Writer Jonathan Hickman revealed what he originally had planned for Storm in his Giant-Size X-Men story. The special one-shots were intended to pair Hickman with a different artist while also putting the spotlight on a different member of the X-Men. The first part of the story kicked off with Jean Grey and Emma Frost going on a telepathic journey in Storm’s mind to find out what is ailing her. Artist Russell Dauterman illustrated the opening and ending, and Hickman revealed how the story was going to end with Storm being pregnant with Black Panther’s baby.
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Hickman was a guest on Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men, where he talked about his time on the X-Men line of comics. It’s here that he discussed the planned introduction of Storm and Black Panther’s child, who would have been raised in The World while also uniting the kingdoms of Wakanda and Krakoa. When asked about what “could have been” comics or stories he’ll regret not getting to work on, Hickman surprised even himself by recalling how the Giant-Size X-Men one-shots were changed to scrap the storyline.
“All of those Giant-Size issues, all of those changed, which is why they’re kind of a mess,” he said. “The first one was going to be — I don’t think anyone will care if I tell this — when Storm is screwed up and injured, and Jean and Emma come out of the psychic rescue of it all, we were going to find out what’s wrong with her is she’s pregnant. And she was pregnant with her and T’Challa’s kid. Then the next couple of issues would have been her having to go into The World and having the kid, who would have been raised in The World. So it would be this heir to two kingdoms who didn’t know the mother or the father. You would get a whole lot of stuff coming out of The World that would crash into all of that.”
He then went on to detail how the reason for the story changing came down to Marvel already having plans for Black Panther, resulting in one of the few times Hickman had one of his ideas scrapped by the publisher.
“The reason we didn’t do that is because Marvel had other Black Panther plans that got pushed in, and also they didn’t want to go in that direction,” Hickman elaborated. “It was too late to change it. Russell [Dauterman] was already halfway through drawing the book, so all of that stuff in the Giant-Size books, all of those got changed on the fly. Which is why they’re a little bit of a mess.”
For those who remember the animated movie Next Avengers: Heroes of Tomorrow, the character Azari, who was T’Chall and Storm’s son born in the future, was going to be the child introduced in Giant-Size X-Men.
“But that was going to be a really cool thing for some stuff that was going to happen later. We were going to get the Next Avengers kid, the one from the future cartoon thing,” he teased. “There was going to be stuff that happened later on that kid would be a really big part of. He’d be a leader ‘of two different societies,’ which would have mattered later on.”
The Next Avengers and Azari have already appeared in the Marvel Universe during Brian Michael Bendis and John Romita Jr.’s Avengers #1 in 2010, and 2014’s Avengers World #10-11, 14, and 19 by Nick Spencer, Stefano Caselli, and Marco Checchetto. However, it sounds like Hickman had some long-reaching plans already in motion for the at least one of the future heroes.
What do you think of these revelations concerning Storm and Black Panther’s child in the X-Men books? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!
