Posted in: Comics, Comics Publishers, Current News, Marvel Comics, X-Men | Tagged: disney, tom brevoort, Wokeness

Tom Brevoort On Big Plans, "Wokeness", And Disney's Input Into X-Men

This year will see Marvel Executive Editor and SVP Tom Brevoort take over Group editorship of the X-Men comic books from Jordan D White,

This year will see Marvel Executive Editor and SVP Tom Brevoort take over Group editorship of the X-Men comic books from Jordan D White, marking the end of the Jonathan Hickman Krakoan Age of the X-Men comics, which began in 2019. Tom Brevoort posted to his Substack newsletter about upcoming plans for the X-Men titles, and that it was only this week that Marvel Comics as a whole learned what they are. "Perhaps my favorite comment was when I was asked how long we'd been working on all of this stuff, and I told the questioner "since August". And if nothing else, they were impressed with the sheer amount of concepts and material that had been generated in that time. But that's the world of comic books for you: we move nimbly from idea to execution, far swifter than is possible in the worlds of merchandise, consumer products, television, film or animation."

It's true, and with TV budgets increasing, the time between creation and broadcast is increasing and increasing of late. Comics can turn on a dime. And just as the Jonathan Hickman run had a very strong visual style courtesy of Tom Muller, it looks like this idea of a consistent visual structure will be continuing, Tom tells us "I also spent a small portion of this week working out the dedicated X-Family Bullpen Bulletins-style page that we'll be running once we hit the ground. And we got in the colors on a couple of our initial covers for our launch titles, as we've started to pull together materials for the Previews catalog. I have to say, doing initial mock-ups, once you put that X-MEN logo on there, sonuvagun if it doesn't become X-MEN for real somehow."

And it looks like we will be all seeing what's going down very soon. "I've had folks scratching around hoping to pick up some inside information for a while now, and everybody's going to begin to see this stuff very soon (sooner than I'd like given that I wish we were deeper into production on everything.) So the whole endeavor is starting to feel more real…. But this week was the tipping point. Before now, this was all theoretical. Today, we're in the X-MEN business for real."

But before the From The Ashes launch in July, they have some other X-Men books aside from the Free Comic Book Day intro to put out. The Blood Hunt one-shot spinoffs., Jubilee, MAgik, Laura Kinney The Wolverine and Psylocke. "These books all exist in a sort of "no man's land" state, in that they're neither Krakoa-era releases nor legitimately part of our initial release set-up. But because they're largely in our hands, they won't be disposable or throw-away, we'll take the opportunity where possible to seed some ideas and elements for the stuff that is to come."

And then there was all the fuss about the wokeness of the X-Men, which kicked off partly as a result of promos for X-Men '97 on Disney+. "I think the ill-defined accusation of being "woke" is nonsense, and I tend to turn off and tune out whenever it comes up in almost any context. The people who are using it, and who brandish it like a sword to attack whatever they don't like, tend to be mostly, well, cretins. They aren't making a good faith argument, they've just come up with an all-purpose term, an infinitely adaptable scarlet letter that they can hang on anything they don't like for any reason. That all laid out, I'll tell you what I said previously on social media when a version of this question came up: for X-MEN, the message is the concept. This is a book about oppressed outsiders, each a minority of one for all that they share the X-gene and a commonality of purpose, who are hated and feared because they are different and who have to constantly struggle to find acceptance within a society that does not understand them and wishes that they would just go away. Every X-MEN comic book published since 1963 would is about these themes to one degree or another. Without them, it wouldn't be X-MEN. So while our primary objective is always going to be to entertain and to thrill, this is always going to be a prevalent stratum in every X-MEN story."

As regarding what is coming in the X-Men comics, with the X-Men '97 animated series and Disney+ in mind, "The one thing I can promise you is that everything is going to change. Some of those changes you will like, and others you will not. That's the way it goes. Some may seem regressive to some people while they feel like a return to the essence of certain characters for others. And some people will be unhappy at the elements of development from the past five years that stay in place, or that move forward in unexpected ways. This is the Marvel Universe, and every story is built upon the foundation of all of the stories that came before it. Everything can't stay the same forever, but neither can it simply revert back to 1992 or 1980 or whenever as though the intervening time never happened."

And as for corporate interference, "to be clear, nobody at Disney has said word one to me about wanting or needing the X-Men to be presented in any particular way. As I related at the top, most of those people were utterly unaware of what our plans were until this past week, when I walked them through everything. I know that people love to pin the blame on gigantic faceless corporations, but if you wind up hating everything that we do, that's going to come down the the choices that I and my team and my creators made and will make, not some evil edict from secret, shadowy bad guys. It will be this way because we made it this way, no other reason."

I can hear the tin foil hats rustling already…

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