As spoken of previously, X-MEN UNLIMITED #9 with a me & Sam Kieth Wolverine story, and a Hurd & Brooks Iceman story, is available TODAY, right this fucking SECOND, at a comic book store near YOU, ready to be BOUGHT and READ and ENJOYED like a CAPS LOCK KEY THAT WON'T UNSTICK.

I am pleased as punch that Simons was able to wrangle a "This issue: WOLVERINE DIES!" blurb on the cover.

I did an interview with THE PULSE that never ran; I might cut and paste my answers here later in the day. Might that be dicky? Eh, who cares.

EDIT:
Alex over at Jake Magazine interviewed me, and that went up yesterday. Check it out here.

EDIT EDIT:
Here's an interview that The Pulse never ran, if you care about such things:

THE PULSE: How did you come to be working on an issue of X-Men Unlimited?

Warren Simons has been diligent and dutifully trying to get my foot in the Marvel door for a while now; I guess I was able to stop playing grab-ass long enough to uphold my end of the deal.

We'd been talking since LAST OF THE INDEPENDENTS, (APR03 1915) the western-heist-action OGN I did with Kieron Dwyer from AiT/PlanetLar came out in 2003. Then I was sending him copies of JUAREZ, from the IDW comic 30 DAYS OF NIGHT: BLOODSUCKER TALES, which I was working on with Messrs. Niles, Chamberlain, and Templesmith (part 8, on sale now, MAR05 2966). And we just got to talking again and I was finally able to follow through.

THE PULSE: What do you like the best about the X-Men?

On the one hand, I like stories about nontraditional families being built by and around damaged people. On the other, I like stories in which stuff splodes and dudes get kicked.

THE PULSE: How did you decide to use Wolverine in your story?

On the one hand, I honestly thought this would be the only time I'd ever get to write for Marvel, so I wanted to take on a character that would let me cram in as much weird stuff as possible in 11 pages and still have it exist as 'continuity.' Wolverine's perfect for that. And, as such, I was able to jam in Devil Dinosaur, Hulk, Sentinels, Ninjas, Phoenix, The Brood, a stampede of horses...

On the other hand, I have a feeling that Wolverine is going to be the next breakout star in the Marvel line-up. My gut tells me there's something about this guy that readers are just gonna LOVE and, very soon, he'll be joining that Mighty Marvel Pantheon alongside Spider-Man and Captain America as one of the big guns, so to speak. You heard it here first, true believers-- what's hot for 2006? WOLVERINE!

THE PULSE: Previews teased "a story about Wolverine's greatest deaths and just how they've affected the nearly-invulnerable mutant over the years." How long have you been thinking about that story?

All my life. This is the story I was born to tell.

Okay, not really. Like I said, I wanted to touch as much stuff on Marvel's shelves as I possibly could; I suppose I worked backwards from there.

THE PULSE: How many pages did you have to tell that story?

Eleven.

THE PULSE: What do you think are the greatest aspects to the character of Wolverine?

He's an awful person. He really is. He's an awful, awful person. And he knows it, and struggles with it every single day. So the man-or-beast thing I like. And he's been alive for like 200 years. So I could write a story about the underworld in Madripoor, 1946, and get away with it.

THE PULSE: How do you think being so "near" and past death so many times has affected the mutant?

Therein hangs a tale, my dear. My thinking is that-- well, he's obsessed with finding and embracing his own humanity, he's meticulously taken himself apart again and again trying to find the parts of him that are human (versus the parts that are animal and the parts that are mutant), he's continually martyring himself, looking for some sort of redemption, for peace, for silence... but, at the end of the day, the one common experience every human being has is death, is dying, is the end of life. He doesn't have that. He never will. So the simplest common denominator we all share eludes him entirely.

I have a suspicion that might jack him up some.

THE PULSE: What's it like working with Sam Kieth on this story?

Freakin' sweet. Sam Kieth drawing my first Marvel work? And it's a Wolverine story? FREAKIN'. SWEET.

And the pages are just beautiful. I love Sam's work, and have for a long long time (remember that short he did in that issue of ANYTHING GOES, the Fantagraphics legal fundraiser book?) and to get to see him do Wolverine one more time is pretty dope.

THE PULSE: What was the editorial process like? How many drafts did you go through?

Three or four? There was a lot of nitpicking back and forth between Warren and I, and the structure is a little unconventional so we were both bouncing it and roadtesting it and making sure that everything played right. It's kind of a tough story for a first time Marvel guy to do in eleven pages-- and there's very definitely a Marvel way of doing things, so that took some getting used to.

Like, there's a no smoking rule now, you know? Little stuff like that I didn't know.

THE PULSE: What influenced your writing on this?

Greg Rucka and Rick Burchett's THIS GUN FOR HIRE in Vertigo's WEIRD WESTERN TALES #1, and Paul Jenkins and Paul Pope's HELLBLAZER short TELL ME from the Vertigo Winter Special. The run of ESSENTIAL X-MEN trades I have on my shelf. Proust.

THE PULSE: Why should fans of your independent work check out this mainstream story?

Isn't that a spurious division? "Independent" and 'mainstream,' I mean. If I self-published a superhero comic, would that not be a "mainstream story"? That's vaguely poisonous thinking there-- that if it's not from Marvel or DC, it's not mainstream. That's like those idiots that still think "creator owned" is a genre.

LAST OF THE INDEPENDENTS is a heist comic. If you like 100 BULLETS or SIN CITY-- remember SIN CITY? Where they made that movie that was #1 its opening weekend and its pulled down 70 million dollars and the sequels have been fast-tracked? Is SIN CITY not mainstream? -- I bet you'll at least think LOTI is okay. JUAREZ isn't a horror comic; I've been calling it a hardboiled supercreep. It's for horror fans, no doubt, but it's not... like, it's a different kind of horror. It's a little disturbing, so if we had to split hairs, I suppose I could agree that it's not quite "mainstream;" it's a little harder than that.

So, here, how about we rephrase the question like this: why should fans of the crime and horror work I've done check out this superhero story? Well, if you like the stuff I wrote about criminals or about vampires, chances are you'll like what I wrote about a superhero. I would like to think the same sensibility, the same voice, and the same kind of humor comes out, even though it's a Wolverine story.

Also, Devil Dinosaur is in it.

THE PULSE: What other projects are you working on?

Right now I am gloriously not working on a goddamn thing. I just wrapped Common's new music GO, which my company MK12 codirected with another company like us called Convert and Mister Three Time Grammy Award Winner and Now Music Video Director Kanye West. That was a huge fucking thing and now it's done and if it's not on air now it will be soon.

THE FIVE FISTS OF SCIENCE, coming your way this summer, is by myself and Mr. Steven Sanders. It's the absolutely, 100% true story up to a point of how Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla teamed up to bring about world peace. Problem is, an evil cabal of industrialists and rival scientists (J.P. Morgan in a role that will shock you! Thomas Edison, as you've never seen him before!) have their own ideas about the end of the world and don't care much for Twain and Tesla's plan.

That's THE FIVE FISTS OF SCIENCE, out in August from AiT/PlanetLar of San Francisco, California. Full color, 100 pages plus extras.