John Byrne is returning to Marvel Comics' X-Men. Not everyone’s happy about it.
Forty years after he defined the franchise, the legendary artist drew 31 issues of new X-Men for free on his own website. Marvel’s publishing them, the first printing sold out before release, and the book arrives June 23.
One of the most important artists in X-Men history is back drawing the X-Men, and he did it the least likely way possible. No contract, no deadline, no plan to sell it. He just started drawing.
X-Men: Elsewhen Volume 1 hits shelves June 23, and before a single copy reached a store, it was already gone.
What Elsewhen actually is
Start with what the book is, because the how is the good part.
John Byrne is 75. He hadn’t published a comic in over a decade. Then, by his account, a drawing of Wolverine fighting Sauron fell out of his pencil in 2018 and he couldn’t stop. Over roughly three years he drew 31 issues of brand-new X-Men stories and posted them, for free, on his own website.
No pay, no editorial oversight, no expectation any of it would ever be a real book.
It’s a continuation, an “elsewhen,” picking up the thread from the era Byrne worked on and running it somewhere new. Marvel saw the pages, editor-in-chief C.B. Cebulski got involved, and the result is being collected through Abrams ComicArts’ Marvel Arts line as a three-volume set, starting with the one that drops June 23.
Byrne framed it to The Hollywood Reporter as a possible send-off. He said he’s starting to think Elsewhen will be his “leaving in a blaze of glory.” That’s a hell of a thing for a 75-year-old legend to say about a passion project he gave away online, and it lands differently than any variant-cover cash grab.
Why Byrne returning is a big deal
For anyone who didn’t grow up on this stuff, here’s why the name matters.
Byrne’s run on Uncanny X-Men with writer Chris Claremont in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s is, for a lot of readers, the definitive X-Men. It produced “The Dark Phoenix Saga” and “Days of Future Past,” the two stories Hollywood has been mining for decades and named whole movies after. He went on to relaunch Superman, define a long stretch of Fantastic Four, and generally help shape what mainstream superhero comics looked like for a generation.
So this isn’t a nostalgia hire or a legacy variant. It’s one of the architects of the modern X-Men going back to the drafting table and putting in three years on the characters for nothing, because he still wanted to. The man clearly still has ink in his veins.
The fans already voted
The first printing was 25,000 copies, and it sold out entirely on pre-orders, before the book existed on a single shelf. A second printing of another 20,000 is already in production. That’s roughly 45,000 copies moving on a collected edition of free webcomics, on the strength of one name on the cover.
Whatever else is true about the comics industry right now, that’s an audience showing up with wallets for an old-school creator doing the thing he’s great at.
Readers wanted this one, and they didn’t wait to be told.
Not everyone’s celebrating
There is some friction, and it’s worth noting without letting it run the story.
When the sellout news broke, Heather Antos, a longtime editor now at IDW Publishing, posted on Bluesky: “During PRIDE MONTH. REALLY, MARVEL?! Do not buy this comic.”
She followed it by calling Byrne a transphobe, pointing to years of comments she says he’s made on trans issues. Byrne does have a long, combative history of weighing in on hot-button topics on his own forum, and how much that should color a reader’s view of his comics is a real argument people are having in good faith on both sides.
It also kicked off the usual online slugfest, with plenty of less-good-faith voices piling on from every direction. None of which changed the pre-order numbers.
The book sold out either way, which is sort of the whole point: in a fight over who gets to decide what lands on the shelf, the readers had already answered before anyone finished arguing.
X-Men: Elsewhen Volume 1 is out June 23. Byrne, at 75, is back on the only characters he apparently can’t put down, going out the way he wants to. The rest is comments-section noise around a book that, by the numbers, people plainly wanted.
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Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.
Hat Tips:
The Hollywood Reporter (June 2026), verified for Byrne’s “leaving in a blaze of glory” comment, the project’s origins as a free webcomic, and the three-year, 31-issue scope
Popverse (June 2026), verified for the X-Men: Elsewhen preview, the June 23 release through Abrams ComicArts’ Marvel Arts line, and the sold-out first printing going to a second
Abrams ComicArts, verified for the three-volume collected format and publication details
Heather Antos via Bluesky (June 2026), verified for her “do not buy this comic” post and her stated objection to Byrne