Jonathan Hickman - a lifelong geek trained in the art of designing buildings before he worked in advertising and then decided to try his hand at comics writing in the mid-aughts - recently took over scribe duties on Marvel’s X-Men comics. Well, suffice it to say that all that’s changed, and it turns out that all it took was the deft, firm hand of a 46-year-old former architecture student. Even when talented writers were assigned to guide the mutants, the stories felt like empty nostalgia exercises filled with half-hearted quips and small-scale threats. Whatever the reason, the X-Men series stopped presenting big, grabby ideas. Though those rumors are probably more extreme than what actually happened - there was still A-list talent being put on the X-books here and there, like writer Brian Michael Bendis or artist Stuart Immonen - you couldn’t shake the feeling that Marvel was spending far more money and energy on fostering titles that starred characters who also appeared in Disney’s Marvel movies. Although there’s never been formal confirmation of this policy, it’s long been said that Marvel Entertainment CEO Ike Perlmutter issued an edict at some point in the 2010s: Screw the X-Men. This may have been by design, to a certain extent, possibly owing to the fact that Marvel’s parent company, Disney, didn’t have the X-characters’ film rights. Their adventures in the pages of Marvel Comics were hardly making a dent in the minds of the average reader.

Some of his previous contributions to Marvel have resulted in elements taken for movies in the MCU, but when it comes to the X-Men movie series reboot coming in the future, he said it's not something he's tried to think about while writing.Not so long ago, it was touch and go for the X-Men. I get the ingredients, I get what makes a good meal.' When the two series come to an end, Marvel plans a huge relaunch of X-Men. 'I’ve been in the kitchen for a long time with it. 'This is something I’ve been writing and rewriting in my head since I was a kid,' he said. 'My job is to do new stuff with it, and launch us into a newer age of X-Men.' His first two comic series based around the league of mutants will launch later this month, with the Pepe Larraz-illustrated House of X, and R.B. 'You don’t want to do archaeology or nostalgia tropes,' he explained. Having previously reinvigorated Fantastic Four and Avengers in comic book form, Hickman's position at Marvel seems specifically suited to X-Men. Comic writer Jonathan Hickman, who previously worked on series for both Avengers and Fantastic Four, sat down for an interview with Entertainment Weekly to detail his 'multiyear plan' to reinvent X-Men. Now that the Fox-produced series of X-Men films have come to an end with plans to incorporate the characters into the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the future, the X-Men comics are also getting rejuvenated.

Jonathan hickman x men