Broken Frontier

Yesterday afternoon, Marvel held a conference call to discuss the upcoming limited series Civil War: Young Avengers/Runaways and Civil War: X-Men. Joining Executive Director Tom Brevoort, Editor Mike Marts, Assistant Editor Nick Lowe and Communications Assistant Manager Jim McCann were creators Zeb Wells and David Hine.

The conference call started with the writers giving a quick overview of the series that they will be writing; Zeb Wells on Civil War: Young Avengers/Runaways, and David Hine on Civil War: X-Men. Wells explained that he came aboard the project when he received an email from Tom asking if he would be interested. He accepted, then proceeded to bone up on the Young Avengers and Runaways lines. Wells is excited to be working with such well-designed characters, and added that piggybacking on Vaughan’s and Heinberg’s popularity was an additional bonus.

David Hine then stepped in and explained how great the book is going to be, and how excited he is to be working with the Classic X-Men line-up of Archangel, Beast, Iceman, and Cyclops. He stated that the art is looking phenomenal, that it is some of the best he’s seen in a book in a while, and Juan Doe, that the cover artist from The 198 will be handling covers for Civil War: X-Men as well.

Before the floor was opened for questions, Wells explained that the Civil War: Young Avengers/Runaways book would be occurring after the events of Young Avengers #12 and Runaways #18—neither of which are on the stands—and because of this could not disclose the full rosters of the teams.

Wells pointed out that the two teams are so very different from each other, with the Young Avengers wanting so badly to be like their super-hero idols, while the Runaways want nothing to do with the “adult world”, just wanting to be left alone.

Next, David Hine was asked if there was any particular character that he wanted to use for Civil War: X-Men that he wasn’t allowed to. Hine stated that he would have loved to use Cable, but that he couldn’t. However, he did point out that Bishop would be playing an enormous role in the story. Hine also pointed out that it was a terribly difficult task to leave his own stamp on the characters, and that when he joined Marvel he wasn’t aware of what had happened over the past 10 years.

The next question Zeb Wells addressed was whether or not he found it intimidating to work with voices that were so well designed. Wells explained it was extremely intimidating dealing with the characters and thought it would be better for him not to read the plots before he started writing. He pointed out that though Young Avengers/Runaways is written with a younger mentality in mind, the whole of Civil War in itself would naturally lend itself to the older crowd as well.

David Hine mentioned that the events that transpired in the The 198 limited series would have a huge impact on the Civil War: X-Men series, and that many of the characters of the former mini would show up in the latter. He also wanted to point out to everyone that the Sentinels would be appearing in their new, revamped iterations.

As the discussion continued, it went on to encompass the entire Civil War series as a whole. Marvel was very satisfied how the big secret from Civil War #2 was kept under wraps until the week before the ship date, when a shipping error caused a few copies of Thunderbolts #103 to get out early and tip the publisher’s hand. Marvel was also immensely pleased with how much media attention they were receiving lately, and that heavy hitters such as MTV and CNN were doing stories on the series.