Welcome, X-Fans, to another uncanny edition of X-Men Monday at AIPT!
While this column typically looks ahead by spotlighting upcoming X-Men-related releases, we’re really looking ahead with this one focused on Timeslide #1 — a one-shot all about looking ahead! On sale December 25, 2024, Timeslide (this year’s edition of Timeless, written by Steve Foxe and illustrated by Ivan Fiorelli) reunites Cable and Bishop and promises many teases for the Marvel Universe in the year ahead.
As the always congenial Steve is among my favorite X-Men Monday guests, I was delighted to see he’d be revisiting Marvel’s mutants and extended an X-Men Monday invite. Lucky for us, Steve accepted. Let’s see what he has to say about his end-of-year adventure.
Courtesy of Marvel Comics
AIPT: Welcome back to X-Men Monday, Steve! First, I just want to point out that the last time you were here (June’s X-Men Monday #254), you said you were “thrilled to get to squeeze in one last appearance before riding off into the X-sunset…” So, how did you find your way onto another X-related project with Timeslide?
Steve Foxe: Mr. Tom Brevoort emailed me with the subject line “TIMELESS,” that’s how! I thought I was flying off into the White Hot Room, but Tom, Annalise Bissa, and I all had a good time doing X-Men: Heir of Apocalypse together. That mini-event had a lot of characters to juggle, so I guess Tom thought I’d be up to the task of Timeless/Timeslide, which required an extra bit of coordination and planning because of its unique role in Marvel’s publishing calendar.
The new X-Office is BUSTLING with books right now, most of them by folks who are either brand-spanking-new to mutants or haven’t been in the X-corner of the Marvel Universe for a while, so it was probably helpful to tap in a reliable pinch hitter for a project with a few extra curveballs. Did I sports right?
AIPT: You sports very good. Now, these Timeless one-shots always have a new, original story, so what’s happening throughout Timeslide?
Steve: The big clue’s right there in the title — the first three iterations of this big, year-end book previewing the year to come were called Timeless, but Tom’s vision for this one was more X-centric off the bat, so we couldn’t resist renaming it Timeslide after Cable’s time-travel callout. As far as the overarching plot, we’ve got Eva Bell — or an Eva Bell — coming to the present to recruit Cable and Bishop to stop a threat to mutantkind that they’re uniquely qualified to tackle.
Courtesy of Marvel Comics
I’ll say upfront that we give readers every detail they need to know right here in the pages of Timeslide, but those who also checked out Deniz Camp and Luca Maresca’s excellent Children of the Vault series will know that these two formed an uneasy alliance to stop the Children from subliminally conquering the planet. That really didn’t sit well with the hyper-advanced enclosed society in the Vault, and they’ve spent the time since that series raising a new Child for the express purpose of removing the mutant threat once and for all: Vacuna.
Vacuna, who got a SICK design from Ivan Fiorelli, can literally consume the very existence of mutants from the timestream. He’s a big, bombastic existential threat that’s also an excuse to throw together two of the X-Men’s coolest characters and force them to work together with the fate of everything on the line. And with the timestream fracturing, as Vacuna starts to achieve his goal, Bishop and Cable begin to get glimpses of potential futures to come for the Marvel Universe…
AIPT: This story promises to bounce around the X-Men’s timeline, and we’ve already seen preview pages featuring Emplate and Weapon X. As you’re a long-time X-Fan, I assume some of the periods and characters we visit are also guilty pleasures.
Steve: Aside from one quick leap that was a totally self-indulgent guilty pleasure involving a major inspiration of mine, I’ve otherwise avoided directly cribbing from or referencing, everything in the issue actually points pretty directly toward something readers should expect to see followed up on in the relatively near future. It may not become immediately apparent, but by the end of 2025, or even into 2026 in some cases, you might look back at panels in this that seemed like I was just having fun and be able to connect the dots.
Courtesy of Marvel Comics
The other thing, when it comes to the X-Men, is that you really can’t throw a brick of Mysterium without hitting something thematically valuable. I wanted to include Emplate because I left him in the wind at the end of Dark X-Men (and I wrote Timeslide before I knew he was going to pop up in the excellent Avengers Academy: Marvel’s Voices Infinity Comic that I hope everyone is reading!). But Bishop also has a DEEP connection to Emplate because of what happened to his sister in the future. So you really end up tripping backward into fun connections no matter what when it comes to the merry mutants.
AIPT: When we spoke about X-Men: Heir of Apocalypse, you were excited to finally write Cable. How was it getting to revisit him and pair him with Bishop for a time-travel adventure?
Steve: I feel like it sounds like I’m making this stuff up when I say it, but I swear to you, the day before Tom reached out about Timeslide, I had a conversation with a friend where I said the one X-book I’d still want to pitch on is Cable. Now, that’s before I knew David Pepose and Mike Henderson had a barnstormer of a story in the pipeline with Cable: Love and Chrome, but it was both awesome and eerie that Tom read my mind like that. And the only reason Bishop didn’t feel like an unfulfilled wishlist character was because I had a lot of fun with the Animated version of him in X-Men ’97.
Courtesy of Marvel Comics
But getting to borrow both of these big burly guys in their most iconic forms for a double-sized, time-traveling adventure, and really lean into their old-school tension? Doesn’t get much better. I loved the work Deniz and Luca did in Children of the Vault, and Ivan and I build on that very directly, but Tom was also pretty eager to ratchet up the long-simmering rivalry between Cable and Bishop, and not let them fall into too easy of a quiet respect for one another. So while they’re working together throughout Timeslide, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re working together easily.
AIPT: It’s great to see Eva Bell again after playing such a crucial role on Krakoa. What can you share about her role in this story?
Steve: Eva Bell left with Krakoa in the White Hot Room, didn’t she? But if she’s there, then who…? And when…? Man, time travel sure is confusing, isn’t it? Eva — whenever, wherever — is a hero prepared to make whatever sacrifice she has to make to preserve mutantkind’s place in the timeline — even if that means paying the ultimate price.
Courtesy of Marvel Comics
AIPT: In X-Men Monday #275, Tom Brevoort told me Timeslide would be heavy on X-Men-related teases. From a writing perspective, how does that work? Are you given a list of teases to weave in or are you cherry-picking suitable teases that work best for your story?
Steve: Tom stood over my shoulder shouting at me like a football coach. It was actually pretty hard to see the screen through all the spittle.
Truth be told, it was very collaborative! We got an early start on this, both because we knew it would be complicated to organize and so Ivan could draw all 40 pages without fill-ins. The benefit of Tom being “Conductor of X” is that he knows what’s coming down the tracks for the X-line already, so as soon as I agreed to do the book, he laid out some of the major events coming up and suggested the ways I could tease those for readers without giving away the whole shebang.
Courtesy of Marvel Comics
There are also plenty of teases that are no more than fractures in time — single-panel glimpses that result from Vacuna assaulting the timeline, much like the glimpses in past issues of Timeless. So not every tease had to be heavily coordinated. Some of them were as simple as Ivan leaving panel space to come back to later. And one of the most tantalizing teases isn’t an image at all. I shouldn’t say more than that, but it’s a callback to something Brian Michael Bendis did a while back that kicked off a lot of speculation, and I’m glad we got to update it for the future moment.
AIPT: Tom also mentioned there may be some hints as to what Revelation’s been up to since we last saw him. As we last spoke before X-Men: Heir of Apocalypse went on sale, what can you share about how Doug Ramsey’s transformation came to be? I did not see that coming.
Steve: One of my first questions when I took the gig was if we could nod to Revelation, and I was very excited to find out the extent to which there are plans within plans for Apocalypse’s Heir in the months to come. I think I said before, but X-Men: Heir of Apocalypse first came about as a way to bridge the gap between the end of Krakoa and the start of “From the Ashes,” which was also filled in by stuff like Hellverine and the Blood Hunt X-Men tie-ins — ways to keep X-Men on the stands in cool, impactful stories as the eras shifted. And I was first asked to write it by Jordan D. White when he was heading up the X-Men line. When Tom came on, he and Annalise kept me on as the writer, and we narrowed down a long list of candidates to see who’d make the most sense.
Courtesy of Marvel Comics
For me, the primary criteria were that: A) it needed to be a hero, so the turn was surprising; B) it needed to be someone relatively prominent, so a wide enough audience would care; C) it couldn’t be someone TOO prominent, so readers wouldn’t assume it would be immediately reversed; and D) a character with significant ties to Krakoa would be ideal, to mark the passing of that era. Doug fit all of those really neatly and had the added benefit of being vastly different from En Sabah Nur in terms of powers and approach. Yes, his visual overhaul courtesy of my killer collaborator Netho Diaz was a huge surprise to readers (and to me!), but that’s comics, baby. Remember what happened to Caliban? Drastic makeovers have been Apocalypse’s M.O. since the jump!
And throughout X-Men: Heir of Apocalypse, I really tried to show how losing Krakoa would be a traumatic experience to Doug in particular — who Jonathan Hickman already suggested might have some Chaotic Neutral or True Neutral shades to him — and justify his decision to explore another path forward.
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I’d love to share some of the other candidates we strongly considered because a few of them were real doozies who would have TRULY set the fans on fire, but I don’t think the internet has shown it can be trusted with “Here’s how a story almost went.” Find me at one of my scant few convention appearances if you’re that curious.
AIPT: Take him up on that offer, X-Fans. They are indeed doozies! As we wrap up, what can Timeslide readers expect from artist Ivan Fiorelli’s visuals?
Steve: Ivan has become one of my favorite collaborators, full stop. We’d never worked together before Timeslide, and here I was, throwing past, present, future, and everything in between at the guy. Mashing up eras, asking him to reserve weird page spaces for teases we didn’t actually have ready yet, to design possible future versions of (redacted), to depict all these gonzo things, and he just made it all look easy. I think Ivan has already proven his bonafides on books like Fantastic Four, but his work on Timeslide and beyond is really a next stage for him.
Courtesy of Marvel Comics
His design for Vacuna and how various powers work incorporate sick bits of cosmic/body horror into the mix, Cable and Bishop have real ‘90s heft to them, and you just get a thrill out of every timeline we revisit. I can’t sing his praises enough. And colorist Frank D’Armata also deserves a shoutout for a job we did not make easy since we’re changing scenery just about every other page.
AIPT: You’re also collaborating with Ivan on the upcoming New Champions series, featuring a colorful cast of new characters — including… Magnetrix?!? First, how excited are you to be writing this series, and second, should X-Fans add it to their pull lists? Seems like there’s some crossover there.
Steve: Pre-first, I have to say how beneficial it was to get to do Timeslide with Ivan before starting New Champions. They’re VERY different books, but we got 40 pages to get to know each other before kicking off a project we’re both really owning from the ground up. That experience was invaluable. You’ll immediately notice some stylistic shifts between books, especially with colorist Arthur Hesli joining us.
Courtesy of Marvel Comics
Now, getting to that first question — I’m super stoked! It’s an undeniably unusual way to birth a series, right? These characters all started out as variant covers. But the artists who designed them put real love and care into their designs, and the character and potential just leapt off the page. Using those original covers as a springboard to devise whole origins and characterizations and interpersonal relationships has been one of the most unique and fulfilling creative processes I’ve yet had.
And Ivan’s been such a key part — my editor Alanna Smith and I are blown away every time we get pages in because Ivan injects so much personality into these kids, it feels like they’ve been around way longer than they actually have. Like, I’m still coming up with who they are and Ivan’s fooling me into thinking they’re pre-existing characters. So I hope, if for no other reason, folks pick it up to see Ivan and Arthur go ballistic on the art side.
Courtesy of Marvel Comics
As for Magnetrix and any mutant ties, I’ll say this: it’d be very boring if every New Champion was a direct protégé or spin-off of the character who inspired them. We’re looking to constantly upend your expectations and surprise you with some of these connections as the series rolls on. Not everyone is linked the way you expect, and not everyone is a young hero. So if you’re thinking to yourself, How the heck are they going to justify another Magneto kid when they’ve already got Polaris and his surrogate kids Wanda and Pietro? Yeah, the same thought crossed our minds…
AIPT: We’ll just have to read and find out! Finally, as we’re in that magical holiday/end-of-year season, do you have a favorite holiday-themed piece of X-Men media you like to revisit this time of year?
Steve: Nearly every Christmas, if my partner will tolerate it, I rewatch “Have Yourself a Morlock Little X-Mas” from X-Men: The Animated Series. I will never, ever get tired of Jean VIOLENTLY rejecting Gambit’s attempt to season Christmas dinner.
AIPT: Well, post-X-Men ’97, that could have been Madelyne Pryor. I guess we’ll never know. Either way, yes, it’s an iconic moment in X-Men history.
But on that note, thanks for stopping by X-Men Monday, Steve! Remember, X-Fans, Timeslide #1 goes on sale December 25, 2024. What a Christmas gift!
Speaking of presents — here’s this week’s X-Men Monday eXclusive: An eXtra early look at Timeslide #1 lettered preview pages from writer Steve Foxe, artist and inker Ivan Fiorelli, color artist Frank D’Armata, and letterer VC’s Joe Caramagna.
Courtesy of Marvel Comics
Courtesy of Marvel Comics
Courtesy of Marvel Comics
Courtesy of Marvel Comics
Courtesy of Marvel Comics
Until next time, X-Fans, stay exceptional!
