Broken Frontier

At Chicago Comic-Con, Broken Frontier chatted with various creators about their current and upcoming works. First up, X-Men's Victor Gischler.

BROKEN FRONTIER: Can you tell us about what’s coming up in your X-Men run?

VICTOR GISCHLER: Well, I’m gonna be honest. Marvel sends ninjas to kill me if I give out too many spoilers. Do you mean this current arc or all together?

BF: Either really. It’s understandable if you can’t say too much.

VG: I tell you what, here’s what I’ll say: In the next arc, we have a guest star. I can’t imagine who it might be. I will tell you that coincidentally, I’m wearing this Spider-Man t-shirt. But completely unrelated, we might have some sort of guest star next arc. So stick around for that. That’ll be fun. I’ve talked to some folks here who are Jubilee fans. I actually had a couple of very pointed questions, such as “You’re not going to kill Jubilee, are you?” I’m not going to go on the record and say what’s going to happen but I will say that I personally don’t have much authority to kill anybody.

BF: Your opening story arc, “The Curse of the Mutants,” focuses very heavily on vampires. Was this a story you had always wanted to tell or was it motivated by the current vampire craze in popular culture?

VG: An idea I had for years? No way, no. Marvel came to me and said “We need to give the Marvel vampires a facelift.” We need to get them juiced up a little bit—a little sexier, a little better—using things that already exist in the Marvel Universe. Making them cool and hip and now. We got such a good feeling from the Death of Dracula one-shot that we thought this might be pretty cool to bring over into X-Men and that’s what we ended up doing.

BF: I found it very interesting that Marvel gave you a chance to start an X-Men series from #1, rather than having you jump onto an already ongoing series. As a writer, was this a lot of pressure or creatively freeing?

VG: You know what, I’ve answered this question this way—I’m a big golf nerd. I love golf. And I remember watching the British Open and the guy in the lead was a big unknown nobody. They put a microphone in his face and said “Are you nervous? This is new for you.” And he’s like, “Yeah, I’m a little nervous but you want to be in the lead, you want the championship. This is where I want to be.” Same thing, man. Of course I’m a little nervous. It’s a high profile book. But you can’t say no. When the big league calls, you’ve got to step up to the plate. I’ve got a lot of people supporting me at the Marvel headquarters and so far, I feel pretty good about it.

BF: What’s coming up for Deadpool Corps?

VG: I just turned in, I think, my favorite Deadpool Corps script. I used to write Deadpool: Merc With a Mouth but Deadpool Corps is a little different because they’re all Deadpools! There’s a bunch of ‘em! I feel like I’ve done some good work on this book but with the script I just turned in, I feel like I’ve finally clicked into place. I’m pretty enthusiastic about it.

BF: I understand that your first novel, Gun Monkeys, is being optioned for a movie.

VG: Yeah, we’ve got a director, Ryuhei Kitamura, who did Midnight Meat Train and a bunch of stuff in Japan. We’ve got a great, big, huge actor. I’m not allowed to say who it is, but a big guy. And I just got an e-mail from my producer this morning talking about the financing and if it’s gonna happen and we are right on the edge of that movie happening. So I’m excited and nervous both.

Deadpool Corps #6 and X-Men #3 go on sale September 9th from Marvel Comics.