Interview: X-Babies

How is it you came to work on “X-Babies”?

The short version is that a while back Jacob Chabot

(artist on X-BABIES) and I pitched a Spider-Ham

mini-series. At the time the character was on ice, as it

were, so it was a no go. More recently we re-pitched that

to another editor (the first one had since left), Nick Lowe, who explained that Spider-Ham was now being used by another office...and then asked if we had any ideas for the X-Babies. I gave it some thought, read up on the X-Babies a bit, and put together a story pitch that got the go-ahead and here we are.

How did you choose the team of X-Men you use in this series?

We wanted to simplify things. To my mind the series, and the X-Babies for that matter, are like a Saturday morning cartoon-esque take on the X-Men, so I wanted iconic characters and personalities. And this team of Cyclops, Storm, Wolverine, Kitty Pryde, Colossus, Rogue and Nightcrawler hit a lot of those marks. Distinct personalities, cool powers, neat visuals, and pretty well established relationships as far as X-lore goes. That, and for the most part it’s the X-Babies team from the original Art Adams story.

   Why is it that some characters are in older costume

  designs and some newer?

  We started, again, from the original team and with a few

  exceptions stuck to the “classic” costumes. The idea was to

  tell a more - I don’t want to say timeless, but less “of a

  specific era” - type of story. So, and I can’t exactly speak for

  Jacob here, it was a matter of picking those looks that were

  iconic. Wolverine in brown, Cyclops with the skullcap,

  Nightcrawler’s traditional threats...those are clasic looks.

  With the others, they’ve had so many various costumes and

  looks I think it was just a case of which one’s the

  coolest/clearest/most fun to draw. And as distinctive as

  Storm with her mohawk is, the look Jacob went with seems

  more...universal, if that makes sense?

  You have also included several Star Comics characters in

  this story, why did you choose to do this?

  The choice to include characters from the old Star Comics

  line has everything to do with the story we’re telling. In my

  head it went like this: I came up with a story concept, started to flesh it out a bit, and then boom, it struck me that those characters would be PERFECT for it. So I included them in the initial pitch and Marvel really took to it, which was very exciting because (a) I didn’t know how many people remembered that stuff and (b) if they’d want to revisit that long defunct line.

Do you think they fit in well with the X-Babies?

They fit in well with this story. And I think once the context of it all is revealed people will understand why. I mean, I hope they do. I’m excited for readers to see exactly what we’re doing because since the initial announcement there’s been a lot of speculation and guessing games as to the why, how, and what of bringing these characters back. And they’ve almost all been quite off in their assumptions.

But in the course of the four issues I think people will get it...and maybe even be pleasantly surprised by what we’ve done.