Marvel Teases Jonathan Hickman’s ‘Imperial’ — Is This His Previously Teased Imperial Guard Comic?

What is Imperial? It’s a new Jonathan Hickman book from Marvel Comics, but that’s pretty much all we know at this point.

Per the publisher’s tantalizing tease sent to press, we know that there will be more news next year on what exactly this is. But they do note that Imperial is “a new saga from visionary writer Jonathan Hickman.”

And the teaser comes with two taglines… “Jonathan Hickman presents the end of the beginning,” and “nature abhors a vacuum.” In addition, they note that it’s coming Summer 2025.

What can we take from that, as well as the text logo set on a starfield? It’s likely a cosmic book of some sort, so could have something to do with the Kree, Skrull, or literally any other alien race in the Marvel Universe. Or it could be something new, a la G.O.D.S. Heck, maybe it is the second part of G.O.D.S., who knows?

…But perhaps most likely: back when he was doing the Krakoa books for the X-Men line, Hickman wanted to do an Imperial Guard book featuring Sam Guthrie and Roberto da Costa, aka Cannonball and Sunspot. Will this be that book?

Here’s what Hickman said about it on an episode of Jay & Miles X-Plain The X-Men:

“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. But it would have been a big space book seeding all of that for when we eventually obviously we’re going to crash it all together. But it was going to seed all of that in a way um in a pretty intense way um it was so I’m bummed about that. I clearly set them up to do all of that when I did those four issues of New Mutants, that was clearly where we were going to go with all of that. I have a couple of things that I really was looking forward to doing that I’m just not going to get to do but they’re in great hands.”

Check out the teaser below, and speculate wildy.

COMING TO MARVEL COMICS IN 2025… IMPERIAL!

Stay tuned next year for news about IMPERIAL, a new saga from visionary writer Jonathan Hickman.

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