San Diego Comic Con 2019 will be the venue for the unveiling of the future of X-Men comics, according to Marvel Comics.
Marvel Comics, via Twitter, unveiled a bit of the contents of their 'Next Big Thing' panel at SDCC this weekend. The tweet in question relates to two future X-Men miniseries and the following reverberations from those events. Marvel Comics is teasing a few choice nuggets of information about the future of X-Men and showing off a new logo, essentially.
House of X and Powers of X are a pair of comics events set to release on July 24 and July 31 respectively, written by Jonathan Hickman. Like any big comics event they bring together a wide variety of books and characters to tell an exceptionally big story which is, according to an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Hickman's passion:
"You want to tell stories that matter, but the way you write things that matter in Marvel is that you're not destructive, you're additive. Yes, I may do things where I destroy the entire Marvel Universe, but I always put it back together, and in putting it together you add to it in a way that puts the characters in an interesting place and you haven't ruined anybody else's job."
Some details of X-Men after the two events were revealed by Hickman already. In an interview earlier this Jun he said to Comicbook.com: "At the conclusion of our 12 weeks of HOX and POX, we'll be launching an entire new universe of X-books. Some will be traditional fare, some carry through on ideas presented in HOX and POX. Some books are completely new concepts. I, personally, will be writing the ongoing flagship X-book."
Presumably, that flagship X-book will take up some of the time at Marvel's 'Next Big Thing' panel at SDCC at 1:45pm, Friday, July 20.
While the X-Men films have suffered from hit and miss critical and popular performance underneath the cultural tent-pole of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there has rarely been a better time to be an X-Men comics fan. Mostly separate from the wider Marvel world, X-Men comics are free to be a little weirder and tell more personal stories within the larger-than-life superhero genre. Writers and artists on X-books always seem to find ways take risks that the rest of Marvel couldn't get away with somehow.
Still, no matter what's revealed at this panel, it'll be hard to be more surprising than the time Storm died and was reincarnated as a space whale. Look it up.