John Cassaday’s hasn’t regularly worked on a Marvel title since his and Joss Whedon’s run on Astonishing X-Men in 2008 . When they announced that he would be teaming up with writer Rick Remender on Uncanny Avengers, fans of his work were beyond excited. Comic Book Resources recently asked Marvel Editor-in-Chief Axel Alonso about how he went about bringing the artist back to Marvel as well as giving us a two page sneak peak at the first which clearly features Wolverine and Rogue preparing for the funeral of Charles Xavier.

I met John at his favorite watering hole and leveled with him, said, ‘This series set the tone for the next decade’s worth of Marvel publishing and I’d kill for you to draw it.’ Then I gave him the series outline and a sampling of Rick’s work, most notably Uncanny X-Force, and that was that. A few days later, John texted me and said, he liked it. Shortly after, we closed a deal. The orders for Uncanny Avengers are insane, and it’s a team effort, but John’s role in putting us through the stratosphere can’t be underestimated. He’s a one-of-a-kind artist.

So, let’s be real here for a minute. As much as we love Captain America…his suit just really is kind of goofy when you look at it these days. Much in part due to the more military like suits we saw Chris Evans sporting in Captain America: The First Avenger and The Avengers. Those suits looked really great on the screen. With the upcoming Marvel NOW! event we will see Cap getting a costume update courtesy of artists Jerome Opena (Uncanny X-Force) And John Cassaday (Astonishing X-Men) and I can honestly say…I am into them.

Editor Tom Breevoort on the design:

“The approach and the thought was very simple: we wanted to modernize Cap’s outfit so as to reflect the gear worn by actual soldiers, to convey that sense of the character visually. Every costume design change is really change for change’s sake, and certainly Cap’s costume is a classic. But that said, it’s been updated before, and so long as what we ended up with still looked like and gave you the silhouette of Captain America, that was what was important to me. We just did years of stories in which Bucky wore a variant of Cap’s costume, and people were able to accept it just fine, and still recognize and react to him as Captain America. Same thing here. We weren’t really thinking about the movie incarnation per se, though it’s difficult to avoid it I suppose. But even there, Cap’s already had two completely different suits in the movies, in CAP: FIRST AVENGER and then in MARVEL’S THE AVENGERS. What we were really going for, more than anything, was the feeling of Cap being an actual soldier. At the outset, I did some research and collected a bunch of different photographs of modern military gear, helmets and what-have-you, and they all informed the design we eventually settled on.”

Source: MTV