Secret Wars writer Jonathan Hickman rebooted the X-Men in 2019 with House of X and Powers of X, two titles which saw the mutants figure out immortality and create a new base on the island of Krakoa.
The game-changing storyline completely changed the role of mutants in the Marvel Universe and is set to wrap up this summer, roughly five years after it began. However, Hickman left the X-Men line much sooner than any of us expected, meaning we never got to see his full vision for the heroes.
Talking to AIPT about the "Krakoa Age," X-Men Senior Editor Jordan D. White admitted that much of what Hickman hoped to do with the team quickly proved to be off-limits to him.
"There were plans to use [Namor] - that’s why Jonathan set things up," he explains. "He fully intended to use him in probably a few different places. But that’s the risk of trying to do things with characters that aren’t yours - by which I mean, not under our editorial purview. Namor is a character who was part of the Brevoort office as part of the Avengers."
"They had plans with him that they started doing that prevented him from showing up in our books...He’s not going to show up in any of our endings. We very much wanted him to show up in the Fall of X era, but he’s kind of in a place where we can’t use him."
Also causing problems was Fantastic Four writer Dan Slott's apparent unwillingness to share Franklin Richards.
"It is not an oversight that [Franklin] is so prominently talked about in the first issue of House of X," White says. "Obviously, that’s a character that Jonathan has spent a lot of time thinking about and caring about when he wrote Fantastic Four. So he was 100% going, yes, Franklin Richards is one of, if not the most powerful, mutants of all time."
"As much as we wanted to use him because he’s a mutant, he’s clearly a Fantastic Four character. And they made the decision that I - sorry, guys, do not agree with - to make him not a mutant," he adds. "And he’s their character to do that with. And that’s the direction they went. And as a result, he was not on the table for us anymore."
Elsewhere in the interview, the editor also revealed that Marvel Comics scrapped plans for a book Hickman planned to write revolving around Cannonball and Sunspot. With that disappointment added to an ever-growing list, it's no wonder he decided to walk away from X-Men.
Hickman has previously said a big part of why he left is that the publisher wasn't ready to move into the second act of storytelling in the era, instead preferring to continue telling stories revolving around the X-Men's time on Krakoa. It's a shame we didn't get to see what he wanted to do with these characters in his entirety, but the writer has since relaunched Marvel's Ultimate line.