Marvel Comics announced today that the creative team for the new Ultimate X-Men series that debuts in September will be writer Nick (Morning Glories) Spencer and artist Paco Medina. The new series, which deals with mutants caught in a post-Ultimatum world, will feature Kitty Pride, Bobby Drake, Rogue, Johnny Storm, James Hudson, Jean Grey, Colossus and Storm. In the Ultimate Universe the mutants are not the result of random genetic change, rather they are the creations of experiments conducted in laboratories run by the U.S. government.
The new Ultimate X-Men series will take place in world without mentors and without some of the most powerful and popular mutants, a world in which Professor X, Magneto, Cyclops and Wolverine are dead. Kitty Pride and Rogue will take center stage in these new X-Men adventures. It’s a very dangerous and challenging time for the differently-empowered. The government has taken a much more aggressive stance on “the mutant problem,” and technology is catching up with, and in some cases, surpassing mutant abilities.
During a press conference announcing the new creative team, Marvel EIC Axel Alonso popped in to mention that he expects that a crossover between the three main series in the rebooted Ultimate Universe, Ultimate Comics: Ultimates with the creative team of Jonathan Hickman and Esad Ribic that was announced yesterday (see “Marvel’s Ultimate Comics: Ultimates”), the Ultimate X-Men, and the revamped Ultimate Spider-Man, which will be the subject of another news conference tomorrow, will occur “not too far in the future.” Hickman and Spencer, the writers of the first two revamped Ultimate titles, both came from the world of indie comics. Will the writer of the rebooted Ultimate Spider-Man have a similar background?
Today Marvel also released the cover image for the second issue of Ultimate Fallout, the weekly July series that will serve as a narrative bridge in the Ultimate Universe from the Death of Spider-Man event to the August launch of Ultimate Comics: Ultimates, the first of the revamped Ultimate titles.
