Marvel's X-Men are famous for protecting a world that fears and hates them, and sometimes that world isn't even their own. Over the years, the mutant team has embarked upon a number of space opera-style adventures across the cosmos, and even in other realities. In fact, one X-team in particular, the British group known as Excalibur, is perhaps best known for a late-'80s adventure called “The Cross-Time Caper,” where they visited a number of different dimensions.

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This fall, both of those elements will be a part of X-Men Gold. In November’s Issue #16, writer Marc Guggenheim and artist Lan Medina kick off a new arc titled “The Negative Zone War,” where their cast embarks on a classic sci-fi style adventure in the Negative Zone. Then, in January’s X-Men Gold Annual #1, Guggenheim, co-writer Leah Williams and artist Alitha Martinez reunite Kitty Pryde, Rachel Summers and Nightcrawler with their old Excalibur teammates, Captain Britain and Meggan.

CBR spoke with Guggenheim about both stories, the new mutant at the center of the Negative Zone arc, and the current “Mojo Worldwide” crossover between X-Men Gold and X-Men Blue.


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CBR: Marc, as someone who currently works in television, what's it like writing Mojo, the interdimensional, unhinged, all-powerful television producer who's currently menacing the X-Men in the “Mojo Worldwide” crossover arc with Cullen Bunn's X-Men Blue?

Art by by Diego Bernard and colorist Rain Beredo

Marc Guggenheim: He's a blast to write! I've never written him before, and he scratches all my itches. It's fun to write someone that unhinged. It's fun to write someone so unrepentantly over the top, and I get a chance to do some meta commentary on things related to television, which I also make my living in. So it's wonderful. It checks a lot of boxes.

What's it like collaborating with Cullen on this crossover? Can you offer up some hints and teases about what we'll see in the remaining chapters?

Cullen is incredible. There's a reason why he's been working as long and as consistently as he has. He really is an expert at comic book writing and he can really give me a run for my money in terms of knowing X-Men history, which is really saying something. I've really been following his lead because he's the expert. He knows what he's doing, and we've got a lot of fun stuff still yet to come.

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We're about to start the second half off the crossover, so there's a lot more fun things to happen; some really cool twists, some more revisiting and remixing of the X-Men's greatest hits, and some really remarkable art coming down the pipe. It's exciting -- we've got some cool things that we haven't even got to yet.

In X-Men Gold #12, you hinted at one of the cool things you have coming up by showing the origin of Kologoth, a new character you introduced in your first arc. What inspired the creation of the character?

Art by Diego Bernard and colorist Rain Beredo

Very early on when I was asked to develop ideas for X-Men Gold, I was craving a classic "X-Men in space"-style story. There have been a lot of X-Men in space stories over the decades, though, so I wanted to come up with something a little different and unique. Instead of the setting being space I chose the Negative Zone because I've never seen the X-Men in the Negative Zone. So I thought that would be kind of interesting.

In terms of Kologoth? That character has slowly evolved over time, but I had this notion of, wouldn't it be interesting to have an X-Men villain who is from another planet, but is himself a mutant? Then we could use that character to further explore the prejudices that mutants of any planet face.

Issue #12 was this outlier kind of issue, where we knew “Mojo Worldwide” was starting in issue #13, and the arc that Ken Lashley was drawing was ending in issue #11. So I got the notion that it might be fun to do an issue purely from a villain's perspective and Kologoth was out there as the obvious choice for me. I think Issue #12 will make a lot more sense once you get a chance to read “The Negative Zone War” arc of issues #16-20. And if all goes according to plan Issue #12 will actually be published in the same trade as #16-20. Those stories really belong together.

When I read #12, I saw elements of both Thanos and Magneto in Kologoth.

He definitely has some megalomaniacal elements to him. With Kologoth, I'm trying to write a character that's classically evil in that Magneto or Thanos vein, but underneath all that malevolence is this tragic backstory. He's really driven by this original sin of his parents casting him out when he was a baby. He's been a real fun character to deal with, and you haven't seen the last of Kologoth. We will dig deeper into his psyche, such as it is, in subsequent issues.

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Going back to what you said earlier, this next arc with Kologoth, “The Negative Zone War,” is meant to evoke the space opera style feel of those classic X-Men in space stories?

Exactly. I feel that the X-Men, especially under Chris Claremont, had a variety of genres and stories that they would find themselves in. Certainly some of the best stories in my opinion were these space ones. I'm a big fan of the Brood saga. So I've wanted to put my own sort of spin on that thing. Because I don't think there's any virtue or benefit in trying to top whatever Chris did.

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What can you tell us about the lineup of characters that you'll focus on in this next arc? Will you have a new lineup coming out of “Mojo Worldwide?”

We'll have the standard lineup with a few twists. Basically, because of the events of Issue #16 the X-Men are down a couple of members. I don't want to say too much about that, but you can tell who's down by process of elimination on the cover of #16.

Art Lan Medina, colored by Frank Martin

So because they have some members in dire straits it behooves the X-Men to add some more people to their roster and I chose Armor from Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men run, who I really love. I also chose Ink, a character I created. So I'm admittedly being a little selfish, and showing a bit of creative nepotism in employing Ink from my Young X-Men run. It's fun to mix some new faces in with the now established X-Men Gold lineup because it creates some new opportunities.

Also expect to see some major moves in terms of Rachel, Kitty and Peter's characters. They all come out of this Negative Zone arc fundamentally changed.

Art Lan Medina, colored by Frank Martin

What's it like working on this arc with Lan Medina? It seems like you're giving him an opportunity to really cut loose and have fun with world building.

Lan is incredible. I think issue #16 is a big leap forward in my writing and Lan's art. I think it's Lan's best issue thus far, and I think with issue #16 I've got the mixture of space opera and action just right. It's hard to do that in 20 pages, but I felt like everything clicked with this issue. And certainly Lan's art helps that enormously.

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In January's X-Men Gold Annual #1, you and co-writer Leah Williams stage an Excalibur reunion. How did this come about? What can you tell us about the book?

This was a huge bucket list item for me. I knew I had enough members of the original Excalibur to set up a reunion, but at the same time I didn't have the proper amount of story space to do it because I had all these other storylines going. So it felt like it would be too much of a digression.

Then it occurred to me that's what annuals are kind of perfect for. I'm a real sucker for the old school annuals that told a fun, self-contained kind of story that was separate from the main plot line, but allowed the writers to go in a different kind of direction and tell a story that didn't exactly fit in with everything else that was going on.

After deciding that the annual was the perfect place to do this Excalibur reunion, I pitched it to Chris Robinson and Mark Paniccia and they very correctly pointed out that since X-Men Gold ships twice a month, I'm basically writing two books a month. So they asked when would I have time to write an annual on top of it. They were 100 percent right, too.

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Chris suggested Leah Williams as a co-writer, and I think she's great. She really is the perfect writer to do this because she's so fundamentally embraced the Excalibur conceit. You can tell that she's a huge fan of the original book, which this annual is designed to be a love letter to.

So I wrote up basically a springboard pitch for the annual. It tackled questions like what's the conceit that gets the band back together? What's the complication? What challenges are they facing? Then Leah took that and ran with it remarkably well. I just finished reading her draft of the annual and it is nothing short of brilliant. It's fun, and it's funny, and it's very, very human. She really managed to channel a lot of what Chris Claremont and Alan Davis were getting at with the original Excalibur book. So it's just a joy and I think people are really going to dig it.

The cover of the Annual has Meggan holding a baby, and your former Excalibur cast members Kitty Pryde, Nightcrawler and Rachel Grey are either rekindling old romantic relationships or starting new ones. So will romance and relationships be a subplot in this annual?

Art Lan Medina, colored by Juan Fernandez

Yes, Kurt and Rachel's ongoing relationship in Gold certainly gets a shout out in the annual. I think that's probably all I should say on that subject for the time being.

Artist Alitha Martinez is drawing the annual, and I really enjoyed her work on World of Wakanda. It seems like she'd could convey the action and emotions of this story really well.

Yes, that's perfect for the script that Leah wrote too. There's a lot of emotion, a lot of acting, and the humor that she's brought to the book really requires an artist that can give you those subtle moments, and really make the humor work with the facial expressions. It's a great combination. I'm excited! I think people are really going to dig this book.

Finally, can you leave us with some hints about what 2018 will hold for the cast of X-Men Gold?

Like I said, some very significant changes happen in the Negative Zone arc for Rachel, Kitty and Peter specifically. Storm has some character defining moments as well. Off of that arc, a member of the team will leave in #21.

"The Negative Zone War" arc set up our biggest and longest arc on X-Men Gold thus far. It's a full five-issue story where were going to bring back some of the members of the new Brotherhood of Evil Mutants that we met in our very first arc as well as pay off the mutant deportation storyline that's been going on for the last several months.

We're moving into a new gear and chapter with X-Men Gold. I'm really, really excited. I think people will like it a lot. A lot of the things we established in the first 12 issues really start to come to fruition once we get out of “Mojo Worldwide.”