Contains Spoilers for Uncanny X-Men #2!Long-running franchises like the X-Men are always adding new characters to their rosters, and the new X-team, the Outliers, shows exactly how to make those characters stick when so many don’t. It’s harder than it looks to make characters interesting from the jump, but the Outliers have what it takes, and that’s down to both the craft of their introductory issue and how well they’re defined immediately.

The introduction of the Outliers in Uncanny X-Men #2 by Gail Simone, David Marquez, Matt Wilson, and Clayton Cowles is the perfect example of how to introduce new characters to an established comic book franchise.

The Outliers are a team of teen runaway mutants (and one powered non-mutant) who, in Uncanny #2, seek the help of the titular X-Men team and, in classic Marvel fashion, end up brawling with the heroes thanks to angst and misunderstandings. They’re a bunch of obstinate, awkward teenagers who don’t really want to be here, and they will stick in the reader's mind from their very first lines.

The Outliers Demonstrate Exactly How to Introduce New X-Men characters

A New Team for a New Era

On her referencing the Stan Lee quote that "Every comic is someone’s first." As Simone has talked about, readers need to know who these characters are and what they do without having to look it up on an online wiki. The Outliers are the perfect example of this philosophy in action. In Uncanny #2, each Outlier gets a cool moment focusing on them, including dialogue that helps to define their character and a visual display of their powers.

Part of what’s so effective here is the specificity of the characters. Jitter has a verbal stutter and uses a wristwatch to activate her powers. Deathdream speaks in black speech bubbles. It’s these little touches that make the characters identifiable and memorable. These characters are then cemented in readers’ minds by having them list their names, places of origin and mutant codenames after the X-Men ask. It’s an on the nose way of giving readers this info, but it’s also logical. The X-Men don’t know who these kids are either.

The Outliers Are Part of an Established X-Men Tradition

The Most Famous X-Men Introduction of All

Simone is taking a cue from the ur-example of X-Men debuts, Giant-Size X-Men #1, which introduced characters like Storm, Colossus, and Nightcrawler to the franchise. Like Uncanny #2, this book introduced a cast of opinionated, argumentative, and explicitly multicultural mutants who immediately demonstrated their powers in spectacular fashion. It’s a winning formula. Disagreements help to illuminate characters’ personalities, and the X-Men’s diversity has always been one of its key strengths, with the fictional identity of mutantdom paralleling and intersecting the real-world identities of its characters and creators.

Giant-Size X-Men #1 by Len Wein, Dave Cockrum, Peter Iro, Glynis Oliver, and John Costanza launched a new era of X-Men comics, leading directly to the monumental Claremont run.

Giant-Size #1 and Uncanny #2 also share the fact that they’re introducing an entire team in a single issue. These introductions keep the issues focused on what matters with the limited number of pages they have, embracing the idea of the "economy of storytelling," which is the question of how best to manage one’s storytelling resources with a set page or word count. Introducing a full team in one issue makes for a fast pace but requires a great creative team to make sure each character feels defined. Luckily, Simone and Marquez are on the case in the 2024 Uncanny X-Men relaunch.

These New X-Men Are Genuinely Really Weird

And That's a Good Thing

The other big part of what makes the Outliers so great from the start is that they’re all at least a little bit quirky - which is a giant compliment. Each member of the team is deliberately a little off-putting. From Calico, who talks to her Pegasus in a way that brings to mind the mythology of faeries, to Deathdream, whose over-the-top goth musings are made all the weirder by the fact that he might be literally undead. A writer can do all the prerequisite info-dumping they need to explain a new character, but if that character doesn’t make an immediate impression, then there’s no point.

Comics should be weird. Creators shouldn’t be afraid to make readers tilt their heads askew - or to give the new characters some very silly beats. The X-Men are built on weird, after all. The X-Men franchise is a mix of social commentary, superhero action, soap opera, space opera, coming of age school drama, Arthurian Legend, and many, many more facets that all intersect and combine in unique ways. The X-Men are a smorgasbord of their creators’ favorite movies, hyperfixations, fears, and kinks. The Outliers are only the latest in a long lineage of weird X-Men ideas, and that’s exactly what they should be.

Uncanny X-Men #2 is available now from Marvel Comics.

Source: Gail Simone