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JORDAN WHITE: When Jonathan set out to tell the story,
he set out to change the way people think about the Marvel
Mutants forever.
Very early in me coming into the X-Men, they said to me,
this is what's going on right now.
This is what's going on here.
You're going to have to come up with stuff here.
But Summer 2019, Jonathan Hickman is going to come in,
and he's pitching for it.
We want you to hear him out and see what he's got.
He is going to do something big with these characters.
JASON AARON: You can tell Jonathan has a lot of fondness
for those characters, for the ideas around the X-Men.
But he's also taking all that stuff
and doing something very, very new with it, which I think
is a very X-Men idea, not just doing the same soap opera over
and over, not just picking the bones of those great runs
and books and moments from the past,
but doing something completely new with those characters.
JONATHAN HICKMAN: The reason why I've
been hired to work on a book is to do my version of the book.
If not, I'm just a writer who's writing
the most neutral, generic version
of the archetypal version of the X-Men.
I think it's important for me as an artist, as an author,
as a writer, to do what my version of it is.
SVEN LARSON: Jonathan, I think, is somebody
who has an amazing ability to take a look at stuff that has
always been there and take a look at it
from a slightly different angle and sort of go, yeah, but did
you ever notice that about it?
JONATHAN HICKMAN: The power of the Marvel universe
is our super consistency of our overall continuity,
like we've been telling the same story for 50 years.
One of the things that I do is, I use that mechanism
to create an internal continuity into the books that I'm doing.
So if I'm telling a longer story,
it remains consistent to itself.
And so, it feels super relevant to the people that have been
reading it, whether you're on issue one or issue 50
or 60 or whatever that I'm doing.
JORDAN WHITE: Jonathan came into the office for a meeting,
and he told us his plan.
What happens in HOUSE OF X and POWERS OF X
isn't going to be a thing that only
affects the five characters on the cover of HOUSE OF X #1.
It's a story that spans all of mutantkind,
and that, in turn, will affect the entire Marvel Universe.
JONATHAN HICKMAN: If you look at the work
that I've done at Marvel to a certain extent,
there are elements that I was playing with at the time that
are pervasive.
Certainly through Fantastic Four and Avengers,
I did a lot of alt-reality temporal shenanigans.
A lot of that is just me being in a mood
at a certain point in time.
Me playing with those kind of things
that I've always thought about, I have this big canvas,
and I can do it as big as I want to do it in the fashion
that I want to.
We're not doing any of that.
There's no alternate universe version of the X-Men
that we're doing, time travel, or any of that kind of stuff.
This is a very cause-and-effect, very linear, narratively
straightforward story.
JORDAN WHITE: I think it's really exciting.
I mean, the stuff he has planned for X-Men,
it really shake things up.
The first time he told it to me, I was upset.
I was like, we can't do that.
We can't do that.
The more I thought about it, the more I went, wait, hang on.
What if we did?
I was immediately impressed by how thorough it was
and how intricate it was and how brilliant his planning is
and how his idea was.
And I can't tell you why.
But I didn't think it would--
I was like, we can't do that.
JONATHAN HICKMAN: I think the most important thing
about X-Men is, obviously, the way that individual readers
identify with characters-- different being
a metaphor for special and all the different variations
that that comes in.
My obligation is to be true to the character,
even though you're putting them in new circumstances,
and be true to the spirit of what it
means to write an X-Men book.
That's kind of my guiding principle.
I'm supposed to do it my way, but it's
supposed to be a new version of that familiar thing.
And that's the challenge and what we're trying to do.
JASON AARON: The X-Men is one of those books I think should
always be evolving, right?
That's sort of baked into the idea.
Those characters shouldn't stay the same.
SVEN LARSON: I'm super excited for what
he's going to be doing next.
I think he'd probably have to go back to Grant Morrison
to find something that's hopefully as much
of a sea change for the franchise
but ultimately staying completely
true to those constant themes and those constant things
that the X-Men has always been about.
GERRY DUGGAN: I feel like Jonathan's take on the X-Men
is going to be the thing that people have been waiting for.
It feels like that lightning in a bottle.
As much great history as the X-Men have had,
the mutants' best days are ahead of them.
JORDAN WHITE: What Jonathan is doing
in this is setting up ideas for the X-Men
and how people will think of the X-Men.
And so, that doesn't just go for the readers.
That goes for the writers as well.
That goes for whoever is going to write X-Men in the future
next month, be it a year down the line, be it 10 years down
the line.
JONATHAN HICKMAN: One trait of my books
that I like to do with this big superhero stuff,
I like to put the characters in a position
that they have to make difficult choices.
I like to ask hard questions of the core of the character.
What does it mean to be a mutant?
It's not a clearly delineated win or loss.
It's, maybe this is right, or maybe
this other thing is right.
And then we'll watch it unfold for a couple of years.
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