• Interview - Simon Spurrier - X-Club PLUS Competition

    Next week sees the release of the Madison Jeffries starring X-Club TPB by Simon Spurrier, Paul Davidson & Rachelle Rosenberg.
    AlphaFlight.net is proud to present an interview with it's writer Simon Spurrier.



    (Please note: This interview was conducted in October 2011 before the release of the seralised #1)

    AF.net: - Simon, firstly thanks for agreeing to the interview.
    Absolutely my pleasure.

    You've been gaining quite a few writing gigs within Marvel lately which a lot of our readers may identify you with, but you first started writing comics over at 2000AD, back in 2001 if I'm correct. How did you decide to get into the comics industry?
    Almost by accident. I didn’t read my first comic – notwithstanding kiddie stuff, or my beloved Calvin and Hobbes – until I was about 16. 2000AD was an eye-opener straight away, and I instantly fell in love with the medium. I’d been a bit of a wannabe author since my annoyingly precocious childhood, but it had simply never occurred to me that there was such a job as “comic book writer”. I fancied a crack at that,
    and started pitching stories. It took me three years to shake-off the usual “I’m better than everyone” teenage nonsense and actually start paying attention to the editor’s feedback – and also to ditch the mistaken belief that there’s anything simple or easy about writing comics – and that’s when I finally started getting work.

    Having written for the screen, prose novels, comics and now web-comics for Avatar Press what do you think it is about the comics medium that still has relevance and works today?
    There’s no reason it shouldn’t have relevance. It’s as viable a means of telling stories as any other – novels, movies, videogames. In fact I could rant for hours about the many ways in which comics are a far more sophisticated and elegant narrative tool than a lot of other media, given the right story… but of course I’d be preaching to the converted.

    As far as I’m concerned genres and sub-genres may come and go at the whim of the zeitgeist – and quite rightly too, if they’ve outstayed their welcome in the spotlight – but as soon as we all start to worry that comics in general are no longer significant we’re guilty of misunderstanding the potential of an entire storytelling form. Or, more likely, we’re guilty of confusing the relevance of a medium with the relative
    trendiness or tiredness of the genres that fall within it.

    Are comics being read less than in some previous decades? Yeah. Is that because comics can’t compete with novels/movies/video-games etc? No. It’s because the sorts of stories comics are telling aren’t always as appealing to the massmind as they once were, and so the massmind has forgotten what a clever, adaptive, expressive format comics are.

    In my utopian world, if a person wanted to experience a crime story (or horror, or comedy, or romance, or superhero, or whatever), they’d walk into a store, find the relevant section, and then browse through movies, novels, comics, games – all displayed side-by-side. I believe every story has its perfect medium – this tale wants to be a movie; that tale could only ever be a comic, etc – and in my perfect world it’s the tale that matters, not the form.

    That’s a ludicrously optimistic world, of course, but frankly the advent of digitisation – the ability to watch films, read books and enjoy comics, all via one gadget – makes it a lot realer than it’s ever been before.

    I’m ranting. Consider a nerve accurately hit, there.

    Are there any existing comic characters or franchises that you'd really like to take a stab at?
    Yeah, loads. As much as I love the Big Superheroes – I get a kick out of every book I see with my name under the “Marvel” logo – I tend to be drawn towards the weirdo stuff: the guys and gals whose agenda isn’t always clear cut, and whose motivating motto isn’t always as simple as “Find Crime, Fight Crime.”

    I like antiheroes, I like spooky stuff, I like Kirby-krackling sci-fi, I like crime. Gimme your Dr Stranges, your Ghost Riders, your Silver Surfers and your Blades. Preferably all at once. And possibly while fighting Elder Gods on the psychedelic lip of a sentient Black Hole.

    Your current Marvel project sees you take control of the X-Club (the Science team formed within the X-Men consisting of Dr Nemesis, Kavita Rao, Madison Jeffries & by association; Danger), a team that you've already written a few times now(In the one-shots Blind Science, Smoke & Blood and the one-pager in the Origins of Marvel Comics: X-Men). How did the mini come about? Was it something you were approached to write because of your association with the team, or a story you wanted to tell and pitched?
    The latter. I fell in love with the characters during the one-shots, and couldn’t stop my brain gurgling away at the possibility of something bigger. My editor Daniel Ketchum has always been keen, so it was just a case of pitching the right story at the right time.
    When Regenesis reared its head I figured a way of tying it all together, and kaboom – we were off.

    Having read the solicitations released so far and a few interviews with you about the storyline it strikes me as a really intriguing concept; The Marvel Universe has always had its geniuses, but as our science fiction moves closer to becoming science fact applying this fictional team to solving the read-world idea of a space elevator
    definitely makes a lot of sense. What motivated you to bring this aspect to the book?

    Hello. My name is Simon Spurrier and I’m a scienceaholic. I’ve now been experiment-free for four weeks, and—
    Seriously, it was just too good an opportunity to miss. The space elevator is just one of the many concepts you’ll find in the X-Club serial which are united in being aaaaaaalmost accessible to us mundane mortals in the real world, but not quite. The brilliance of the Marvel Universe is that we’ve got all these guys running around with amazing abilities who – if correctly deployed – can give us the leg-up we need to explore these astonishing ideas we can’t quite reach ourselves.

    The space elevator is the crudest example of the whole thing. In the real world we don’t quite have the technology to build a strong enough umbilical tether, or shield it from radiation, or launch the counterweight platform, etc. But in the Marvel U? You’ve got polymath geniuses like Nemesis who can intuit new solutions, you’ve got tech-manipulating savants like Jeffries to build it all, and you’ve got impossible powerful ex-villains like Magneto to heft the whole thing into orbit.

    Honestly, anyone with even a passing interest in science will know that we live amidst a conceptual swamp of brain-meltingly insane truths and mysteries. Every time we make a breakthrough we explode a billion new questions. Ours is a universe where – just to give you one example – two particles can be “entangled” so that by manipulating one, the other mirrors its behaviour instantly… even if they’re separated by massive distances. And nobody knows exactly why. Even Einstein, everyone’s brainiac of choice, called it “spooky action at distance”.

    Some people act like Science is this boring force which comes along and steals all the magic and mystery from the world, and yet here we have one of the greatest intellects of the recent past describing things as “spooky”…?

    Science is brilliant.

    …of course, it’s worth mentioning, just in case I’m scaring people off with my geekgasm, that the X-Club serial isn’t about science per se. It’s about a bunch of brilliant, deep, fascinating and dysfunctional characters who set out to explore the bleeding edge of biology, technology and weirdology, and then have to scrabble about like maniacs when it all goes horribly wrong.

    Doctor Nemesis seems to be a character that although only relatively recently introduced to the X-verse seems to be a lot of fun for writers to play with and one that you definitely seem to have a handle on. What do you think it is about the character that people like?
    Ha… he’s great, isn’t he?

    I think a lot of people respond really well to that sort of arch, pissy, snarky character on a purely surface level: his grumpy spleen is always a pleasure to read, though you probably wouldn’t want to spend much time round the real version. If you’ll forgive the stereotyping, it’s a personality-set that I think appeals particularly to the Brit inside me: we tea-quaffers can’t help but get a guilty stiffy at the thought of that much distilled sarcasm and wit. That said, it’s almost too easy to think that’s all there is to the guy: a genius so comfortable with his own brilliance that he doesn’t suffer fools easily and, worse, assumes everyone he meets is a fool.

    My take on Nem is that he’s desperately proud of his team and his place in the mutant community, and he’d do anything to protect the people around him. He cares deeply for mutantkind in general and his crew in particular. He’d simply never dream of telling them so.

    To me he’s the perfect combination of brilliance, bastardliness, and – bizarrely – charm.

    Being an Alpha Flight website, the character most of our readers will know about is Madison Jeffries – one that's changed quite a bit from his days in Alpha Flight. What would you say defines Jeffries' current mental situation and the way he chooses to isolate himself from the world and his former friends?
    I have to be a bit careful here, because one of the major threads in this serial is about precisely that. What’s really going on in the guy’s head…?

    I’ll say simply this: readers can’t have helped noticing Jeffries becoming more and more distant over recent years. It’s as if his particular gift – an intuitive affinity with technology – has started to rob him of his humanity. In X-Club we’re going to find out a bit more about that, and bring it to a very clear conclusion.

    Given the recent events of Schism what is it that you think motivates Jeffries to stay on Utopia rather than pack up and leave?
    The answer to that is broadly the same for all the members of the X-Club. They each have their own set of preoccupations and agendas which – to them – absolve them of any need to get involved in the “party politics” of the X-Men.

    Kavita sees herself as a guardian of mutantkind in general, not of factions within it. Nemesis is the same – all he cares about is protecting his people – and Utopia’s facilities offer the best hopes of doing so (although he’d probably disguise his own honourable intentions by sneering about the pettiness of schoolyard squabbles).

    Danger is very much a part of Cyclops’s “vision” for the Utopia X-Men, but her stated interest – the incarceration and rehabilitation of villains – keeps her on Utopia as much as anything else.

    To a certain extend Jeffries is the odd one out. His suite of abilities makes him – and I truly believe this – one of the most powerful mutants on the planet, but his state of mind is a problem. It’s not so much that he sees himself as “above” the schism… rather that he has bigger problems of his own. As I said above, we’re going to be exploring that in this serial.

    Since his introduction into the X-verse Jeffries has pretty much stuck to the tinkerer aspect of his character but over in Mike Carey's Age of X we saw him suit up in his Box armour which pleased a lot of fans, due to Jeffries habit of getting knocked out a lot over the last few years. Will we get a chance to see Jeffries use his powers pro-actively for combat over the course of the mini-series at all?
    Yes. Eventually. And not in the way you might think.

    Something that a few eagle-eyed readers picked up on was the cameo of Jeffries and his brother Lionel over in #1 of Age of X: Universe, a character that not a lot of people have ever heard of. Did you ever read any of the original Alpha Flight run involving him, or was this a case of really good research?

    Sorry to say, the latter. I did my homework on Jeffries back when I did my first X- Club one-shot – including digging up some pages from the AF run – so I knew all about his flesh-manipulating bro. I figured they’d jointly make a really fun tag-team in the creepy alternate-world of Age of X, particularly as an Iron Man enemy. They ended-up fusing poor Mr Starks’ body into the metal of his suit, making him a sort of walking cyber-zombie. “The Iron Corpse”. Y’see? FUN WITH SCIENCE.

    On art duties for the mini-series is Paul Davidson, an artist that you've already worked with on the Blind Science one-shot and a few other projects. What does Paul bring to the book?
    Paul’s got a great eye for character. He’s one of those rare artists who can dramatize expressions and figures in a way which – in less capable hands – would look exaggerated or cartoony, but which he can render to be just as dramatic, serious or iconic as the scene demands. My sound-bite of choice at the moment, in describing Paul’s skill, is that he can “reconcile the epic with the intimate”. Given we’re telling a story about four complex characters in the context of reality-shaking global science, that’s exactly what’s needed.

    You gained a lot of respect from Alpha Flight fans for your Aurora story in Dark X-Men: The Beginning #3 (also drawn by Paul Davidson) wherein you dealt with her multiple personalities in a fresh and unique way. How did you come up with the concept of essentially using her personalities as weapons to choose from, in an almost Mission:Impossible team-selection way? Had you done much research into MPD?
    A little bit of research, yeah, though it’s worth saying the MPD we see in movies and comics – including the way I approached it – is a lot “neater”, a lot more exciting, and a lot less psychologically harrowing than the real world version.

    Regarding the Aurora story, I just approached it from the direction of not going down the obvious path. She’s a mutant with an incredibly powerful skillset – we all know that – so what story can we tell which shows-off her other facets, in a way which still makes her look smart and capable? In that light, getting her to use her own malady as a weapon to escape Norman Osborne was a fun solution.

    Before we finish, is there anything you'd like to say to anyone that's still on the fence about picking up X-Club #1?
    Miss it and you’ll be missing the following: Magneto’s grand moment! The most embarrassing day of Cyclops’s life! A sinister new enemy assaulting the X-Men from within! The weirdest cliffhanger in history! Aaaand the chance to see Kavita Rao putting seagull poop to a use for which it was never intended.

    And then in episode two Doctor Nemesis gets chemically bonded to a starfish.
    Seriously.

    SCIENCE HO!

    Simon, it's been a pleasure, thank you once again.

    --
    Simon can be found online at:
    http://www.simonspurrier.co.uk/
    http://twitter.com/sispurrier

    X-Men: X-Club is released to Comic Stores on June 20th.

    X-MEN: X-CLUB TPB
    Written by SIMON SPURRIER
    Penciled by PAUL DAVIDSON
    Cover by NICK BRADSHAW
    “WE DO SCIENCE!” In the wake of SCHISM, the members of the X-Men’s Science Team take it upon themselves to make a gesture of goodwill on behalf of mutantkind and better the world — using SCIENCE. But just as construction of the X-Club’s state-of-the-art space elevator nears completion, chaos erupts! And it appears to the world that mutants are to blame. Can Dr. Nemesis, Madison Jeffries, Kavita Rao and Danger clear the X-Men’s name before their experiment backfires? Don’t miss the story that will surely change how you look at the X-Men and the Periodic Table of Elements FOREVER! Collecting X-CLUB #1-5.
    120 PGS./Rated T+ ...$16.99
    ISBN: 978-0-7851-6443-2




    COMPETITION

    To celebrate the release of the TPB we have a copy of the first single issue of X-Club, signed by Simon, along with an original Paul Davidson sketch of Danger to give away to one lucky reader, wherever they are in the world!


    To enter, all you have to do is add a comment in the section below this interview - It's as simple as that!!!
    One commenter will be chosen at random on July 20th 2012 and offered the prizes.


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    Comments 31 Comments
    1. rplass's Avatar
      rplass -
      Wow, that's a great interview, Phil and thanks for the well-researched set of questions for him. The fact that it's dated from before the mini-series came out really doesn't matter. I can't believe how coherent he stayed. You'd never know he'd be capable of lasting that long as a focused interviewee based on his Twitter feed.
    1. Phil's Avatar
      Phil -
      Oh yeah, the only thing the dated-ness effects is the very last question and even that's marginally.

      The few times I've met Si he's been an absolute pleasure to talk to and his enthusiasm and love for comics flows from him.
      And he's got a great sense of humour.

      His latest novel 'A Serpent Uncoiled' is an absolutely brilliant read, and I really enjoyed the first issue of his new Boom Studios series Extermination which came out last week.

      And I really liked X-Club.
    1. MistressMerr's Avatar
      MistressMerr -
      I'LL PUT MY SCIENCE IN YOU! I'LL PUT MY SCIENCE IN ALL OF YOU!

      The science geeking out was far and away my favourite part of the whole thing, and it makes so much more sense now that he'd latch on to such a weird team as the X-Club and make them his babies. Love it!
    1. Flightpath07's Avatar
      Flightpath07 -
      He is the Felicia Day of science, I take it?
    1. Le Messor's Avatar
      Le Messor -
      I'm one of those 'science sucks all the wonder out of stuff' people. Boo! Hiss! Throw Mik off!!!

      - Le Messor
      "If you wish to succeed, consult three old people."
    1. cmdrkoenig67's Avatar
      cmdrkoenig67 -
      Fantastic interview, Phil! Thank you both (yourself and Mr Spurrier) for sharing it with us.

      Dana
    1. -K-M-'s Avatar
      -K-M- -
      I didn’t even realize it was the same author from Dark X-Men: The Beginning #3, Mr. Spurrier writes some pretty fun stories.

      I loved his recent X-Club mini, it was just good old fashioned fun. As a fan of Doctor Who, I’m a nerd that enjoys the quirky science type stories.
    1. EccentricSage's Avatar
      EccentricSage -
      Ok, when Madison Jeffries gets to be awesome again, I'll start picking it up. Good Interview. I am glad that this writer cares enough to do his research.

      Is the conclusion of Madison's arc in the book worth it? Does he get some emotional healing at long last? I might pick it up, depending upon how he was handled.
    1. -K-M-'s Avatar
      -K-M- -
      Yeah Jeffries was treated with a lot of respect, the ending was a tad odd but they have been hinting at it for years now.
    1. Le Messor's Avatar
      Le Messor -
      Is it wrong that every time I see 'X-Club', I think of that old boy band (or whatever) S-Club 7?
    1. Flightpath07's Avatar
      Flightpath07 -
      Mik; Yes. Yes, it's wrong. (But funny)
    1. Phil's Avatar
      Phil -
      So, did anyone that didn't pick up the miniseries pick up the trade?

      Anyone else got any thoughts on the series?
    1. Le Messor's Avatar
      Le Messor -
      Quote Originally Posted by Phil View Post
      So, did anyone that didn't pick up the miniseries pick up the trade?
      I plan to; thanks for letting me know it's out.

      - Le Messor
      "I'll teach you to kick me..."
      "You don't need to teach me I already know how!"
      ~ Duck Soup
    1. rplass's Avatar
      rplass -
      I got it! It has some neato pencils and sketches at the end, one of them with Jeffries, pretty cool stuff! I don't wanna say the pencils are overinked but let's just say the inker's got a heavy hand; I wonder how Paul Davidson's art would look with a lighter touch.
    1. Phil's Avatar
      Phil -
      There was no seperate inker.
      Paul was the sole artist.
    1. rplass's Avatar
      rplass -
      Ah, well, same concept then: I wonder how it would look if he himself had a lighter touch on the ink over his own pencils. It's a subtle thing to notice but I don't think he's ever had anything published by Marvel with someone else inking over his pencils. Maybe something else he did.
    1. Karl 1000's Avatar
      Karl 1000 -
      Went for this purely because of Simon's involvement and was not disappointed. Great to see him getting some love in the US.
    1. rplass's Avatar
      rplass -
      Hey Karl 1000, welcome to the boards! This isn't a US board though; it's actually a good blend of UK, US and Canada, along with a bunch of other countries I can't remember or we already bombed.
    1. Flightpath07's Avatar
      Flightpath07 -
      Quote Originally Posted by rplass View Post
      or we already bombed.

    1. Phil's Avatar
      Phil -
      I think Karl means in the US comics market, rather than the UK one he began in.