Here's an article explaining in more detail but the tl;dr version is that in 2019 John Byrne started posting an X-Men story on his message board. The basic premise of the story is: what if Byrne had continued writing and drawing Uncanny X-Men instead of leaving that title in 1981? Marvel's announcement this past week was that they're formally publishing it in three volumes beginning next year.
So how does this prove my point about the story content?
Byrne wrote and drew this new story as fan fiction. It was something he was doing in his free time without any editorial oversight from Marvel. He posted material as/when he finished it, so it didn't follow to a precise set of regular deadlines. But he was just posting it to his message boards, mostly as an exercise in creativity. No one was paying him for it; it was just something he felt like doing. He could put as much or as little effort into any portion he wanted. You can see that very much in the simple fact that the entire story is just done in pencil. They're fairly tight pencils, to be sure, but you can still see guidelines and eraser marks and the like. But there's no inking done, and no coloring to speak of.
It wound up taking up the equivalent of 32 issues. He stopped in 2022 basically when he hit a creative dead end. He had the last "issue" done for months before he posted it because he wasn't happy with it and didn't think one of the subplots was resolving well. It was just something he was doing for fun, so he was under no obligation to take it to a specific end point or work on it for a set amount of time.
And it's all posted on his message board. You can go there right now and read through the whole thing. One of message board memebers even posted an 'index' of the entire thing so you don't even have to go hunting around for all the individual posts. And it's all available online. For free.
So why would Marvel (well, technically, Abrams ComicArts working under their license agreement with Marvel) bother publishing it? The story is now a few years old, it concerns an alternate continuity that doesn't "count," it's by a creator who isn't "hot" right now (legendary though Byrne may be, his last professional work of note was over a decade ago), and -- and this is my key point -- it's freely available online! If you're a die-hard fan of Byrne's, there's a good chance you've already read it. It's been online for several years already, no doubt many fans have downloaded the entire thing, and it's been captured by the Internet Archive so even if Byrne is asked to remove all of it before it's published, it's not hard to get a hold of.
The reason they're publishing it is because fans will be willing to pay for the specific book format. So they can have a copy of the story sitting on their bookshelf. Yes, Abrams is going through the effort of having the whole thing inked and colored and re-lettered, but the story is already out there. If you just wanted to see what Byrne would've done in 1981* you can see that right now and not have to pay for it. Fans will buy the printed version, though, specifically so they can have a printed version. It's not about the story, so much as the format. At least that's what Abrams' is banking on and, frankly, I think it's a pretty safe bet.
* The caveat, of course, is that Byrne is over four decades older now. He's had all that time to noodle on differnt story ideas, certainly many of which might've been introduced specifically by social and technological events that he hadn't considered back in 1981. Not to mention, he's got several decades of additional practice in terms of writing and drawing comics. He doesn't create comics now the same way he did then for any number of reasons. So it's not really "what would Byrne have done in 1981 if he continued on the book" but "what would 21st-century Byrne do if he went back in time and picked up where his 1981-self left off?" I'm sure some of the basic ideas would remain but the execution is certainly radically different.
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