Weapon X-Men #1

History

The series originated when Joe Casey — who had previously written Cable and Uncanny X-Men in the early 2000s alongside Grant Morrison's concurrent New X-Men — pitched the concept to Marvel over a year before its February 2025 launch. Casey has stated in interviews and on his Substack newsletter that bringing Chamber to the forefront was a deliberate priority, a creative ambition he felt went unrealized during his original Uncanny X-Men run. Marvel branded the title as part of the One World Under Doom event, a move Casey publicly pushed back against on Substack, clarifying that the series' only connection to that crossover was a single sequence set in Latveria and a brief acknowledgment of Doctor Doom's new status as Emperor — a tension between editorial marketing and the creative team's standalone intentions that generated notable pre-launch discussion among collectors and press.

Trivia · 8 facts

• First team appearance of the Weapon X-Men (vol. 2): Wolverine (Logan), Deadpool (Wade Wilson), Cable (Nathan Summers), Chamber (Jonothon Starsmore), and Thunderbird (John Proudstar) as a named unit.
• Written by Joe Casey, with pencils by ChrisCross, inks by Mark Morales, colors by Yen Nitro, and letters by VC's Clayton Cowles; cover art by Alex Ross.
• Released February 19, 2025, as an oversized first issue; editors listed are Tom Brevoort (editor), with Martin Biro (assistant editor) and Annalise Bissa (associate editor) also credited.
• The series was published as a five-issue miniseries under Marvel's X-Men: From the Ashes initiative and later collected in the trade paperback Weapon X-Men: The Real Thing.
• The plot of issue #1 kicks off with Wolverine investigating a stolen cache of adamantium in Spain, which leads to the murder of the obscure villain Khyber — a character who originally appeared in the 1988 Wolverine solo series — before Cable assembles the team for a mission into Doctor Doom's Latveria.
• A major plot twist reveals Deadpool secretly gassed Wolverine in a Paris elevator to suppress his healing factor, then handed him over to Baron Strucker for a bounty — positioning Deadpool simultaneously as team member and traitor in the opening issue.
• Joe Casey explicitly stated on his Substack that Weapon X-Men had 'absolutely no connection' to the One World Under Doom event outside a Latveria scene and a passing reference, despite Marvel's official branding of the title as an event tie-in.
• Thunderbird's inclusion capitalizes on his Krakoan-era resurrection; Casey described writing the character as an opportunity to explore someone who had been dead for fifty years of real-world publishing history and is acutely aware of everything he missed.

Cast · 6 characters

Full credits

Variants (4)