The six-issue project will cover three decades' worth of material.


With almost 50 years worth of stories to deal with, even the idea of catching up on the comic book mythology of Marvel's X-Men sounds like an exhausting proposition — but not for long. This December, Marvel will launch X-Men: Grand Design, a new project intended to summarize the first 30 years of X-Men continuity.

The series is the creation of Ed Piskor, known for his critically acclaimed Hip-Hop Family Tree comic book series. Just as that project condenses and summarizes the origins of hip-hop, Grand Design is intended to distill more than 8,000 pages of comics — from the 1963 debut of the team all the way through departure of writer Chris Claremont in 1991 — into six 40-page issues to be published across three years.

"Ed Piskor is a singular talent," Marvel editor-in-chief Axel Alonso said in a statement from the publisher about the project. "And he is unleashing the same passion, craft and attention to detail that fuels his award-winning Hip-Hop Family Tree on decades' worth of X-Men stories."

The series will be released as three two-part miniseries: X-Men: Grand Design, X-Men: Grand Design – Second Genesis and X-Men: Gand Design – X-Tinction, with each of the minis subsequently collected into one oversized paperback along with an issue of the series Piskor was inspired by, recolored by Piskor himself.

"If it wasn't for X-Men comics, I may never have thought to ever pick up a pencil and start making them in the first place," Piskor told The Hollywood Reporter. "In my own way, this is a love letter to writer Chris Claremont and his team of industry-leading artists like John Byrne, Marc Silvestri, Arthur Adams and Jim Lee. This project is the culmination of my own 35 years of obsessing over this material. X-Men: Grand Design is a once-in-a-lifetime dream project for me."

The first issue of X-Men: Grand Design will be released Dec. 9, with the first paperback collection available April 17, 2018.

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