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

Tom Brevoort Saw X-Force As "The Krakoa Mossad" In His X-Men Plans

Marvel's X-Men Group Editor and SVP Tom Brevoort saw X-Force as "The Krakoa Mossad" in his original plans... but then things changed a bit.

In his most recent Substack, Marvel Executive Vice President Tom Brevoort revealed his first e-mail he sent to then-X-Men Group Editor editor Jordan White, after a brainstorming session between the two about how to lay out a new X-Line in the aftermath of the end of the Krakoa era. This came before David Buckley offered the X-Men Group Editor role at Marvel Comics to Tom Brevoort, with Tom Brevoort commenting, "Possibly, this memo was one of the reasons why I was handed the job."

• X-MEN – Primary heroic super hero team. Focused on universal situations whether they specifically involve mutants or not.
• UNCANNY X-MEN – Secondary heroic super hero team. Philosophically at odds with X-Men. Focused primarily on mutant situations.
• School X-MEN – Kitty and new players recruit new mutants and train them in the use of their powers. Wear modified school uniforms ala New Mutants or Generation X. This book effectively is NEW MUTANTS but it could use a stronger X-centric title.
• X-FORCE – The Krakoa Mossad, clinging to the idea and ideals of their destroyed homeland and taking the fight to its enemies.
• X-FACTOR – Government-affiliated mutant squad. Freedom Force. If integration is the goal, then these are the most integrated heroes.
• WOLVERINE – Wolverine as a solo player. Pick him up living in remote cabin in Canada, where he's brought back into the fight by somebody?
• THE SENTINELS – People transformed into stealth Sentinels. Programmed to hunt down mutants, but they can do more and be heroic as well.
• MYSTIQUE – Cool spy/espionage book with a morally ambiguous lead.
• "Professor M"? Magneto wheelchair-bound?
• Take founders and ANAD characters off the board for a while?
• Brotherhood of X
• Need fewer active mutants overall, and need to scatter the ones we know across the globe.
• New villains. Old villains in new and interesting places. Some theoretically heroic mutants now in villain roles.
• Mutants mostly living under the radar/inside the closet. A Red State future. Trying to pry open the door again/regain lost rights and cultural gains.
• Mutants have families and friends and lives apart from being mutant super heroes. Not everybody drops everything else in their lives to live as a mutant full time.
• Mutants interacting with normal people in society, good and bad.
• Build relations between all X-Teams so they're each in opposition to at least one other faction, providing story grist. So X-FACTOR doesn't like SENTINELS because they're anti-mutant but they're forced to work with them. One team of X-MEN doesn't agree with the stance of the other team of X-MEN. X-FORCE has a chip on its shoulder for X-FACTOR, whom they consider sell-outs. And so forth. Arrange the factions like on a wheel.

Mossad is the secret security force of Israel, of course, with a deserved reputation for what some may call "heavy handed tactics" and whose director answers directly and only to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. I always saw Krakoa as being a parallel for both Israel and Palestine simultaneously, and it looks like some of that was in the building as well. The natures of X-Men and Uncanny X-Men switched, the original 1963 X-Men and the revamped 1974 X-Men stayed on the board, and of course, X-Force had a big change to become something else, but Tom Brevoort says, "It's remarkably on point as to many of the specific titles that we wound up building. Heck, I even had Sentinels this early…. ultimately, this is very much what we wound up doing." Even with Magneto in the wheelchair…

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