Jonathan Hickman On His Abandined X-Men Inferno Plans For Rogue

Rogue was absent from the recent X-Men: Inferno, despite her life being all twined up in those of the book’s antagonists Mystique and Destiny. The story saw Mystique disguised as Charles Xavier, see Hope Summer take his role in the Krakoan resurrection process and bring Destiny back from the dead. Talking to the Xplain The X-Men podcast on the occasional of their 150th podcast, and the publication of Jonathan Hickman‘s final X-Men comic book with Inferno #4, Hickman had lots to say, including about Rogue’s absence.

Hickman stated “Clearly Rogue is super important in the Mystique/Destiny paradigm and I was going to have her be the person who stole Emma’s powers. And she would have brought Destiny back. She would have been the one who used the Cerebro to inject Destiny’s mind back into her body. But the problem with it was that if I did that, I would have needed a lot more real estate to do that. All the “Emma” pieces that we needed, it just didn’t work. I wrote a version of it and it was so cool but I didn’t have the space to do the other things that I had to do… and so a darling had to die. It sucked because I don’t think I got to write rogue the entire time, outside of a couple of panels in House (Of X) and Powers (Of X). There are a lot of X characters that I didn’t get to write and that I really, really wanted to, but there’s a lot of them, that’s bound to happen.”

Noatably, Gerry Duggan, who recently took over the main X-Men comic book with Pepe Larraz, has been writing pretty much nothing but Rogue, maybe in recompense…