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Rick Remender broke through in comic books in a big way with the twin successes of his Uncanny X-Force and Venom runs at Marvel Comics in the early '10s, and that gave him the platform to launch the creator-owned hits that became the bedrock of his modern career like Black Science, Deadly Class, and Seven to Eternity. Remender's creator-owned work has also got him a rare exclusive deal with Image Comics from 2023 to 2026. 

But here now, as that Image exclusivity is apparently at an end, some of the fans of his Marvel days are asking if he'd ever come back to the House of Ideas for new projects. As it turns out, though, Remender has some unfinished business with Marvel that is very enticing.

"I don't really have any itches left to scratch in [the Marvel] universe right now. Who knows? Maybe one day something will reignite my fascination with that stuff," Remender says during a fan AMA on League of Comic Geeks. "I've walked away from two different opportunities to write the X-Men books because, ultimately, my heart is in making things that I own and can do what I want with and to be able to express parts of myself without anybody telling me how to do it or what I'm allowed to do."

Those two occasions were in 2014 and again in 2019. 

In 2014, Remender was at one point slotted in to take a lead role in the X-Men line in what would become the 'All-New, All-Different Marvel' era, picking up from his storylines in his then-recent Captain America and Uncanny Avengers runs. This pitch would've had mutants break away from Earth drama and establish their own community - in this case, on a moon of Jupiter. That would be somewhat similar to Jonathan Hickman's 'Krakoan Age' run years later, but also similar to previous X-Men runs such as the mutant island of Utopia in Matt Fraction's X-Men run, among others.

Remender's 2014 X-Men plans would have also included an expansion of Weapon Minus, a concept he introduced in his Captain America run about a program running contrary to the Weapon Plus group, which created Captain America, Luke Cage, Wolverine, and Deadpool, among others.

In 2019, while Marvel was also in prolonged negotiations with Jonathan Hickman to take over the X-Men line in the aforementioned 'The Krakoan Age,' Remender was also courted to return to Marvel after a multi-year hiatus. Marvel ultimately accelerated negotiations with Hickman, getting him onboard to relaunch the X-Men line.

Remender also said that in the early '10s he pitched "a giant Venom event dealing with the symbiote and it's spawning season" that was never commissioned... although the writer says to this day he doesn't know why.

In 2026, however, Remender seems very intent, fulfilled, and well-paid to work on his own creator-owned projects, along with the ability to be his own boss, and do it, in his own words, "without anybody telling me how to do it or what I'm allowed to do."

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.