Marvel’s Jonathan Hickman Teases Pivotal New X-Men Series

Marvel’s game-changing X-Men story event “House of X” has come to its conclusion, with the big “Dawn of X”X-Men relaunch arriving this week. Now that both the House of X and Powers of X series are done, and all the big reveals (and new mysteries) are out on the table, Hickman is opening up and doing interviews to help fill in some blanks of the X-Men’s retconned continuity, while also offering some new food for thought. During one segment of a recent interview, Hickman even went so far as to tease that there’s a new X-Men book that’s on the way – and it sounds like it will be the most pivotal X-Men comic of all.

It should be no surprise that this new X-Men series will be a solo comic dedicated to Moira X. Hickman’s reinvention of X-Men character Moira Mactaggert turned out to be the centerpiece of House of X‘s mind-bending storyline, and if what Hickman says is true, her book will be the centerpiece of the entire X-Men Universe!

Read below for what Jonathan Hickman had to say about the Moira X series, in response to a fan Q&A submitted by AIPT. For context, the discussion was about why Powers of X‘s never revealed the timeline of Moira’s sixth life and the Year 1,000 future. That’s when Hickman revealed that the 6th Life timeline had been taken out in order to give the Moira X solo series some breathing room:

“The reason why [Powers of X] changed in production is because there was a writer we had hoped to get to do our eventual Moira book (that works as a kind of ‘dancing between the raindrops’ of X-Continuity story), and they agreed to do it long before we were expecting them to commit. Which was great news. Then I basically told them what I was planning to do and asked if they wanted me to NOT put the timeline in the book (which would lock a lot of plot/story stuff in), and after talking about it, we decided not to stick it in there… But we got the writer we wanted, and that book is going to be amazing. I’m very excited.”

This is pretty exciting news for X-Men fans who are enjoying the retcon of Moira. House of X #2 has been a major sales success for Marvel; that book revealed Moira’s status as an Omega Level Mutant with reincarnation power, along with the strange story of how she lived nine lifetimes trying to identify herself as a mutant, cure the X-Gene, and eventually search for the path that would lead mutants into a bright future. The various lifetimes of Moira X have each offered serious kernels of intrigue that fans feared might never be fleshed out in longer format – especially the darker end of Moira’s life cycles (6 – 10), in which she became a much more radicalized and morally gray character. Her alliance with Apocalypse in future war with Nimrod and the year 1,000 future where Moira and Wolverine are the last mutants alive after a war with brand new Marvel species (Post-Humans) are definitely areas fans want to revisit. After House of X, it’s also clear that Moira is playing a chess game with the fate of all mutants, humans and even machines as the pieces, and that she is only selectively sharing the knowledge of her lifetimes with Charles Xavier and Magneto, (seemingly) the only people on earth who know about her mutant ability.

That’s all to say: We definitely need that new Moira X solo book to really get the full story happening “between the raindrops” of this new X-Men continuity.

“Dawn of X” begins with Jonathan Hickman’s X-Men #1 releasing this week.