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SDCC 2012: James Asmus Launches Gambit

At SDCC the other week, news of a new ongoing Gambit comic written by James Asmus was announced by Marvel. Rumor has it they were even handing out the first issue.

This news caught my attention, because as a teenager Gambit was one of my favorite characters.

He was a suave, calculating, bad-boy that every teenage boy wanted to be. He’d unapologetically butt heads with Cyclops and Wolverine on numerous occasions and had no respect for authority.

Then some big brain decided that Gambit needed to be a lap-dog in the X-Men, even to the point where the X-Men got pissed at him and dumped in Antarctica without any clothes.

He turned up a few issues later, holding no anger or resentment towards Rogue and the X-Men, and it was business as usual.

This is where I stopped caring about Gambit. In his previous solo series of 1999, he was the king of thieves and interacted in the wider Marvel Universe. But in the X-Men books he was weak at best.

So that’s my love/hate relationship with Rémy LeBeau.

So when news of another ongoing series reached me, I did what every red-blooded, comic book nerd would do: I reached out to the Twitter-verse:

I was hoping that some of the SDCC goers could let me know a little about what to expect. What I didn’t expect was a response from James Asmus himself:

Could it be that I can expect the same Gambit I loved as a teen? Unrestricted by his silly little spot on the X-Men? Unleashed from his ridiculous, Twilight-esque relationship with Rogue? I hope so.

This is enough for me to try out Gambit #1, which hits comic book stores around the world on August 8th. Watch this space, because you’ll be hearing my thoughts.