In a pretty awesome movie in terms of reaching out to female comic fans, Marvel is going to relaunch their adjectiveless X-Men series in April with an all-female cast. This is pretty awesome news because I am definitely in favor of more female-led comics. Some of my best friends are lady comic book geeks.

I bet someone really, really wanted to call it ‘X-Women’

The series will be written by Brian Wood, with whom I have very little reading experience, and drawn by Olivier Copiel, one of the greatest comic book artists working today. Copiel is an amazing talent, and to see him put on this book is truly awesome. Marvel is clealry taking this book seriously. Copiel’s issues of Avengers vs. X-Men were some of the best drawn of that whole series.

As you can tell from that cover, the book will star Storm, Rogue, Kitty Pryde, Psylocke, Marvel Girl and Jubilee. My only concern is that almost all of those characters, with the exception of Jubilee, are already starring in some of the other X-Men comics. If you don’t know, the X-Men franchise these days is filled to the brim with comics. And a lot of the characters are appearing in multiple books. It’s a huge hodge podge of characters and teams. So on the one hand, it’s a great idea for a book like X-Men to have such a unique premise. On the other hand, it’ll be a huge continuity headache to figure out why all of these heroines suddenly hang out together in their own separate comic, as opposed to the various comics in which they already appear.

But that’s only a headache if you let it be a headache. I’m sure I can get over it if the comic is awesome.

“I feel like as far as the X-Men go, the women are the X-Men,” Wood explains. “Cyclops and Wolverine are big names, but taken as a whole, the women kind of rule the franchise. If you look at the entire world as a whole, it’s the females that really dominate and are the most interesting and cool to look at. When you have a great artist drawing them, they look so amazing and always have.”

According to Wood, the star of the series will be Jubilee, which is cool with me. I’ve always been a Jubilee fan, at least since I was introduced to her in the animated series in the 90s. I can only hope he’ll work to fix some of her crazier continuity in the past few years. Jubilee went from losing her powers on M-Day to becoming a technology-powered hero in New Warriors to then becoming a vampire when Marvel tried unsuccessfully to tap into the Twilight craze. Yeah, that was ill-planned.

As for stories, Wood says Jubilee will be a big focus when she finds a baby who may be the key to the future of mutants. He also says the villain Sublime (from the Grant Morrison days) will come to the X-Men seeking help. There will also be Sentinels, aliens and a return to the X-Men’s soap opera roots, all of which sounds pretty awesome to me.