Abrams ComicArts has announced an expansion of its Marvel Arts line of original graphic novels featuring Marvel Comics characters with X-Men Elsewhen by writer/artist John Byrne.
X-Men Elsewhen is a three-volume series celebrating both the 50-year history of Marvel’s X-Men team featuring fan-favorite creations such as Wolverine, Storm, Colossus, and Nightcrawler; and also the culmination of longtime writer/artist John Byrne’s five decades of association with these characters.
X-Men Elsewhen began nearly seven years ago and featured John Byrne’s return to the X-Men, the comic-book franchise he helped grow to new heights with his work as co-plotter and artist alongside writer Chris Claremont and inker Terry Austin. That trio’s time on the series has served as inspiration for films, animated series, and numerous comic books that followed. Among the high-water marks co-plotted and illustrated by Byrne during this initial go-round were classic storylines, “The Dark Phoenix Saga” and “Days of Future Past.”
In X-Men Elsewhen, written and penciled by Byrne, inked by Byrne and Paul Wills, colored by Lovern Kindzierski and Leonard O’Grady, and lettered by Byrne and Patrick Brosseau, the central conceit of the series involves Byrne’s return to those storylines, albeit with one major difference: the culmination of the “Dark Phoenix Saga” saw Jean Grey, the Phoenix, make the ultimate sacrifice to save the universe from her power, which had grown too great for her to contain. In Elsewhen, however, the storyline picks up from that point but explores the never-published ending where Jean Grey survived the experience, albeit in a drastically altered fashion.
That story change results in an entirely different future for the team and the surrounding Marvel Universe of characters. In X-Men Elsewhen Volume 1, the characters return to Earth and face very different experiences in the Savage Land and beyond, in an expansive storyline that also features the Sentinels, the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, Spider-Man, and many other familiar faces.
X-Men Elsewhen is the pinnacle of Byrne’s storied history of working on the beloved X-Men from Marvel. Volume 1 will be available April 2026 from Abrams ComicArts.
