I subscribed to all the subsequent Dawn of X titles and couldn’t help but want to write about the bigger themes introduced I initially got involved with AIPT writing a series of articles exploring the foreign policy of Krakoa. It was a fresh take on the X-Men, and a much-needed injection of new energy into what felt like a book caught in nostalgia. I started going to my local comic shop, got myself a pull box, and read each issue of the dueling minis multiple times.

Hickman’s House of X/Powers of X got me back into comics in a big way. David Canham In the Krakoa Era, the X-lineup hit its stride for depth and quality And I wonder if he’ll return in the future to finish things the way he originally imagined. I wonder if this frustration, not only due to COVID but also due to the creative differences with his team, contributed to his decision to leave the X-Men with so little of his master plan realized. Hickman strikes me as a meticulous planer, as one can see in his detailed eye for continuity, so I wonder just how frustrated changing his plans made him. I wonder how the Hickman Era of X-Men would’ve developed without the COVID stoppage. Who knows how much of Hickman’s grand plan had to be changed or scrapped entirely. The Way of X series, meant to spin-out of X-Men #7, didn’t debut until over a year after that issue released. The big crossover, X of Swords, was pushed back from the summer to the fall of 2020. By then, the excitement had died down.īut, worse than that, storylines, future plans, and the launch of other new series had to be delayed, reworked, or completely thrown out. Issue #2 released in March, but issue #3 didn’t come out until July. Take, for example, the Wolverine series, which debuted in February 2020.

We just couldn’t wait for next week’s X-titles to be released.Īnd then everything came to a screeching halt and all momentum was lost abruptly. The first wave of Dawn of X titles had just finished their first story arcs, and the second wave of titles was launching. Hickman’s House of X/Powers of X reignited our excitement in the franchise in the summer and Fall of 2019.

One example: What if the sudden spread of COVID in the spring of 2020 hadn’t shut down the distribution of comic books for two to three months? The X-Men franchise was still riding high on a huge swell of momentum. When I now look back on the two-and-a-half years of Jonathan Hickman being the “Head of X,” I can’t help but ask that familiar Marvel Comics question, “What if?”

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