X-Men Artist Leinil Yu Exits Marvel Comics Series, Will Continue to Work on Covers

After a year of working on the series, Marvel Comics artist Leinil Francis Yu has announced that this week’s issue of X-Men will be his last as the interior artist. Yu has been collaborating with Jonathan Hickman since his relaunch of the series began in 2019, but luckily for all of the readers he’ll still be around providing covers for the series. Making the announcement on Twitter, Yu wrote: “X-men 12 is my last gig as interior artist. Will continue as cover artist. Thank you for all your support encouragement. Enjoy the issue!” Turkish artist Mahmud Asrar, no stranger to X-Men, is set to fill his shoes and is confirmed to draw issues 13, 14, and 15.

You can find the full solicit and cover for Yu’s final issue as interior artist below.

X-MEN #12
JONATHAN HICKMAN (W) • LEINIL FRANCIS YU (A/C)
X OF SWORDS — THE SUMMONING BEGINS!
A lead-in to the biggest X-story of the year.
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99
ORDER USING APR20089

X-Men #12 marks one of the first prelude issues into the upcoming X of Swords crossover event (pronounced “Ten of Swords,” like the Roman numeral and the Tarot card). The new event will crossover ever X-Men title into a 22 chapter epic story that has been in the wokrs for some time.

“We’re in a really interesting time in that the books have launched and they’re all healthy, and the reception of the line across the board has been fairly positive, I would say,” Hickman previously explained. “And we know the things that we’re doing down the road. And so what we’re doing now — and ‘X of Swords’ is a perfect example of this — is that we’re just trying sh-t out. We haven’t done a real crossover across a bunch of books, that was a real, true crossover, in a really long time. And so we got together as the X group, and we were like, ‘We want to do a crossover.’ And the question is, ‘Okay, so were we just screwing around? Or do we actually have a story?’ And thank goodness, we have a story. But it’s really a group experiment across the line. And we’re doing that again in December, and we got some stuff we’re doing next year that works the same way.”

Hickman continued, “It’s really kind of fascinating because it all comes out of a process in a kind of team environment that I’ve never experienced in Marvel. It’s really kind of interesting what we build. We have a group Slack and we talk to each other all the time, and so all of the books feel like a family of books. It’s not editorially driven. It’s more organically driven, right? And so this is just another thing that’s coming out of that. We’re pretty excited about it. We think it is going to be cool stuff, as opposed to ‘time for another event.’”