What Is Happening In Marvel’s FCBD2025 ‘X-Men’ Story?
by Tony Thornley
Free Comic Book Day is often a mixed bag of comics- some are bite sized one shots, others are reprints and yet others are teasers for the year to come. With a reveal from Marvel on Friday, their tease for 2025 is even more interesting.
Coming from one of our favorite writing teams of 2024, Collin Kelly and Jackson Lanzing, and artist Edgar Delgado, the solicit tagline for the mutant half of the X-Men/Fantastic Four flip book is an interesting one.
And on the eve of the birth of the All-New, All-Different X-Men, there is one extra mutant in attendance. who is it? Only Collin Kelly and Jackson Lanzing can tell you!
The tag line seems to point to one of two things.
First, we might be about to get a retcon. Was there a secret seventh member of the All New All Different team of X-Men? Could we be seeing a big secret character on the level of Sage, Vulcan and Darwin? I think that’s unlikely considering the already existing retcon of those latter two characters, who were secret All New All Different X-Men that were eaten by Krakoa before the Storm and Wolverine fronted team. (And if you don’t get that Sage reference, Chris Claremont revealed her as a secret X-Man all along in the early 2000’s.)
Secondly, I think the answer lies in the recent Timeslide one-shot. In that story, the time jumping X-Men Cable and Bishop visit the Dark Phoenix Saga and find an unexpected member of the X-Men amongst the team- Kamala Khan! Considering Lanzing and Kelly are the writers currently responsible for new mutant Ms. Marvel’s X-adventures, could we be seeing the seeds planted both in that one shot and this one of an upcoming time travel story?
This newly revealed page by Delgado actually doesn’t show much to confirm anything… but one of the newest X-Men might be about to become a veteran, and we’re on board for that.
Free Comic Book Day 2025 is on May 3rd, 2025, and we’re definitely on the edge of our seat until it hits.
