The two sides of the X-MEN:TAS creative team hadn’t met before the initial meeting on February 17, 1992. Mark Edens and I, leading the writing staff, hadn’t met Will Meugniot and Larry Houston, leading the art and production side. If we didn’t see the series the same way, it would be a long, frustrating, unproductive year. Fox Executives Margaret Loesch and Sidney Iwanter chose to throw us together. The two-part pilot story (“Night of the Sentinels”), which introduced the X-Men’s world (Will’s idea), would be the test. It is easy to talk like you see eye-to-eye on a project, but until something gets written and drawn, you don’t know. As Mark and I and his brother Michael sped through setting up the first 13 half-hour stories, Mark wrote a quick 14-page outline of episodes one & two, the most crucial story we were to write over four years. We spoke with Will and Larry (and Bob Harras at Marvel), trying to learn the X-Men as we wrote. But we really didn’t know how our writing would go over with X-Men experts. As we expected, Will gave us X-Men newcomers a lot of notes on those 14 pages. The good news was that most of them were positive and encouraging, even excited. We wanted to see the same series made. This would prove crucial when, for seven months, many voices wanted us to change the show. But the team hung together. Sidney and Margaret had picked right.
