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“There is no ‘The’ future. There is no Destiny.” – Destiny

It’s an age of reckoning for mutantkind. Krakoa has grown from an isolated island nation into an empire that spans the cosmos, but even the strongest empires can fall to the weaknesses inside their walls. The heads of this prosperous new society have endured an inferno…but the sparks of something greater have just been lit.

In 2019, writer Jonathan Hickman launched the X-Men into a bold new status quo through House of X/Powers of X, following the mutants as they forged a new nation and fought to change a seemingly immutable future. Working with countless collaborators, Hickman would continue this master narrative across the Dawn of X and the Reign of X, with each new writer adding their own voice to the story of Krakoa. However, the office would suffer a major shakeup in 2022, with Hickman announcing his departure in the wake of the upcoming Inferno event, leaving his plans for the line seemingly unfinished. But what some saw as an ending, Hickman’s collaborators saw as a beginning. Building on the foundation the writer had helped create, this team would work to forge their own ambitious new chapter, shaped through countless ideas for “the Mutant Metaphor,” and the heroes who embody it.

For the first time, the X-Men have the power to choose their destiny, leaving the question…what comes next?

(Spoilers for each title and the line-wide story to follow)

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The roaring and immediate success of the first season of X-Men: The Animated Series skyrocketed the Fox to the top of the Saturday morning television charts and made the nascent network a serious competitor of ABC, NBC, and CBS in the ratings game for the first time. This triumph naturally meant the pressure was on to maintain excitement for season two. The series writers had to balance the high-quality storytelling that made the first season a smash hit with increased scrutiny from the Fox higher-ups over their precious new property. As related in X-Men: The Art and Making of the Animated Series, the series creators received a mandate from above “that the series could no longer be ‘serialized’: Each episode must stand alone.”

This presented a significant change from the structure of the show’s first season, which threaded connective tissue throughout its thirteen episodes to tell a story of the X-Men’s fight against humanity and the Sentinel program. With the directive against serialization, the writers had to work to find a middle ground that satisfied the bosses without completely sacrificing the comics-style long-form storytelling that set the series apart.

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