For the past several years, the mutant heroes of Marvel Comics' X-Men have been fighting a battle to keep mutantkind from going extinct. It was a battle the X-Men's leader Cyclops was determined to win, and in the final issue of "Avengers Vs X-Men," he managed to achieve his goal as the mutant messiah Hope Summers used the power of the cosmic entity known as the Phoenix to reignite the viability of the mutant race.

Victory had its costs, though. Disagreements over the role of the next generation of mutants split the X-Men into separate factions; one led by Cyclops, the other by Wolverine, and in the post-AvX landscape, one of those factions is leaderless due to Cyclops' actions while possessed by the "Dark" side of the Phoenix entity. The X-Man murdered Charles Xavier, the X-Men's founder and a man who was like a father to Cyclops, resulting in his current incarceration.

Now, the X-Men are at a crossroads, faced with the questions of how to deal with the new mutants that are emerging all over the globe and who will lead them with their founder dead and his chosen successor imprisoned.

Writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Stuart Immonen will begin to answer these questions this November when they expand the Marvel NOW! initiative with the launch of "All-New X-Men." They'll also raise several more tough questions, including how the X-Men deal with the arrival of their five teenage founding members who have been mysteriously transported from the past to the present day Marvel U and perhaps even more potentially troubling, why are they here? To get the full scoop on what readers have to look forward to, CBR News spoke with Bendis about his plans for the series, which is now the flagship title in the X-Men line.