Jonathan Hickman – Off Panel #228 (October 28, 2019)
Excerpt from 41:28

David Harper: Tying into what you’re saying about how all this stuff had already existed before HoX and PoX, one of the things I thought was really interesting in the interviews you’ve done is that you talked about how one of the rules of the X office is “be additive, not destructive.” And you talked about how rules are kind of important for all this.
Why is that such an important rule? Is it really because there’s just so much unmined and unused territory out there in the X-Men, or is it something more than that?

Jonathan Hickman: It’s a lot of different things, David. First of all, because X-Men books have been an incredibly incestuous place creatively, they tend to be repetitive in the kind of stories that they’ve been telling for the past couple half-decades… or decades… or whatever. It’s a lot.

But as people got more and more frustrated, the stuff got more and more destructive. And that’s why, whenever you come onto an X-Men book and you make a list of characters you want to use, half of them are dead, half of them don’t have powers, half of them have just come back from being dead, and then you’re going to get somebody pitching that they’re going to kill them again.

It had become, like, the fandom of the X-Men… It had become… the books themselves had become a really dark and destructive place. And I don’t think that’s good.

The other thing is it doesn’t mean anything anymore. It doesn’t mean anything when we kill characters in our books anymore, because everybody knows that the IP’s coming back. And it doesn’t have the impact. And I’ve said this in the writers’ room and stuff like this:

You need to stop telling those stories about killing characters. I understand that sometimes, narratively, you want to do something dramatic. But let me tell you, as a storytelling mechanism, walking into the room and kicking all the toys over is not a good look anymore. It’s not the kind of stories that people are wanting to read. It’s not actually helpful in terms of you doing your job five years down the road. Actually, it makes all of our jobs incredibly difficult.

The other reason is just that, like I said earlier, I want us to be telling positive stories about the characters.

Okay, so here’s a tangential thing, but it illustrates the point. We’ve gotten a bunch of pitches in about X-Men stuff, right? As soon as I took over, we started getting pitches, and all the pitches, not all, but a lot of the pitches were literally breaking shit… breaking stuff. Sorry. And it kind of proved my point that what everybody is expecting to happen is for the other shoe to drop, and everything to not work, and everything to go bad. The radical storytelling choice here of doing positive books, where people don’t die, feels like a radical choice. Just hilarious, right? In your T+ entertainment arena.

One of the reasons why I did the resurrection stuff was not only because I wanted everybody to be able to have all the mutants back, without us doing, like, literally dirty issues of bringing characters back in various ways. We brought everybody back, and we made it so that if you told a story where they died, it’s a plot device, and not an emotional hammering of the reader.

You can’t play it as, “Oh my God, this is awful and terrible.” You have to be more creative than that. I’ve challenged all of the X writers to… it’s fine if you have a story where a character has to die, that’s fine. But what’s the other story? What’s the more interesting story? Right?

Instead of us holding hands and weeping about how sad it is that we don’t have Gambit anymore… That funeral would have less people at it than Maggott’s funeral. A lot fewer…