Christos Gage on Assembling an All-Wolverine Team in Weapon X-Men (Exclusive)

It’s up to an X-Men team full of Wolverines to save the multiverse. Marvel shocked fans in last month’s Original X-Men one-shot when the controversial villain Onslaught made a return, with his sights set on multiversal domination. Penned by writer Christos Gage, Original X-Men also featured the return of the Wolverine from the Age of Apocalypse. The story continues in Weapon X-Men, as the Phoenix recruits more fan-favorite Wolverines across different Earths to stop Onslaught. Not only will fans get reacquainted with Wolverines they haven’t seen in a while, like Old Man Logan and Zombie Wolverine, but Gage and artist Yildiray Cinar have also created a female Wolverine named Jane Howlett who will join the festivities as well.

ComicBook.com spoke to Christos Gage about Weapon X-Men to find out how they decided which Wolverines would get to star in the series, how the Onslaught in Weapon X-Men is different from the original villain, Jane Howlett’s thoughts about meeting her multiverse counterparts, alternate Earths fans will get to visit, and more. We can also exclusively reveal pages from Weapon X-Men #1 by Yildiray Cinar, as well as a design sheet for Jane Howlett.

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Picking Wolverines for Weapon X-Men

ComicBook.com: There are quite a few fan-favorite Wolverines that fans haven’t gotten the chance to see in a long time. What was the decision process like to decide which Wolverines would get to star in Weapon X-Men? Were there any that didn’t get to make the cut?

Editor Sarah Brunstad and I kicked around a bunch of names, but at the end of the day the story really dictated who was chosen. It called for “damaged” Wolverines, if you will. Ones who weren’t the supremely capable versions you might see in, for example, Days of Future Past, where he was a Colonel in the Canadian Resistance Army, or MC2 Wolverine, who had settled down and become a well-adjusted family man. So we have Weapon X from the Age of Apocalypse, who has lost a hand and the woman he loves; Earth X Wolverine, who has let himself go, both physically and emotionally; Old Man Logan, who is severely traumatized by having killed his fellow X-Men while in the grip of illusions; Jane Howlett, who is young and inexperienced by the standards of a Wolverine; and Zombie Wolverine, who happens to be dead.

We didn’t really consider many others that we didn’t use…at one point we weren’t sure it would be all Wolverines and debated adding characters like Vampire Storm, but the Team of Logans just felt right. Oh, Jane Howlett actually came about as the result of what was really a joke on my part. I kept saying I wanted to use Scared Victorian Boy Wolverine from Astonishing X-Men, until Sarah correctly and intelligently pointed out that for an entire miniseries he’d kind of be a one-note joke. But that did get me wondering about a character that sprang from kind of a classic What If premise: What if Wolverine had stayed at the Howlett ancestral home? And as I continued thinking about that, I thought about making James Howlett into Jane Howlett, since a female heir, even to a rich family, would face challenges a male wouldn’t in an era when women couldn’t even vote. So that’s the fun of the collaborative process. Then Yildiray designed her and she was just so awesome she took on a life of her own!

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Meet Jane Howlett

Jane Howlett is the new kid on the block. Since fans may be the most interested in her since this will be the first time they meet her, how will she take being recruited into this multiversal mission and meeting variants of herself?

With major side-eye. She’s another Wolverine, but there are some differences that make her stand out, besides the bone claws. For one thing, she’s a woman. For another, she’s from the year 1909. Unlike the others, she never left the Howlett estate or lost her memory. She’s a bit like Lara Croft meets Wolverine. For an aristocratic woman of her time, she’s very independent. She’s a little taken aback that all these tough guy counterparts of her are brooding over Jean Grey or Mariko or whoever. She’s spent most of her life trying to avoid being married off to a man of the upper-class Canadian landed gentry, and succeeded mostly due to the fact that she’s quite rich. So in a lot of ways she’s the odd one out…but she’s still a Wolverine, meaning she’s the best there is at what she does, and you don’t want to mess with her.

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A different Onslaught

Onslaught is another character with a loyal fanbase. What was it like getting to bring him back as a threat, and how has his motivations changed since his debut back in the ’90s?

So this isn’t the exact same Onslaught as the one from the 90s. That one was a melding of the darkest parts of Magneto and Professor X. This one, as readers of the ORIGINAL X-MEN one-shot will know, is from an alternate universe and is made up of the darkest parts of Magneto and Jean Grey. As a result, while this Onslaught has the same powers as the 616 version, its motivations are different. It is still motivated by Magneto’s experiences in the Holocaust, and a resulting desire to have mutants rule the Earth for their own protection and survival. But on the other side, it is equally shaped by Jean Grey’s formative experience when, as a child, her best friend was hit by a car and Jean, using her barely understood telepathic powers, was in her mind as she died. So this Onslaught is obsessed with conquest and immortality…a dangerous combination!

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Alternate Earths

Will readers get to visit some other alternate Earths besides the ones that the Weapon X-Men team calls home?

Yes, and in fact they won’t be going to any of the team’s home dimensions, with the exception of Phoenix’s. They will be journeying to worlds that are both familiar and different, meeting versions of Marvel characters readers will expect and, hopefully, not expect! And who they meet will cause them to confront some of their own demons.

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Epic issues

Lastly, anything else you’d like to leave with fans for what to look forward to in Weapon X-Men?

I just hope they enjoy it. Yildiray is going nuts on this book! Each issue is an epic unto itself. If you’ve ever read an issue of a comic and said, “Hey, hardly anything happened!” I can promise that won’t be the case with any issues of WEAPON X-MEN. But you don’t need to be familiar with what’s going on in any other titles or past continuity. Hopefully everything you need to know is explained in the story. And each issue will have a text page where I reveal all the source material I drew from, in case readers want to seek out those back issues. So we’re both new and old reader friendly. All you need to do is pick it up and have fun!