What was behind Tabula Rasa as a location and concept crossing over from Uncanny X-Force to Uncanny X-Men…? Kieron Gillen explains:
In an X-Summit early last year, we were talking about our plans, and during Rick [Remender]‘s he mentioned — as an aside — this newly evolved Savage-Land-esque place he was introducing. I just sort of leaped onto it excitedly, throwing a half dozen quirks that the evolution-in-a-day thing could lead to… It felt like the right thing to do. It folded X-Force back into the Marvel Universe, making it clear that the wiping out of a town isn’t something you just do in a panel and never refer to again. And after Rick introduced this place, I felt it worthwhile to try and populate it and make it a fun location people could use as settings for stories in the future.
Rick and I made sure we were introducing the bits and pieces in the script the other wanted. If you nose in X-Force‘s pages, you can see things like the tapeworm people foreshadowed, and generally, we wanted to make a new toy for the MU. A separately-evolved pocket! “Jurassic Park” meets Spore meets Area-51! That kind of thing. Rick and I just like making new stuff up, basically. It was a good opportunity to do so.
I’ve said before that I think that the X-Books now are better than they’ve been in a long time – since Morrison’s run, maybe, or even before that; certainly, with UXM, UXF and Wolverine and the X-Men, there’s a stronger line of books now than then – and seeing “new” ideas like Tabula Rasa or the reborn Angel cross between books really reinforces an organic bond between the books more than any crossover could. If the post-AvX Marvel Universe, whatever it ends up looking like, can spread that kind of magic around, it’ll be in good shape.
April 5th, 2012 at 4:59 pm
Good article. And I agreee with you. The continuity has been very strong in the X books for a while now – Messiah Complex through to now really.
April 10th, 2012 at 2:49 pm
I’ll admit continuity is good when done right since it adds some interesting new things to the old toy box , but they don’t tend to last that often. Particularly when the next writer decides he wants to go back to basics or rewrite everything so it fits some sick fan dream.