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

Tom Brevoort On What Went Wrong With X-Men And Krakoa

Marvel Executive Vice President and new X-Men Group Editor Tom Brevoort is back from San Diego Comic-Con and is talking X-Men and Krakoa.

Marvel Executive Vice President and new X-Men Group Editor Tom Brevoort is back from San Diego Comic-Con and has been sharing his moments on his Substack newsletter, including drinking in the same room as Harrison Ford. But he has also been answering questions about taking over the X-Men line at Marvel. Such as one from reader Levi, on whether or not the X-Men will kill now.

"Between your philosophy on X-Force no longer being allowed to be a kill squad and the fact that you immediately retconned Xavier's murders at the end of Krakoa, a pattern is starting to emerge. Do you intend to make your tenure on the X-Men less morally gray than they've been written as for the last 45 years? Do you intend to present them as more plainly heroic? Do they X-heroes now have a no-kill code similar to the Avengers or Fantastic Four?"

Tom Brevoort answers thus:

"My philosophy boils down to this, Levi: I don't think that the X-Men should be casual or gleeful killers. While they have certainly been in situations where lethal force was called for and appropriate over the years, I don't think that this should be their default setting. And one of my big complaints about the end of the Orchis War was in how readily and even joyfully some of the X-Men murdered their foes. That's fine for some characters—nobody is going to question Wolverine killing a bunch of people (though I feel that even he has certain rules of engagement which he will honorably try to follow). But seeing Nightcrawler teleport a couple of hapless Orchis goons into deep space and leave them to die just felt wildly out of character and wrong to me."

From X-Men: Fall Of The House Of X #2 by Gerry Duggan and Lucas Werneck, towards the end of the Krakoan Age of X-Men.

"If our heroes are going to be heroes, then they have to be held to a higher standard than that. We said it a lot back in DEATHLOK thirty-plus years ago: you've got to do what's right, not what's easiest. I'm sure that we'll have plenty of moral grey area that we can explore, but I do think that the days when the X-Men would casually throw around lethal force and laugh about it thereafter are over now."

I mean, damn, Kitty Pryde…

No more of that now, it seems. While Callie asked,

"Tom, I keep hearing about how the point of this new line of X-Books is meant to have 'something for everyone,' as you felt like Krakoa didn't have wide enough appeal. I'm just wondering if you have any context of the early krakoa era, as it's been said pretty explicitly by JDW/Hickman that the point of the initial krakoa launch was to have at least one book that would appeal to everyone."

And Tom Brevoort laid out the way he saw it.

"That may have been the point, Callie, and even what was laid out in those early books. And I don't really want to disparage any of it. But what I can tell you is that I'm far from the only person who felt that all of the X-Titles during the end portion of that era tended to slosh together a little bit, and all of them seemed to revolve around Krakoa business—as they sort of had to, given the set-up. So we're working to try to remedy that."

The new Uncanny X-Men #1 from Gail Simone and David Lopez is out tomorrow. Yes it has a QR Code. No, it doesn't work yet.

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