Lucca Comics & Games 2026 is set to take place from October 28 to November 1, 2026, with Marvel’s Jonathan Hickman making his first trip to Italy for the event.
We got to sit down with the award-winning, best-selling author to talk about his work, the event, and the upcoming Midnight X-Men and Avengers: Doomsday. Hickman is known for his massive worldbuilding and long-term planning, having joined Marvel Comics in 2009. His work on the Fantastic Four, Avengers, X-Men, Ultimate Spider-Man,among others, is incredibly influential. His work on the Avengers specifically is the foundation for the upcoming MCU Avengers movies in Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars.
Now, Hickman is about to launch Midnight X-Men, a dark, horror-themed take on the mutants, in the brand-new Midnightuniverse for Marvel Comics. Ahead of his appearance at Lucca Comics & Games, we dive into his creative process, tease the upcoming Midnight X-Men, and touch on the Avengers movies to round out the conversation.
Hey Jonathan, it’s an absolute pleasure to meet you! Very excited to talk to you today.
Jonathan Hickman: Thank you.
I’d love to kick off with a question about Lucca Comics & Games. Correct me if I’m wrong, it’s your first time taking a trip out to Italy for the event. What are you looking forward to about the event?
Jonathan Hickman: Meeting a bunch of people, having good dinners, seeing people I haven’t seen in forever. I’m very excited about the whole experience. I’m going to stick around for a couple days and travel a little bit, and that’s obviously going to be fun. I haven’t been abroad in quite a while, so it’ll be good to get out of the States.
I’m sure Italy at this time of year will not be a bad place to go to. With Lucca Comics & Games focusing their theme onlegacythis year, I was curious what that word means to you when it comes to your work?
Jonathan Hickman: That your real competition is yourself, and that every time you put out a new book, you’re in a war with all the other stuff that you’ve made. Hopefully you can inch forward instead of inch backwards, and hopefully, you can sleep at night with what you’ve made.
Speaking from experience, your work specifically has really been there a lot for me throughout the course of my life. Infinity hit me at a time in my life when things were challenging, and it gave me the space to jump into and get lost in grand storytelling and epicsuperherofights. How does it feel knowing that the work that you do is important to so many, and will continue to live on for years and years to come?
Jonathan Hickman: Well, the truth is I tell stories for myself. I’m a very selfish, aristocratic creator in that I feel like I have something to say, and people should want to hear it. That’s a component of it that I think all good art has, and I do have that. But I had to wait a long time before I got into the business, and as soon as I started, my whole thing was I want to make the most of this. I want to do work that I want to do. I’m not trying to do what people would expect from me all the time.
I’m not trying to create, like, “You know what would really work this week because there’s a Spider-Man movie coming out? A newSpider-Man book.” I never wanted it to be that way. Obviously, sometimes I’m asked to do things in that manner by Marvel, but I try to be a good employee that way. But generally speaking, I’m trying to tell stories that I’m excited to tell, and I think it’s okay to be selfish if the end result is you put something out there that people tend to enjoy.
Now, obviously, the day will come where people don’t enjoy my stuff as much, and I would just be talking to myself, which is how it ends for all of us, I think, in this business. I love the thing where I make something, and I give it to the audience, and they decide how they feel about it. I’ve never been interested in interrupting the honesty of that exchange. I stay out of it when I give it to you, and you get to experience it and take from it whatever you want.
That’s probably one of the things that I’ve enjoyed the most out of my career. I don’t talk about the books that I’ve made, and I don’t explain them. I let people interpret them how they want to, and I think that’s the way. I think that’s the way to do it. I feel, back to your original question: How do I feel about people liking them and enjoying them and getting something from them? I feel like that’s the honest exchange that we should all be doing.
If I’m being as blunt as I can possibly be, I think when you hear praise and you take it, or when you hear complaints and you take it, you’re setting yourself up to fuck with your mechanism. I think that people like it is nice, but that shouldn’t affect my job. I don’t know if that’s the answer that you were looking for, but that’s kind of my thesis on if people like my work, why I make it, and how I feel about people enjoying it.
That totally makes sense, and I think your work always comes across as honest and as a story that you want to tell. I think that’s why they resonate so much with many people, myself included. One of the things that you’re known for is these massive, long-reaching, epic multi-chapter storylines. What does that planning process look like when you’re first starting on a title? Do things change as you actually start to write the issues out?
Jonathan Hickman: Usually, when I do a book, I get what the book is about and how it should begin and how it should end all at once. That’s what the idea looks like in my head, and that’s great. You have an idea, and you know how it should start, and you know how it should end, and that’s a good starting place. Usually, when it turns into actually being work, a thing that I would actually make, is if I can’t stop thinking about it, right? If I can’t stop thinking about it, I write down the idea and just some rough stuff about it, and I just put it in a drawer and let it sit there.
If I can’t stop writing on it or coming up with little pieces of it, then I’ll talk to somebody about it, and we’ll decide to do a book about it. Then, when you sit down and you actually start working on it, the fun part is how the middle of it changes, and how it all gets rearranged. How you can mess with the stuff in the middle is what reemphasizes the cool beginning and reorients the ending into an even more powerful experience.
Amazing! The Midnight Universe is obviously right around the corner, with Midnight X-Men being the major title that you’re working on. Were the X-Men your top pick when Marvel said, “Hey, we’re doing ahorroruniverse. We would love to get you involved.” How does it feel entering the horror space with them?
Jonathan Hickman: It’s very exciting, and it’s really me getting to do that kind of work that you were talking about again after not having done it for the past few years. I’ve really been doing a bunch of mini series and little tiny event books that there’s tie-ins to and stuff like that, and those are fun. It’s not the kind of storytelling that blows my hair back in the way that I like for the experience to be when I’m telling a story. I’m very excited to be working on this. It’s going to be very, very cool. It’s sprawling. It’s epic. It’s what I do well.
What was themutantselection process like for this new version of the team? Was it a situation where you had a story you wanted to tell and these mutants fit in well, or was it that there are some characters you really love to work with and the story followed after? What was that process like finding this new team?
Jonathan Hickman: Well, it’s really more that I get to play with everything than it is working with specific characters. Obviously, I’ve done X-Men books in the past, and probably the difficulty there is that the line normally has to be so many books. You don’t get to do the kind of thing that I am used to doing, which is kind of taking over a title and messing around with all the pieces in a particular way. This book is really the X-Men universe, not the X team of X-Men. I mean, there will be a version of that at some point, but it’s really more about playing around with all of the pieces in a brand new setting.
How does that horror aspect come into Midnight X-Men? Both on the writing front and actually seeing it come out to play, because you’re obviously known for these massive space operas, these huge events that take place over the course of dimensions and galaxies. How does that horror angle come in, and how do you feel working in something that’s a little bit of a different space compared to some of the stuff you’ve worked with with Marvel before?
Jonathan Hickman: Well, it’s really all myth-making and diving into mythology and all of that kind of stuff. It’s not different structurally in the sense of you’re playing with a lot of pieces; how do you move those pieces around? Tonally, it’s much, much different. It can be operatic, but not be hopeful. It’s different. The morality tells, and stuff can still exist. It’s just that they don’t end the same way. It’s not that different in construction; it’s different in tone and atmosphere. I would say those two things more than anything else. There has to be a cost attached to everything that has a different payoff than it might otherwise. It’s a lot of fun.
Is there a particular character in Midnight X-Menthat you’re looking forward to readers seeing for the first time? Whether that’s a massive reinvention of somebody we’ve known before or tweaks to them? Is there a single character that you can’t wait for people to see what you’ve done with?
Jonathan Hickman: There’s a lot of that. I mean, it’s not just one. R. B. Silva did a bunch of the designs for this, and we have cool-looking stuff. We’re Marvel. We want to make cool-looking books and all that kind of stuff. I’m really looking forward to people seeing the cool take on these characters. That has a visual aspect of it, of course, but it also has this character twisted a little to the left, a little to the right, or completely turned upside down. It’s fun.
Youmentionedyou have six arcs, or 36 issues, planned for Midnight X-Men at this point in time. Are there things that we’ll see in the first issues that we can come back to 20 or 30 issues later, and see that foundation being built, or are you ever tempted to throw in some red herrings or misdirection just for the people who really dig in?
Jonathan Hickman: Of course, of course. I feel like that’s the best way to tell a story. I want you to be able to reread it and find things that happened in issue one and issue two. There’s a line of dialogue in issue two that Philip and Kennedy Johnson didn’t understand, or not really didn’t understand, but thought that wasn’t right. Then when I explained to him what the 20-issue payoff was, he had a different opinion.
That’s my favourite thing about comic books is that you can do a payoff that’s three years in the making, and then when the payoffs start coming, they come one right after the other. They lead to this crescendo, which is a paradigm shift inside of the book itself. Comics do a couple of things in such a way that’s better than any other medium, and that’s one of them.
I’m curious to hear your thoughts on what makes for a good bit of foreshadowing or a good red herring, one that you can really look back to and be like, “Now you get it.” How do you design that in a way that the payoff does feel satisfactory and not just be like, “Okay, that happened”?
Jonathan Hickman: Well, there are two different versions of it. They’re both great. They both have great value. One is one that it’s there from the beginning. I know that this character is going to do this in issue 20 or at some point in the future, and I’m going to set that up now. I’m going to be vague and opaque, and maybe it’s just a panel or whatever. But I know that that is going to happen, and I am building towards that payoff. That’s one, you know.
I feel like I’m getting ready to sound like Iraq War Donald Rumsfeld with known knowns and known unknowns and all that kind of stuff. The second version is that there’s something there, but you’re not quite sure what it is yet. That’s where you put something on the table, and you leave it on the table in a way that it is just sitting there waiting for you to pick it back up, and that’s subconscious. I think that when your writer’s brain is firing on all cylinders, you know that there’s something there.
Your brain just hasn’t made that connection yet, but you know your mechanism well enough that you’re comfortable saying this is going on the table, and I’ll get back to it. And you do want to get back to it. The worst thing to do is to set a bunch of stuff on the table and never address it. I have documents that are long-running. I put this on the table. Remember to pay this off at some point in time. Or, I need a solution, and I go back in, and I read through all of my dangling plot stuff, and realize this is the solution to that.
What you’ll find, not to make this sound like magic instead of a technical thing, is your brain has a way of putting it all together in a multi-layered aspect that it’s like a babushka doll that you didn’t know that you were stacking on top of each other. There’s just a magic to it. You know, it’s art. It’s not science. There’s alchemy there, and you just have to be confident in your mechanism and let it happen.
Well, I’m very excited to read and reread Midnight X-Men over and over again to pick up those plot pieces where I can. A couple of questions looking towards the future, because I have to ask. Your run on the Avengers withTime Runs Out and Secret Warsis informing the next major MCUAvengersoutings. Is there anything from your work that you’re hoping or looking forward to maybe seeing in live action or on screen? Any moment from those chapters that you’re like, oh, I hope this makes it in?
Jonathan Hickman: Well, actually, studios have me consult on a bunch of stuff, and I’ve read the scripts and that kind of stuff. I read the outlines and whatnot, so that aspect of it is ruined because you kind of know, you don’t have that element of surprise. There’s stuff in there that’s super cool. I got to visit the set, I guess…earlier this year. Awesome, awesome. The set was unreal, but I shouldn’t talk about it, because I’m not supposed to. I think it will do well.
Amazing. And one last question, as we round out here: I am an absolutely massive Spider-Man fan. Your work on the latest Ultimaterun truly made my heart happy. You’ve worked on the X-Men, Fantastic Four, and the Avengers. Now you return to the X-Men in a new way. Is there any Marvel property that you’re still hoping to work on in the future? Is there any project left that you’d like to leave your mark on and plan out a grand epic in a few years’ time? Is there any property left that you’re still hoping to work with?
Jonathan Hickman: There are a few.
Okay, cool. I’ll take that as hope for the future. Then, Jonathan, it’s been an absolute pleasure to talk to you, and to dig into your brain a little bit. I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much.
Jonathan Hickman will be at Lucca Comics & Games 2026 from October 28 to November 1, 2026. Midnight X-Men #1 is out now.
