Welcome to the second installment of Leave Your Spandex At the Door v.2.0!This week I’m continuing the coverage on Marvel’s upcoming X-Statix presents: Dead Girl mini-series in January. Last week I chatted with X-Statix co-creator and now inker/cover artist Mike Allred. This time I’m proud to welcome the series co-creator and writer, Pete Milligan into the Nexus virtual living room!
Pete is a writer I’m extremely passionate about; he has been my favourite writer ever since his first X-force issue came out, and I discovered the rich backlog of 9th art masterpieces he has written: Enigma, Shade the changing man, Skreemer, Human Target, the Eaters, and of course X-Force/X-Statix! Pete talks to LYSAD and the Nexus about the new series written by him, with pencils by Nick Dragotta, inks and covers by Mike Allred and colours by Laura Allred! Many thanks again to new X-Statix editor Warren Simons for providing the Nexus with the covers and even more preview images from the first issue. I confess that splash page with Dead girl, Gwen and Mockingbird is the most beautiful piece of art I have seen this year!
X-STATIX PRESENTS: DEAD GIRL #1
STORY: It’s hard to keep a good girl down…especially when she’s Dead! That’s right, True Believers, hold onto you’re freaking hats! After a brief hiatus caused by their, ahem, deaths, everyone’s favorite mutants are back! And this time, they’re bringing a host of…questions with them. Like why do some heroes and villains keep on dying, only to return from the dead? And why do other heroes and villains bite the bullet, only to remain dead? Who decides on this craziness? Is it some karmic wheel in the sky? Some fickle finger of fate? Or is it just some guy in the marketing department? Well, one such deceased villain, named The Pitiful One, is going to find out. When the Pitiful One decides that he’s tired of being dead, he assembles a posse of Marvel’s deadest villains to attack the world of the living. And it’s up to Doctor Strange to stop him and his evil cohortsâ€â€but he needs help from…well, you know. With Kraven the Hunter, Tike Alicar, and a few other surprise, dead guests. PRICE: $2.99IN STORES: 01-18-2006
X-STATIX PRESENTS: DEAD GIRL #2
THE STORY: When a bloodthirsty gang of dead villains – including the original Mysterio, Kraven the Hunter, and the enigmatic Pitiful One – cross over to our mortal plain and begin killing everybody in sight – it’s up to one man – nay, one Doctor – and one girl – nay, one Dead Girl – to fix things! Everyone’s favorite deceased superheroes – including Ant-Man, the Phantom Rider, and someone very, very sensitive”¦return! (And if those sound like slim pickings, maybe they are”¦but that’s just because all the cool heroes have already come back to life”¦) WARNING: DON’T MISS THE EXTREMELY EMOTIONAL RETURN OF MISTER SENSITIVE! HE’LL CRY IF YOU DON’T READ THIS! PRICE:$2.99IN STORES: 02-15-2006
Manolis Vamvounis: Hello Pete and welcome to the Nexus! I’ll start off with the same question as last week: Who is Dead Girl?
Pete Milligan: That’s a good question, and one that this mini series – DEAD A LONG TIME – will strive to shed a little more light on. Basically Dead Girl is an amusing, gallows-humor kind of young woman who is both dead and yet not dead. That is, though she’s dead she seems to be able to walk about the land of the living quite well. To such an extent that in the final episode of X-Statix she appeared – at least to some of the X-Statix team – to have died all over again. To be really dead. Her past has been alluded to – there’s a suggestion that she was brutally killed by some guy, upon whom she later wreaked terrible revenge – but as Dead Girl herself recounted this story it must be taken with a pinch of salt. It’s not beyond her to lie”¦especially to herself.
Manolis: How does this story kick off?
Pete: The story kicks off in the early Seventies with two young black kids discovering a dead and horribly beat-up supervillain in a trash can in an alley. We then cut to some time later – millennia, in subjective underworld time – and this dead supervillain, a creature of almost superhuman levels of self-pity, has worked his way down to one of the deepest most foul bogs of hell, in search of something that will allow him to have his revenge on the superheroes who put him here.
Manolis: Is X-Statix going to return to its Celeb-reality roots or is there going to be another raison d’etre for the team? If X-S is going to be something different, what can fans look forward to, certainly not just another mutant book?
Pete: This book is not an X-Statix book, though it does feature some of the main characters from X-Statix, and picks up their lives – and deaths – from sometime after we last saw them.
Manolis: At her first appearance Dead Girl had said: “I think I know what to do now. A way out of the existential maze. My life was a mystery. My death makes no sense. But my life after death after life might come to mean something”. Will you ever explore her life before Death? And will we find out her real name?
Pete: I do plan to explore her life before death at some juncture, and reveal her real name. Who knows, her real name might even be revealed within the pages of this mini series, Dead A Long Time.
Manolis: What was your original inspiration for Dead Girl?
Pete: I don’t know, and I am going to avoid – for once – giving some facetious smarty-pants answer here. Sometimes characters don’t seem to have any clear original inspiration. They must have had some spark of inspiration, of course, but sometimes it’s a kind of ontogeny in reverse: you look at your team of existing characters – in this case X-Statix – and try to figure out what kind of new character would best and in a most interesting way conflict with or complement them”¦and from there you work back through the womb of gestation to the secret act of creation.
Manolis: How has Dead Girl evolved from her first appearance? What has changed about her personality and her relationships?
Pete: As you always hope will happen with a character, she has become more rounded. At first she was f
ull of wise-cracks and gallows-humor â€â€- and though she still has plenty of this I feel her awareness of her unique existential situation and her expression of what it feels like has developed. Consequentially she has become a much more poignant character. Sexier, too.
Manolis: A slowly developing subplot in the X-Statix run was the relationship between the Anarchist and Dead Girl. It started off as a press-bubble, but it developed into a uniquely dysfunctional affair. What was the connection between these two characters?
Pete: They clicked. Maybe partly because Tike is so hyper intelligent, and so incredibly race-aware, that Dead Girl was someone he could relax with. In some way being dead put her beyond race.
Manolis: In an older discussion about Shade, you’ve explained how your characters take a life of their own and “write themselves”, dictating their stories and actions to you. Was this also true for the X-Force/X-Statix characters? At what point in their ongoing story did you realise they had come to life for you?
Pete: I think my previous answer addresses this. I hadn’t planned for Dead Girl and Tike to have any kind of relationship but it seemed to happen. They both seemed to want it. And who was I to get in their way?
Manolis: Which is your proudest X-Statix/X-Force story, in terms of how the story and the art came together?
Pete: I don’t know. I’d be guessing. I know I was really happy with our first episode of X-Force. I was really excited by Mike’s covers for the illâ€â€fated Princess Diana story too.
Manolis: The most important event during your run was of course Edie’s death which served as a turning point for the series. Mike Allred has revealed before that you didn’t know which of the Big Three was going to die until the last minute. Have you ever regretted killing Edie, and how do you think the book would have been affected if Tike or Guy had died instead? With the return of What If recently, I would really like to see the idea explored in a one-shot.
Pete: I don’t know about What If. But Mike is rightâ€â€until I killed I didn’t know it was going to happen. I actually thought it was going to be Tike. Then all the story gods conspired to make it clear that Edie had to go. I was really sad though, and I know Axel and Mike were. Did the book suffer? I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe I was stupid to do it. Maybe I deserve the gas chamber. A similar thing happened to me a few years ago in Shade The Changing Man when I killed KATHY. In that instance, I really do think the book suffered and was never as good. That though was because Kathy’s death seemed to be so clearly the natural ending of the book, and we perhaps should have stopped it then. With X-Statix it was a team book, the team carried on, and Edie’s death, though traumatic for them, didn’t stop their reason for being there. Which was of course to be famous, make money, and have some fun.
Manolis: Comics have always been accused of featuring a so-called “revolving door of death”. Even holy goats like Bucky, the Jason Todd Robin and even Thunderbird seem to be clawing their way out of the grave recently. Do you agree with the resurrection and revamping of these old characters? Does it take away from the significance of the original stories? For example, would bringing back Edie now take away from the magic of X-Force 128?
Pete: The very subject is at the heart of a Dead A Long Time. Some of my own feelings of the matter can probably be detected by close reading of the mini-series.
Manolis: What are your favourite deaths in Marvel history?
Pete: First place, Edie Sawyer. I had to say that, didn’t I?
Second place, Princess Diana.
Manolis: X-force and X-Statix was always a book that didn’t so much break the fourth wall, but rather turned it 180o on its head, by making the events in the story reflect the real world fans’ reactions to the book and the rumours. The original X-Force showing up in issue 117 represented the old school fans’ protest at the roster change, the Rob Liefeld name-copyright rumour served as an in-story explanation for the name change in the ending of X-Force, and the Mysterious Fanboy’s monologues in the opening X-Statix run resonated with a lot of the fans’ feelings concerning her death and the new status of the team. Then when the title’s sales were dropping, the story seemed to reflect that with the team worrying about their waning popularity and losing their relevance. Was this something you were always consciously striving for? Was the Mr. Code character in the Henrietta story another instance of this?
Pete: Yes, to just about everything there. I think it’s what gave the comic its distinct flavor and added a bit of fun too: by reading this comic you got a skewered insight into the making of the comic. And the name of Mr Code was obviously a wink at The Comics Code, with whom we got into trouble with our first episode of X-Force.
Manolis: Out of all the X-Statix characters you’ve created, who do you think is the most likely to break out of the title and into the mainstream X-Men team?
Pete: I’m not sure, but the most unlikely is Gin-Jeanie, the alcoholic tectonic plate shaker.
Manolis: Thank you for answering my questions Pete, it’s greatto see the series returning, and everyone so hyped about it!
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If you want to discuss this interview you can drop me an email or visit the new official LYS@D discussion thread.
Manolis Vamvounis
a.k.a. Doc Dooplove
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