After weeks and weeks of begging, Marvel still refuses to confirm that Jonathan Hickman is sending the X-Men to Mars. However, a new interview on Comicbook.com revealed many previously unknown details. We have done all the hard work of reading that interview so you don’t have to (ever though you should).
It has now officially been confirmed that House of X & Powers Of X (remember that X is a Roman numeral) will be the only X-Books running from the time they start, to the time they wrap up. All other books, including the Rosenberg Uncanny X-Men, will finish up their story and quietly end. We saw signs of this with the quiet cancellations of Mr & Mrs X as well as X-23 in the last few solicits.
In their place will be the bi-weekly House of X & Powers Of X. Hickman said of this:
We needed to sell the idea that this is what we’re going to be doing for the next few years. So if you want to read X-Men books during the run from late-July through September, House of X and Powers of X are the only new X-books available and everything that’s going to follow is based on them. We wanted to be clear to the fans, to the stores, and just as importantly, to the creators who are going to be staffing these books in the future. We wanted the message to be very clear: This is a whole new era for the X-Men. This is what we’re doing now.
In October we can expect Wave 1 of the new X-Books. Hickman will be writing the, as of now, unnamed ongoing flagship X-Book and other creative teams will be announced around SDCC this July. These books are currently in production. A Wave 2 is planned for sometime in 2020 and talent is currently being hired for that. The message is clear, this is not a short term change, this is the next several years of being an X-Men fan.
Hickman also revealed some details about the new books. House Of X is
“a pivotal month in the history of the X-men where everything changes for mutants on Earth”. We can only assume Hickman specified Earth because all the mutants are moving to Mars but that is merely very good speculation on our part. Revealed art shows fan favorites like Monet, as well as antagonists like Apocalypse.
Powers Of X, on the other hand, will explore the history of mutants. We see new versions of Sentinels, Magik and Nightcrawler dressed the same as two mysterious characters, and some historically villainous mutants. The implications of this are unclear but Hickman promises that each issue will
“makes you reinterpret the issue you had previously read.”
On the X-Men as a franchise, Hickman described his love for the elements of found family in the books. He also explained that he has thought a lot about the social and structural elements of the mutant metaphor. He used a lot of biology words I didn’t know. Sorry, that ain’t my field.
If anything has come of this, hopefully fans feel a bit more direction for the books as we close the Age of X-Man and enter the Age of Hick-Man. If nothing else, we got to see some really pretty art by RB Silva, Pepe Larraz, and Marte Gracia.
Zachary Jenkins co-hosts the podcast Battle of the Atom and is the former editor-in-chief of ComicsXF. Shocking everyone, he has a full and vibrant life outside all this.
