He's very excited about all the plans we have. This is not the end game of his many, many years-long story, but this is where he said, 'This is the story I'm going to tell and then I'm going to step away.' And again, I'm sorry, I just need to emphasize, he's not stepping away with any disappointment or anger. And it was always going to be his finale since I knew he was leaving. So I'm not going to tell you what that title was, but it used to be called something else. But the other thing it was called is a title we're going to be using shortly. He just isn't going to be writing a monthly book.'Īnd as to Inferno, which seemed to have been set up since the first mention on House Of X, originally it had a different name.

So, his influence is going to be felt very heavily going forward. He was at our summit all three days, helping us plan out the next three years worth of stories basically. As you saw from a bunch of social media posts last week, Jonathan is still heavily involved in what we're doing.

And, of course, I can't say too much about any of that, because that's all the future of the comics. And there are at least some aspects that won't happen. There are absolutely aspects of it that are going to happen. The plan changed because Jonathan changed his mind about what we should do. So the plan didn't change because no one liked Jonathan's plan. Like, 'year one' could be 10 years - we don't know how long it will be. We called it 'year one,' 'year two,' 'year three.' But relatively early on, we stopped saying that because it's not a year. But after seeing how things started to unfold, Jonathan said, 'I think we might want to not do this.' It was his suggestion and I think he said the whole time that he came in - even when it was the three-act plan - he came in going, 'But who knows how long act one will last.' In fact, at first, we didn't call it three acts. It wasn't a case where Marvel said to him, 'We don't like your idea anymore - change it.' Or where the writers said, 'We don't like your idea - change it.' Everybody loved Jonathan's idea, including me. Jonathan came in with a plan and then the plan changed based on the actual unfolding of the story and how everything played out. Jordan: I feel like no matter how emphatic he is about it, people still kind of misconstrue it - that Jonathan came in with a plan and then everybody poo-pooed that plan so much that he left and that couldn't be further from the truth. Who, with Inferno, is stepping away from the X-Men books he had been showrunning for three years, with only the first arc of his planned X-Men storyline having come (partially) to fruition.

As part of AIPT's regular X-Men Monday, X-Men group editor Jordan D White, who I first met as a Marvel intern at Heidi MacDonald's karaoke evening one cold New York Comic Con, has been laying out just what the hell happened with Jonathan Hickman.

X men inferno hickman