The X-Men have experienced enough alternate timelines to make keeping track of mutant history a full-time job. Some have offered glimpses at better worlds, while others have shown exactly how badly things can go when humanity’s fear of mutants is allowed to win. Few, however, have left a mark on the franchise quite like House of M and Days of Future Past. The two stories represent radically different nightmares for mutantkind.

​​​​​​​House of M imagined a reality where mutants had become the dominant population and Magneto’s family sat at the center of the world, while Days of Future Past showed the opposite extreme, with Sentinels hunting mutants nearly to extinction. They have remained two of Marvel’s most recognizable alternate realities for decades, and now the publisher is finally putting them on a collision course. This time, revisiting them comes with a catch: there may not be room in the multiverse for both to survive.

Marvel is bringing the two realities together in X-Men: Incursions #1, a new one-shot from writer Alex Paknadel and artist Jim Towe. The issue is the first of five one-shots returning to the period leading into 2015’s <em>Secret Wars</em>, revealing previously untold stories from the Incursions that ultimately destroyed both the Marvel Universe and Ultimate Universe​​​​​​. The first story pits the mutant-dominated reality of House of M directly against the dystopian future of Days of Future Past. The two universes are on course to collide, and Marvel is giving them only eight hours before the impact destroys them both. There is one way out, but it isn’t much better: one universe can apparently survive if the other is sacrificed.

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