smile looking right at Carter. And then when the book came out, it was just the eyes.”

With Chuck Austen ending his X-Men run and the exit of Annie and Carter, this was also the last readers saw of Carter’s imaginary friend who had made Xorn run rampant in New York and killed Jean Grey. Cassandra Nova would show up in Astonishing X-Men vol. 3 by Joss Whedon which started in 2004. There Cassandra Nova was psychically influencing Emma Frost from her prison at the X-Mansion to get Emma to free her, so maybe Cassandra Nova just shifted her focus from Carter to Emma Frost, but this has never been explained.

Devaluing Morrison’s Magneto
When Grant Morrison was done writing New X-Men he had basically ruined the series by having Cyclops committing adultery, killing Jean Grey and "Magneto" and leaving Xavier’s school as a ruin. ”It’s funny, but the only death threat I ever got was from a Jean Grey fan. He threatened to kill me because I had destroyed Jean Grey,” Morrison revealed in Comics Creators On X-Men.

“The frustrating aspect of the current publishing environment is that you can’t allow things to evolve and percolate anymore. It happens too often where storylines and characters that have been introduced are forgotten as soon as a new creative team takes over,” Claremont lamented in Comics Creators On X-Men. “Guys come in with agendas. Grant Morrison came in with a Manifesto that outlined thirty-odd issues of New X-Men. This is what he’s going to do and basically what he did with a couple of tweaks along the way. The problem is that at the end of the thirty-odd issues, the canon was left in ruins. Grant doesn’t care. He’s off writing Superman. Someone else comes in and does his twelve issues before moving on. Everything is done in neat, confined boxes that are great in self-contained compilations. For me, the X-Men was an exercise in telling the life story of these characters. The stories and characters were always growing, always evolving. Now you have all these guys coming in for specifically defined periods and they all start from scratch and reboot from zero all over again. Do you try and pick up where the previous guy left off or what?”

The real Magneto showed up in Chris Claremont’s 2004 Excalibur series which took place in Genosha. This would be his first appearance since X-Men vol. 2 #113. Grant Morrison’s Magneto was called “an impostor.” This didn’t invalidate Morrison’s run if you only read that, but in the overall X-Men canon it did. Like reviving Jean Grey for X-Factor #1 devalued her death in X-Men #137. Chuck Austen had an opinion about that as reported in the Jean Grey's Return In X-Factor chapter here on the Secrets Behind The X-Men blog, concluding among other things that “If you kill someone, (readers) say, ‘Oh, they’ll be back soon.’"

Colossus, who sacrificed himself in Uncanny X-Men #390 in 2001 to cure the Legacy Virus, would come back in Astonishing X-Men vol. 3 in 2004. His sister Magik, who had seemingly become a younger version of herself in the 1989 Inferno crossover and died of the Legacy Virus in Uncanny X-Men #303 in 1993, returned in New X-Men vol. 2 #37 in 2007. Later Cable would die and come back. Nightcrawler too. So, when Jean Grey died again in Morrison’s run, no one expected her to stay dead this time either and eventually she did come back again (in the 2018 Phoenix Resurrection: The Return Of Jean Grey miniseries). And certainly, no one expected Morrison would be allowed by Marvel Comics to kill off the X-Men’s arch-nemesis Magneto.

Way too many mutants
“The X-Men represent the next generation,” Grant Morrison philosophized in Comics Creators On X-Men. “The next generation always frighten the older generation, because basically, our children are our replacements. We’re going to die and they’re getting to carry on. For me, who’s a young guy and a punk rocker of the ‘70s, the X-Men are the kids who are going to change the world. That’s why the rest of the world hated them, feared them and wanted to stop them. That’s the angle I came up with – it’s the children versus the adults.”

“I wanted to get back to the whole idea of a world which hated and feared them,” Morrison continued. “The world would only hate them if it looked like their numbers were growing. I wanted mutants to be like any other new generation, and want their own music, their own shops and their own fashion designers. I thought that would increase the tension level of the whole human-versus-mutant struggle.”

“There became too damn many of them,” Chuck Austen commented to News@rama. “Holy COW, are there a lot of mutants running around.”

As previously reported in the Changing X-Men Directions chapter here on the Secrets Behind The X-Men blog, Chris Claremont thought so too. “I think there are more mutants in the Marvel Universe than there are other superheroes right now,” he said. “It's hard to be the downtrodden minority when you outnumber everyone else two-to-one.” And another former X-Men writer, Scott Lobdell agreed, telling Comics Creators On X-Men: “I’ve looked at the books, and you just see 40 completely silly mutant students going to class and we don’t know their names, and we’re not supposed to know their names - we’re not really supposed to care about them. They’re just wallpaper. What was always fascinating to me about the X-Men was their uniqueness. I always liked the X-Men when mutants were rare, I always believed there were maybe a hundred mutants on the entire planet. Every once in a while, the X-Men would stumble across another one. (…) Mutants are so prevalent now that parents don’t want their kids listening to mutant rap music. It just leaves me scratching my head. You look at the books nowadays and it’s like somebody goes in to order at Burger King and there are tentacles coming off the head of the person behind the counter. It just took everything that was rare and unique about the book and about the X-Men Universe and made it somehow pedestrian. My understanding is that the Scarlet Witch changed all that with the House of M storyline. Hopefully that will allow the creators on the books to get back to telling exciting and poignant stories about the rare and unique characters that populate the mutant slice of the Marvel Universe.”

House Of M became the “mutant massacre” event John Byrne dreamt of back in 1991 because he thought there were too many mutants even back then. Published 14 years later, in 2005, the House of M event limited series written by Brian Michael Bendis had the Scarlet Witch utter, “No more mutants” in a moment of distress and the Marvel Universe’s mutant population was immediately reduced to the 198 who were protected from her spell. Of course, the X-Men remained, but all the “wallpaper mutants” were gone.

 

Abandoned Morrison plots
Grant Morrison told Comics Creators On X-Men that because of 9/11, he had to downplay his Afghani mutant Dust’s part in New X-Men. “After 9/11 I moved away from the original story that I had planned to do with her. I had some really good powers for her, but the real-world situation had become so volatile that I just didn’t want to touch her after 9/11. The world had just got too serious. There’s a point at which you can comment on things and a point at which the world becomes too big for comics. These issues mean so much to certain people that it’s best to just shut up. I didn’t want to be responsible for anyone getting any death threats.”

The Dust character was one of the 198 mutants who survived House of M, though. She continued to appear in various X-Men titles afterwards.

Another of Morrison’s plots never went anywhere beyond his run. “The basic idea I wanted to go with is that mankind is in trouble, reversing the last 40 years of the X-Men where it’s the mutants who were in trouble,” Morrison told the Wizard X-Men Spectacular 2001. “You don’t quite know the truth behind it until, like, the fifth issue, but they’ve discovered the extinction gene inside humanity. It’s there, the programmed destroyer of that species. Humankind will be extinct within four generations, and suddenly they all go, ‘Now what?” With that, the war between man and mutants heats up outrageously.”

When New X-Men started, Morrison didn’t wait for the fifth issue to reveal that bombshell, leading right off with it in #114, but the notion that humanity would be extinct after four generations wasn’t touched upon by subsequent X-Men writers. Instead, mutant kind seemed headed for extinction after House of M.

“I disagreed fundamentally with New X-Men on a lot of different levels; except I couldn’t stop reading it. It was really good,” Chris Claremont told Near Mint Condition. “It shows me something that I, perhaps, felt that I either missed or ignored or disagreed with, but I can’t stop reading it. That is what I would want as a reader: An irresistible story with visions of characters, perhaps, that I’ve created, or written or identified with that shows me pieces of their reality that I hadn’t considered and makes me wanna come back for more.”

“But it was grounded in a fundamental mistake, to me, which is making the X-Men public,” Claremont told in a Near Mint Condition X-Mas edition interview. “It took away the one thing that made them unique in the Marvel pantheon: That they were ghosts. No one knew who they were or where to find them. Yeah, a couple of guys did. The Avengers on occasion and some members of the deep state, but for the most part they were ghosts. And that was cool. You couldn’t say that about the Avengers, the Defenders, nobody else. That made them unique. When Jean came out and made the school public, they weren’t unique. They were just like everybody else which, to my eye, diminished them. But that being said, Grant’s run was, for me, irresistible.” 

Abandoned Austen plots
“I was a big fan of the Claremont/Cockrum, Claremont/Byrne era, so in a way I wanted to kinda go back in that direction a little bit.” Chuck Austen told the Greymalkin Lane podcast. “I wanted Colossus, and I wanted Kitty Pryde and I wanted a lot of those characters, but none of them were available.”

When Austen started writing Uncanny X-Men with #410 in 2002, he told Comic World News: “My first question when I took over was, ‘What happened to Krakoa? Is he still floating around out there in space? Did he re-enter the atmosphere?’ There is a dangling plot thread that goes back to the very re-introduction of the X-Men. Come forward from there and you trip over at least two an issue. Why was Mystique being chased by those villagers? How could she toss her own child over a waterfall? Does anyone remember there were elves in issue #102? What was that all about and what happened to them? And the biggest dangler of all... Who’s the third Summers brother? Some of those will be answered during my run. All of them, if sales go up and I stick around.”

But Austen’s run only lasted for a couple of years, and he only got to answer the Mystique questions. Writer Jonathan Hickman had the X-Men move to Krakoa in 2019, while a third Summers brother would get revealed twice as reported in the Post-Age of Apocalypse chapter here on the Secrets Behind The X-Men blog, leaving only the elves unaccounted for. They did appear in Generation X #8 by Scott Lobdell in 1995, though.

Chuck Austen also had plans to bring back Reverend William Stryker from the 1982 X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills graphic novel written by Chris Claremont, but so did Chris Claremont himself in the pages of X-Treme X-Men, both wanting to tie in with the second X-Men movie which featured a version of the character. So, Austen had to change his story.

“It all kicks off with Uncanny X-Men #423-424, the two-issue arc called Holy War that stars Nightcrawler and ties into the release of X2,” Austen told Wizard X-Men Special 2003. “The story deals with religious themes and has Kurt going up against the Church of Humanity. We were going to pit him against William Stryker, but when Marvel asked Chris to do God Loves, Man Kills II, he asked me if I would mind not using him so he could use him in his sequel. So, we changed it over from Stryker to the Church of Humanity, and the story basically brings to a close Kurt’s associations with the priesthood.”

Nightcrawler’s association with the priesthood had begun in X-Men vol. 2 #100 by Claremont, so with Stryker appearing in the X-Treme X-Men #25-30 story arc entitled God Loves, Man Kills II it was a give and take.

Austen’s plans for Husk and Stacy X
Chuck Austen told the Greymalkin Lane podcast; “I once asked (editor) Mike Marts, ‘What happens to all of Husk’s husks after she sheds her skin?’ And he just kinda looks at me and goes, ‘I don’t know.’ I said, ‘Well, can I write a story where there’s a guy who goes around collecting them? He’s saving them. He’s got some of them pinned on his walls and stuff.’ He goes, ‘Eew, that’s super creepy. Yeah, you can do that.’ So, I was leading towards a story where she winds up getting kidnapped by this guy. He just wants her to keep changing. He wants to see what he can do with her husks. He’s collecting them, he’s wearing them, and it’s really super weird and disturbing and creepy and it’s getting to that really dangerous place.”

“And Warren doesn’t know where she is and he can’t find her and he’s desperate to get ahold of her, so he goes to her mother’s house and then Sam shows up and starts kicking his ass. He’s like, ‘Who the hell do you think you are? Screwing my sister in front of my mother (in Uncanny X-Men #440)! Who are you?’ And he can’t stop Sam from beating him up long enough to explain to him, *I’m looking for Paige right now and you need to stop doing this and help me.’ He finally gets to the point where he hears him, but he still doesn’t like Warren. So, they have to go off and find his sister and in the process of finding her, he sees that he has a hatred of rich guys who take advantage of poor people. He has allowed that emotion to sort of inform him that, ‘You don’t really love my sister, and you shamed her and you’re doing all of this stuff.’ And then when they finally find Paige and he sees the two of them together, he realizes, ‘Oh hell, they really do love each other.’ That was the story I wanted to get to eventually.”

“Another thing I was setting up were Stacy X winds up leaving and then, later on, she comes back in a way that nobody ever expects. There was going to be a Mr. Sinister storyline where he really does go Josef Mengele and he’s got a camp. It’s a hellhole. One of the things he does is to keep testing the mutants to see what their powers can do and how far he can push them. So, he’s got Warren staked out on the ground in the elements just to see how long he can survive without food in the open elements. And there’s this lizard woman that keeps coming to him at night to feed him and give him water to try to take care of him against Sinister’s wishes. And then as the series goes on, she winds up saving his life and we find out that it was Stacy X who had gone through a secondary mutation.”

Austen’s plans for Northstar and Havok
“Northstar WILL find true love,” Austen promised in Wizard X-Men Special 2003:.”It’s going to take him awhile, because he has to go through some changes to be ready for a serious relationship but stay tuned!”

However, after Austen’s run ended in 2004, Northstar would only appear sporadically in the X-books, so readers had to stay tuned all the way to Uncanny X-Men #508 in 2009 where writer Matt Fraction had Northstar rejoin the X-Men complete with a never-before-seen boyfriend in tow.

As for bringing in Havok who had been starring in a now cancelled Mutant X series set in an alternate universe, Chuck Austen told News@rama: “I wanted to get him back to our universe and have him and Polaris hook-up and have a baby. But what if it wasn’t THEIR baby? How could that change things? Of course, the plans have evolved a lot since then, and who knows how they’re going to play out.”

They sure did play out differently with the introduction of Nurse Annie and her son Carter and basically ended back at where Austen picked up for Havok and Polaris, leaving them as he found them for the next writer.

Chuck Austen’s run was considered controversial at the time because of the emphasis on soap opera over action. “There were some very strongly supported X-fan websites, and they would ask me to come and post things there and it was just dog pile,” Austen told the Greymalkin Lane podcast. “I got death threats. I got people threatening the lives of my children. It was grim. (…) And Chris Claremont used to refer to me, ‘Hey, you’re the most hated man in comics.’ I said, ‘Yeah, thanks. I know.’”

Sources:
Tom DeFalco: Comics Creators On X-Men, April 2006
Caleb Gerard: From Pencils to Plots – A Conversation with Chuck Austen, Comic World News, 2002
Greymalkin Lane the podcast: Interview with Chuck Austen, RedCircle, 28 October 2022
Richard Ho: X-tra X-tra!, Wizard X-Men Special, 2003
Christopher Lawrence: Bloody Good, Wizard X-Men Spectacular, 2001
Near Mint Condition: Chris Claremont Interview! X-Mas Edition! YouTube, 17 December 2020

Near Mint Condition: Chris Claremont 2023 interview! YouTube, 14 December 2023

Power of X-Men: Interview with X-Men Writer Chuck Austen, YouTube, 2023
Alex Segura Jr.: Austen Uncanny, News@rama, 2003

Updates! - New secrets behind the X-Men revealed

Even though no new chapters have been added since 2012, the Secrets Behind The X-Men blog is doing well. In the years since, it has accumulated more than 300.000 hits and is still getting between 25 and 100 hits every day - sometimes more. So I decided to finally give it an overhaul, adding updates to several of the chapters/articles on the blog. A couple of the updates have been snuck in since 2023, but I added them to this overview anyway, so fans who haven’t read the blog in recent years will be advised to them.

In Banshee: Reserve X-Man: A John Byrne quote from Comics Creators On X-Men was added about Chris Claremont originally intending Professor X as the father of Proteus.

In Wolverine’s Secret Origin: In the part about Sabretooth and the Maruaders, the Wolverine: Deep Cut limited series by Chris Claremont from 2024 got referenced for Wolverine inadvertently freeing the originals of Mr. Sinister’s cloned Marauders.

In Nightcrawler’s Forbidden Origin: X-Men Blue: Origins #1 from 2023 got referenced at the end for making Mystique and Destiny Nightcrawler’s parents after all.

In Storm's Untold Stories: A quote from Chris Claremont about Dazzler originally being conceived as an "anti-Storm" black singer was added.

In The New Mutants Averted X-Men West: A reference was made to the 2021 Chris Claremont Anniversary Special at the end of the chapter. 

In Jean Grey’s Return In X-Factor: A few 2023 interview quotes from Bob Layton about how the return of Jean Grey came about instead of Dazzler joining and why he quit working on X-Factor were added. A long quote from Chuck Austen about the long-term consequences of Jean Grey’s return was added. I also added quotes from Bob Harras from Comics Creators On X-Men about why Louise Simonson was chosen as new writer and expanded Louise Simonson’s comments about the same subject from her chapter in Comics Creators On X-Men. And the Wolverine: Deep Cut limited series by Chris Claremont from 2024 got referenced for Mr. Sinister’s orphanage where Cyclops grew up getting blown up. Finally, I added a quote from Fabian Nicieza about writing the wedding issue between Cyclops and Jean Grey and Bob Harras changing it.

In Cosmic Comedy with Excalibur: A 2024 interview quote from Alan Davis about why he initially quit drawing the series while Chris Claremont was writing it was added.

In Strip-mining Wolverine: Wolverine vol. 3 #50-55 from 2007 were referenced twice, first for Romolus being behind the Weapon X project instead of Apocalypse, and then for Silver Fox having both been killed by Sabretooth in the wild west and turning up alive as a Hydra agent.

In X-Men And X-Factor United:  The whole second half of the chapter with Claremont telling about his plans for Wolverine as an assassin of the Hand if he had continued as writer was expanded with a handful of quotes from a Near Mint Condition interview - about Wolverine's fight with Lady Deathstrike, about his body expunging the adamantium after Colossus rips his claws out, about Jean Grey wanting to save him and becoming the Hand's assassin instead and about Mark Millar stealing his plot idea. Also, he thought Magneto would make a more interesting headmaster than Professor X.

In Upstarts, High-Lords and Armageddon: I added John Byrne quotes from Wizard #3 about his ideas for the X-Men while he was scripting the books in 1991, including a new mutant massacre.

In Post-Age of Apocalypse: The part about Adam X as the third Summers brother was expanded to now reference X-Men Legends #1 and 2 from 2021. The part about Senator Kelly’s telepathic aide in Uncanny X-Men by Scott Lobdell was expanded with info about the aide from Larry Hama’s Wolverine run. And I added a quote from Fabian Nicieza about why he left writing X-Men and X-Force in 1995 towards the end of the chapter.

In Taking The X-Men to The Extreme: Mentions of “the end of Claremont’s association with the X-Men” were deleted as he would return to write limited series and one-shots with X-Men characters after the X-Men Forever series ended in 2011. For instance, the 2023 X-Treme X-Men vol. 2 miniseries which solved the 2003 sub-plot of Alice Tremaine’s pet Sentinel. Also, mention of the New Mutants Forever miniseries was added at the end of the chapter.

AND… I’m writing a new chapter covering Grant Morrison’s run on New X-Men and Chuck Austen’s attempt to explain why it wasn’t the real Magneto Morrison killed off - and that's just for starters. Expect this new chapter sometime soon in the year 2026. And I'm already planning another chapter beyond that as well, which will cover Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men and Claremont's 2014 Nightcrawler series among other things.

MEANWHILE: Don't miss the X-Men related articles on the Superhero Lover blog:

Northstar: The First Openly Gay Superhero

Shatterstar And Rictor: A Bromance Turned Into A Sexy Relationship

Iceman Dated Human, Mutant And Otherworldly Girls Before Dating Guys