WEAPON X-MEN ORIGINS 003

More of How It Happens

So, let’s pull back the curtain once again on the upcoming WEAPON X-MEN series hitting stores in February 2025. Hell, somebody might end up finding this behind-the-scenes stuff at least mildly interesting…

The series is a team book. And, when creating a new team from the ground up, you inevitably have to come up with a suitable roster, right? And, unlike a typical solo hero title, most of the cast of a team book consists of the characters that are on that team. Now, if you’re using previously established characters, it sometimes takes a bit of effort to get official clearance on which characters you’d ideally like to use. You can never assume that you’ll get your first picks, no matter how perfect they might seem.

The main characters that appear in WEAPON X-MEN are the obvious trio of major Marvel icons: Wolverine, Deadpool and Cable. And thankfully, using those characters was never questioned by anyone.

But they were only half of the original roster that I laid out in my initial pitch.

At first, I proposed a six-man roster. Chamber was on that original list. I figured he’d be no problem to get my hands on, and that turned out to be the case. For me, Chamber represents that 90’s era of the X-Men universe as much as Cable and Deadpool do. And I said it back when I brought him into UNCANNY X-MEN twenty-four years ago… I’ve always felt that Chamber was the most visually interesting mutant character that came out of the GENERATION X series created by Scott Lobdell and Chris Bachalo. And I barely scratched the surface with him when I was writing the UNCANNY title, so getting another crack at him was certainly appealing to me, creatively speaking.

Once we got the greenlight, I rethought my cast count. I realized that the most iconic X-Men rosters tended to be a five-member team. Think about it… there were five original X-Men. Then the classic lineup during the Claremont/Byrne years on UNCANNY eventually settled down to simply Cyclops, Storm, Colossus, Nightcrawler and Wolverine. Grant’s NEW X-MEN core cast began as the quintet of Cyclops, Jean Grey, Wolverine, Beast and Emma Frost. Once an X-lineup gets any bigger than that, it seems like things start to get a little narratively unwieldy and dramatically muddled.

(Useless Comicbook Theory #274: where the X-Men’s magic number was five, the Avengers generally seemed most effective at seven-character roster)

So I lopped off the one character that was the most unlikely choice I had originally pitched (no sense in actually naming that particular character… but it was a bizarre, left-field pick, believe me). That left a single, final open slot on the roster. And I thought I’d come up with a great choice that would cause the most friction, in terms of team dynamics… a character that would undoubtedly make readers wonder what the hell this book was going to be… a real wild card on a team of wild cards…

… Sabretooth.

I thought the inclusion of one of Wolverine’s greatest foes would really set this series apart. I figured this was a slam dunk. Remember, this was May of 2023… more than a year and a half ago. Then, as that year went on, I started hearing about an upcoming storyline in the monthly WOLVERINE series, called “The Sabretooth War”. It wasn’t until I got deeper into development with Tom Brevoort that we both learned that, at the end of this “War” storyline, that Sabretooth would be effectively off the table, unavailable for anyone else to use. Because he’d be dead. So, although I spent a couple of days thinking of ways to get around something as inconvenient as comicbook death, Tom ultimately convinced me that we should move on and think of alternatives.

My next thought was Quicksilver.

I’ve always loved that character and even had vague plans to bring him into UNCANNY X-MEN back when I was writing it, because I’d always thought that the son of Magento should be an official X-Man. The symmetry of it just felt right to me. But I never thought I’d actually get him, so I didn’t even bother bringing it up to Tom.

One idea that I did broach with Tom was bringing Namor the Sub-Mariner onto the team. After all, Namor is supposed to be the “first mutant”, so it wasn’t that much of a stretch and it made some kind of contextual sense.

In addition, it seems he was briefly an X-Man about ten years ago. And he’s certainly iconic, in his own way. Tom admitted that while it was an interesting choice, the then-upcoming NAMOR series was already in the pipeline and suggested I… well, keep fishing.

Not long after, I was on the phone one day, shooting the shit with writer, Steve Orlando (who I’ve known since he was a fetus), who casually mentioned that the original Thunderbird was back in the mix, that the character had been resurrected during the Krakoa era and was walking amongst the living once again. It was a lightbulb moment, for sure. I’d always thought that Thunderbird was cool, in his limited time in the pages of the first few issues of the “all-new, all-different” X-MEN that also introduced us to Storm, Nightcrawler, Colossus and Wolverine. The Dave Cockrum-designed costume was also a favorite, really striking in its look and its color scheme. To my specific generation of comicbook readers, the death of Thunderbird -- on the team’s second mission -- is absolutely an iconic moment that helped set a certain tone for the new X-Men that still kinda resonates to this day. So the more I thought about it, the more I liked it. In fact, Thunderbird’s particular “man out of time”-style dilemma provided me with a solid emotional thruline that brought the entire first batch of issues into sharper focus.

I relayed my idea to Tom and he signed off on it. Finally, WEAPON X-MEN had a complete roster. And in a few short months, you’ll be able to judge for yourself if we made the right calls.

Joe Casey

USA