With Joss Whedon and John Cassidy's run on Astonishing X-Men, Marvel took the opportunity at San Diego's Comic-Con to announce the new creative team behind the company’s tentpole mutant title.

Even though there have been numerous rumours about big Hollywood names taking over and even some fans stating at one time that Tarantino would be the writer for the book (thank God that never happened), Marvel has come clean and stated that renowned comic writer and counter culture guru Warren Ellis (Transmetropolitan, Planetary, Authority) will become the new scribe for the book.

Joining him will be up and coming fan favourite artist Simone Bianchi, whose work on Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers and Jeff Leob’s recent Wolverine story has had fans’ jaws dropping with his fluid and super detailed style.

While the stories from the new team are under wraps, as you can see by the artwork the main cast from Whedon’s Astonishing run are all there and it seems that X23 will be added to the cast.

The book will also be going in for a bit of a name change as Ellis wants to move away from the classic Whedon run and instead invoke his own take on the team without picking up any of the threads from the previous creative team.

So with Astonishing X-Men: Second Stage fans can expect a lot of Ellis-styled big ideas, insane concepts and other oddities such as tackling the issues of secondary mutations (which was bought in by another future-thinking writer, Grant Morrison, back in his classic 2000 run), Mutant breeding pairs. extra dimensional Warpies and the 'counting problem' of 198 mutants that happened after the 'House of M' storyline.