Jason Aaron sat down at Heroes Con to talk with IGN about his current slew of titles. While he did hint that he would be putting out a new creator-owned series in the future, there was nothing he could dish on at the time of the interview.
But that still leaves a lot of his Marvel work to cover, including Wolverine and the X-Men and its crossover into X-Men: Battle of the Atom, Thanos Rising, and Thor: God of Thunder.
IGN Comics: Wolverine and the X-Men has been a rollicking good time with tons of energy and humor and hijinks, but recently with Broo getting shot, the series has taken on a noticeably darker tone. There are still light and funny moments here and there, but most of it went away along with Broo's kind-heartedness. What brought on the tonal shift?
Jason Aaron: It didn't seem like it changed to me. I always wanted it to be a book that's fun and silly at times, but still a book that has real stakes. In my mind, that was always the book I was doing. Broo getting shot in the head is one of the darker moments, but that was the plan from the beginning, that the book would go back and forth, so you would have light-hearted moments but also have serious moments in the same book. So in my mind, I'm still writing the same tone even if it may seem dark. Certainly the Doop issue is something much sillier, but it's all one beast.
IGN: You've been building up the new Hellfire Club for some time now. And now we're finally starting the Hellfire Saga. What elements did you want to establish before going into the actual Hellfire Saga, and what can we expect to see once it gets going?
Aaron: This is what the Hellfire arc has been building to all this time. They were introduced as the main villains of the book right from the get-go. It's not so subtle that I'm doing this book about Wolverine taking control of the school and family and kids coming of age, and then the bad guys are all 13 year-old kids who usurp their parents and have taken over control of the Hellfire Club. All of that has been building towards them starting their own school in opposition to the Jean Grey School.
These kids are motivated more by greed and ambition more than anything, so they make a lot of their money selling Sentinels. You see them building all these different kinds of Sentinels all over the globe. Having Cyclops turn into the Dark Phoenix was good for business, so they're selling a lot. For them, they like mutants being hated and feared. That's the atmosphere they want to keep.
So having Wolverine open this school where he's going to teach these kids to learn to live in peace with humans, that's the last thing they want. From the get-go they've been opposed to this school and want to shut down what Wolverine is trying to set up. This is the next step in that. We've seen them try and manipulate different kids at the school, but now we see them pull some kids over to their bad guy school where they're going to warp them and turn these kids into the next Brotherhood of Evil Mutants.
IGN: As you said, they are a bunch of 13 year-old kids, and we all know that Wolverine’s big thing is that he values children. He’ll murder just about anyone but never kids. How does that factor into how he deals with this conflict? He can’t just go chop them up because they’re kids.
Aaron: Right, I like the idea of giving him bad guys he couldn’t stab -- he’s not just going to beat these kids up -- and just watch him wrestle with that. At the same time he’s Headmaster of the school and he’s not comfortable with that, so this is just another complication. Again, the book is about family. Wolverine, as this father figure, is dealing with the kids at his school, he’s also dealing with these rambunctious kids, so it’s all about adults developing, coming of age, developing that responsibility... kids coming of age -- that’s the theme of the book.
Aaron: Initially, I wrote him in there as manning an information booth at the school, and then Chris Bachalo just started drawing him in the background all the time and then Nick Bradshaw just kind of followed suit. It started as kind of a joke, but at some point he’d been in the book so much it was like, we should do that issue that explains why he’s here in the first place.
IGN: Is Doop going to remain in a more background role or is he going to go on a mission one day?
Aaron: In the Hellfire Academy arc, we see him with the X-Men out trying to track down the Hellfire Academy. But for the most part, he’s not going to become a main character. It’s hard to make him a main character when no one can understand what the hell he’s saying.
IGN: [laughs]
Aaron: He’s always one of those guys who works best as one of those weird guys who is a part of the group in the background.
IGN: Okay, that’s the last question about Doop.
Aaron: [laughs]
IGN: X-Men: Battle of the Atom is coming in the fall, which looks like it will be a crossover for all the X-books where a team from the future comes to the present. Have you been building up to this in anyway? And what role will Wolverine and the X-Men play in it?
Aaron: I’m building to it in some sense. Battle of the Atom mostly revolves around All-New X-Men, the kids that have come to the present from the past. That’s what kinda gets the story rolling. But then that involves the X-Men from past, present, and future all in one story. So yeah, Wolverine and the X-Men will be a big part of that. You’ll see the X-Men’s as well as the kids’ story in a different way.
It’s a big, huge, sweeping X-Men story that we haven’t done for a few years now. And it’s the 50th anniversary of the X-Men, so we’re very conscious of that in terms of the players in the story, the locations and everything to make this seem like a celebration of the X-Men past, present, and future just like the story is.
IGN: In Wolverine in the X-Men #29, you showed a glimpse of the future of the Jean Grey School. Is anything you put there a setup for anything in Battle of the Atom? There were a lot of interesting names and references dropped.
Aaron: Somewhat. At the time I wrote that, I was aware of everything we were going to be doing in Battle of the Atom, so yeah some of that may be teasers of stuff you’ll see. Certainly I wanted it to be all the same future. Maybe not the same point in the future, but it’s all the same future of the X-Men.
IGN: Some of our readers wanted to know why Wolverine had the white beard despite his healing factor slowing his aging process -- do you have a response to that?
Aaron: Well, I’d say if you ask that, then you don’t have children.
IGN: [laughs]
Aaorn: He’s had 25 years of running a school and dealing with children. That’ll give you some gray hair.
IGN: And moving on to Thanos Rising. A lot of people are surprised at how far you've gone to humanize Thanos. We've never seen this side of him before. What was your intention going into the book on how sympathetic to make this super villain to the reader?
Aaorn: For me, especially with the villain, it’s not very interesting to write a guy who is just 100% bad. There’s nothing you can relate to them about if the guy’s just a hardcore, stone cold bastard. Five issues of that would get a little old.
To me, the more interesting villains are the ones you can, in some sense, relate to or sympathize with at times. Maybe you sympathize with them one moment, the next moment they do something truly atrocious and you feel bad you ever sympathized with them in the first place. That, to me, is the good stuff I find interesting, so that’s what I wanted to do with Thanos.
Also, a lot of the stuff that’s in there in terms of his history is not stuff I created whole cloth. Jim Starlin laid out a lot of these bits and pieces over the course of several stories over the years. Never before was there one origin story for Thanos that you could point to and say, this tells who this guy is. So this that story. But I still take a lot of those pieces, put them together, and fill in the blanks in between them.
But in terms of where Thanos is from, being from Titan and his family history and the fact that he murdered his own mother, then went off and wandered around the cosmos and hooked up with these space pirates -- that’s all from Starlin. All stuff that’s been referenced before. We just never really had the story of that.
Aaron: Not every arc will have all three guys in it. The next arc after the Godbomb arc just focuses on present day Thor. But then right after that, there’s a young Thor standalone issue, and then the arc after that will probably have present day Thor and King Thor in it.
So I’ll mix it up from time to time going forward, but certainly all three versions will be a part of the ongoing story of the book. It’s just we won’t see all three of them teaming up again anytime soon, maybe ever. And we won’t see all of them in the same story, but there’s still an overarching story with young Thor I’m telling and an overarching story with King Thor.
IGN: So the movie Thor has the beard, which is very fitting of a Viking, but they won’t give it to him in the comics. We’ve seen a lot of movie elements and Ultimate universe elements make their way into the main Marvel universe, but you have King Thor mocking present day Thor for not being able to grow a beard. Where does the beard love come from? You have an epic beard yourself.
Aaron: [laughs]
I would be okay with Thor having a little more of a beard and I think I maybe initially suggested it but [Thor: God of Thunder artist] Esad [Ribic] never drew it. I liked the idea that you had young Thor is clean-shaved, smooth-faced, and old Thor would have a big beard, and today’s Thor could be somewhere in the middle -- a little bit of a beard, a little scruffy, more like Chris Hemsworth.
But Esad just forgot, I guess, or didn’t want to draw it, so it wasn’t in there. So yeah, maybe going forward I’m fine with Thor having a little scruff or a beard to him. I’d be cool with that.
IGN: Okay, I can’t end on any question better than the beard question, so that’s all.
Aaron: [laughs]
Joshua writes for IGN. He can’t wait for Man of Steel so he can finally see how Superman shaves. Follow him on Twitter or IGN.
Source : ign[dot]com
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