“Spinning off of what Walter said, if you look at pretty much all other Super Heroes in the Marvel canon, with the exception perhaps of Spider-Man, they all derive from a totally altruistic and accepted—that’s the essence of it: accepted—platform,” Claremont explained. “People generally know who the FF are. They trust the FF. They know who the Avengers are. They trust the Avengers. The X-Men—the X-canon, I should say, being a very specific time and a very specific place in history—not so much. They come out and do something, but there would always be this ‘but’ at the end: ‘Do we really trust them? They’re creepy. Where did they come from? Something changed them. We don’t know. They got born this way.'”
“A lot of that came out of my own history as an immigrant: walking into a room and having a different accent, which I did as a kid; dressing differently; approaching things differently. You were very much aware of being an outsider, and that was both scary and there was a feeling of anger in return,” he recalled. “It’s like, ‘Why are you like this? Why do you hate me? Why can’t we be friends?’ ‘Well, you’re from somewhere else.’ It’s like, ‘Yeah. So?’ But that was the emotional foundation that was easy to translate into the book and evolve over the course of basically getting to know these characters and evolving them over time, giving them depth, giving them an individuality, and turning them as much as I could into people rather than objects.”
“What I loved was the chosen family aspect, the fact that these were all people who were different and chose to be with other people who were the same as they were, only different; who had the same problems and that they chose to interact in such a positive way with each other, to help each other with their difficulties,” Louise Simonson shared. “I mean, I kind of liked that part of it particularly… There’s this wonderful characterization that we just talked about, about these people. These weren’t comic book characters. They were people.”
