As part of their Next Big Thing live press calls, Marvel has just announced “the First X-Men” by Christos Gage and Neal Adams, a new five-issue series slated for August.
Plotted and illustrated by Neal Adams and scripted by Christos Gage the book acts as a prelude to the classic X-Men story, offering up another new look at the early days of Xavier before he was in a wheelchair. “Of all the mutants on Earth, Professor X could easily pass as a human. Why would he want to get involved in this?” Adams said. “Maybe all this was going on before Professor X was Professor X…when Professor X was a teenager. Maybe mutant kids were getting abused by the military, by the government. Somebody would have been looking out for them, but maybe that person came to Charles Xavier, realizing he couldn’t protect these kids. That was my pitch.”
The book will star Wolverine, who sees how the government is treating mutants and recruits Sabretooth to help him form a team of mutant protectors, with a core element of the book being to establish why mutants were so feared in the first place. “How deeply is Wolverine entrenched in the X-Men? Why was this first team…maybe a failure?” asks Adams. “Lots of questions to answer.” The team will also consist of “some guy named Erik Lensherr,” and will feature new characters and new elements created by both Gage and Adams like Bombastic Aghast.
Adams and editor Nick Lowe also stress that the book is very much in canon, but they’re doing their best to make sure it all lines up with what we knew before. “This is key to Wolverine’s history and his relationships with other characters. This will answer questions that have been out there for decades,” Lowe says, with Adams adding, “None of this won’t lead up to the very first time you see the X-Men and everything after. We were very careful.”
