Avid comic readers know there’s one undeniable truth to any crossover or event featuring Marvel’s merry mutants: prepare yourself for the worst and hope for the best. For every Age of Apocalypse there’s a Utopia, Necrosha or Schism just waiting to drag you down. Tentatively, I dove into last year’s X-Men: Battle of the Atom crossover to see which side of the fence I fell on; the initial fan feedback was divisive, to say the least.

A 10-chapter arc weaving through X-Men, Uncanny X-Men, Wolverine and the X-Men and All-New X-Men and bookended by two one-shots; Battle of the Atom starts with the original, time-displaced team of X-Men deciding (arguing) whether or not they should leave the present day and return to their era. But why settle on past and present when you can have not one but two different X-Men teams from the future join in?

Another year, another crisis in the X-Men universe. Can’t they all just get along? Fortunately, they can’t and that makes for some great reading for fans.

This new arc looks to carry on the tradition of fine storytelling and we’ve got a preview of the first issue of X-Men: Battle of the Atom for you today. Here’s more from Marvel:

Hank McCoy brought the original X-Men into the present in the hopes of changing the course of history and stopping Scott Summer’s mutant revolution before it even begins. But as the young and confused X-Men try to cope with their devastating futures, the team begins to unravel from the inside.

And just as mutant civil war is about to hit its boiling point, an unexpected third party comes in to change the game – the future X-Men! They’ve traveled back in time with a warning – the originals need to go back to their rightful time or they will be the final nail in mutantkind’s coffin. They risked everything to come to the past and won’t leave until the All-New X-Men are back in the past.

Along with all the other cool stuff like movies, TV shows and new, geeky gadgets we get to talk about here at The Flickcast, comics are another one of our favorites. So, when a new, interesting comic preview is availbale for us to bring to you, we do just that.

This time that comic preview is from Marvel and it’s their upcoming book Marvel NOW! – X-MEN #1. In the comic:

“Storm, Rogue, Jubilee, Kitty Pryde, Rachel Grey, Rogue & Psylocke redefine what it means to be a Child of the Atom when an old enemy shows up at the X-Men’s door, seeking asylum from an ancient evil come back to Earth. Meanwhile, Jubilee has come home, and she’s brought with her an orphaned baby who might hold the key to the Earth’s survival…or its destruction!

With an imminent alien invasion and an eons-spanning war between brother and sister around the corner, Storm steps up and puts together a team to protect the child and stop a new threat that could destroy all life in the Marvel Universe!”

Sounds cool, right? Click through for some preview pages for the comic. Look for X-Men #1, written by Brian Wood with art by Olivier Coipel, to arrive in comic shops on May 29.