Apocalypse Co-Creator Louise Simonson On X-Men: Apocalypse and Why She Hasn’t Seen Days of Future Past

During the conversation, though, we spoke briefly about her days in the X-Men office back in the ’80s and ’90s, during which time she created the famed villain Apocalypse, and the upcoming feature film wherein that character will be the titular villain.

Simonson hadn’t yet seen X-Men: Days of Future Past when we spoke, and so hadn’t seen the only live-action iteration of her character to grace the big screen so far — and we chatted a little about why that is, too.

Ed. Note: Louise is married to artist Walter Simonson, so when she says “Walter,” that’s him.

What was your time like on the X-Men books? It seems to me the X-titles are always weird because as often as not you’ve had eight or ten of them at a time.

Well, that was not true in my day. We’re talking about a looong timespan here. When I first started editing X-Men, there was just Uncanny. Then we brought in New Mutants because we had to because Shooter made us essentially [laughs]. 

And then I guess they brought in Excalibur after that and then after that it was like, X-Factor and Wolverine got his own title and it did kind of tend to expand. But it was a very popular universe so I can understand from a publishing perspective why you would want to expand on it…infinitely…until it collapsed under its own weight [laughs].

So recently I was at my local comic shop, and somebody there held up a book and said, “Hey, look! It’s the first appearance of Cletus Kasady!” And I looked and it had been done by a buddy of mine, and I thought that was kind of cool because I had no idea, and of course Carnage is a character people expect to see in the movies soon. Now, you’ve got Apocalypse under your belt and he’s going Hollywood! Do you think they will incorporate some elements of your early stories into that?

It will be interesting to see! I hope it does.

Nobody’s officially said to me anything about it at all, so I keep thinking until I see a painting that may or may not have anything to do with the movie [laughs]…we’ll see about that.

Well, if you’d waited through 20 minutes of credits, you could have seen, briefly, a young Apocalypse in X-Men: Days of Future Past.

I did hear that! We haven’t even seen that movie! What happens around our house is that we say, “Oh, yeah, I really want to see that one,” and then things come up and we’ve got work to do and honestly, Walter doesn’t particularly like going to movies. He’d rather watch them at home if he bothers to watch them and most of what he’d like to watch are old things from practically before he was born sometimes. So we don’t always see everything and we certainly don’t see it when it first comes out. I haven’t seen the most recent X-Men movie which I heard was fabulous.

I bought a friend of mine who had done Superman in the past a ticket to Man of Steel back when it was in theaters, and said, “Here, now you have to go!” Maybe we’ll conspire to have ComicBook.com comp you guys tickets to Apocalypse!

[Laughs] Well, I expect when it comes out, we’ll probably go see that one. Or at least I will. I don’t know about Walter, we’ll have to see!

Or what you could do is what Gerry [Conway] did: guilt the filmmakers into inviting you to the premiere!

Well, honestly, when Marvel releases things — at least movies that we had anything to do with — we usually get invitations but one of the problems we’ve found is that we get asked to go to these free movies except that we get there and half the time there’s nobody we know around. It’s a lot of suits in advertising and not a lot of people that we know, that we see.

And it costs us $20 to go across all the bridges and another $30 or $40 to park the car, so it’s like “we can see a free movie for $30 each?” We usually thank them for asking and we really do appreciate them inviting us. If we lived in the City we’d do it in a heartbeat.