Back in September of last year Marvel announced that Hip Hop Family Tree creator Ed Piskor would be distilling more than 8,000 pages of X-Men comics into one seamless masterpiece with X-Men: Grand Design, a definitive remix of the first 280 original issues of X-Men comic books. And, to mark the trade paperback release, we’ve got a look at the first five pages from X-Men #1 in 1963, recolored by Piskor in his distinctive style.
“My work on X-Men would never have been possible without Marvel’s collaboration and the popularity I’ve achieved thanks to Boing Boing’s support on their site for over four and a half years,” said Piskor. “It’s a pleasure to bring the Marvel mutants to the Happy Mutants of BB for this limited serialization of X-Men: Grand Design. I created each page to function as its own unique and complete strip that, when read in total, would tell a bigger story. Over the course of the next few months I’ll be providing a director’s commentary with every strip, to give you, the reader, some insight into where my mind was when putting the whole tale together. There’s a lot that goes into each episode, and this is the exact crowd who would appreciate the deep-dive look under the hood.”
In addition Marvel has also announced that X-Men: Grand Design will return late this summer with the two issue comic book series X-Men: Grand Design, Second Genesis, with issue #1 set for release on July 25th and issue #2 on August 29th.
Over six tumultuous decades, the X-Men have carved a singular place in comic book lore and popular culture. From their riotous birth in the ’60s, to their legendary reboot in the ’70s, to their attitude adjustment in the ’90s, to their battle against extinction in the ’00s, the X-Men have remained unquestionably relevant to generations of readers, the ultimate underdogs in an increasingly complicated world. Now, New York Times best-selling author Ed Piskor (Hip-Hop Family Tree, Wizzywig) takes you on a pulse-pounding tour of X-Men history unlike anything you’ve ever experienced before, an intricate labor of love that stitches together hundreds of classic and obscure stories into one seamless masterpiece of X-Men lore.
