Steve: Recently you also finished work on X-Club, a miniseries focusing on the X-Men’s science team. It also felt like the first time in ages somebody celebrated the X-Men as a symbol of diversity. What was the starfish’s name?
Spurrier: The starfish is pure and beautiful and unique, and as such is above the need for something as prosaic as a name.
I had so, so,
so much fun writing
X-Club. Frankly I’m still slightly amazed Marvel let me get away with it: it’s a weird, niche, mad little book. A bunch of dysfunctional scientists led by a megalomaniacal superpomp savant doing crazy quantum mechanics, bio-engineering and buggering about between the walls in reality. Oh, and of course the whole Mechaphile thing. I’ve been waiting to tell that story for ages – Madison Jeffries and Danger have always had a bit of a crackly tension between them: it was just waiting for someone to step up and say “that bloke’s totally in love with a machine.”
The book went down amazingly well, anyway. I’ve since been offered a rather tasty newer, bigger, meatier Marvel book – I can’t talk about that just yet – so someone somewhere obviously approved.