The name of writer Jonathan Hickman is synonymous with big swings — add in Inferno and AXE: Judgment Day artist Valerio Schiti and all-star colorist Marte Gracia, and you’ve got a dream team of heavy hitters. And that team will be tackling the heaviest hitters of them all, Marvel Comics announced today, in a new series called GODS, revealed in an animated trailer.
Marvel has been showing off mysterious teases for the new series at conventions since San Diego Comic-Con 2022, but now Hickman and Schiti are finally able to speak openly about the project. And according to Hickman, in Marvel’s news release, GODS is an idea as old as House of X/Powers of X, which catapulted the X-Men into a fantastical new status quo in 2019.
“When I came back to Marvel a few years ago, I wrote two series bibles,” Hickman writes. “The first was House of X and the other one was G.O.D.S.. To say that I’m excited to finally be able to share this story with everyone is a massive understatement.”
“His pitch inspired me almost immediately,” wrote Schiti. “The core of the story is so perfect and clear that it swept away my anxiety and turned it into a burst of creativity.”
Hickman says that “G.O.D.S. takes place in its own special corner of the Marvel Universe — in the cracks that lie at the intersection of science and magic,” and Marvel’s trailer for the series shows exactly 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 news release, Wyn is “a mysterious player in a war that exists outside of the orders we know and a vital member of an eons-old hierarchy that includes the omnipotent rulers of the universe such as Eternity, Infinity, and the Living Tribunal. [This scene is] only the beginning of a breathtaking epic at the crossroads of science and magic, one that will shatter our understanding and open our eyes to ideas beyond all that we perceive.”
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Fans will have to wait until fall of 2023 for the series to debut, but in the meantime, Marvel Comics has promised that a special preview for GODS will be included in the company’s 2023 Free Comic Book Day issue, Free Comic Book Day: Avengers/X-Men #1, available in participating stores on May 6.
“I’ve had the pleasure of working with Valerio Schiti on this for the last year,” Hickman wrote in the news release, “and watching him bring this to life has been a total joy. G.O.D.S. is my favorite kind of Marvel comic: one that feels like something old, but pushes the Marvel Universe in an exciting new direction.”