MacKay is hardly the only one dealing with these dynamics. Gail Simone (Birds of Prey, Deadpool) and David Marquez (Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man, All-New X-Men) will follow Gambit back to his old New Orleans stomping grounds in Uncanny X-Men, where he’ll team up with Wolverine, Jubilee, Nightcrawler, and Rogue. Over in Exceptional X-Men, Eve Ewing (Ironheart, Ms. Marvel) and Carmen Carnero (Amazing Spider-Man, Captain America) will take Kitty Pryde back to Chicago, where she and Emma Frost try to work together and train a group of new mutants.
For Simone, Gambit’s retreat to the bayou gives Rogue a chance to rest after the complicated events during the Fall of X storyline. But her retreat gets interrupted, not only by some young mutants who need help, but also by a frightening new baddie.
“Besides the Southern Gothic vibes, [Uncanny X-Men is] probably the scariest X-book,” she teases. “The new villain in there is someone that I would put up against any horror movie, psychological villain out there … and the sexiest.”
According to Brevoort, these various retreats to old, familiar places is a natural outcome of the From the Ashes event, in which Marvel’s mutants must find a way to live without their Krakoa home.
“All of the assorted mutants of the world need to go and reintegrate back into the rest of the planet and live and coexist alongside a whole bunch of people that they just spent the last five years saying that they were the new inheritors of the future and that you have new gods now,” Brevoort says. “People around the planet have not taken that message to heart in a purely positive fashion.”
As tough as that situation certainly sounds, things aren’t all bad for Cyclops, at least in our world. At times, Cyclops has come to represent the boring leader, a character whose sole function is telling cooler characters to stop being so cool. That characterization didn’t apply to the comics, but the live-action X-Men movies and X-Men: The Animated Series haven’t always given Cyke the most to do.