Marvel Comics' big summer crossover for 2026, Avengers: Armageddon, was advertised as being a big shake-up for the comics’ setting. Now, at this year's San Diego Comic-Con, Marvel has provided a few different looks at what Earth-616 will look like after Armageddon.

While the details have yet to be revealed, we already knew that Armageddon would conclude with the effective end of the Avengers. Instead of being a well-funded team of powerful superheroes that stand as Earth's first line of defense, as they were in Jed MacKay's recently completed run, the Avengers post-Armageddon have been reduced to a smaller team of mostly street-level characters.

That doesn't mean Earth is defenseless, however, as the X-Men will step up to keep the world safe. Coming this December, Christopher Yost writes and Tony Daniel draws Maximum X-Men, a new ongoing series that sees an all-star squad of X-Men take center stage as the leading super-team in the Marvel Universe.

The new squad is led by Storm and features Wolverine, Colossus, Bishop, Psylocke, Firestar, and Justice. Their first mission as Earth's primary defenders is to fight off an invasion from the Negative Zone.

The announced lineup for Maximum X-Men also suggests that some membership changes are coming to the other current X-Men books post-Armageddon. Wolverine is currently in Gail Simone's Uncanny X-Men, while Psylocke is on Cyclops's squad in Jed MacKay's adjectiveless X-Men.

In a profound example of 2000s nostalgia, the new Maximum X-Men team means Wolverine will once again be on the X-Men and Avengers simultaneously, as well as starring in his own solo book. There will likely be no explanation thereof. He's just really good at time management, apparently.

Avengers: Armageddon, by Chip Zdarsky, Delio Diaz, and Frank Alpizar, is Marvel's current big event book. In the wake of last year's One World Under Doom, the nation of Latveria has fallen into chaos and Doom himself is missing.

The Hulk villain "Thunderbolt" Ross has salvaged a machine from Doom's abandoned arsenal that allows him to predict the future with an alarming degree of accuracy. With that, his own powers as the Red Hulk, and a squad of renegade American super-soldiers, Ross plans to conquer the world one nation at a time under his flag of "New America," starting with the leaderless Latveria and its neighbor Symkaria. It's up to the Avengers and Fantastic Four to stop Ross, but they'll have to defy an order from the United Nations to do it.

The new Maximum X-Men team lineup has a couple of interesting picks if you read any Marvel in the 1990s. Firestar and Justice were formerly on the teenage super-team the New Warriors. Both characters are mutants and Firestar has been an off-again on-again member of the X-Men for a while now, but this will be Justice's first time on the team.

Firestar, aka Angelica Jones, was famously first introduced in 1981 as a cast member of the NBC cartoon Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends. The creators had wanted to use the Human Torch, but couldn't due to a licensing conflict, so they created the similarly-powered Firestar as a stand-in. The comics' Firestar was introduced four years later in Uncanny X-Men as a young mutant who'd fallen under the sway of the then-villainous Emma Frost.

Justice has a long and unnecessarily complicated history as a character (it involves time travel and the original '70s version of the Guardians of the Galaxy), but the current version was born in New York state as Vance Astrovik. When his mutant power of telekinesis emerged, Vance ran away from home to join the Marvel Universe's superhuman wrestling league. Vance's plan from there was to become an Avenger under the name Marvel Boy, but Captain America told him to come back once he was a little older.

Vance and Angelica went on to become co-founders of the '90s superhero team the New Warriors, and were even a couple for a while. A few years later, they both joined the Avengers during the landmark Kurt Busiek/George Pérez run. Since then, Firestar has been on two different X-Men squads and had a bout with breast cancer, while Vance did a stint as a trainer for young superheroes as part of the federal Initiative program.

The combination of two New Warriors, Wolverine, Psylocke, and Bishop means that whatever else happens, the Maximum X-Men is likely to be the most '90s X-Men team that we've seen in some time.

Maximum X-Men is currently solicited for release in December 2026.