First X-Men Sees Gage, Neal Adams Take on Wolverine

In what appears to have been a project long in development, Marvel announced The First X-Men today, a five-issue, Wolverine-centric story written by Christos Gage and drawn by famed Batman and Green Lantern/Green Arrow artist Neal Adams.While the series will be written by Gage, it was apparently a story idea pitched to Marvel by Neal Adams, according to a liveblog that Marvel did earlier this evening.The story, which will feature Wolverine, Sabretooth, Magneto and other X-characters and be set in the days prior to Charles Xavier’s involvement with the mutant community at large, was a story designed to look at what might drive Xavier, who could hide his powers if he wanted, to get involved and active in such a visible way in the movement for mutant rights.”Of all the mutants on Earth, Professor X could easily pass as a human,” Adams said during the event. “Why would he want to get involved in this? Maybe all this was going on before Professor X was Professor X…when Professor X was a teenager. Maybe mutant kids were getting abused by the military, by the government. Somebody would have been looking out for them, but maybe that person came to Charles Xavier, realizing he couldn’t protect these kids. That was my pitch.”That was a good enough pitch to impress Nick Lowe, the senior editor for the X-Men family of titles, who called the project “the perfect marriage of creator and character that we knew fans would go nuts for.” The ferocity and realism of Adams’ style along with the brutality of an old-school, pre-superhero Wolverine story does seem like a perfect fit, something the fans at the liveblog all seemed to agree with.