After a pointed effort to keep the X-Men characters in the new “From the Ashes’ relaunch of the X-Men line of comic books at Marvel strictly in the present, the company has announced a major exception in this year’s end-of-the-year one-shot, Timeslide #1, from writer Steve Foxe and artist Ivan Fiorelli, where the X-Men’s two most famous time-travelers, Cable and Bishop, will be forced to team up with each other to save the Marvel timeline from seeing the whole mutant race eliminated from history!

As Marvel noted in the press release about Timeslide (which will be taking the place of Marvel’s recent tradition of releasing time-travel based stories titled Timeless, involving Kang):

One of mutantkind’s most hyper-advanced foes is eating his way through time, trying to stop the X-Gene from ever evolving in the first place. Only two X-Men can stop this chronal predator from achieving his goal – if they can tolerate working together long enough. Join Bishop and Cable on a trip through futures past, present and beyond.

Bishop and Cable, of course, were once hardened enemies during a period where Cable was raising Hope Summers from her infancy, and Bishop was chasing them through time, intent on killing baby Hope, who he believed would bring about the terrible future that Bishop grew up in before he traveled to his past (our “present”). They had worked out a number of their issues over the years, but can something like that ever truly be forgotten? That is what we will see in this new series.

Steve Foxe discussed the project in a Marvel press release about the project, “I was thrilled when Tom Brevoort reached out about Timeslide. These annual mega-issues have become a perennial favorite of mine, both as a standalone story of their own and as a sneak peak of what’s to come for the year ahead. Getting to structure this one around Cable and Bishop—two of my favorite mutants, and two I didn’t write much during my prior X-tenure—was icing on the chrono-cake.

Foxed added, “Ivan Fiorelli can truly draw anything, and this story proves that era by era on a tour of some of the X-Men’s most notable moments as a new threat opens his maw and threatens all of mutant history. We build on Cable and Bishop’s tumultuous relationship from Children of the Vault for a pulse-pounding ride that touches on some of my favorite parts of X-stories past—and teases some exciting upcoming mutant tales. And while the flash-forwards in this issue aren’t only X-related, it was exciting, as a diehard X-fan, to write the first Timeless that became TIMESLIDE!

How does this change an X-Men stance during the reboot?

Recently, in his popular Weekly Substack newsletter, Tom Brevoort, the head of the X-Men line of titles, explained that his initial plan for the “From the Ashes” relaunch was to avoid time-traveling mutants as much as he could:

One of my first decrees to all of my creative teams as we started things up was that I wanted everything to take place in the here and now. And I wanted it to be digestible for ordinary people who hadn’t been following the books for a couple of years. So that meant momentarily sidelining any characters who came from the future or from an alternate timeline or any of that stuff. I made one or two exceptions—I permitted Rachel to be a part of X-FORCE because she was attached to Betsy. She’s also a long-established character, one that I think you can get into without even needing to immediately mention “grew up during Days of Future Past and was a mutant-hunting slave-hound”. Even relatively popular characters such as Cable and Bishop were sidelined for this reason. They’ll all begin to show up here and there as we get things established, but at the outset, i wanted a clean entry point, and there was already a ton of baggage from Krakoa that needed to be covered without trying to do alternate future origin

Timeslide, therefore, is obviously the “here or there” that Brevoort was noting when he said that they would eventually show up once the line has been rebooted, and December of this year is plenty of time after the start of “From the Ashes” in July.

Timeslide #1 is due to be released on December 25 (with a cover by Kael Ngu).

Source: Marvel