Hickman’s Imperial: Marvel’s Space Epic A Decade In The Making

Jonathan Hickman has been playing in the Marvel Universe for 15 years now and almost no one can lay a greater claim to the universe’s makeup in that time than him. Not only did he destroy the Marvel Multiverse (in the greatest superhero crossover of all time, Secret Wars), but he shaped the now-dead original Ultimate Universe with epic runs on Ultimates, mapped the multiverse in Fantastic Four, and rebuilt the Ultimate Universe in its most recent relaunch. Hell, he even sowed some seeds for the cosmogony of the multiverse in House of X/Powers of X (seriously, if you haven’t read what Al Ewing did to Secret Wars in his Defenders, you need to go check it out). But there’s one story he’s been chasing from the start: a book about the Shi’ar Imperial Guard. And we’re finally getting a payoff in this year’s Imperial.

Marvel is pitching Imperial as a chance to see Hickman reshape the Marvel cosmos in the same way he did the Ultimate Universe. And while I’m excited to read anything he does, what has been most interesting is the fact that he’s been playing with these characters and ideas for a long time. There were rumors going back to his time with the Avengers that Hickman had a pitch for the Legion of Super-Heroes, DC’s futuristic space teens. And in the Legion is the origin of the Shi’ar.

Dave Cockrum was the artist who, with Chris Claremont, created the Shi’ar as part of his work on the big Phoenix story at the dawn of the Claremont era. Prior to his work on X-Men, Cockrum had been a seminal artist on the Legion of Super-Heroes, and he made the Imperial Guard loosely analogous to his Legionnaires. So Superboy became Gladiator of Kallark; Brainiac 5 became Mentor; Saturn Girl became Oracle; and so on. So while their in-universe story was based on imperial Rome, their look was very Legion, forever linking the two franchises in the minds of fans.

Hickman used the Imperial Guard a ton in his Avengers run, having Gladiator (a Superboy stand in from the planet Kallark) lead the coalition of space societies that included the Spartoi, the Kree, the Skrulls and the Annihilation Wave as they joined the Avengers to battle an army of Builders bent on destruction in the universe. And those stories rocked. He’s also revealed in post-X-Men interviews that his original plan at the dawn of the Krakoa era was to put mutants Cannonball and Sunspot in an Imperial Guard book, fleshing out Shi’ar society relative to the mutant status quo.

He told X-Men podcast Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men in their 150th episode, “I was going to do an Imperial Guard book with Bobby and Sam and it was going to be them on the other side of all of that technology stuff in the Shi’ar. And the Imperial Guard and Starjammers would have been part of it I’m sure. But it would have been a big space book seeding all of that for when we eventually… crash it all together. But it was going to seed all of that…in a pretty intense way.” And on another podcast discussing his Krakoa era (Cerebro), he set fandom aflame with a what-if: when he was deciding whether or not to move forward with his X-Men revamp that he had an offer on the table from DC to revamp the New Gods and the Legion. 

This is why you never ask writers about old pitches. 

The idea of Hickman working with the Shi’ar has been bouncing around the public sphere for almost as long as he’s been writing at Marvel, and his track record made it a very exciting possibility beyond what he was able to fit in his books. Getting a payoff to those rumors now, after a decade in circulation, adds a ton of fan excitement to what would have already been a very highly anticipated book.

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