For anyone who spent the 1990s with a bowl of sugary cereal and a VHS tape labelled “X-MEN – DO NOT TAPE OVER”, Marvel has found a new way to set the cartoon generations at each other’s throats. X-Men ’92: Incursions #1, out on 6 January 2027, pits the team from the 1992 animated series, the one with the theme tune still living rent-free in the head of every Gen Xer, against the teenage mutants of X-Men: Evolution, the early-2000s show that sent Xavier’s students to high school. Only one universe gets to walk away.
The writers are about as on-the-nose as casting gets. Christopher Yost and Craig Kyle wrote multiple episodes of X-Men: Evolution, including the one in which they invented X-23, the teenage clone of Wolverine who grew into Laura Kinney, star of Logan and eventual wearer of the claws in her own right. The pair later ran X-Force together from 2008, and Kyle had a hand in the script for Thor: Ragnarok. This is their first story together in fifteen years, and Kyle has promised that, with Salva Espín on art, they are going to “stick the landing”. Espín knows the territory, having drawn Marvel’s prelude comic for X-Men ’97. Luciano Vecchio provides the main covers, with variants from Gurihiru and from Steve E. Gordon, who designed the characters for Evolution and directed on it, which is a nice touch.
The framework is borrowed from the bleakest stretch of Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers: Time Runs Out, the prelude to his 2015 Secret Wars, in which Earths from different realities began colliding in so-called incursions. If two worlds touch, both perish, unless one is destroyed first. It’s the trolley problem with planets, and Hickman used it to grind Marvel’s cleverest heroes into moral paste. Marvel is now revisiting those collisions across five Incursions one-shots, starting in November with X-Men: Incursions #1 by Alex Paknadel and Jim Towe. The rest of the set offers House of M versus Days of Future Past, Spider-Gwen versus Spider-Girl, and a gamma-powered Fantastic Four squaring up to a cosmic-powered Hulk, which sounds less like a publishing plan than a fan-fiction archive that has been handed a printing budget.
The pitch for this one is properly cruel. The ’90s X-Men must save their own world, but doing so means destroying another, populated by younger versions of themselves who still believe in Xavier’s dream. That is quite an existential burden for characters who, on television, mostly worried about Sentinels and whether Jubilee’s yellow coat counted as camouflage. There’s a pleasing bit of archaeology in the title as well: X-Men ’92 was originally a 2015 Secret Wars spin-off by Chris Sims and Chad Bowers that dropped the cartoon team on to Battleworld. So the animated X-Men are returning to the very multiversal catastrophe that first brought them into Marvel’s comics line.
Here at SFcrowsnest we can already hear the arguments breaking out in comic shops: Rogue versus Rogue, Jean Grey versus her own teenage self, and the eternal question of which incarnation of Cyclops was the bigger wet blanket. Whichever universe wins, the theme tune will survive. It always does.
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