Jonathan Hickman’s X-Men Returns in September With X of Swords Crossover

The coronavirus pandemic shut down many business across the globe, including comic book stores and the production of Marvel Comics titles such as X-Men and its various spinoffs. The Dawn of X line of X-Men titles has proven to be a hit with fans, though they’ve been without new issues of X-Men, X-Force, New Mutants, and more for the last few months. And while some of the spinoff titles will return in the coming weeks as some stores begin to open up, we’ve still yet to see anything of the main X-Men line by Hickman and line artist Leinil Francis Yu.

But that should all change as Marvel has just announced the crossover event X of Swords will kick off in September with the release of X of Swords: Creation #1, including a cover teaser that gives us a look at Apocalypse’s First Horsemen. The issue will reunite Hickman with House of X artist Pepe Larraz, with Excalibur scribe Tini Howard serving as co-wrtier Check out the cover below:

Fans have already seen a glimpse of the First Horseman in Hickman’s story from Marvel Comics #1000. They also appeared in issues of X-Men detailing the history of the island Krakoa; while the ancient mutant now serves as the nation state established by Charles Xavier, a flashback showed that Krakoa was previously one half of a landmass called Okkaro. Arroka was the other half and came to be inhabited by monsters, which made Apocalypse and his Horsemen severed the island in half.

ComicBook.com had the opportunity to speak with Hickman at C2E2 and discuss his plans for the series and how it would dive deep into X-Men history.

“Think of an X-Men character that has had or used the sword at some point in the history in the Marvel characters, and there might be a chance that that character will make an appearance with a sword,” Hickman teased. “There may be more than 10 swords, but there will at least be 10 swords. It feels like it’d be wrong if there weren’t.”

Many fan-favorite characters from X-Men history have wielded swords, from Magik to Shatterstar to Nightcrawler to Psylocke to Wolverine and many more, there’s no shortage of powerful blades in X-Men history. It will be interesting to see how it all comes together.

X-Men – X of Swords: Creation #1 is scheduled to debut in comic shops in September.