After "Stone and Anvil", PAD deliberately jumped "New Frontier" three years so he could refer back to the "missing" years and fill in the mysteries over time.
I'm just reading those two post-Stone & Anvil books again and am loving some of the references to events.
However, has it been clearly stated he would go back to flesh out those gaps? I thought the foreword made it very clear that the series would be going forward from its new setting, rather than back.
I've not seen any of the comics (unfortunately), and have no idea of the new novel's plot.
You know how almost all of the early New Frontier books start with a "THEN" section, or some kind of flashback? And Stone And Anvil had half the book dedicated to the past? That was part of the initial goal of the series - to create a series of books that worked both in the explaining of backstory and in the ongoing narrative. All the characters were seeded with events from their pasts that would take a long time to come out... and it worked, it took 6 years, 17 books, and a novella for it to all be revealed.
So when he skipped three years in the future, it was with the goal of re-creating a similar feel - lots of history in the mean time to explore in recollections and hints, as the ongoing narrative continues.