Marvel’s favourite superhero husbands are heading for the YA shelves. According to the reports lighting up X today, F.T. Lukens and Julian Winters are co-writing a paranormal time-loop romantic comedy starring Billy Kaplan and Teddy Altman, better known as Wiccan and Hulkling, for Random House Children’s Books. It’s due in summer 2028, and the promotional art comes from Russell Dauterman, who has drawn the pair often enough to do it in his sleep, including on the cover of this year’s Wiccan & Hulkling: Raid of Ultron one-shot.
The choice of writers makes sense. Lukens is a New York Times bestseller whose YA fantasies, among them So This Is Ever After and Spell Bound, run on magic, banter and queer romance in roughly equal measure. Winters, author of Running with Lions and How to Be Remy Cameron, describes himself as a comic book geek, which means he presumably already holds strong views on which version of the Kree–Skrull War counts. The two have shared a stage at book events before, so this looks less like an arranged marriage than two friends finally getting round to the group project.
Billy and Teddy first turned up in Allan Heinberg and Jim Cheung’s Young Avengers in 2005. Heinberg assumed at the time that Marvel would never let him write two gay leads, and at one point planned Hulkling as a female shapeshifter. Twenty-odd years later the pair are married (the wedding took place during 2020’s Empyre, with the Kree and Skrull empires in attendance), Teddy has spent time as emperor of a galactic alliance, and Billy has had his own solo series, Wiccan: Witches’ Road. Joe Locke’s turn as the mysterious Teen in Agatha All Along has brought them a fresh audience, many of whom weren’t born when that first issue came out, which is the sort of fact that sends comics fans of a certain age for a quiet lie-down.
A time loop is an inspired engine for a romcom. The premise has been mined since Groundhog Day taught Bill Murray to play the piano and carve ice sculptures, and Happy Death Day and Palm Springs have shown there’s plenty of life in it yet, so to speak. It also suits Billy rather too well. This is a reality-warping witch whose powers were once suspected, in Kieron Gillen’s Young Avengers run, of having wished his own boyfriend into existence. If anybody is going to trap a first date in an endless loop by accident, then insist it was nobody’s fault, it’s him.
Superhero prose novels for younger readers have had a patchy history, but YA is where these two started, as teenagers fighting Kang while working out how to tell their parents who they were. Going back there, without the space thrones, feels less like a spin-off than a homecoming. Summer 2028 is a long wait, admittedly. Then again, for the stars of a time-loop story, it’s practically tomorrow. And tomorrow. And tomorrow.
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