Jonathan Hickman has been playing in the Marvel Universe for 15 years now and almost no one can lay a greater claim to the universes makeup in that time than him. Not only did he destroy the Marvel Multiverse (in the greatest superhero crossover of all time, Secret Wars), but he shaped the now-dead original Ultimate Universe with epic runs on Ultimates, mapped the multiverse in Fantastic Four, and rebuilt the Ultimate Universe in its most recent relaunch. Hell, he even sowed some seeds for the cosmogony of the multiverse in House of X/Powers of X (seriously, if you havent read what Al Ewing did to Secret Wars in his Defenders, you need to go check it out). But theres one story hes been chasing from the start: a book about the Shiar Imperial Guard. And were finally getting a payoff in this years Imperial.Marvel is pitching Imperial as a chance to see Hickman reshape the Marvel cosmos in the same way he did the Ultimate Universe. And while Im excited to read anything he does, what has been most interesting is the fact that hes been playing with these characters and ideas for a long time. There were rumors going back to his time with the Avengers that Hickman had a pitch for the Legion of Super-Heroes, DCs futuristic space teens. And in the Legion is the origin of the Shiar.Dave Cockrum was the artist who, with Chris Claremont, created the Shiar as part of his work on the big Phoenix story at the dawn of the Claremont era. Prior to his work on X-Men, Cockrum had been a seminal artist on the Legion of Super-Heroes, and he made the Imperial Guard loosely analogous to his Legionnaires. So Superboy became Gladiator of Kallark; Brainiac 5 became Mentor; Saturn Girl became Oracle; and so on. So while their in-universe story was based on imperial Rome, their look was very Legion, forever linking the two franchises in the minds of fans.Hickman used the Imperial Guard a ton in his Avengers run, having Gladiator (a Superboy stand in from the planet Kallark) lead the coalition of space societies that included the Spartoi, the Kree, the Skrulls and the Annihilation Wave as they joined the Avengers to battle an army of Builders bent on destruction in the universe. And those stories rocked. Hes also revealed in post-X-Men interviews that his original plan at the dawn of the Krakoa era was to put mutants Cannonball and Sunspot in an Imperial Guard book, fleshing out Shiar society relative to the mutant status quo.