Guide to Jonathan Hickman's X-Men (Early Access for ALL PATRONS) (Patreon)

Today I bring you a critical guide for my continuing X-Men coverage!

Jonathan Hickman's X-Men - Definitive Guide 

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Love it or hate it, Jonathan Hickman's era of X-Men comic books has brought a brand new status quo to X-Men, which has reinvigorated the army of X-fans around the globe.

That new status quo isn't just about the relaunch of a full line of tightly-coordinated comics. There are some major plot beats in Hickman's X-Men that make it a fundamentally different world for mutants than we've ever seen before (though I won't spoil them for you here).

That all began in 2019's House of X and Powers of X, a pair of intertwined six-issue mini-series released weekly for three months. These twin series made major retcons to a handful of key characters and moments in X-history that work so well that you'll be convinced that Claremont set them up himself way back in the 70s and 80s!

From there, in October 2019 Marvel launched a first wave of six ongoing X-Men books - X-Men for Hickman's one- and two-shot world-building stories, Marauders to expand on one of his core concepts, Excalibur to build a brand new history of mutant magic, New Mutants for spreading the word to mutants around the world and across the galaxy, X-Force for the internal and external security concerns of the mutant race, and Fallen Angels to expand Sinister's corner of mutantdom (and which fizzled and was replaced with Hellions).

A second wave of titles debuted in 2020, including both limited series (Giant-Size X-Men, X-Men/Fantastic Four) and new ongoings (Hellions, Cable, Wolverine, X-Factor). The global pandemic cut off the chance for their launch to be accompanied by the first big event of the Hickman era in X of Swords. The line resumed in July and built to a newly-expanded X of Swords event that ran for 22 massive issues from September to November across every title as a direct crossover.

That in turn set up a third wave of titles after X of Swords (SWORD, Way of X, X-Corp), which by June 2021 will expand the X-Men line to a staggering 12 ongoing titles.

What are they all about? How do they intertwine? Which are must-read and which can you skip? This guide explains it all.

X-Men guides have always been the cornerstone content of Crushing Krisis, and for this groundbreaking era I didn't want to simply add a handful of new X-Men (2019) collections to my X-Men Flagships page. This era requires more explanation than that, especially given how intertwined all of its titles have proven to be.

That was the impetus behind making this new page of core X-Men content, which hosts not only links to collections of X-Men (2019), but also all oversize collections of this era plus the "Dawn of X" anthology trade paperbacks that collect the era month-by-month, manga style.

The page also includes a list of the 20 X-Men stories that are most-heavily referenced by Hickman's X-Men, a full explanation of House of X #2 and the retcons of Powers of X, and notable X-Men appearances in the rest of the Marvel Universe in this period.

This is the second new guide that I built using my new solicits database, after the Externals guide last month. This build was considerably faster as I learn my way around my new set of tools - and, it repeatedly saved me time and re-work when it came to getting the contents right on some of these new collections!

As a core X-Men guide, this won't be Patron-exclusive for long! However, in order for the guide to be useful to a general audience, I need to also update the guides for Cable, Excalibur, Mister Sinister, New Mutants / Young X-Men, Wolverine, X-Factor, X-Force, and Marvel Events.

In updating those guides, I'll be rebuilding them from scratch using my new back-end processes - so, it's not just a matter of adding 2-3 new collections to each one! I've done a lot of the prep work for that already, so I hope to knock them out in the next few weeks - at which point this page will go public (as will the Sinister guide).

I'll continue to expand this page with additional details through its public launch.

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What's up next for comic guides?

I've got two big focuses at the moment.

One is updating all of the core X-Men guides to be built from my new solicits database, which will also include a lot of front-end clean-up of format and image size/quality.

(I'm hoping to also pair each guide refresh with a brief "How to Collect" video - my first guinea pig will be Excalibur.)

I'm also about halfway on a new DC guide that I hope to have ready for you soon!

As always, I'm very interested in what you would like to see THE MOST right now as a Patron of CK - whether that's brand new guides or updated content. Leave a comment below with your most-anticipated guide, and I'll give you an update on where I stand!

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