The British scriptwriter Kieron Gillen joined the famous X-Office – the group of writers of the mutant titles led by the Head of X Jonathan Hickman and born after the relaunch of the X-Men with House of X/Powers of X – immediately after Hickman himself left, becoming one of its narrative pillars together with Al Ewing, Si Spurrier and Gerry Duggan.
His advent, with the A.X.E. Judgment Day event and the all-mutant mini-event Sins of Sinister, represented a big change for the Krakoan phase of the X-Men, putting even more focus on characterisations (as seen in Immortal X-Men) and new storylines, culminating in Rise of The Power of X and X-Men Forever, two of the miniseries that marked the conclusion of five years of stories. We interviewed him to talk about his experience and to understand what this work has meant, both from a narrative point of view for readers and from a professional point of view for him and the other authors involved.
Hi Kieron and thanks for your time.
You have returned to X-World almost a decade after your first experience. How was this second time different, both from a narrative point of view and in your writing approach, considering these ten years of experience as a scriptwriter?
Back then, it was a strange job – I was writing Uncanny X-Men, but I knew when I started that my run would be tying into two major crossovers (Schism and Avengers vs X-Men) neither of which I would be writing, or have significant input into. As such, my job was creating a narrative around those two big poles. I was a support player.
This time, I’ve basically been heavily involved in three events (Judgment Day, Sins of Sinister, Rise/Fall) and often creating the places for other writers to play. Basically, this time I’m just higher up the pyramid.
Also, I hope I’m a better writer. I’m certainly bringing everything I learned across the decade to bear – there’s techniques I learned in The Wicked + the Divine and DIE which I wanted to use in the Marvel universe, for example, and they seem to work well.
You took the reins of Hickman’s project together with Ewing, Duggan, Spurrier and others. What was it like to organize almost two years of stories together with other authors to develop and evolve the great fresco that originated from Jonathan Hickman’s stories?
It was fascinating. I was a fan beforehand, and loved seeing what the office had done. I was looking somewhat enviously at the X-Slack, and hearing (and seeing) how supportive they all were. The X-Slack seemed like the coolest gang in town. Of course, I’d want in, if only to see what it was like.
And it was interesting – everyone is great, and I love these people. The group is supportive and collaborative in building something bigger than any individual. At the absolute least, it made everyone more aware of each other’s stories and so they could connect more naturally. At the most, it gave us all ideas which made our stories better – there’s some key aspects of the end of Rise of the Powers of X that I’m going to give a lot of call outs to Al Ewing for.
What was your perception of the expectations of X-Men fans at the time when Hickman left its run? How did you use these expectations to build your story? In particular, there is a whole political and social environment that you have explored.
Oh, mainly they were disappointed that Jon was leaving. Which is totally understandable, right? I was aware that no matter what we did, there’d be some “I would have preferred to know what Hickman was going to do!” just because that’s the nature of humanity.
In terms of how I let fan expectations influence the work? To be honest, I didn’t. That’s not how I work. I looked at where Krakoa was going to be when Jon left, and looked for what excited me. If I’m excited about something, I’d find ways to make other people excited about it. I mean, there weren’t many people who were calling out for more Exodus, right?
However, there’s also times where my interests are just going to align with the readers, just because I’m a fan and I understand the promises the book has made. Like, Jon brought back Destiny, after a long political battle to keep her dead. Clearly, she was going to have to be a huge deal in my book.
Immortal X-Men has been considered by many to be the ‘political’ series of the Krakoan Mutant Era, with its focus on the island’s governing body. When Jordan D. White called you, was the series already planned or did it come out of a discussion between you, the editor and the other X-Room writers?
If I remember correctly – and I may not, as I’ve had a baby in the period between then and now, and my brain is mush – Jordan got on the zoom and said “Hey – Jon’s going to be leaving the X-line. Are you interested in doing a Quiet Council book?”
It’s never been said, but I can’t imagine that Jon wouldn’t have been writing the Quiet Council book if he stayed. It’s absolutely his jam. It was absolutely the right time in the Krakoan story for that kind of book.
Your stories are character-centric. Young Avengers was a sort of Rue Britannia with superheroes; on the other hand, the protagonists of The Wicked + The Divine were sort of X-Men in a music-magic context. How did you deal with the mutants of the Krakoan universe?
Heh. You’ve now got me thinking about which Phonogram was most like Young Avengers. I immediately went “Singles Club, surely?” but now I’ve come around to your position. And The Immaterial Girl was originally written to be coming out at the same time as Young Avengers, and kind of acting as a weird sister book. And, yes, the X-men were absolutely an influence on The Wicked and the Divine – old person gathers a group of young people in a mansion and manipulates them. We even had a Danger Room homage at one point.
But yeah – you’re entirely right. I write from character, and build up. And no matter who I write, it’s basically always the same – I just take them seriously and try and give them interiority. Who is this person? How do they justify their actions to themselves? How do they see the world? It was just a process of looking at all the heroes and villains I touched and trying. The format of Immortal X-Men was explicitly made to force me to do that.
And in particular, how did you structured the writing of Immortal X-Men? On the one hand we have the main story with an ensemble cast and a political plot, but on the other hand we have single issues that delve into individual characters.
I structured the story with difficulty.
I did have the big idea of each character on the council having a point of view episode. I realized that due to the fact I did have this big story, sometimes I’d be using a character’s point of view to forward the story more than doing an intense character study. That was mostly dictated by the schedule, as things are always moving around. I didn’t know Judgment Day would be happening when I started Immortal X-men. I only shortly after that knew that Sins of Sinister would be happening after issue 10. Hell, I didn’t know Sins of Sinister would be happening when I started the book.
As such, you take all the material you have, the space you have and the time when each bit will be released, and then work out the best way through it. For example, issue 8 (the mystique issue) that was positioned just before the end of Judgment Day. I couldn’t do a tie-in (because that point of the story didn’t allow it) and I didn’t want to jump after Judgement Day (as that would give away the conclusion) so I decided to do a Historical Issue. I always planned to do at least one historical issue, so this was the perfect time – in fact, the only time, as I needed issue 9 and 10 to do everything I needed to do Sins of Sinister. I ended up doing 2 periods in the book, as I needed to establish things in both (the black womb project in the 1940s WW2 America and Nathaniel Essex’s death towards the end of the 19th century). With all that on the plate, while Mystique is the PoV, it’s a story primarily about her PoV on Destiny and Sinister’s secret war – though I do a lot to define how Destiny and her have this epic romance too.
That’s a long example, but shows some of the thinking that went into it.
How did your experience in and passion for role playing help you in writing Immortal X-Men and more in general series with many characters? Immortal X-Men can be seen both as a role play game as well as a chess game.
I certainly think I think like a gamer. My immediate thought is “how can this thing be broken?” Sinister’s Moira Engine absolutely is the sort of thing an RPG nerd trying to break a system would come up with, right?
I’m not explicitly channeling any of it though – this is just what interests me. I like politics. I like games. I like smart people trying to out maneuver each other. All that just goes in.
Talking about characters, we would like to go deeper into some of them. You have taken Sinister back into your hands, after he has been, in many aspects, the symbol of your first mutant run. You created a psychological background (as well as a big retcon) that had made him abandon the framework of pure villain in which he was trapped since his creation in the 80s. What fascinates you most about this character and how has your vision of him changed over the years?
Oh, I dunno about that. I may have done a lot of work with Sinister, but I don’t think I’ve ever moved him away from being a pure villain. I hope he’s a more complicated villain than when I found him, but he’s very much a villain. I don’t really redeem characters, and certainly wouldn’t redeem him. He is, in the language of my people, a total arsehole.
I’m broadly of the position that the Marvel Universe needs as many good villains as it can get. It’s at least one reason why I spend more time with them, as heroes only really can prove their mettle against people worth fighting. If they’re just ciphers, who cares?
When I started digging into him, what interested me mainly was:
- The high camp aspect, which was always there, but I turned way up.
- The fact he was a creature of the 19th century Britain. That’s a great way to talk about Western complicity with the worst stuff – he is, in a real way, our monster.
- His perspective on mutantkind. He doesn’t hate mutants. He loves mutants! However, all he loves is their genes. The thing which makes someone mutant a mutant is all that matters to him. He’s only a few steps further down the line from some of the mutant supremacists.
- His potential for mad-scientist play. He’s got all these genes! What can you do by throwing genes together. This means he’s a supervillain who has his own vibe. It’s fun to see what he cooks up next.
Since I left him, he perhaps leaned more playful than I was writing back in my first run – and certainly more modern in his references. I picked up on those aspects, and folded them into the story. The awfulness of Sinister tweaking his personality to be more disarming to people, for example. Even being weaker physically so people don’t treat him as the 1990s threat he was, for example. It’s all tactics. The man is a monster.
The “Krakoan” Sinister has been fundamental for the narrative developments of the entire second part of this era: was his role already foreseen in the initial plans or did it develop during your management, given your love for this character? I am particularly talking about the revelation about him and his other three self, which changed the character history completely, as well as the plot of the whole X-Men series.
The four sinister story actually grew from the room – Gerry was already doing Stasis in the X-men, and which lead to a further conversation. Spurrier had the idea that there should be four Sinisters – after all, if we have a club and diamond, where’s the other two? We ran from there.
I integrated that with the Enigma part of the story (and the Moira Engine), and rolled from there. As we approached the end of the story, I took over a couple of the clones and played with Stasis a bit more too.
In a real way, Enigma was giving the Dominions a personality to make a confrontation more meaningful as we approach the end game. Enigma is obviously an unusual dominion (as they’re normally just a lot of different personalities that merged, rather than one copied a whole bunch) but he’s still a Dominion, and showing how one emerged seemed useful. After all, what sort of people make one of these things? I suspect at least a few of them are like Nathaniel Essex.
As a non-native speaker who reads your comics in English, I realize that I often find terms I don’t know. Something that happens to me much less with other writers. It seems to me that your work is also oriented towards lexical research and the use of a specific vocabulary. Where does this particular attention to terms come from? Is it purely a communicative need or is it also a kind of pleasure? For the X-Men I think again of Sinistro, which allows you to infuse a typically British black humour into the series and generally play with language.
I’m sorry! I’m aware I’m a nightmare for translators with my word choices, and a character who leans baroque like Sinister is especially bad for that. And all the puns! This is not easy for anyone whose first language isn’t English. I suspect it’s not easy for people whose first language is English.
I think that I mainly align the voice to the character – certain people don’t speak like that, right? But in a book when there’s a bunch of characters of that type, it definitely gets a lot. I’ve been aware that when Exodus, Destiny and Mother Righteous are in the room, I’m glad for Hope is there to change the tone a bit.
So really, it is a bit for pleasure (I like words, and reading) but also to differentiate characters. As said earlier, it all comes from characters. If folks have their own vibe, that really helps.
Apart from Sinister, there are many elements from your previous run that have returned in these stories, for example the focus on Hope, but also in some ways also on Colossus and Emma Frost. Ten years after you first run, how did you see these character changes and how did you change your approach to them?
Some of it is just as they were I play – Colossus was really an X-Force character, but I enjoyed playing with his heartbreaking status quo. With Emma, I had her for basically my first year, and viewed her basically as the leader of the Council for that period, which is a change from when I last had her. I wish I had more space with her, really – I knew she was going to be out of my hands by the Gala, and with the contracted timeline, she got less play than I’d have hoped.
Hope was my addition, of course, and certainly one of “my” characters from my first time in the X-Office. Adding her was for several reasons (some of which will only really become clear by the end of the Krakoan period) but at least in part was “the Five are the fundamental thing which drives Krakoa. Hope is their sort-of leader. Hope is, by temperament, a little bit prickly. She has been surprisingly… good so far. What happens when she starts demanding her seat at the table?”
She’s also just a very different voice to everyone else in the table. I think I’m more firmly in control of her voice now too, which is nice – the “Cable’s Daughter, grown up in hell futures, not always very good socially” vibe is a lot of fun.
To finish on the characters, a slightly simpler question: besides the above mentioned ones, which was the one (or which were the ones) that most amused or stimulated you to write?
I don’t really pick favorites, but the one who surprised me most was Shaw. He’s perhaps the character who most benefited from Immortal’s structure. Having to get inside his head for an issue made me really get to grips with him, and the specific brand of self-serving egomaniacal monster he is. From that issue and later, he became a character I loved to write – he’s got some great small material in Fall of X.
Exodus may get a mention too – he’s the character I feel I did the most with to make a more useful character to the Marvel Universe. However, he’s the character I instantly saw and thought “this guy has so much potential” and then tried to do it. Like, 1000-year old Crusader knight who is both a mutant supremacist and a devout period catholic? That’s bizarre. Let’s just write that and see what happens.
Speaking of Immortal X-Men, we cannot avoid to talk about your collaboration with Lucas Wernek. He, as well as Jamie McKelvie and other artists you collaborated with, have a strong sense of acting and a particular care for characters design and expressions. How important was it for your writing to be able to interface with an artist with these characteristics? How did your collaboration go, more generally speaking?
Lucas was great – honestly, he’s been a joy to work with. He’s such a natural, glamorous superhero artist that I regularly felt terrible I was making him mainly draw people sitting around a table – every issue I made sure there was some manner of showcase for him to play with. Of course, the table-sitting wouldn’t have worked without him either. Partially from the character work you note, but also he draws – for want of a better phrase – such hotties. These are glamorous people gathered around a table, and the charisma he evokes with his line is why we end up wanting to hang around.
During your work on the X-Men, you also wrote some mini or maxi events. Apart from Sins of Sinister, an event entirely internal to the mutant series, the other big story you wrote was A.X.E. – Judgment Day, the event with which you effectively closed your run on the Eternals. At the same time, though, you sowed important elements for later X-Men stories. What did this story represent for you, and how was it to handle a maxi-event that intertwined so much with your stories?
I think it was an interesting one. As I said earlier, I’d never written an event for Marvel, and this was my first real line-wide one. I learned a lot from the process – I got a chance to put my theories into practice, and then realize the limitations of them. One of the interesting things was learning about the one strange thing about being the person doing the event. Before, when I did tie-ins, my thing was looking at how to subvert a crossover to my own ends. As in, I have a story, so how can I use this crossover to forward my story. When you’re writing the event,well, the event is your story! There’s aspects of Immortal X-men (and Eternals) which were elevated to the big book, which leads you to panic, realizing you need to work out something to do in Immortal X-men. I did a mix of a few things – I think using issue 5 as the Exodus spotlight was a smart move, for example.
Also in Judgment Day you introduced various elements of humanity in this big fresco of superhero stories: was it a way for you to give a different, more human perspective of the stories you were writing?
Yes. For me, that’s what the Marvel universe is about. It’s about people. It’s our world. In the back half of my Immortal run, I’ve tried to do the same with Krakoa – having Kafka and Chlorophil in the mix was important for that reason.
And in regard to this, a more general question regarding the X-Men and especially the “Krakoan” ones: what do you think they can say about our world, our society?
I think if you can sum up what a story does in a sentence or two, it’s not really much of a story. The reason we do stories is that they are big, complicated and contain multitudes. They say many things, and reflect things from different angles. I wouldn’t want to give any one answer to this. Sorry.
You are writing Rise of the Power of X and you will write X-Men Forever, the finale of the Krakoan story cycle. What can you tell us about these stories and the approach you’ve taken?
Well, I’ve left this interview way too late, so it’s nearly all wrapped. At the time of writing, we have the last two issues of X-Men Forever, the final Rise of the Powers of X and Issue 700 to go. I’m not even sure when folks will be reading it. I hope folks like it. I’ve tried to give it an ending which resolves some of the questions Jon, RB and Pepe set in motion when they started Krakoa – as well as the questions that folks have developed along the way (including mine.)
Thank you for your answers, Kieron.
Interview conducted by email in April 2024
Kieron Gillen
Kieron Gillen (1975) is a British journalist and screenwriter, creator of several successful comic book series; he is best known as the author of Phonogram and The Wicked + The Divine, both published for Image Comics, and for his work on several Marvel Comics titles , including X-Men. He has been collaborating with Jamie Mckelvie since 2003, when he wrote comic strips for Playstation Magazine UK. In 2006 the first volume of Phonogram was published: the series, published in Italy by Edizioni BD, continued for three seasons and had a sequel in 2008. In the same year he began a fruitful collaboration with the House of Ideas. Initially called upon to work with Greg Scott to expand Warren Ellis ‘ Newniversalseries , in 2009 he is at work on the Dark Avengers title and on a new series, S.W.O.R.D. In the following two years he writes ten Thor albums, a spin-off on the X-Men titled Generation Hope, and co-writes with Matt Fraction the Uncanny X-Men secenits . In 2011 he collaborated on the launch of Marvel NOW writing Invincible Iron Man, again in collaboration with Fraction, and Young Avengers with McKelvie. In2014, again together with colleague Jamie Mckelvie, he started the series The Wicked + the Divine, published in Italy by BAO Publishing, which won the British Comic Award in 2014 as “Best Comic” and was nominated three times for the Eisner Award in 2015 and ended in 2019. Between 2019 and 2021 he wrote the thirty issues of the Once & Futureseries (BOOM! Studios), published in Italy by Edizioni BD, with artwork by Dan Mora. For Marvel Comics, he wrote several comic series set in the Star Wars universe and in 2021, together with Esad Ribić, he created a new comic series on the Eternals. In 2022, he returned to the X-Office, writing the Immortal X-Menseries and the miniseries X-Men Forever and Rise of the Powers of X that marked the end of the Krakoan Age of X-Men.
