Hey, X-fans! Today is the U.S. release date for Logan, the latest in Fox’s blockbuster X-film franchise and the final on-screen adventure of the ass-kicking, claw-swinging, immortal mutant warrior—at least as far as actor Hugh Jackman is concerned. For the finale, Logan’s got the ultimate traveling buddy by his side: Professor Charles Xavier, leader of the X-Men, played by Patrick Stewart. Together they’re going to try to protect a young girl known to Marvel fans as X-23 (and who’s also the current Wolverine in the comics) from a group of bad guys tracking her, and Logan and Charlie will do it while spouting four-letter invectives never heard before in an X-Men movie—because they were never rated R before! (Thanks, Deadpool!) Based on the trailers, this may turn out to be the most dramatic, character-driven X-movie of all time. All of us here at ’Warp Central can’t wait to see it!
And speaking of character-driven X-Men stories, I’m reminded of this post from May 2014, when X-Men: Days of Future Past hit theaters. Give it a read, and learn all about my own work with Marvel Comics’ Merry Mutants, in a trilogy of bestselling novels that I wrote titled X-Men: The Chaos Engine Trilogy. In it, the X-Men battled Dr. Doom, Magneto, and the Red Skull for possession of the Cosmic Cube—a device that can alter reality with the merest thought. (You Marvel movie fans might better recognize it as the Tesseract, seen in Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger, The Avengers, and Guardians of the Galaxy.)
What might interest you to know is that, although Wolverine and Professor X play large parts in all three books, the star of this three-volume epic isn’t Phoenix or Cyclops or Storm, but the X-Men’s resident ninja and psychic assassin, Psylocke (who was played by actress Olivia Munn in last year’s X-Men: Apocalypse). There’s plenty of action to be found in the pages of The Chaos Engine, but at its heart it’s a character-driven adventure as Psylocke fights to reverse all the damage done to the multiverse by three villains screwing around with the Cube. Track down some copies—you can get them pretty cheap, used, through online outlets—and try out a trilogy that made a lot of X-fans happy. I think you’ll enjoy it, too.
And while we’re on the subject of the X-Men, check out this post from last month, where I talk about X-Men: Darktide, a short animated film I cowrote in 2005 that starred the MiniMate toy versions of Professor X’s team—including Wolverine—in battle with Magneto and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Not the biggest X-event ever, but it did get me my own listing in the Internet Movie Database!
