Ever since the series has been announced, Marvel fans have been asking an obvious question about Jonathan Hickman and Valerio Schiti’s new series, G.O.D.S.: what does that title stand for? Popverse had the chance to ask Hickman that very question, and the answer was… not what you might expect.

“We haven’t revealed this yet, but if you look at the title page — I actually think we didn’t put it in the first issue because we had to pull the data pages out of it because it was already out of it — the little dots have numbers in them. It’s more like a word puzzle than it is an acronym,” Hickman explains during a conversation about the upcoming series. As to what that word puzzle might be, he teased, “We’ll reveal that soon enough.”

As to why it looks like an acronym, Hickman shared, “We had a big fight over the name G.O.D.S. Marvel was like, ‘Can we put dots in between it, so that it means something?’ And I was like, ‘no, but we can do this, and that would make it cool.’ They were like, 'Fine, whatever. We won the dot argument, so whatever.’”

Marvel does have a thing for acronyms, to be fair; there’s S.H.I.E.L.D., S.T.R.I.K.E., A.I.M., H.A.M.M.E.R. — which didn’t even actually stand for anything, as was the running joke of the Dark Reign era of stories — and more; just earlier this year, the Fury one-shot issue introduced S.C.O.R.P.I.O. It’s practically part of the Marvel DNA at this point... but then. G.O.D.S. is all about something beyond the norm for the Marvel Universe, so it only makes sense that the title isn’t exactly what it seems…

G.O.D.S. #1 will be released October 4. Read more from Popverse’s conversation with Hickman here.

G.O.D.S. will give the Marvel Universe its own version of Sandman’s Endless… and more.