The X-Men Panel has just concluded over at the ol’ C2E2, and there’s been a number of various announcements. New storylines, book cancellations, and new creative teams coming onto the books. Here’s a rundown of what happened. By the way – Steve here, in case you’re confused why Todd is suddenly rattling on at length about X-Factor.

First off is a new crossover story called Battle of the Atom, which will be written by Brian Wood, Jason Aaron and Brian Michael Bendis – more on that in a few minutes.

XMenBattleOfTheAtom_1_Cover

 

Also announced: Irish hero Declan Shalvey will be joining the Deadpool team for their next storyline, ‘The Good The Bad and The Ugly’ in August. With Brian Posehn and Gerry Duggan still handling the writing for the series, this new storyline will see Deadpool join up with two other members of the Weapon Plus programme which created him – Wolverine and Cable – to take down a rogue branch of the company.

DEADPOOL_15_col_sm

 

The next arc of Wolverine by Paul Cornell and Alan Davis will be called ‘Killable’, and seems to find Wolverine without his healing factor. Starting with issue 7, Wolverine suddenly won’t be so impossible to kill off, and Sabretooth will be the first in line to take advantage of that. This looks like a longer-term storyline for Wolverine than might be expected, and seems like an interesting way to knock the character down a few pegs. 

WOLV2013007_COV

The biggest news of the panel, for me, was the news that Peter David’s X-Factor will be coming to an end in September, with issue #262. This is the image Marvel have made available – showing Polaris having a friendly catch-up with her brother Quicksilver – but I’ll be very surprised if there aren’t a number of variants celebrating one of the longest-running, highest-quality X-Men titles of the last two decades. I sincerely hope Peter David gets to move straight across to a new project from this, because he’s a stunning writer, capable of adding character and depth to anybody (even Shatterstar!

The next arc of X-Factor is called ‘The End of X-Factor’, and now we have confirmation that it really will be.

XFACTOR260_col_100

 

 

4 COMMENTS

  1. Gotta hope PAD is getting the relaunch treatment. X-Factor’s been such a solid book for years (story and sales) — if a MARVEL Now X-Factor gets more eyeballs on a great book, I’m all for it.

  2. Nooooo!!…not X-FACTOR! I’ll be disappointed to see it go. It’s been a, consistent, favorite throughout it’s run. On the plus side, though, the book will have run 113 issues (117 if you count the MADROX mini-series which, effectively, served as the pilot). That ain’t bad. Probably, much longer than any of us ever thought the series would last in today’s climate. I can consider that a “win”. I look forward to whatever PAD does next.

Comments are closed.