Next month, writer Kurt Busiek and artist Alex Ross will reunite for new content from the world of their beloved miniseries Marvels. In a new, 16-page story, Ross and Busiek will breathe new life into Uncanny X-Men #98 and show how Phil Sheldon and his family — retired following the events of the original Marvels — react to Sentinel attacks on mutants. The Marvels Epilogue is the culmination of months of feature-rich Marvels reprints that have celebrated the 25th anniversary of the acclaimed miniseries by reissuing the single issues in deluxe “director’s cut”-style editions that included sketched art, script pages, and more.
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Busiek has returned to the world of Marvels once before — with 2008’s Marvels: Eye of the Camera — but Ross was not part of that story, which was instead illustrated by Jay Anacleto. This — as well as the epilogue itself — feels a bit like Kingdom Come, which Ross developed for DC and published with writer Mark Waid on board. Waid would return to the world of Kingdom Come not long after (with The Kingdom), but it would take significantly longer to lure Ross back (in a JSA arc with Geoff Johns). In the case of Kingdom Come, the epilogue was shorter, and developed for a collected edition of the original miniseries. It was the events of that epilogue which later became a jumping-off point for Waid’s story, while Ross went back to the source material.
“In making Phil an observer and narrator, but not that much of a direct participant, we were hearkening back to older traditions, when novels were often narrated by someone off on the fringes of the action, someone who was in a position to know what happened because he or she knew the lead characters, but wasn’t all that involved in events,” Busiek told me in a 2008 interview. “It was fun working with Phil in that way, but since then, most of the narrators of Astro City stories, to pick an example, are both point-of-view characters and leads. In this case, Bill Jemas and Joe Quesada asked for the story to be as much about Phil as about what he witnesses, and given plans I’d had back when I’d been thinking of the story as a one-shot special, that dovetailed with my plans just fine. And it wasn’t much of a mental shift — like I said, I’ve been taking that approach long enough in Astro City, that it all kind of came together naturally.”
The Marvels epilogue will be Christmas in July, as the Sheldons take an outsider’s perspective on the events of Uncanny X-Men #98 by Chris Claremont and Dave Cockrum, marking the first major role played by mutants in the Marvels universe. Ross will provide the art and cover, but in addition to Ross’s cover, variant covers will be provided by Dave Johnson, Ron Lim, Skottie Young, and Fred Hembeck, plus a Hidden Gem variant cover by Cockrum.
You can check out the official solicitation information below.
Hitting comic shops this July – an all-new addition to the classic MARVELS graphic novel written by Kurt Busiek and fully painted by Alex Ross! And it’s a “Marvels” look at the “all-new, all-different” X-Men of the 1970s! In this 16-page story, Alex and Kurt bring Marvel’s world to brilliant, realistic life one last time, as the now-retired Phil Sheldon and his daughters, in Manhattan to see the Christmas lights, find themselves in the middle of a clash between the outsider heroes and the deadly Sentinels, giving them a close-up perspective on the mutant experience. Also featuring a behind-the-scenes look at the making of this special story, and other bonus features.
MARVELS EPILOGUE #1
Written by KURT BUSIEK
Art by ALEX ROSS
Cover Art by ALEX ROSS
On-sale July 24, 2019
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Image Credit: Marvel Comics
