by Mike Collins

1. When we last spoke you had just been announced as the new writer on X-Men. After all the interviews and online commentary how did it feel to actually sit down and start the first script?

It's hard to describe. The first script on any new project is always hard. You have to get the feel for the individual voices of the characters you're writing, and you have to get the "big voice", the pace and tone of the story, the way the narrative is articulated, right too. It's slow, at first, and then if it's working you get the sense of it building and building, and by the end you sort of slipstream along because there's only one way it can go.

All those processes were compounded here by the fact that this was a book with thirty years of continuity - or forty-three years, if you go back to the first publication of X-Men#1. That's a little intimidating. I wouldn't want to exaggerate, but there's a sense in which you feel the weight of all that history sitting on your shoulder. And there's a part of you that's muttering "can I do this?" the whole time.

But it was exhilarating, too. I mean, how could it not be? To get my hands on those characters, to write the X-Men, after reading them for so long... The only analogy I can think of is, you've got a friend with a top-of-the-range Porsche 928 S, and he's giving you a lift somewhere, and then out of the blue he says "would you like to drive for a while? I'm getting tired here." And you turn the key and it's all there, in your hands, all that perfect engineering. Lousy metaphor. I'm not a car fetishist, and I don't even like driving these days, because in London you can't go a hundred yards without hitting a jam, but it's a bit like that - something you coveted but never expected to own, but, well, there you are. You can't own it - it's too big to own - but it's in your hands.

2. Your first issue begins the "Super Novas" arc. How would you describe your intial storyline?

I designed it to be a sort of inexorable build from tension to crisis to carnage. There's a sense in which, from the moment Sabretooth walks through the doors of the mansion in #188, the action doesn't stop until the big confrontation in #193. That gives a slightly false impression, though, because of course there's a lot of other stuff going on in there as well. I needed to define characters and relationships, and I needed to build the mystery as to what the Children are and how they're different from the threats that are already out there in the X-verse.

And of course I'm also seeding references to some later stories in there - particularly, for the story that comes to a head in #200. We start getting hints about that from #189 onwards.

2A. Speaking of defining character relationships, how is that going so far? You have a main team that many people scratched their heads over, including Sabretooth and Mystique. It's a great chance to have the team constantly at odds with each other isn't it?

Oh yeah, you bet. That was what I was aiming for, really, and I'm enjoying playing with the ramifications of that. I wasn't interested in creating controversy for its own sake - honest - but I was very much interested in having a team that had that richness of past interactions and past tensions to draw on. It's like scripting a comic book set in the house of Atreus. Pure madness, but dark, resonant madness.

The first arc is really about bringing the team together, and obviously we're already feeling the strain at that point - but it's nothing compared to what's going to come later.

3. The cover to issue #188 gives us our first glimpse of the Children. Who are they and where do they come from? Kind of a scary looking bunch...

Well, I don't want to give too much away here. Who are they? They're your children, and mine. Where do they come from? From a sealed environment called the Vault - and that's their full name, the Children of the Vault. They're not mutants and they're not humans: they're an intended solution to a problem, but now they've become a problem in their own right - and the thing that brings them into play at this moment in the history of the Marvel Universe is M-Day. Moreover, they don't have super-powers - but they have something that's even better in a way. And yeah, they're very scary. They even scare Sabretooth, who isn't exactly a timid sort of guy.

3a. Where did the idea for the Children of the Vault spring from? Can you give us any more details on who they are individually?

Hmm. I'd rather not get too specific here. The initial idea was to have a threat that wasn't mutant in origin - that wasn't even super-powered, arguably - but came in at right angles to what we already know and worked in its own scary way. The Children can do things that normal people can't do, but the explanation doesn't have anything to do with the usual logic of superpowers. And they can actually use each other's abilities if they need to, which makes them pretty formidable.

But the scariest thing about them is the way they see the world. Even the affection of the Children is dangerous, as we get to see in #191.

Individually... I'll just throw out a few names. Sangre. Serafina. Perro. Fuego. Aguja. I guess you can spot the common theme there...

4. How long is Super Novas and what is it's main focus?

It's a six-issue arc, running from #188 to #193. There's a double focus, really: it's partly about defining the Children and building up to the big confrontation between them and the X-Men, and it's partly about creating my team - which is anything but a smooth and automatic process. it's more of an accretion around a core - Rogue, then Iceman and Cannonball, then the others, with a few interesting question marks around the edges.

And in the middle of that, of course, we've got the return of Northstar and Aurora.

5. How do Northstar and Aurora fit into the story?

By means of a set-up. They're rather ruthlessly used by the Children to achieve a specific goal, and we'll see some very nasty stuff happen as a result of that. As you know, Aurora is in a fragile state, psychologically, emotionally - and Northstar is very literally not himself. What happens here is going to move them onwards, but initially not in a good direction.

7. You're a new voice in the world of costumed super hero's. How would you describe your writing style for people not familiar with it?

Hmm. Kind of a hard question. My style has tended in the past to lean very heavily on strong (I hope) back-and-forth dialogue and on character. That's not likely to change, although I hope I've proved with my work in the Ultimate universe that I can do compelling action scenes as well. I've got a name for being poetic and allusive, but that's mainly because it's my Vertigo work that's got me noticed. I can work in very different styles from that.

8. I'd like to talk about your main cast in more detail. What kind of character arcs do you have planned for them? How do they fit into your overall run?

Again, I have to be careful what I say because I don't want to give too much of the game plan away in advance.

Rogue is team leader and emphatically at centre stage. She's chosen for that role because she can improvise and take risks - because she's hard for an enemy to predict, as Cyclops says in #188. I want to bring the boldness and directness of her character to the fore, and I want increasingly - through the events of the first few arcs - to take her to a point where a lot of her self-doubts and regrets about the past don't seem quite so important any more: where she's acknowledging her strengths, and where she's more comfortable with herself. Even her relationship with Mystique is going to change, not so much because she's prepared to forgive and forget as because Mystique's emotional hold on her - which is very much a legacy of her childhood - is going to lessen.

Iceman and Cannonball are the other two strong veterans in the team - leaving out Cable, whose experience and situation are somewhat different. I want Bobby, like Rogue, to start using his powers in a wide range of striking and innovative ways, so we stop thinking of him as just the guy who can make ice slides - like Frozone in the Incredibles. In terms of his character arc, though, he's going to get into a relationship which will make him re-assess himself, his life, his core values. If we see Rogue becoming stronger and more assertive in these early issues, we may see Bobby becoming more hesitant in some ways and more uneasy about choices he's made.

Cannonball is also going to have a relationship which screws him up in a more direct and immediate way. He's going to descend into a crisis whose outcome is not at all clear. Having established him as the "safe pair of hands", steady as a rock sort of guy - one of the mainstays of the team - we kick all of that security away and watch how he reacts to a situation where things aren't so clear cut and where his whole life is at stake.

Sabretooth has no character arc in the accepted sense of that phrase. Don't expect him to change. He's too self-centred to compromise, too ruthless to want to. But he's got some surprises in store for him, and he's not going to come out of his time on the X-Men roster unscathed.

Mystique, by contrast, is so malleable in some ways that you can't get a handle on her at all. She's a survivor, a pragmatist - someone who reads the ground, reads the situation and does whatever is necessary to survive. We do see her change, but we're not sure how far the changes are real, how far they're just a concession to the place where she finds herself. Something is going to touch her, though, more deeply than she believes she can be touched, and it's not going to be easy for her to get over.

And at some point she and Rogue are going to have to fight each other for something that they both need but only one of them - or maybe neither - can have.

9. Is there a theme that you are working with for Super Novas and beyond?

Not so much, no - unless the forging of the team and the relationships within it is a theme. The stories intertwine and inter-relate, and as always in the X-Men there'll be revelations about the team members which arise out of the missions and the threats and the decisions they have to take. But I'm not banging a specific drum. I suppose in Supernovas there's an underlying concern with the kind of Darwinian competition you get when space is limited and habitats are threatened. And later on, too, the X-Men will meet another contender for "who takes over when humanity kick the collective bucket?" That's probably just a reflection of the stuff that's on my mind right now.

Meeting the alien, in yourself and elsewhere. That's the theme, if there is one.

10. Pan. You made a somewhat mysterious mention of a potential adversary on your site. Is there anything you can say about him/her/it/them?

If the Children have had their humanity stripped from them by someone else, for reasons that you could call mistaken but idealistic, Pan (not his full name) has voluntarily given away his own humanity in order to gain an advantage in the ultimate game of survival of the fittest. He's the reason why both Lady Mastermind and... someone else who I don't think we've named yet... are present in the X-mansion in #188, and he's someone who Rogue comes to have a very personal grudge against. He's a very nasty piece of work - physically and morally repulsive, and more or less impossible to kill. I think he'll be one of my scariest bad guys.

11. Aside from the main cast who else might we see in the initial story arc?

Well there's Lady M, of course. And someone else who guested in Uncanny a few issues back, but otherwise hasn't been seen in X-circles for ages. Val Cooper, for obvious reasons. Northstar and Aurora you know about. A former mutant named Pasco who we don't get to know well enough to become attached to. Lots of Astonishing and New X-Men characters popping in for cameos. And someone who'll come to be the main antagonist in the second arc, but who we won't even recognise as a threat when we first see them.

12. Your team goes on the road. Where are they headed? Can you reveal why they leave the mansion as a home base?

I can't say anything about where, but as for why, it's kind of the obvious reason. Life at the mansion has become unbearable - very tightly circumscribed, very tightly controlled and observed. My team come to the conclusion that they can do a lot better by being outside of that situation.

The new base is a very peculiar one, and roads are about the one transport infrastructure that it can't use. It's better by sea or air or almost anything else.

13. The cover to issue #190 is a bit of a jaw dropper. Will inter-team fraternizing be one of the themes of Super Novas?

Well, only in the background, as it were. These are beats I'm hitting partly because they help to ramp up the tensions in the team from the start, and partly because they're hard to resist when a perfect opportunity comes up. I'm not going to be leaning hard on the old mix-and-match mating dance aspect of things: just allowing characters to come together - romantically, sexually or otherwise - when it seems natural and appropriate. Which I admit still makes that cover something of a surprise. It's absolutely spectacular, isn't it? Admit that it made your pulse quicken just a little...

14. How tied into the current Marvel Universe will X-Men be?

Depends what you mean, really. We acknowledge the big events that are going on in the MU, because that's our setting. But they only impact on the story we're telling at a couple of removes, at least to begin with. You won't see a lot of Civil War references in X-Men, for example.

15. Going forward where do you see this title going? What comes after Super Novas?

After Supernovas we're going to have an issue or two where the team are sort of dealing with the after-shocks of the events they've just been involved in. That's when the move out of the mansion becomes official, and when the team roster is - for the time being - finalised.

And then in #196 the X-Men take possession of their new home and realise that there's a menace already there before them - a menace which is both new and old, and very, very nasty. The possibility exists that they've been manipulated into a trap that was set up a long time before. That story arc (no title as yet) will feature the return of a villain who for my money was about the scariest and most formidable the X-Men ever faced, and who this time has brought reinforcements.

16. For me, your book seems very much like a Vertigo take on the X-Men.(I mean that in a good way!!) Will your stories have more of a dark nature to them?

There are certainly going to be dark elements, but I'm not thinking in terms of bringing a Vertigo sensibility to the book. My goals are more specific than that. There's a danger that when you start talking about "dark", people assume the worst - heroes who are so morally ambivalent and so ruthless that they become repellent; battles where everybody loses; carnage for the sake of carnage. I'm not interested, really, in taking the book in that direction. I'm not saying, by the way, that that's what Vertigo books are about either. It's just that word "dark" and the overtones it's accreted around itself ever since Miller's The Dark Knight Returns.

Yes, I want the book to have a scary edge. I want the threats the X-Men face to be genuinely disturbing and monstrous, and for the reader to feel that everything is at stake. I'm not interested, though, in the kind of coarsening of the fictional world that sometimes accompanies those goals. I'm not going to drag the X-Men themselves through the mud and make them behave in ways that destroy the dramatic illusion. They'll face some hard choices, and they'll go through terrible experiences, as you'd expect. But they won't suddenly turn out to have been bastards all along, if that makes any sense.

17. For readers still on the fence about X-Men, what would you say to them to entice them into giving it a try?

I'd say take a look at Chris's covers for #188 and #190. If you're not interested enough to pick up the issues after seeing those images, go read a funny animal book.

18. What else are you working on Mike?

For Marvel I'm doing Ultimate Fantastic Four, taking over when Mark MIllar's run finishes with #32. Pasqual Ferry is doing the art, and we're having the time of our lives. Cosmic warfare, casts of thousands, superpowers you never heard of, the works. I'm also writing an Ultimate Vision miniseries, which picks up where Ultimate Extinction ends. I've got one or two other projects in the pipeline, but that's enough to keep me busy and happy in the meantime.

At Vertigo I'm doing the Faker miniseries with Jock and a new monthly, debuting later this year, with Jim Fern. We think we've finally got a title we like for that one, but it's early days so I'm not going to say what it is.

I've got an OGN coming out under the Sandman Presents umbrella later this year or early in 2007, and another book with Sonny Liew and Marc Hempel probably hitting the stores a little while after that.

And I'm pitching a book that I'll be co-writing with my daughter, Louise. How cool is that?

19. Aside from your comics work you are also a novelist. Can you tell us a little about your novels?

They're supernatural crime thrillers set against the backdrop of the rising of the dead. The protagonist, Felix Castor, is an exorcist living in London at this time - our time, just after the turn of the new millennium. And the streets are filling up with revenants. You've got the dead who come back in the flesh, as zombies; in the spirit, as ghosts; in stolen flesh, as werewolves, and so on and so forth. So suddenly there's a great demand for exorcists, and Castor is one of the guys who steps up to the plate. He's not religious or anything, he just has this gift: he can perceive the dead and he can bind them. And he makes a living at it, kind of like a Raymond Chandler private detective, working for a set fee plus expenses.

The first novel, The Devil You Know, has Castor taking on a job at a London archive. There's a faceless female ghost in among the book stacks and she's scaring the staff, so he's brought in to bind and banish her. But he gets interested in the question of why she's there, if this isn't where she died - and things sort of snowball from there. At one point, someone raises a succubus - a sex-demon - to kill him, and this demon, Ajulutsikael, known as Juliet, becomes a main character in the book.

I'm writing the series for Orbit in the UK and Hachette in America. The first book is already out, and the second, Vicious Circle, follows in October. I'm halfway through the third book now and still going strong. I hope ultimately there'll be at least half a dozen of them, with a big revelation and resolution coming at the close of book six.

20. Thanks for taking the time to speak with us again Mike!

My pleasure.