Jonathan Hickman and Valerio Schiti will redesign the Marvel foundation this fall
Writer Jonathan Hickman’s name is synonymous with big swings — add inferno and AX: Judgment Day artist Valerio Schiti and all-star colorist Marte Gracia, and you’ve got a dream team of heavyweights. And this team will take on the toughest thugs of all, Marvel Comics announced today in a new series called GODS, which will be revealed in an animated trailer.
Marvel has been showing mysterious banter for the new series at conventions since San Diego Comic-Con 2022, but now Hickman and Schiti can finally talk openly about the project. And according to Hickman, in Marvel’s press release, GODS is an idea as old as House of X/Powers of X that catapulted the X-Men into a fantastic new status quo in 2019.
“When I returned to Marvel a few years ago, I wrote two series bibles,” Hickman writes. “The first was House of X and the other was GODS. To say I’m excited to finally be able to share this story with everyone is a massive understatement.”
“His pitch inspired me almost immediately,” Schiti wrote. “The core of the story is so perfect and clear that it swept away my fear and turned it into a burst of creativity.”
Hickman says that “GODS takes place in its own special corner of the Marvel Universe — in the rifts that lie at the intersection of science and magic,” and Marvel’s trailer for the series reflects just that: a conversation about the nature of good and evil between Doctor Strange and a new character known only as Wyn.
According to Marvel’s press release, Wyn is “a mysterious player in a war that exists outside of the orders we know, and a key member of an ancient hierarchy that includes the universe’s all-powerful rulers such as Eternity, Infinity, and the living Court.” [This scene is] just the beginning of a stunning epic at the crossroads of science and magic, one that will shatter our understanding and open our eyes to ideas beyond anything we perceive.”
Image: Marvel Comics
Fans will have to wait until fall 2023 for the series to debut, but in the meantime, Marvel Comics has promised that a special preview of GODS will be included in the company’s Free Comic Book Day 2023 issue, Free Comic Book Day: Avengers/ X -Men #1, available at participating stores May 6th.
“I’ve had the pleasure of working with Valerio Schiti on this over the past year,” Hickman wrote in the press release, “and watching him bring this to life has been an absolute delight. GODS is my favorite kind of Marvel Comics: one that feels like something old but takes the Marvel Universe in an exciting new direction.”
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