X-Men Monday #259 – Collin Kelly & Jackson Lanzing Talk ‘NYX’

Welcome, X-Fans, to another uncanny edition of X-Men Monday at AIPT!

I’m truly happy for the Academy X fans. After 259 editions of X-Men Monday, you really get to know X-Fans and who and what they care about — or at least the X-Fans who read and submit questions to this column. And a good portion of them wanted more Academy X. (Yes, and that includes Hellion.)

Now, obviously, the Krakoan era was light on Academy X content. It’s something former X-Men Senior Editor Jordan D. White talked about quite a bit in response to X-Fans’ pleas. In fact, in his final X-Men Monday appearance last month, Jordan said the following:

“I know we didn’t spotlight Academy X enough, specifically. Honestly, I think it’s one of those things that is cyclical in the sense that it’s an era that the writers we were working with… it just wasn’t their era. None of them were big Academy X fans. But those folks will be there. Those folks will come back.”

As you’ll see in this interview, Academy X fans, your time has come. On sale July 24, 2024, NYX #1 — written by Collin Kelly and Jackson Lanzing and illustrated by Francesco Mortarino — promises to bring Academy X characters and plot lines into the “From the Ashes” era. Because, as you’ll soon read, Collin and Jackson are fans. Let’s see what else they have to say.

AIPT: Collin and Jackson, welcome to X-Men Monday! While you’re no strangers to comics readers, as this is your first appearance in this column, I was wondering if each of you could share your first X-Men eXperience as a fan?

Jackson Lanzing: So, I had a fun rule that I’ve talked about whenever doing X-Men press. My mom loves when I talk about it, so I’ll talk about it again. My mom actually had a ban on watching the X-Men cartoon in my house. She didn’t really know what it was, and I think she saw people shooting other people with big Cable guns and was like, “I can’t allow it.” So I wasn’t allowed to engage with X-Men because I had very hippie parents for many, many years. 

It wasn’t until high school that I got back into comics after many, many years away. I went into a local comic shop and it was a really fortuitous week because it was a very similar age to right now. Marvel was launching two simultaneous X-Men series. It was Chris Claremont‘s Uncanny X-Men, where he was coming back, it was set at the school, and it opened with them playing baseball. It was the most classic Claremont X-Men stuff. And then there was Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men #1. So that was my first X-Men experience — heading into that X-Men line. I pretty much became a voracious X-reader after that and went back into Grant Morrison’s New X-Men, which really became my first love in X-Men.

Collin Kelly: Well, I very much was allowed to watch the X-Men Show. My mom would set me in front of television and I would just watch for hours and I absolutely loved it. But then I found Morrison’s New X-Men run at my local library when I was a teenager. You give me that gross, weird stuff and I was gobbling it up. And then leading into the same age Jackson mentioned — I think Joss’ Astonishing X-Men run is one of the best onboarding experiences you can possibly have for X-Men.

AIPT: It’s funny, I was in kindergarten at the height of Turtlemania and my teacher banned Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles because it’s all we’d obsess over in class.

Jackson: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was the only one of those that wasn’t banned in my household. Turtles was my safe spot that I was allowed to watch. I guess it was because humans weren’t hurting humans. It’s all animals.

AIPT: Thank god for that animal loophole! So, when NYX was announced, Marvel’s press release mentioned you two bonded over series like Runaways, Young Avengers, and the original NYX. The X-Men line has had many fan-favorite series focused on the next generation of mutants. Beyond the original NYX, have any of them influenced how you’re writing your “From the Ashes” series?

Collin: Oh, yes, absolutely. One of the X-Men eras that really caught me, hook, line, and sinker was the Academy X era. We were all in the midst of Harry Potter mania, and the idea of separating people out into little schools and houses was in the cultural imagination. So you’re taking these young X-Men and putting them under the banner of these classics. You’re putting Cyclops in one of his first positions as a teacher and letting Emma Frost return to her roots as an educator. These were really exciting stories that then allowed us to key into the youthful energy of just a bunch of kids playing baseball.

One of the things Claremont really taught us well is X-Men are often best serviced as soap opera, right? Yes, we want to see Sentinels getting their heads blown off, but really, we’re there to see which boy Jean Grey is going to kiss. I think that era was incredibly vibrant in terms of the kind of young love and the focus of those personal relationships. 

Plus, who can fall in love with Hellion? That poor garbage boy. 

Jackson: So, obviously, we’re carrying a lot of the characters or plot lines from Academy X forward in this new era. We’re already playing with Laura and Anole, but you’re going to see a lot of other characters come into the book over time that help us continue to evolve that era. 

The only other one that I would really point out as an influence on the book was Peter David’s latter-day X Factor — the one that played it like a noir in Mutant Town. It played with that idea of what it meant to be a minority population in a human city, have to look after your own, and have to deal with your own disinterest in being a superhero and your interest in being either a public servant or just a private citizen who can get by day to day. That book was really great at taking characters like Strong Guy, who I found very unappealing or inaccessible, and made them people that I could really understand and access. 

So a big goal for us in NYX is to take characters who sometimes get trapped behind their own iconography. Laura’s definitely one of those. But I think Sophie Cuckoo is an incredible example of this because she’s so fundamentally trapped behind the iconography that we understand. 

And especially in some ways, Kamala Khan is burdened by an enormous amount of iconography. I think that’s what Iman Vellani and Sabir Pirzada’s whole run was about — her trying to be like, “All right, well, am I a mutant? Am I a human? Am I inhuman? Am I a superhero? Am I an Avenger? Am I a Champion? What am I?” And I think, ideally, what our book says is, you’re Kamala Khan — let’s focus on that.

That’s sort of what we’re doing across the board. It’s not about Wolverine, it’s about Laura. It’s not about Prodigy, it’s about David. And the way we’re reflecting that is every issue of NYX is titled by the name of the character that it’s about — not their mutant name, their human name, because that’s the world they’re living in right now, and the world they have to start understanding how to operate inside. 

AIPT: Let’s dig into your cast a bit further. X-Fan Harry G was wondering how you chose your ensemble. 

Collin: Well, one of the ways we first approached this was looking at, first and foremost, what characters did we love? If you only get one chance to write X-Men, you should write the things that you love and care about. And for us, that meant going deep and pulling, not necessarily the classics, but finding those characters that exist in the corners who haven’t had their full story told. A character like Anole, who I’ve always loved since he was just a little green lad going up through his journey of not only discovering how to be a lizard man but how to be queer within that space is an incredible story. And yes, he’s been trapped behind a bar, but what does that mean now that he’s forced to get out of it? That’s a rich story that we feel deserves to be told. 

Jackson: I think the other thing we’re really eager to do is take this unique period in Kamala Khan’s story, which benefited from the whole Krakoan resurrection plot line. We were in the room when that was all being discussed and sort of decided, really never thinking that it would be our job to come in and explore what that meant. But here it is. And I think what we’ve discovered is that it’s a really wonderful thread because it’s turned Kamala into the Kitty Pryde of this era. She’s a character who gets to learn what it is to be a mutant, piece by piece, moment by moment.

But unlike Kitty, she’s somebody who does understand what it means to be a superhero outright. So it’s been really fun to be like, OK, she’s an active superhero from the get-go. She doesn’t have to ask anybody for permission. She doesn’t have to ask how to be an X-Man. She’s Ms. Marvel, man, she’s an Avenger. She’s fine. How do we then deal with what it means for her life to change now that she’s a mutant — not just in the public perception of Ms. Marvel, which is, I think something that Sabir and Iman have dealt with a lot as well — but also in what she owes to her community. Not what she owes to herself, but what she owes to all the rest of the mutants or what she doesn’t. I think that’s going to be a big conversation as the book progresses because we’re really looking to make a book about community. So Kamala becomes a really hardcore part of that.

Then, the others really came out of a natural desire to surround those characters with characters who could forward their story and had their own stories to tell. So Sophie became a really obvious number to Kamala, just in terms of making sure there was a character who represented everything Kamala wasn’t. Somebody who was really embedded in mutant culture, who was really defined by it, who barely has a civilian identity, and certainly doesn’t have an individualistic identity. Somebody who really has to learn what that’s like from the start.

And Prodigy, a character who we are longtime fans of, obviously was a huge part of Academy X and a huge part of the future of the X-Men to the degree that he had been named a member of the X-Men right before they were all murdered. And we thought it was a really important moment to say, OK, Prodigy went through his whole journey, he’s become the Cyclops that he always wanted to be, and it didn’t work. What’s next? How do you step back away from that and back into some kind of life? What do you become in the absence of your dream? 

Collin: And I think that kind of landed us easily on Laura as the kind of final member of this cast, because she’s someone who is, as we meet her at the start of this, very specifically says, “I’m only Wolverine.” If Sophie is our bright light, standing to blind everybody, and Kamala is this kind of honest truth, trying to find her way, then Laura knows exactly who she is, or at least she thinks so. She’s living on a knife edge. She’s living by the blade and her journey of discovering what that humanity is, what lives underneath the mask, if there still is anyone underneath the mask, is once again going to be a good journey for her, but also an important reflection as all of these characters are dealing with their own identities and what that means in this new post-Krakoa world.

AIPT: You mentioned Sophie — X-Fans Brett Smith, Esme Grey, and Mario B wanted to know what inspired you to choose Sophie of all the Cuckoos.

Jackson: So in part, it’s that there’s been some indications over time that of them, she’s the one who has the most interest in being a hero, or in being superheroic, in general. I think that’s really interesting because we were going to be putting her in a relationship with Kamala, where they were both going to be learning stuff from one another. This is very much about their friendship kicking off and Sophie kind of understanding why Kamala is cool. And Kamala kind of understanding why Sophie’s cool and the two of them finding some kind of home within each other. I felt like Sophie fit best. Of all the Cuckoos, she felt like the one with the least inherent darkness. She felt like the one with the least need to stay and be a leader among them. She felt like the one who was kind of ready to take a step out and look beyond that.

And as anybody who reads NYX #1 will know, we’re not leaving all the other Cuckoos on the side of the road. We’re using the whole thing, but we’re really focusing on Sophie and what Sophie is doing.

AIPT: You mentioned kissing earlier — X-Fan Emily asked if we can expect to see new or established romances in NYX. Emily is particularly hopeful to see more of David and Tommy together. 

Jackson: I want to apologize in advance. David and Tommy are no longer together. David has a new boyfriend. You will meet him in NYX #1, in part because what we’re doing with David is, especially at the beginning of his journey, very much about him separating himself from X-Men and Krakoa, in general, and trying to look at it from a more objective and more humanistic perspective. People understand what that means, ideally by the end of the first issue.

Collin: It was an amicable breakup. They just weren’t going in separate directions. 

Jackson: Tommy was going very fast in the other direction.

But there will definitely be new romances to be had. There are a couple of new love interests for Laura that we’re looking at, playing out over the course of a little while. We’ve got sort of a building love triangle that’s going to build around her. We’ve got regular romance for Anole — his dating life is actually something we’re really interested in. 

Collin: His Grindr account is just so weird, man. There are so many weirdos in that thing, but luckily some people who actually can start to understand him. We want all of these characters to find love, but as writers, we are going to make it as difficult as possible.

AIPT: OK, this mysterious Krakoan… X-Fan Kaldervallry was wondering what we should expect from this new character. A bit harsh, but Kaldervallry asked if they’re just a poor man’s version of villain Magneto or something else entirely?

Jackson: No, that’s good! That’s what you should be saying. That’s what you should be wondering. That’s the objective.

No comment.

After NYX #1, I think we’ll have plenty of stuff to say about the Krakoan. As it stands, I think it’s best to encounter him the way he’s encountered in the book. Suffice it to say, the Krakoan is a character who is not there to be a sort of stalk X-villain. He’s not the new Magneto if you want to think about it that way. Our heroes and villains are ideally going to be approached whenever possible with empathy, first with an understanding they’re not out here trying to be evil. They’re out here trying to live, and they’re trying to find a new way to identify in the aftermath of Krakoa. And some people are going to make good decisions, and some people are going to make bad decisions, and those decisions are going to reflect on each other. And the Krakoan is maybe our most germane thread for that exact idea and it’s going to thread not just through the first arc of NYX, but beyond it. 

Collin: And there are probably a lot of fans out there who understand how angry losing Krakoa might make you. And the Krakoan is very much a mouthpiece — a representative — of a lot of those perspectives. It hurts when you lose something you love. It hurts real bad.

AIPT: Beyond the Krakoan, can we expect any other adversaries in NYX?

Jackson: So, within the pages of NYX #1 and #2, you will meet two legacy villains. More than two legacy villains, honestly — three legacy villains kind of. And a new sort of Han Solo-esque, between-good-and-bad character. That’s a mutant you’re going to encounter in NYX #2 named Local. Local’s a really exciting new addition to the squad who’s bringing out a whole different sort of angle on Laura and on a couple of different characters, and acts as a gateway into an exciting, I think, new take on a legacy villain. 

Collin: And if people want to meet him early, every one of these X-Men books has a QR code in the back where you can unlock a last 31st page. 

AIPT: Beyond the Krakoan, we have Anole continuing to be a bartender and Prodigy teaching students about mutant culture. NYX seems like a must-buy for fans of the First Krakoan Age. Is it safe to assume you two were regular readers and fans of the era?

Jackson: Oh, I mean, it brought me back to X-Men. I had been gone for a little bit as a reader. You know, from high school forward, I’ve been reading a lot of X-Men over a long period of time. And I’ve stopped at every signpost along the way and caught some of it. Krakoa kept me in the whole time. Those Dawn of X trades that published it all in sequence — I was buying those even though I had the single issues. Collin and I were genuinely banging on the door of that office in our early days at Marvel. And it was too late. At that point, they had everybody they needed, but we desperately wanted to be involved in that because it was such a unique and exciting narrative space.

Collin: And just as storytellers, we owe so much to Jonathan Hickman. The way he tells stories, the way he graphs things — the data pages…

Jackson: We went and jacked those for Star Trek. We just took those over to Star Trek because they’re so good. 

Collin: But it was an incredible age with incredibly intriguing and great thoughts that evolved the X-Men in some really, really intriguing and important ways. While we absolutely will not say that era is required reading for this book or any of this new line, it is incredibly important for us to acknowledge what has come before and the impact that Krakoa had on the mutant population. 

Jackson: We’re one of the few books that’s designed in some ways to answer that era rather than push past it directly. And that comes from our initial pitch. I think a lot of fans hear “From the Ashes” and assume new stuff, new stuff, new stuff. And it is — NYX is filled with new stuff. But on the flip side of that, it really felt important that, especially for this book that was supposed to be very street level and ground level and about how we move on and how we push through and how we adapt from “What was that thing?” “What did it mean?” “How did it live on Krakoa? “How did it not live on Krakoa?” “Where is the language used?” “Where is it not used?” “What was it like for people who were on Krakoa?” “What was it like for people who weren’t on Krakoa?” All of these stories feel really exciting and interesting and continue to flow from the Krakoan era.

The Krakoan era is not done in that particular context unless we are done talking about it. And I think of it as a piece of history, the same way that “The Age of Apocalypse” or “The Dark Phoenix Saga” basically live forever in the X-Men imagination. Because you can always come back to Phoenix and you can always come back to “The Age of Apocalypse” and you can always come back to House of M or whatever. I think it’s been really important for us to say you can always come back to Krakoa as this really fundamental era that happened. And now moving forward, that gives you all this new story territory. So we really do think of NYX as simultaneously forging forward and also acting as a bit of a celebration of what came before. 

Collin: I think celebration of life in a lot of ways is an important way to think about this book. We are embracing it while also acknowledging that without that kind of homeland, the diaspora means something else. And the question of what do we hold onto, what do we grow from, and what do we grow into from the soil, is the whole core of the book — with a bunch of young people kissing.

AIPT: Of course. And what can you share about NYX‘s visuals?

Jackson: Francesco Mortarino is on fire in this book. It’s awesome watching him grow with every page and push himself to get creative and imaginative.

Collin: And get fashionable! It’s very, very fashionable. We had a note at the top, like, this should be embodying New York streetwear and he hit that with a vengeance. Every one of these looks is fierce as hell. 

Jackson: It’s also really wild because all of his background people are also fierce as hell. So New York is just a really fashionable city under Francesco’s pen. And then color artist Raúl Angulo is taking Francesco’s pages, which are already extraordinary, and applying this neon-soaked color palette across the board that’s taking Francesco’s work up a whole level. So, we’re really enormously thankful to be working with both of them. And you have the legendary Sara Pichelli on covers. How cool is that? It’s really exciting for us.

AIPT: While we’re discussing NYC, X-Fans Carlos Ivan and Mario B said, since your series will be set in the Big Apple, is there a chance the cast might interact with the larger superhero community in the city?

Jackson: Yes. Not in the short term, primarily because we have so many people in our cast that it feels important not to expand too far beyond mutants just yet. That said, stay tuned. That particular premise of how the rest of the superhero community operates around this is something that we’re going to be very interested in playing with, especially as we get into act two. But what I think you will see more directly upfront is an interaction with actual New York. 

This feels like it’s set in the place. You’re going to see actual restaurants, you’re going to see actual clubs, you’re going to see actual places — they’re just going to have different names because legal — but every place in NYX is an actual place. We’re not New York locals, we’re Los Angeles locals. But we spent a lot of time in New York and we want to make sure that it’s local-proof.

Collin: Our editor is a New York local.

Jackson: Shout out Annalise Bissa, who makes this whole book local and was happy to correct us.

AIPT: I was going to ask about you two being based on the West Coast.

Jackson: Honestly, we initially pitched this book as LAX. It was a gag, but that was the pitch. And then it became NYX as we realized we really wanted to center around Kamala and there was no way to take Kamala to Los Angeles without fully abandoning Jersey which felt really wrong for her. So we sort of redeveloped the book as NYX as a result.

AIPT: Well, after NYX is a hit, that’s the spinoff series, right? Each one of you can have a book.

Collin: [Laughs]

Jackson: The dream.

AIPT: OK, final question. Together, you two are known as the “Hivemind.” How would the Hivemind do against the Stepford Cuckoos in a psychic battle?

Jackson: Oh, no…

Collin: [Laughs]

Jackson: Oh, no. I feel like our only chance would be using what we’ve got, which is that we’re so similar that it would be really hard to tell us apart.

Collin: Jackson would hit them with the really interesting musical theory, where he’d be slamming them with like really hot tracks so they’d be off balance. And then I’d come in there with my absolute unhinged circular logic that does not bear any resemblance to human logic. And between his coolness and my absolute absurdity, I think we’d spin them right off the planet. We’d take those Cuckoos down. 

Jackson: I like it. All right, this is good.

Collin: But then Sophie would wink at us and we’d be totally destroyed. 

Jackson: Yeah, it’s unfortunate. I’m in love with Sophie Cuckoo now, so I don’t know what I would do. It’s real bad.

AIPT: Well, it seems like you have some things to sort through on your end, so this is a good note to end on. But Collin and Jackson, thanks for stopping by X-Men Monday!

X-Fans, for this week’s X-Men Monday eXclusives, here’s your first look at the cover and solicitation for NYX #4, on sale October 30, 2024.

NYX #4

COLLIN KELLY & JACKSON LANZING (W) • ENID BALÁM (A)

Cover by SARA PICHELLI

• Genius. Student. New Mutant. Young Avenger. X-Man. As PRODIGY, David Alleyne has been all these things and more – but now he faces his most difficult challenge yet.
• Facing down his past and looking his present in the eye, Prodigy must fight to understand what mutant culture really means to those left behind by Krakoa…
• …and how far he’ll go to protect the mutants of New York City from a devastating – and dangerous – conspiracy of their own.

On Sale 10/30

But wait, there’s more! You get to read four pages of NYX #1, eXtra early!

NYX #1 goes on sale July 24, 2024. Thanks, as always, to our friends at Marvel for the preview!

In the next edition of X-Men Monday at AIPT: Writer Geoffrey Thorne makes his X-Men Monday debut to discuss the “From the Ashes” X-Force series. Click here to submit questions to Geoffrey by 5 PM ET today (July 15, 2024).

Until next time, X-Fans, stay exceptional!