Ed Piskor's well-received X-Men: Grand Design is a love letter to Marvel's merry mutants, retelling all of the key moments of their foundational eras in his signature style. Spread out over six giant-sized issues, the series chronicles the X-Men's history from the origin of Magneto all the way to the dark tomorrow of "Days of Future Past."

While the series chronicled and tweaked the X-Men's adventures from the Stan Lee and Jack Kirby Silver Age comics to 1990's "X-Tinction Agenda" crossover, it saved it's most meaningful changes for its final chapters. Retelling the several dark futures experienced by the X-Men, Grand Design moves away from official Marvel continuity by essentially combining those futures into one. This allows somewhat unrelated characters such as Bishop to take center stage, even if they weren't originally in "Days of Future Past." That's beyond all of the other additions and subtractions to the mutants' lore, which subtly update and use elements from other X-Men adaptations.

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In attempting to emulate and cohesively retell the property's original stories, X-Men: Grand Design notably lacks several of the plot and character elements introduced in later stories from the 2000s onward. However, it also adds backstory elements from other continuities and adaptations, namely the cartoon X-Men: The Animated Series. The most noteworthy of these explain the absence of more recent characters like Cassandra Nova and Gabriel Summers, since including them ould drastically change the origins of Professor X and Cyclops as they were told in the original stories.

However, Professor X's origin still went through some meaningful changes that condensed complementary parts of pre-existing continuity. In the original Silver Age comic books, a young Charles Xavier was paralyzed after having a rock dropped onto his legs in retaliation for his foiling the plans of the sinister alien Lucifer. But in Grand Design, his legs are crushed in a similar fashion, but because of falling rocks in the cave of the Cyttorak Crystal, where his step-brother Cain Marko found the relic that made him the Juggernaut. Other ways in which the early days are different is that Mesmero is a founding member of the Brotherhood of Mutants, despite his showing up much later in the original comics. Government agent Fred Duncan is swapped out for Nick Fury as the X-Men official liaison, while the relatively minor character Mimic is changed into being an actual mutant.

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X-Men Grand Design Forge Bishop

The final chapters of X-Men: Grand Design focus on the dark future shown in the iconic "Days of Future Past." One familiar futuristic face that it adds this time is Bishop. Though he's known for traveling through time, Bishop hails from a different dark future on another Earth separate from "Days of Future Past's" Earth-811. Both futures resulted in Sentinels taking over and reshaping America, but Earth-811's age of tyranny began when the Brotherhood of Mutants killed Senator Robert Kelly. Bishop's original Earth-1191, however, had briefly seen unity among humans and mutants against the Sentinels, before returning prejudice and bigotry led it to remain a dystopian wasteland. Bishop being truncated into the "Days of Future Past" storyline alludes  to his presence in a similar timeline from X-Men: The Animated Series.

Though this does drastically change X-Men continuity by pruning various alternate futures into one, it still achieves the series' goal of making the franchise's often confusing history far more digestible. The changes aren't nearly as strange as the immense differences found in Tom Scioli's Fantastic Four: Grand Design. Despite these changes, X-Men: Grand Design went through with telling the story that readers expected, even if it were in an unfamiliar way.

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