COMICS: Rick Remender Talks In Great Detail About Marvel NOW!'s UNCANNY AVENGERS

In an in-depth interview with Marvel.com, writer Rick Remender (Secret Avengers, Uncanny X-Force, Venom) has talked about what we should expect from Marvel's flagship Marvel NOW! title, Uncanny Avengers. With a roster comprised of some of the most well-known Avengers and X-Men, it looks set to offer a very refreshing dynamic to the Marvel Universe. Much more can be found by clicking on the link below.

On How The Idea Of Uncanny Avengers Came About:

It goes about three creative retreats back when I was having dinner with Jason Aaron and we were talking about our plans for UNCANNY X-FORCE and WOLVERINE AND THE X-MEN. We were also talking about Avengers Vs. X-Men and the fallout and things that were being thrown around and the idea came to me for an X-Men/Avengers mash-up thing. Given some of the things that are coming up in AvX it seemed to make a lot of sense. There are some events at the end of AvX that I think naturally feed into something like this; sort of a healing book that would not just deal with the ramifications but with sort of a new flagship bridge between the two worlds that had been separated in their own little pockets for so long.

It’s great to have someone like John Cassaday on art. At first I was a little nervous that I wouldn’t have a Jerome Opeña or a Tony Moore or somebody who I had a long history with just because of comfort levels, but I think one of the cool things about Marvel NOW! is that it’s a big ball peen hammer to the [Marvel line] and everything gets shifted up and mixed up and everybody’s working with new people and on new characters. So I had to take a breath and trust that everything was going to be okay. And obviously with a genius like John Cassaday it will be. Adding to the pressure of course, John’s last big, major project [ASTONISHING X-MEN] was with Joss Whedon, who made ["Marvel’s The Avengers"] into this worldwide phenomenon that it is with his brilliant writing and directing on that film. So the pressure is coming from a few directions and you kind of have to forget it. You kind of just have to cut it in half and scrape aside the part of it that is the scope and size and magnitude of what it’s going to be and really just focus in on what the story you want to tell is.

There’s something that Cyclops said to [Captain America] on Utopia that’s ringing in his head. He didn’t do enough to help. And Steve is taking that to heart. Coming out of AvX with the landscape shifted and changed as much as it is, there are events that lead Steve to recognizing that he needs to do more and there are five new things that lead to the creation of the team. The team itself really isn’t even created until halfway through the first year. It’s still chaos. I didn’t want it to just be like "And now everybody shakes hands and hugs!" So without being able to discuss the specific events, I’ll just say that it comes from a place of healing and it comes from a guy who has firsthand experience with the horrors of prejudice and hatred and sees that this is his potentially final opportunity to stand and do something about it and help. I have gone to great lengths to make sure every character involved has a very specific reason for being there, a very specific reason for being put on the team, and chosen, and they all have very unique perspectives on the team’s necessity, where they’re at as people and why they think that this is a good thing to do. Wolverine’s motives come half from AvX and the other half from the end of the "Final Execution" arc in UNCANNY X-FORCE. So those two things, without giving them away, [change] him in a way that I’m really excited to be writing. I think that we’re helping to really develop and progress Wolverine as a character.

I think that the bottom line is that he sees the value in people seeing Captain America and Havok descend down to save the day when things go gnarly. There needs to be a face in the Avengers that could be the Captain America for [mutants]. And going through his list, Havok is the very best choice for that. You’ve got somebody who’s trained by Xavier, he’s a beloved X-Man, he’s well-educated, he’s formerly a government agent—with X-Factor being what it was in the nineties he was part of a government-sanctioned unit—so he’s got a shiny veneer that you can present to the public and hopefully help people see mutants as something different. There’s other reasons as well—two, three huge ones coming out of AvX—that will lead to that decision, but that’s how Havok becomes the guy that Cap sees as "You’re going to lead this squad, you’ve got a ton of experience leading, and this is your time to stand up and be the big public face of the Avengers." And of course Alex, having had such a chaotic past for the last, you know, forever, this is going to be a very difficult situation, and not one that he’s necessarily going to just grab the reins on.

She’s in a unique situation. She and her brother were the first mutants that Cap ever tapped for the Avengers, and they were on the second Avengers team. So she is a long-time Avenger who caused a lot of heartbreak and death, and depowered a whole lot of mutants. Obviously the events that led to that, she was not entirely in her right mind. Doctor Doom had helped confuse her with an energy source that had driven her quite crazy. And she had lost her kids. There’s redemption potential there, but I want to make sure that I’m careful with it. She’s a great character and she’s sort of torn between these two worlds. She’s always really been an Avenger when it comes down to it, but her community should be the mutant community. But they don’t necessarily dig her. She’s the daughter of Magneto, former Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, an Avenger—she’s never really fit in with the X-Men. But at the same time, it’s kind of her people. Or should be. So she’s in a situation now where she’s reviled by most mutants for what she did, at least those who know what she did. And then you’ve got the Avengers, who she also played a big whammy on. It’s still not necessarily very easy to go "Oh, well if charged up you can alter reality—that’s a bad thing and we might maybe not want to go down that road with you."

There’s a chaos factor in the first arc. It’s not necessarily somebody going through a list for all of the members. That would be a perfect person. There is a story that unfolds and the team is sort of forced to come together and work together during the course of this very heinous plot that The Red Skull is hatching, and Rogue is involved in that. I don’t want to give away all of the reasoning as to why she sticks around, but it’s definitely tumultuous. Thor is not a fan of her at all. He sees her as the exact opposite kind of mutant they need on this team. Now they’ve got two women who have both been in the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, and if they’re trying to do something that’s going to be public and help sort of heal mutant/human relations, having two former members of something called the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants is probably frowned upon by the PR people. But then again, there’s recollection and the reality is the X-Men almost disbanded when Rogue first joined. It was Xavier who said every mutant deserves a second chance. He was the one who vouched for her and put himself out there for her. In the case of this, there’s a somewhat similar situation. And it’s somebody who doesn’t have a track record like Wanda at this point. So when Thor points at her and sees the woman who was with the Brotherhood and attacked him, all she has to do is point and go "Hey, there’s Magneto’s daughter who almost wiped out reality and she’s an Avenger. You’re okay with her though, right? ‘Cause you have history." There’s so much great character grist there. Everybody’s got a very unique perspective and I wanted there to be a lot of chaos here because that also helps me define the argument between humans and mutants and what the problems are with this movement in the Marvel Universe. Each one of these characters is having this very unique history and this very unique perspective—Rogue included. Rogue doesn’t necessarily want to be an Avenger. You have to remember she was basically raised through her teens by Mystique to be a terrorist and hate the Avengers. The Avengers were, like you said, one of her very first targets. So she’s got her own issues with the fact that these golden super heroes who everybody loves didn’t do a damn thing to come to the X-Men’s aid on so many occasions. Her landing on the squad— it’s definitely a lot of drama coming up.

There’s an event in the first issue that forces his hand, and he’s as noble as a being comes, but to him the argument between mutants and humans is akin to flies mewling and puking over the color of their wings. So he sees this debate as just asinine. Humans or mutants, you’re all humans. You’re all just people on this planet. Initially he doesn’t necessarily have a pony in the race. He’s not on one side or the other. He’s clearly an Avenger. Those are his family, those are his people. But what I think is important to build is going to come from his relationship with Wolverine that exists and how he perceives Alex and Rogue and how he begins to interact with them. There will be a changing arc for him in the first 18 issues that I don’t want to give too much away, but there is growth and learning to be had. I think that more than anything he just sees it as an Avengers group that can do some good to heal a rift between factions of humanity. And he’s also probably first just doing it as a favor to Cap just to do what he does. Use that hammer of his to try and do away with evil and keep innocents safe and keep everybody living in a prosperous community. But the heart of why he’s there is something that I grow over the first mega arc.

When we were talking about it at the retreat, it was actually Jeph Loeb who said Red Skull. And at first I was like "Well, not actually The Red Skull." And he was like, "Why not?" And then that question immediately told me a story. I’m like, well of course The Red Skull. That’s crazy. There are things happening in the Marvel universe at the end of AvX that lead somebody like The Red Skull to seeing a reason for doing away with the mutants, and that’s a plot that we’ve obviously seen many, many times. Somebody wants to kill off the mutants, the mutants are chased and killed off. I can’t tell you the specifics of what makes this different because it’s all pinned on the end of AvX, but it’s a very clean motive that he has. This Red Skull is a digital recording that Arnim Zola took during the middle of World War II and saved it with a machine that can create a clone that was basically in a bunker. Red Skull said "Create a duplicate of me that will wake up in 70 or 80 years when everybody has forgotten what I’ve done, and the world won’t be out hunting me anymore." And so this Red Skull, he woke up however many months or years back from now, and he’s a Red Skull taken directly out of World War II. The Red Skull we’ve seen as he grew and progressed in the Marvel Universe, that guy died. This guy is almost a reset of The Red Skull, and that works really well for the analogy with civil rights stuff. What his plan is, I wanted it to be big but very human and very grounded. So while it’s awful and big and, I think, interesting motivation for him, at the same time it’s very ground-level and rooted in human interaction and character stuff that will then hopefully give birth to a lot of emotional impact, which is the goal. I want to make sure all this stuff has context. And obviously Cap and Red Skull have a very personal relationship. By the end of the fourth issue, all of these characters have a very personal animosity toward Red Skull, and he them. There’s a very personal grudge there. The Red Skull has an army of S-Men, as I’m calling them right now, and these are augmented humans who have all had their lives adversely affected in some major way by a mutant and see the good in joining him. And they’re all different ethnicities and creeds and colors as well, as The Red Skull sees that the mistake he made was to focus in on ethnicities of humanity when the real threat was bubbling up all around him, which was the mutants and their inevitable takeover of humanity.