‘I Was Pretty Pissed Off’: X-Men Writer Opens Up About Drama That Nearly Axed Marvel’s Latest Hit

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Waepon X-Men launches next year, bringing Wolverine, Deadpool, Cable and more onto the same team of mutant badasses. Series writer Joe Casey recently opened up about how the series almost died before it got off the ground, as Marvel nearly killed the series due to a behind-the-scenes mix-up.

Posting to his newsletter “Joe Casey Writes,” the writer is surprisingly candid about how next year’s Weapon X-Men (with artist Chris Cross) series came to be – or how it almost didn’t come to be, as it were. In the first of a two-part series dubbed “Weapon X-Men Origins,” Casey writes about how a lunch with X-Men writer Gerry Duggan led to Casey pitching a new series to then-X-Editor Jordan White.

While batting around different ideas, Casey suddenly came up with the title “Weapon X-Men,” which surprisingly had never been used before. Casey writes:

Here was a name — a potential brand — that seemed so perfect and so obvious, I couldn’t f***ing believe that no one else in the past fifty years (since the term “Weapon X” was first created as a vital component of Wolverine’s backstory) hadn’t thought of it. But no one had. Until me.

Every writer friend I told about it… well, you could practically hear their hand slap their forehead over the phone. It was a minor mic drop moment. After all, we all know how difficult it is to come up with these kinds of ideas. When one of us does, the rest of us can’t help but acknowledge the minor victory.

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Casey then explains how he wrote up his pitch for Weapon X-Men and sent it off to White, who responded enthusiastically. “It looked like we were full speed ahead,” Casey writes, “then things got weird.” In the second installment of “Weapon X-Men Origins,” Casey explains how the editorial reigns for the X-Office were handed over to new X-Men editor Tom Brevoort. Explaining his own history working with Brevoort as an editor, Casey felt confident that his Weapon X-Men series would still be a possibility amidst all the editorial changes happening in the X-Offices.

According to Casey, it was much later when he received a letter from White explaining that another series called Weapon X-Men was coming out from Marvel, from the creative team of Christos Gage and Yıldıray Çınar. “Not the same series I had pitched, of course,” Casey writes, leading the writer to become understandably upset:

I’ll admit, I was pretty pissed off. Here I was, all full of myself, patting myself on the back for thinking of a name that had never been used before. Hadn’t even been thought of before. Not by Claremont. Not by Morrison. Not by Liefeld. Not by Hickman. Not by anyone. And it clearly had some commercial value. Needless to say, any and all manner of conspiracy theory raced through my brain.

Before it even got off the ground, it sounded like Casey’s pitch for Weapon X-Men would never see the light of day, destined to occupy the same space as hundreds of other pitches and stories that never came together throughout comic book history.

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After cooling down, Casey contacted Brevoort to see what had happened, and quickly received an explanation:

I won’t go into too much detail here, because I suppose it’s probably Tom’s story to tell… but the long and short of it is as follows: The mini-series in question had a different title originally. Tom wanted that title as part of his upcoming relaunch and informed the editor involved that they should simply find a new title for their mini-series. Without Tom’s knowledge (or Jordan White’s, for all I know), the WEAPON X-MEN title was lifted from my pitch and haphazardly slapped onto the mini-series. Even the writer of said mini-series (an amazingly standup guy, btw) didn’t even know what had happened (or where the title had originally come from).

Brevoort and Casey decided to go ahead with the writer’s original pitch, keeping the Weapon X-Men title in place, even though it had already been used. It’s strange to think that Casey’s original, very commercial pitch almost didn’t happen because Marvel stole the title away for another series, but these things happen in the world of comics publishing.Fortunately, Casey’s original pitch will make it to comic shops in 2025, sofans will get to read Weapon X-Men in all its intended glory.

Weapon X-Men #1 is available February 19th, 2025 from Marvel Comics.

Source: Joe Casey Writes – Weapon X-Men Origins Parts One and Two

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