After 61 years and 700 comics, Gail Simone is Uncanny X-Men's first solo female writer

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Today in a hyped panel at SXSW 2024, Marvel announced its plans for the largest scale overhaul of the X-Men line behind-the-scenes and in-front-of-everyone in decades. It involves cancelling all of its current titles and re-tasking its editors, in favor of the company's top editor taking over and bringing with him mostly new creators to the X-Men line to launch nine new ongoing series.

In the flurry of news coming all at once, there's one thing that sticks out to us: Gail Simone writing Uncanny X-Men. While she was already announced to be writing the revamp's kickoff story in one of Marvel's Free Comic Book Day titles, Simone now on Uncanny X-Men - the legacy main title of the X-Men line going back to the whole franchise's inception in 1963 with Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's very first issue, is historic.

Why?

It's the first time a woman has been the main writer of Uncanny X-Men in its 61-year history (and 700 issues).

Yes, we checked.

The closest to this was Kelly Thompson as one of three co-writers on the book for ten issues in 2018 and 2019. And while women and other non-male gendered individuals have written other important X-Men group and solo titles, including the spin-off to the franchise simply called 'X-Men', Gail Simone is the first to unreservedly write Marvel's first, and most historic, and longest-running X-Men title.

Simone's first issue will be August 7's Uncanny X-Men #1 with artist David Marquez, and according to Marvel's math this is the 701st issue of the series across numerous volumes.

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