Well, this is exactly what I’ve been looking for. Growing up on X-Men The Animated Series, playing the arcade games, and hours spent running around with the action figures, I’ve been a firmly entrenched fan of the X-Men and it’s lore since I was a kid. But I never really got into the original comics. I recently tried jumping in at various points of Chris Claremont’s run (the fuckin’ Godfather of the X-Men), but could never get into it (felt a little too dated and LOTS of talking). But this, this looks perfect.
X-Men: The Grand Design will be a re-telling of the original X-Men run, in “six 40-page comics…that unify the first 280 original issues of X-Men into a single storyline.” And Ed Piskor is doing it all: writing, penciling, inking, coloring and lettering every panel, “likely the first time in Marvel’s history a single artist has had that honor.” Piskor saw that it “could be streamlined, shorn of what he calls ‘redundancy,’ ‘deus ex machina nonsense’ and stuff ‘that completely doesn’t work’.” And that sounds perfect to me: a streamlined retelling of the story still presented in the colorfully retro style.
It’ll be quite a wait though, as the first issue isn’t out until December, and the trade paperback not until April of 2018. So in the meantime I might check out his groundbreaking work, Hip Hop Family Tree, which is drawn in the same style as this upcoming project (and looks dope). Put this on my ‘highly anticipated’ list fo sho though.
Check out Ed’s tumblr for more art and info on the project.