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Marvel Comics has just released a teaser for a new event 'saga' by Jonathan Hickman called Imperial.

"Jonathan Hickman presents the end of the beginning," the teaser opens, followed by the Marvel Comics logo and a logo for 'Imperial.' It ends with "Nature abhors a vacuum" with the vague "Summer 2025" release date.

This seems to dovetail in an aborted Marvel project Hickman had been developing as part of his well-remembered 'House of X' X-Men era. 

"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 Star Jammers would have been part of it i'm sure," Hickman said on the X-Plain the X-Men podcast in 2022. "But it would have been a big space book seeding all of that..."

Hickman is known to have been developing this Imperial Guard idea with Marvel since 2018, to be part of the expanding 'House of X' era he was building with the X-Men books. It was intended to spin out of the New Mutants series Hickman co-wrote, but in the 2022 podcast he said he wasn't "going to get to do [it]" and was "bummed about it."

To borrow a phrase from another Disney project, "... somehow, Hickman's Imperial Guard idea returned."

But in a good way.

It's not clear if this will still be a Imperial Guard book or something bigger, as the framing of it by Marvel seems to cast it to be a limited series of some kind. With The Fantastic Four: First Steps coming in July 2025 and it featuring Galactus and Silver Surfer, it seems like an ideal time for Marvel Comics to do a book set in outer space... right?

Look for Marvel to announce more details including the artist(s) and plot in spring 2025.

Interested? Here's where to find your closest local comic store, courtesy of Sweet, and here's a guide to how (and where) to read comics online. If you're looking for the best comics in recent memory, check out the Eisner Awards winners and the Harvey Awards nominees. And if you like free comics, here's everything we know about Free Comic Book Day 2027.