The Four Color Media Monitor

ComicBook interviewed writer Seeley about the Psylocke miniseries he's scripted, which, like the Rogue miniseries, is a retro-based tale trying to build upon past storylines by sandwiching it in between older stories from the times it draws from. He tells, for example:

ComicBook: You have done a lot of really cool things with the X-Men. What makes Psylocke: Ninja exciting for you?

Tim Seeley: Ninja allows to pick up on an approach I honed with Rogue: The Savage Land, and that’s going back to read some of my favorite 80s/90s comic books and figuring out where there are little gaps that could be filled in with all-new story, that still respects the existing continuity. Savage Land had to be, by design, fairly contained, but with Ninja, I was able to pull in not only Uncanny X-Men issues, but also Daredevil, Wolverine and even New Warriors! So, this is a very personal story for Betsy, but it’s also pretty personal for me, as I smash all my back issues together into something new!

I don't deny it's an impressive idea he's got, but it's being done under a bad company management. So bad in fact, that what he may be able to do with X-Men is not allowed to be done with Spider-Man, or even Captain America and the Avengers. As a result, now that I think of it, it's actually surprising they allowed Seeley to retain a certain faithfulness to earlier X-Men tales, considering all the implausible distortions even the mutants underwent since the turn of the century that only soured the mutant milk. It can easily be said Spidey and the Avengers are undergoing a certain form of censorship in terms of creative license that disrespects their particular fandom as much as Mary Jane Watson's been as a fictional character in nearly 20 years after One More/Brand New Day.

With the X-Men having such a long history full of iconic moments and stories, what did you find particularly challenging about digging into this time in Psylocke’s history?

Well, Betsy Braddock becoming ninja Psylocke is some really dense continuity–it’s also got some conflicting ideas that don’t quite line up! So, I had to focus on what I thought made it a great story in the first place, and that’s Betsy essentially being remade into someone else, then becoming comfortable with, and really adapting to who she was the whole time. I think she has to have agency, while also letting her roll with a very crazy sci-fi body-swap brainwash story–and that takes some serious thinking.

I suppose so. Yes, the star lady should have some personal agency assigned. And maybe the continuity here is pretty dense, and has some conflicting parts, perhaps more than Hawkman supposedly does, though as I've noted before, it was only at the dawn of the 1990s that Hawkman's consistency fell apart, no thanks to the editors of the times. But, it's awfully rich to say there's conflicting ideas regarding Psylocke when today's tattered "continuity" since the early 2000s is much worse, and doesn't really exist at all. Brian Bendis is one of the writers responsible for dismantling Marvel's coherency for the sake of short-term publicity stunts, and now that he's reportedly returning to Avengers, there obviously won't be improvement. Recalling Bendis wrote X-Men too at one point, it won't be a shock if he's able to write it again. And on that note, it's rich to say something takes serious thinking when Bendis certainly doesn't do so.

Good luck to Seeley on producing a Psylocke miniseries that's said to be more faithful to the original Marvel continuities. But it's pretty apparent even C.B. Cebulski won't allow a proper repair job for the flagship X-books, and that dampens the impact of Seeley's miniseries, including Rogue's. On which note, let's not forget what they did to her recently. That really ruins everything.

Labels: bad editors, censorship issues, Daredevil, history, marvel comics, women of marvel, X-Men