Krakoa, the mutant nation, is supposed to be the X-Men’s utopia. However, it’s also a place where massively powerful arch-enemies live side by side and alcohol flows freely. That volatile combination can and does produce explosive mutant outbursts. Who steps in to restore the peace when confrontations happen on Krakoa? How do they ensure they don’t happen again? How do you keep the peace in a place like Krakoa while maintaining its mutant ideals?
Writer Simon Spurrier and artist Jan Bazaldua tackle those questions in Marvel’s Legion of X, a brand new series launching in April. The book follows mutants like Nightcrawler, Legion, Pixie, and the non-mutant Juggernaut as they explore what it means to be Krakoa’s peacekeeping force. CBR spoke with Spurrier about Legion of X‘s cast, the cases they’ll investigate, and how the series connects to characters from his previous work on Marvel’s Way of X. Also included with this interview is Legion of X #1’s standard cover by Dike Ruan, its teaser variant cover by Bob Quinn, and a sneak peek at Bazaldua artwork.
CBR: In Way of X, you explored what religion and spirituality can and should be in the culture of Krakoa. Legion of X sounds like a similar deep dive into the idea of a police force. Is that what you’re aiming for?
Simon Spurrier: Yes, in a nutshell. When people ask me what Way of X was about I said, “It’s about religion on Krakoa except it’s not about religion at all.” With Legion the answer is, “Yes, it’s about policing, but it’s not about policing at all.” It’s about the reality of having, for the first time in the Marvel Universe, this exciting setup, where you have a dense population of super-powered individuals, all of whom have the tendency to be quite dramatic in their interactions. [laughs] Any of them could lose their temper and have a bad day. The consequences of that could be anything from a brutal barroom fight to accidentally ending the universe. So, it follows that when you’ve got this crucible you need somebody to keep the peace.
There is a certain sort of mind, and we have characters like this, who hear the phrase “keep the peace” and think of uniforms, catching baddies, and dragging people to jail. Then there’s Nightcrawler, who thinks that keeping the peace actually means finding ways to stop these explosions from happening. It’s not enough for people to be happy. If you want people to be happy you just take away all of their freedom and then they’re just happy little zombies. [laughs] What you have to find is a way to make people feel valuable. That was some of the subtexts of Way of X. All of this is a long way of saying that Legion of X is very interested in interrogating different ways of keeping the peace in the most explosive, dramatic, delightfully weird, and wonderful population imaginable.
So, this book can tell a variety of different crime/procedural tales. Anything from investigating a bar fight, to missing persons, to a full-on “whodunit?”
Yes, and we have all of those things — the weirder the better. Alan Moore’s Top Ten was obviously a big influence on this, but also way back when I first pitched Way of X I had this idea that if you go back to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco during the Summer of Love and you explain to somebody that within a couple of years it was all going to go twisted and wrong and you were going to have Charles Manson, Helter Skelter, and the bad trip, what would they do to change that? What would they do to protect this dream of freedom, equality, and creativity? That’s kind of what Nightcrawler is trying to do. So, inevitably you have to indulge in some fun NYPD Blue style precinct stuff, but that’s where the similarity ends. That’s because in this story the precinct is a Wild West sheriff’s office inside a bubble universe afloat in the Astral Plane — all of which is contained within Legion’s head. [laughs]
Sounds like this is a crime book that asks big questions and is full of both colorful characters and psychedelic strangeness?
Yes, one of the first things that happen is Nightcrawler gets summoned to the Great Ring of Arakko on what was formerly Mars. We’ve met all the members of their Great Ring except for one, who I came up with. She’s called Ora Serrata, and she is their idea of a chief of law. I can’t wait for people to see Jan’s designs for her because she’s just extraordinary. She needs Nightcrawler’s help because there’s a fugitive who’s on the run from Arakko and is hiding out on Krakoa. It’s a god. There are some very specific laws on Arakko about deities and beliefs. That all ties nicely into Nightcrawler and his particular field of interest. So in Legion of X #1, she says, “One of our deities is missing.” [laughs]
That begs the question of what jurisdiction will Nightcrawler and company have in their investigations?
That’s a very good question. Lots of heads will be knocked around as a result of that question. Arakko though would not suffer Krakoan peacekeepers to come and interfere. So rather than just sending one of their bad-asses to Krakoa to find their missing god they ask Nightcrawler to play chaperone. It’s made very clear though that if this is not cleaned up very quickly then Ora Serrata herself will come down and figure it out. I don’t want to say much until you see her, but she is not somebody you mess around with. [laughs] She’s genuinely terrifying.
What other cases will be part of your cast’s initial investigations?
Another of our core mysteries involves a “Skinjacker.” They can leap into your body and live your life for a day. They can talk to your friends and get up to all sorts of mischief while they’re borrowing your skin. That’s horrifying. It’s a real violation of identity, freedom, personality, and all of the things that we sort of take for granted in the western world. And yet, they’re not breaking any of Krakoa’s three laws: Make more mutants, Kill no man, and Respect the sacred land. What do you do?
So, there’s a lot of really cool stuff you can do when you start from a position of how you keep the peace in a remarkable, miraculous population. It’s absolutely not the case that it’s a bunch of mutants pulling on blue uniforms, wielding truncheons, and beating up bad guys. It’s a lot more interesting, exciting, explosive, and weird than that.
The fact that you have Nightcrawler in a police book suggests it’s going to be more than a police book because he’s the de facto heart of every book he appears in.
I think so too. Some of the people who pick this up will have read Way of X. It’s important to me that that not be critical though. You can come into this knowing only that Nightcrawler is a fantastically convoluted, complicated, sometimes contradictory, but always wonderful character. He is a man defined by his empathy, and hilariously enough, his humanity. That’s the joke, isn’t it? The Krakoan era is about drawing lines between mutantkind and humankind, yet I’d argue there are mutants who are the epitome of what we regard as human characteristics. Nightcrawler is all of those things. He’s a clown, a pirate, a swashbuckler, and a prankster. He’s very horny, but he’s also extremely religiously inclined. He cherishes the notion of greater things he can fulfill in his own mind. So, he’s not somebody you’d immediately think of as being chief of police. But he probably is somebody, given everything I’ve said before, of whom it makes sense that he’s interested in finding creative ways to make life better — preventing horror, chaos, and the bubbling up of hatred and division in this population that he loves.
Other returning Way of X characters include Pixie and Doctor Nemesis. What made you want to bring them over to this book? And what can you tell us about their roles in Legion of X?
I just love them all! [laughs] Doctor Nemesis is endless fun. He’s all my most cynical, skeptical tendencies with Frasier Crane’s voice and a silly haircut. He’s in this a little less than he was in Way of X because the approach I’m taking is to have four or five core characters: Nightcrawler, Legion, Pixie, and Juggernaut, and a rotating cast of secondary characters.
The basic idea is Nightcrawler hasn’t gone out and said, “I’m forming a team of cops.” It’s more that he’s saying, “I’m starting this hazily defined organization whose job is to try and make things better for people here. Anybody who wants to join can.” So there are people dipping in and out. You get cameos from all sorts of great characters who I’ve always loved that don’t get enough screen time, but we spend most of our time around those four or five characters.
Pixie is one of them. Not that she’d ever call herself this, but she’s sort of Nightcrawler’s lieutenant. She works very closely with a character I created for Way of X called Lost, who is an ectomorph. She controls gravity and grew up in the absence of it. So, she’s very long and thin. She went through an awful lot in the years of her life before Way of X and Way of X was about her breaking free from all of these wretched, controlling influences which robbed her of free will and her identity. So, now we get to see her finally as she really is — this very strong-willed woman who’s prepared to stare anything in the eye and to tell it to fuck off. She’s awesome. I love her.
You mentioned Juggernaut, a non-mutant with a long history with the X-Men. What made you want to bring Cain Marko into this book?
As I said before, if you tell people you’re creating a peacekeeping organization there are those who think they’re going to take a pair of cuffs, smack naughty people upside the head, and drag them off to prison. At the beginning of our story, that’s Juggernaut’s position. He’s been permitted to come live on Krakoa by Professor X. He thinks this is what’s expected of him. So his whole arc is about him having doubts, and it’s beautiful and wonderful to see. There will be some early revelations about exactly why Professor X wanted him on Krakoa and spoilers! It’s not what he wants to do at all.
Who’s the character standing next to Juggernaut in the promotional teaser?
That’s ForgetMeNot, a character I made years ago. His whole thing is, the second you look away from him he evaporates from your memory. So, back in X-Men: Legacy #300 I joked that he’s been a core member of the X-Men for years, but nobody remembers. [laughs] He’s this tragic X-Men who’s now on the team and is partnering with Juggernaut. So, there’s a lot of comedy from the fact that Juggernaut has this partner who he keeps forgetting about every time he looks away.
The titular character of this book, David Haller (AKA Legion), is another old favorite of yours who appeared in Way of X and was the focus of your X-Men: Legacy run.
Yes, I love Legion because, to me, he’s the epitome of creative use of the mutant metaphor. The metaphor, of course, has been used to comment on racism, gender, sexuality, class, and prejudice — all these important matters. When I did X-Men: Legacy, it was beyond important to me that it be a metaphor for mental health. Legion is the perfect character to let you talk about that. The fact that you can’t cure yourself when you’re struggling with mental issues, but you can learn to manage yourself. You can own your problems. He had this little rubric of, “I rule me.” He refused to be under anyone else’s power, even himself. He realized he was always going to be a problem, so he wrote himself out of reality. Marvel being Marvel, he immediately wrote himself back in. [laughs] That’s cool because it means I get to play with him some more.
By the end of Way of X, he had realized that it wasn’t enough to lurk in the shadows. He got this gradually awakening ambition for leadership. There’s a lot of stuff in Legion of X about him deliberately seeking to be a different sort of leader than his dad. He loves and respects Charles Xavier, but he makes no bones about the fact that Charles Xavier is a really bad parent. And if you have a population like Krakoa, the necessities for your leader are somewhat different than if you have a repressed, tormented, rarefied underclass, which was the mutant narrative up until now.
So, Charles Xavier was a very good leader for mutantkind while they were going through these punishing, awful years in the wilderness. Now they’re the strongest faction on Earth, the tactics Xavier has been using up until now are arguably no longer what people need. They might be a real problem. So, we start to see Legion having these thoughts and wondering if he could present an alternative. One of the ways he’s doing that is at the end of Way of X he had taken himself up to the top of the tallest volcano in the solar system on Olympus Mons on Mars, he sat down, and he planted a Krakoan gate seed inside his own brain. It allows anyone who wants to step through a portal into this beautiful, mad, non-euclidian, psychedelic, space which he calls the Altar. It’s a place of healing and culture where anyone can enter a warming hive mind called the Choir.
The mutant Dust is the conduit that lets people into this hive mind. I realized she’s not just a mutant whose only power is to control dust clouds. She’s actually an unsurpassed genius at distributed networking. She can manipulate billions of particles, and if you reduce people to psychic particles that means she can create these astonishingly complex and extremely beautiful psychic networks — essentially, a gestalt/hive mind. So, that’s all going on inside the Altar, and what makes it even more fun is the Altar is adrift on the Astral plane. It’s like an island. Legion has deliberately left an opening on the shell of the Altar so that anybody who wants can leave or come back onto the Astral Plane.
Earlier we talked about Juggernaut. I’m curious about the dynamic between him and Legion since both have an awkward and troubled history with Charles Xavier.
That’s a good question. We’ll tease that up until Legion of X #3, which I’m writing now. That’s where they have the talk up to and including, “What should I call you?…” [laughs] It’s lovely and feeds into some of the things I was hinting at early on about leadership and new perspectives on Professor X. So, that’s there, and we’ll have a lot of other interesting dynamics to explore as well.
You mentioned that other characters will come into and out of the book. How will that work? Will they sort of be “deputized” for certain cases and arcs?
There will certainly be some of that, but it’s more that people are going to come and go. It keeps things flexible, free, and easy. So just to tease, Banshee becomes an element of our story and will probably be for a long time. He’s not a dip in and out character. I’ve got big plans for him
Finally, Jan Bazaldua’s work on The Winter Guard has this classic superhero feel to it but is also full of dynamic action and expressive characters. Will we see a similar approach from them on Way of X?
Yeah, very much so! We’ve taken a slightly formalist approach where we start with quite a rigid structure with like four panels on every page. We alternate the size and positioning of them, and that sets up a rhythm for the first issue. Then as these investigations change, and things start to fall apart the structure starts to break down. That’s our big conceit for the pacing and the narrative, and Jan has been able to run with that in ways that I never expected.
You can have two equally sized panels: one of which is people just walking down a corridor talking, and then the next is people being murdered by a rogue god. They both have the same sort of weight despite being worlds apart from each other because of the work Jan has done. That’s been wonderful to see.
Find out just how much trouble Nightcrawler has on his hands in Marvel’s Legion of X #1, hitting comic stands on April 20.
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