Originally Posted by
RachelGrey
lol, nice sarcasm there.
I love that he is calling back to the history of the mutants in so many little ways.
I also love how Hickman encourages the other writers to embrace the histories of their cast. Excalibur #1 by Tini Howard, you have Betsy encountering Brian, Megan, Maggie, Jamie, avoiding Kwannon. You can tell Tini is going all in on the Braddock/Otherworld/Captain Britain mythology in a way I don't think any writer has done before. Like seriously all in!
Marauders by Gerry Duggan is the ultimate Kitty Pryde and Emma Frost rebirth for both characters. Gerry is taking what Jonathan did with Emma in House of X and running forward with it, and then using that to impact Kate Pryde, and through Kate linking in Storm, Bobby, Bishop, and Pyro. Seriously both Kate and Emma needed a bit of a reset after the last 3 years of mess created for both of them, and this helps to get them both on better footing as characters going forward. There are hints that Bobby and Storm are going to get some big development in the next few issues, and I liked the Gerry kept going with Storm's development from House of X and X-Men too, she is very focused on rescuing mutants from all over the world, it was even revealed in X-Men that she is putting a lot of pressure on herself to accomplish this. It's not unexpected that Storm decided to stay with Kate and help rescue mutants, because Storm has already been working on this for a while, and as a council member she may have decided to keep an eye on Kate's team to make sure they stay safe.
I love how Jonathan sits down with all these writers and they work together as a team to bring the books forward. To me there is a cohesive feel to the X-Men that hasn't been there in a while, all the books are interlinked with each other in that they reference what is happening in the others. Everyone is working from the same base of operations, Krakoa, and they are going to be interacting with each other on each other's books from time to time.
This feels like how you run a TV series with multiple characters and storyboard the entire season and then fill in the scripts as you go. A good comparison would be a show like Babylon 5 that was storyboarded out for all 5 seasons and they just had to make modifications to the story as actors came and went over the course of the series. J. Michael Straczynski knew exactly how each season of Babylon 5 was going to play out and knew the big epic events he wanted to cover in each season.
This is how the X-Men feel now, Jonathan Hickman took the time to sit down with all the writers and they have hashed out at least 2 years of story already. Sure the final scripts all have to be written still, and there is probably room for adjustments to the overall story along the way, but overall these writers have a good idea where they are going with all their main characters for the next year or 2.