X-Men face moral dilemma in 'No More Humans'

Brian Truitt | USA TODAY

Mike Carey first jumped into the world of Marvel Comics' X-Men after the massive House of M event, the pronouncement of "No more mutants!" and a severe dearth of those in the homo superior race.

The British writer's coming back into the fold in 2014, this time with bad news for mankind.

Next year brings the original graphic novel X-Men: No More Humans by Carey and artist Salvador Larroca that spins out of the recent Battle of the Atom crossover and puts the X-Men in a serious dilemma: how to respond when the world's entire human population disappears, from those at the local mom-and-pop comic shop to the likes of the Avengers and Fantastic Four.

"The stakes, for mutants and humans alike, couldn't be higher," Carey says. "This is a story about who gets to inherit the world and what the cost of that victory might be."

The 128-page No More Humans hardcover book is out May 7 and will also include codes for a free digital copy of the graphic novel and of Battle of the Atom No. 1.

Carey, who penned the X-Men and X-Men Legacy series in the late 2000s, wanted to come up with a "juggernaut" of a crisis that wouldn't just call on the mutant supergroup's skill and ingenuity but also could serve as a moral touchstone.

"There are times in this story when it seems as though there isn't any right thing to do — and when the different ideals and personalities of the X-Men threaten to split them apart," Carey explains.

"We really throw them some monstrous, agonizing curveballs. And we see them, finally, finding the core of themselves and responding as the heroes they are."

Marvel senior editor Nick Lowe promises that the story will appeal to both mainstream audiences who just watch the X-Men movies and also the hardcore fans who've been wondering about the aftermath of Battle of the Atom and its effect on the X-Men at the Jean Grey School and at Cyclops' Xavier School.

The core cast is a "dream team" for Carey, one that includes past and present Cyclops, Jean Grey from the original X-Men squad, Beast, Wolverine, Magneto, Storm and Emma Frost.

But, Carey says, there will also be a mix of familiar heroes and villains — plus one canonical character who hasn't been around for a while "who comes late to the scene but changes everything in a single panel" — in the story that forces the X-Men to choose sides and positions.

The time-traveling saga Battle of the Atom introduced the new antagonist Raze, the offspring of Wolverine and Mystique from the future, and he's the catalyst of the goings-on in No More Humans with a scary agenda and tactics that lead to a powerful first act, according to Carey.

"As far as he's concerned, everything that happens in our time is established and well-documented history. That gives him a terrific edge, and we see him putting it to harrowing use," the writer say.

"We also get to see him interacting with his mother and father. It's not a warm and cuddly family dynamic, sadly."

Carey feels the graphic-novel format offers a different set of expectations than a reader would get with a story explicitly embedded in the run of one particular X-Men book, and No More Humans marks the first original X-Men graphic novel since 1982's seminal God Loves, Man Kills by writer Chris Claremont and artist Brent Anderson.

When that book came out, it was a major influence for Carey, he says. "Chris Claremont was redefining long-form storytelling in comics, and one of the things he was doing was building his book around a solid core of compelling characters, widescreen action and realistic moral dilemmas.

"The themes of intolerance and bigotry addressed in God Loves, Man Kills carried a lot of weight and felt — as a lot of Claremont's work did — like a new color in the mainstream comic book palette. They also felt like a perfect fit for these conflicted characters, who were hybrids of the hero and the outcast."

Carey similarly set out for something deeper than good old superhero fisticuffs in No More Humans. The best X-Men stories for him have had a dimension of moral ambivalence, and the core situation in his story is either a heaven-sent opportunity after decades of being put down or the biggest existential crisis ever.

"One of the themes we keep coming back to is whether the ends ever entirely justify the means and whether you can profit indirectly from evil without being tainted by it yourself," Carey says. "Having said that, we also build up to a battle scene that starts off big and then goes off the scale."

Carey has been away from the X-Men for a couple of years, and Lowe wanted a meaty story to lure him back from his novels, screenwriting and long-running The Unwritten comic.

"Mike is ridiculously talented and does here what he always did best: put our biggest characters in the most difficult situation possible and see them try and fight their way out of it," Lowe says.

The reason Carey keeps returning to the X-Men, though, goes back to his childhood. In fact, they played a major role in two parts of his life.

When Carey was around 8 years old, he read the first wave of Marvel reprint titles that were produced in his native Great Britain. And then later it was Claremont's building of a foundation for the modern franchise that drew him back into comics after he had been a lapsed reader in his teens.

"On one level, I'm writing for those earlier versions of me," the writer says. "I try to triangulate on the stories that both 8-year-old Mike Carey and 16-year-old Mike Carey would have loved to read."