People are screenshotting their favorite moments left and right, tossing out their theories about where it’s all going, dissecting all the metaphors and references, and just generally squealing over how into it they are: “We’ll be talking about what this issue MEANS for a long time but I could spend hours just talking about how it LOOKS,” they say or “it’s just fucking fantastic” or simply, “THIS IS SOME WILD SHIT.” But when they are ready, what a conversation there is to be had. Hop onto Twitter on a given Wednesday, the day new comic-book issues come out, and you’ll find the tag “#xspoilers” - so named because users can mute all tweets with that tag if they haven’t had a chance to read the new issue yet and aren’t ready to join the conversation. Reading them now is like falling in love after years of luckless dating. 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. Not so long ago, it was touch and go for the X-Men.

X men hickman