Kelly: We’ve talked about that in interviews. A lot of the new X-Men, the younger kids who aren’t Laura, have gotten lost in the shuffle. There’s just so many X-Men. I don’t think anyone’s trying to put anyone on the bench. It’s just what happens when you have that many incredible characters and that many incredible stories. So, we obviously can’t raise them all up, but one of my favorite things—and I know it’s Ed’s, I don’t know about Matt’s—in this story is the story of these young X-Men. Specifically, Armor, Pixie, Rockslide, and Glob have big roles. And it’s not just [that] they have big roles punching things, they have questions and they have complaints, and they have an evolution of where they’re headed. And I think it’s really cool stuff that you don’t get to see a lot.

Ed: Yeah, it’s been one of the most fun things. The whole series is great, but that in particular has been nice, to elevate them. Back in the day, you had the new mutants who graduated and became X-Force. They became their own X-Team. You don’t see that much anymore.

Kelly: No.

Ed: This is not a promise that that’s what’s happening at all.

Kelly: No. no. Since we’ve already seen the pin-up for the X-Force, we know that’s not what happens. But it’s still a story, and it’s a story that we want to tell. And it also creates a lot of good opportunities for me and Ed to try to push each other out of the way to write Armor, so that’s always fun.

Matthew: I also think that there is a component, when people see it, about a generational idea in what the X-Men are and like I know early on, Ed and Kelly were very excited about the kids. And I love the kids too, but it took me sort of a long time to realize, “Oh, the kids’ story is sort of mirrored in a bigger story in a different way.” That fits into the generational idea of X-Men that we’re kind of examining. If you have a favorite era of X-Men, we’re trying to give you something that you’ll like. We’re trying to show you, “here some of them are, here they are doing their thing and how they deal with these problems.” The kids are the last generation of X-Men, so following them a bunch has been really rewarding in a way that kind of caught me off guard. But I do love it very much.

You can hear the full interview on the next episode of This Week in Marvel, coming this Friday!

UNCANNY X-MEN #1, written by Ed Brisson, Matthew Rosenberg, and Kelly Thompson with art by Mahmud Asrar, R.B. Silva, Yildiray Cinar and Pere Pérez, is available now online and at your local comic shop!