Posted in: Comics, Marvel Comics | Tagged: al ewing, jonathan hickman, krakoa, moira mactaggert, moira x, x-men

Al Ewing Was Originally Going To Write Moira Mactaggert X-Men Comic

Published Thu, 06 Jan 2022 08:57:10 -0600

Last updated Sat, 08 Jan 2022 19:47:11 -0600

Jonathan Hickman was talking to the Xplain The X-Men podcast on the occasional of their 150th podcast, and the publication of his final X-Men comic book with Inferno #4. And he had lots to say – including his plans at Marvel Comics for Al Ewing. British 2000AD writer who has been mining Marvel Comics continuity in the Ultimates, Avengers, and now Defenders titles. Al Ewing has also been writing the SWORD comic book series as part of the Krakoan X-Men line and is now lined up for the X-Men Red series, with the very unpregnant Storm on Mars, or Arakko as it is now called. But was originally brought in by Jonathan Hickman to write the title we have heard called Moira X. Even though it didn't happen.

That's how we got Al into the office, I seduced him with "Al, come do this Moira book" and he was like "I don't know" and then he thought about it and all of it started to click for him. All of that changed though of course when it became clear that I was leaving, and so we pushed all that stuff into a box that blows up a little bit in Inferno, but it blows up a lot more later.

It does blow up rather, does it not?

Al Ewing Was Originally Going To Write Moria Mactaggert X-Men Comic — X-Men Inferno #4

As for why we used Moira, it needed to be someone who we didn't know was a mutant, and it needed to be a power set that would allow us to explain why they were scheming as hard as they were, why they wanted to go to the ends that we were going to take them, what is it with this fascination of always building a nation? It's failed so many times before, why do you keep trying to do it? Because we feel like that's a solution, that that would work on the generational timeline, and I just love the trial and error of trying to figure it out. It also explains the big reason why she got the Legacy Virus. I think that's the biggest tell I've ever seen in my entire life, and I know that Chris [Claremont] didn't feel that way. I know that he wrote around it, I know that the reason why narratively you do it is to humanize it, and not mutinize it, and to say it affects all of us and not just mutants. I'm sure that people pushed up against that pretty hard, but I also thought it worked with why Xavier has always been the way that he's been. It's almost like he's breaking bad, he always goes a little bit too far and he's always pushing it in a way that is completely contrary to his position and it just kind of all clicked as a story. Of course it doesn't work 100% because it's a retcon and there's plenty of issues where I'm sure that it really rubs incorrectly, but sometimes you have to make radical changes whenever you're dealing with that kind of that kind of strata in the continuity and we made a choice, but Iloved her as the idea of it being her, as her. Not being a human but pretending to be a human and actually wanting to be a human, being the motivation for why she became an antagonist and protagonist in the background.

There's been so much talk over the history of X-Men of of creating a third voice, a third perspective to the Charles/Magneto dichotomy there and it feels like this is where we in some ways finally got that what we needed. Something that was just outside that simple binary that was like "no, no, this is much bigger than either of you are thinking about right now". That's the idea behind the Council, I felt like there were voices that, if you took the mutants and you removed death, and therefore the ultimate version of danger, they would begin to build a culture. I thought that there would be a lot of questions that would come from a lot of really logical places, and that's why I made the choices of who sits on the Council. Some of them are deals with the devil and some of them are are pragmatic decisions. Others were bartered and traded for people who wanted to become powerful, just like Charles and Magneto are, and now we're in a position where it's shifting even more and it will continue to shift until it reaches the apex version of the most dramatic storytelling possible."