Summer 2015. “Secret Wars.” “Civil War.” “Age of Ultron” vs “Marvel Zombies.”
And today? “Years of Future Past,” revealed on CBR and illustrated by Arthur Adams.
The obvious assumption here is that this is related to the classic 1981 story, “Days of Future Past,” which featured an adult Kitty Pryde transposing her consciousness back in time from a dystopian future to the present in order to save the future. That this image features the word “Years” instead of “Days” opens up for potential theorizing obviously, though the image does feature the more classic 80s rendition of the X-Men related to “Days” to the letter, with the X-Men on the left, Brotherhood (and Mystique, prominently) on the right, Sentinels in the back and an adult Kitty in the front.
While most seem to assume that this is a multiversal jaunt of some kind in relation to Marvel’s Secret Wars” (which is fair, because Marvel is getting really past-obsessed at this point), yesterday I theorized that these teasers all dealt with a series that would potentially show what things in Marvel’s continuity have changed since the time-shattering finale of “Age of Ultron,” which was their punching of the Source Wall moment. This teaser doesn’t particularly feed into that idea in any discernible way, but the use of “Years” as opposed to “Days” is a fun one to speculate on. Certainly there have been multiple iterations of dystopic futures that X-Men have to travel back in time to prevent (like “Age of Ultron,” which wasn’t an X-Event but saw Wolverine going back in time to prevent); perhaps there is something in the “years” aspect to that end.
Either way, re-visiting classic stories to see how history has been changed seems a likely point for all this, and I’ll stick to my guns on it until I’m told otherwise — which will likely be Friday during CBR’s Axel-in-Charge column, I’d imagine.
