What Could Have Been/Comic Books

• Instead of Eddie Brock, the Venom symbiote was originally supposed to go from Parker to a woman who had a grudge of her own against Spider-Man. The story was to be that a cabbie watching Spider-Man as he was driving hit and kills her husband trying to flag him down, she was also pregnant at the time, but lost the child. However, that idea was discarded when it was decided that she wouldn't be a credible enough threat.
  • Similarly, Venom was intended to be killed off in issue 400 (he first appeared in issue 300), so the symbiote could move on to other characters, like J. Jonah Jameson. It was swiftly killed when Venom gained popularity.
  • Marvel at the time, also felt that readers would not view a woman as a physical threat to Spidey, and in turn became something of a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy in that Spidey doesn't have many memorable female villains.
    • For kicks, here's the article.
• Chris Claremont, for fairly obvious reasons, is responsible for a ton of these in X-Men. For example, Mr. Sinister was originally supposed to be the psychic projection of a kid who started stalking Scott Summers when they were both in an orphanage together. The fact that he was the invention of a child was the explanation for his (frankly) ridiculous name, and his entire look. Gambit, meanwhile was supposed to be Claremont's Take That response on New Teen Titans villain Terra, as far as being a spy Mr. Sinister hired to infiltrate the X-Men, right down to seducing Storm to get the X-Men leader's confidence. He also planned on sacrificing the Alan Moore-created villain the Fury to further build up Nimrod as a major villain (with Nimrod, not Mister Sinister and the Marauders, being responsible for the mutant massacre) and the notion of a lengthy plotline where Wolverine is turned into the brainwashed minion of "The Hand" (this actually happened, only the Hand teamed up with HYDRA at the time), kidnapping Jean Grey to become his "Queen of the Night", leading to Forge and Banshee having to rescue Jean.
  • To be fair, sometimes Executive Meddling is responsible, and sometimes he's assigned to a different book and the author that replaces him decides to go a different way.
    • Which still counts as Executive Meddling, anyway...
    • The "Dark Wolverine" story was later repitched as the opening storyline for the 1991 X-Men series: rather than fighting Magneto and the Acolytes, the X-Men would fight the Reavers, of which Lady Deathstrike would kill Wolverine via ripping out his heart. But the Hand (revealed to be in league with the Shadow King) would obtain Wolverine's corpse and recreate his heart/resurrect him as an agent and have him reappear in Uncanny X-Men #294, as part of the rematch between the X-Men and the Shadow King and his army of minions, as the Shadow King (via Gateway) seeks to gain control over everyone's dreams.
    • The division of the franchise into two books in 1991 might also have gone differently. A piece of original pin-up art by Jim Lee shows Wolverine, Beast, Forge, Strong Guy, Jubilee, Psylocke, Storm (in an unused costume) and Rogue, with Magneto looming in the background. Another shows Xavier, standing up, with Jean in an updated Phoenix costume, Storm (in the familiar '90s costume, suggesting this one was drawn later), Wolverine, Colossus, Gambit and Beast. There is a similar piece by Whilce Portacio that includes Cyclops, Jean, Archangel, Iceman, Gambit and Colossus with Xavier behind them. It's also been said that at some point Xavier would have been killed and Gateway, of all people, would have mentored some of the mutants. Also, let's not forget Jim Lee's "Things to Come" illustration with a creepy Skrull woman and Selene alongside Matsu'o, Omega Red, Longshot and Dazzler. You can see all of the art here.
    • Selene was there because she was the leader of the Upstarts, Lee's replacement for the Hellfire Club. Unfortunately, Selene was put on a bus when Lee left Marvel, as far as Bob Harras and Fabian Niceza deciding to use Gamemaster instead as the Big Bad.
• Wolverine was originally going to be revealed as not a human mutant, but an actual wolverine that was mutated into humanoid form. When another writer attempted this with Spider-Woman and the plot point was rejected, the writer decided not to go with the mutated wolverine bit.
  • Len Wein, the original creator, has gone out his his way more than once to crush this rumor. While it was the idea of another writer to have Wolverine as a wolverine cub evolved by the High Evolutionary, Wein had no part in this plan. He had always envisioned him as a mutant. Other rejected backstories for Wolverine included a mutant rancher whose bones were crushed and were replaced with adamantium while he was bedridden in the hospital and having Sabretooth as his father.
  • Long before Wolverine became the poster-boy for the X-Men books, he just barely escaped being killed off soon after joining the team. An editor was annoyed that Wolvie was so similar to Thunderbird (the other rebellious bruiser who was introduced in revamped lineup), and demanded that one of them be killed off in the Count Nefaria mission. In the end, Claremont decided to kill off Thunderbird. Three decades later, Thunderbird is barely remembered and Wolverine is one of the most iconic superheroes ever created. Go figure.
  • Mystique was going to be revealed as not Nightcrawler's mother, but his father, having impregnated another woman while in the form of a man. Executive Meddling prevented this one, as it was expected to be controversial. Fans however seem to like the idea, and occasionally a writer will suggest retconning it into the truth (particularly since the reveal years later of Nightcrawler's actual father, who is literally the Marvel equivalent of Satan, has pretty much caused massive Fanon Discontinuity and is among one of the main reasons Chuck Austen has become a pariah among comics fans).
  • The X-Men villain Apocalypse had been suggested as both the mastermind behind the Weapon X program (a plan fitting an immortal mutant with advanced technology and a penchant for playing god), as well as the third Summers brother who was sent back in time (explaining his and Mr. Sinister's obsessions with the Summers bloodline). Instead, Weapon X became part of Weapon Plus (with Captain America and Nuke being part of said program, as Weapons 0, 01, and 07) and the third Summers brother was sent to his death by Professor X, who them wiped Cyclops' memory when he got upset about it, but that brother came back to life with super-charged powers and conquered a galactic empire.
• The "last" volume of The Sandman was going to be about an issue longer, with the speeches of Alianore, Odin, and Death in full. And Superman, but that was Executive Meddling.
  • Gaiman once scripted an issue taking place in the dreams of an unborn fetus as it's being aborted by a doctor, but he declined to publish it because he knew that the subject of abortion would generate too much controversy. And he considered it too dark, even by Sandman standards.
  • Neil Gaiman was in negotiations to write a prequel showing what Dream was doing before he was captured (all we know from the series is that he was tried beyond reason in another galaxy). It didn't happen because the execs wouldn't renegotiate Neil's contract in light of the fact it was several years later and he was higher-tier.
• Watchmen was originally penned to be about a group of Charlton Comics characters DC had recently acquired. But since the plot Moore wrote had many of them killed off and thereby unusable in future story lines, it was suggested he make up his own characters.
  • So that's why they look so much like Charlton Comics characters? It is so clear now...
  • That's not all. The second Silk Spectre was going to be a teenage runaway simply named Silk, the world would actually be Twenty Minutes Into the Future, with no disease and easy genetic modification. Antarctica was going to be a huge resort for the rich and wealthy, an idea which ended up trickling down to ultimately being only Ozymandias' lair.
• Gerard Jones' version of Green Lantern: Emerald Twilight. Basically, the Zamarons (the female gladiator counterparts to the Guardians of the Universe) were supposed to take over the Green Lantern Corps, reinstate super-villain and renegade Green Lantern Sinestro as head of the Corps, and do away with all of the established weakness of the power rings (mainly the yellow impurity and 24-hour charge). Hal Jordan would then go renegade, but not in a crazy mass murderer sort of way, but in an Only Sane Man manner as far as going "rogue" rather than take orders from his arch-nemesis and a bunch of crazy war mongering space amazons. Apparently, DC editorial hated the scenario (largely because it required people knowing who the Zamarons were), so Jones resigned from the title, and Paul Levitz, Mike Carlin, Denny O'Neil, and Archie Goodwin wrote a new plot based on Jones' script, and gave it to Jones' successor, Ron Marz, to write. The result is the Emerald Twilight that was published currently.
  • You can learn more about Jones' Emerald Twilight here.
• The Green Goblin was originally intended by Stan Lee to be an actual demonic goblin-thing released from an Egyptian sarcophagus. Steve Ditko apparently convinced him that a human psychopath in a costume fit the tone of the Spidey series better. This idea was used in the Ultimate Universe, where that universe's Norman Osborn mutates into an actual goblin due to an experiment.
  • Ditko allegedly didn't intend for the Goblin to be Norman Osborn, though; that was Stan Lee's idea. Ditko objected vehemently, and Lee won the argument by virtue of being editor. This was rumor to be the last in a long series of arguments the two of them had over Spidey's direction; allegedly, Ditko considered this one to be the final straw, and he quit Marvel. However, more recently Ditko stated that their falling out had nothing to do with the Green Goblin's identity, and claimed that they'd both agreed that Norman should be the Goblin from the start.
  • Some rumors state that Ned Leeds was Steve Ditko's choice for the Green Goblin, backed up by the fact that near the end of Ditko's run, Ned Leeds and Peter had a very antagonistic relationship where they patched things up as soon as Romita took over. Ned was later framed for being the Hobgoblin, making him Marvel's go-to guy for not quite-goblins.
• Due to Executive Meddling, the grand finale to Simon Furman's long-in-the-making saga for IDW's Transformers comic series was cut from 12 issues down to 4. Readers therefore missed out on epic battles featuring big bruisers like Sixshot and Monstructor, while the long-awaited confrontation between Optimus Prime and Nemesis Prime was reduced to a poorly-explained affair that lasted around three pages. It also resulted in many storylines and character arcs being shortened or even ruined. One character arc involved Sideswipe trying to get to Earth in order to save his brother Sunstreaker who had been kidnapped. The original ending had them being reunited and Sideswipe learning an important lesson, the new ending completely erases any potential brotherly relations between the two and Sideswipe learning the lesson that he dosen't give two craps about his brother or any suffering he experiences. One wonders just how much action readers missed out on by the story being reduced to a third of its planned length.
• The original outlines for Marvel crossovers Civil War and Secret Invasion have some major differences to the end products. Civil War would have originally included what would become World War Hulk (in drastically different form as Hulk, his new wife, and their children invading Earth) and involved a plot device "Power Stealing Electric Chair" that would have stripped Speedball and Captain America (comics) of their powers; whilst the original ending to Secret Invasion would have massively depowered the Sentry and killed off Hercules and Jessica Jones and Luke Cage's baby, as well as having Norman just out of the blue STEAL the Avengers name from the real Avengers.
• Siegel and Shuster conceived of two early versions of Superman before the famous one. The first was an ordinary man who gained mind control powers in an experiment and became a supervillain until his powers faded (too bad he killed the scientist who gave them to him in the first place) though this was a One Shot. The second version was a nonpowered colorfully attired strongman who went around beating up bullies. This second version eventually became the then mildly popular Slam Bradley (who didn't wear a costume, but otherwise looked a lot like Superman). In this case, Executive Meddling worked for the better, forcing the creative team to create the third wildly popular version of the character and define an entire genre of fiction.
• Alan Moore's Twilight of the Super Heroes.
• Genndy Tartakovsky's Luke Cage.
• Gail Simone's original proposition for the Cassandra Batgirl was to have her rescue a sincerely faithful Christian preacher to Gotham's homeless population from a mugging and be converted by his sincere, strong faith in forgiveness and the teachings of the Bible. Taking up a new, white-colored costume, and devoting herself to the most vulnerable of Gotham's residents -- the mentally ill, the homeless, runaways and immigrants -- she would become known as the Angel of the Bat and, for the first time ever, would be genuinely happy.
• When J. Michael Straczynski thought up his ridiculously controversial Sins Past storyline (which revealed that Gwen Stacy had had a child with Norman Osborn, he planned for Peter Parker to be the child's father, but Joe Quesada, the EIC of Marvel, felt that this would age the character too much. ^[1]
  • J. Michael Straczynski, then still the writer of Spider-Man, originally planned a very different version of One More Day, in which many events in Peter's life were changed by his helping Harry Osborn through his drug addiction. This would result in Norman Osborn never returning to being the Green Goblin, Gwen Stacy never dying, Harry and MJ never breaking up, and, in effect, Peter never marrying MJ. This was rejected, however, because Joe Q. didn't want to make all the stories of the past 35 years moot. Unfortunately, this storyline would make much more sense than Joe's version of One More Day... which went and made all the stories of the last 20 years moot anyway.
  • As bad as One More Day was, JMS' version sounds exponentially worse. Erasing the marriage from history was stupid, but it's been very clear that nothing else about Spider-Man continuity has been altered and events from the past 20 years are still referenced in current comics. If they'd gone with JMS' version, it would've completely destroyed 75% of Marvel continuity, to say nothing of undoing some of the most famous Spider-Man stories of all time (as opposed to the version we got, which only undid one of them). It's the difference between the kind of minor timeline tweak that happens in issues of Fantastic Four all the time anyway and a complete Crisis On Infinite Earths-style total reboot.
  • The point is that, for all the damage it would do, it'd at least make sense, rather than the bizarre story of Spiderman trading his marriage to the devil which somehow also undoes his secret identity being revealed that we got.
    • The whole "Nothing about the last twenty years has been altered" portion is complete bunk, as it's made perfectly clear in "One Moment In Time" that Mary Jane soured on the idea of having kids with Peter after he missed their wedding, thus her pregnancy NEVER OCCURS, and thus the 90s Clone Saga occurs VERY differently. Whilst characters from that era have since resurfaced in the post-OMD storylines (such as Kane and The Jackal), that whole period of Peter's life has yet to be properly reexplored in flashbacks, references, or otherwise to even give us an INKLING of how it went down without MJ being pregnant.
• Lots of storylines from the Sonic the Hedgehog comics end up like this, most notably an alternate version of the "Endgame" series where Sally was actually killed instead of put in a coma, a storyline involving a secret romance between NICOLE and A.D.A.M, and the very start of the "Mobius: X Years Later" storyline, dealing with the crisis that Locke "prepared" his son Knuckles to defend against, as per prophecy (hint: it involves an alien Eggman Expy). Oh, let's not forget the comic's recent Word of Gay reveal...
  • In fact, the sheer amount of this trope in the comic, combined with the demand by fans to know about it, has pushed former head writer Ken Penders to work towards revealing all of these dirty little secrets on his webpage. Thus far, plot details announced include the death of Snivley in a Heroic Sacrifice against Eggman, Sonic gaining a higher rank than Sally, conflicting with their relationship, and an alliance between Knothole and Station Square.
    • Ken also planned to have Bunnie and Antoine married as well. However, unlike Ian who blasted through the engagement and wedding in under three issues, Ken would of had the proposal in issue 175 and the actual wedding in 200.
  • And Karl Bollers wanted to: do a story arc where Knuckles and Monkey Khan get brainwashed by the Iron Queen and Eggman (respectfully) as part of a three-way battle between the Queen, Eggman and Mammoth Mogul over a power source equal to the Master Emerald; turn Snively into a Powered Armor-wielding Anti-Hero who allies with Shadow against Eggman; and have the Source of All return, being controlled by Ixis Naugus.
    • Given the reveal that the comic is practically being crushed under layers of Executive Meddling, it's hardly surprising.
  • The "Anonymous" storyline was originally supposed to reveal that the one acting as Anonymous was actually the original Robotnik (the one killed off in issue #50), but the plan fell through.
  • Oh, and the alien Knuckles was supposed to fight in the prophecy? It was supposed to be a man named Dr. Ian Droid, the bad guy who appeared when Sonic teamed up with the Image Comics characters.
• After Sonic the Comic went reprint-only, writer Nigel Kitching posted some of his intended ideas for stories on the STC mailing list - here and here for example. Some of those ideas were later adopted by the STC-Online Fan Web Comics.
• Another Spider-Man example, and possibly the best-known; Gwen Stacy. Stan Lee has said several times that he originally intended Gwen to be Peter's one-and-only, and that MJ was created only as competition for Gwen. However, for several reasons too numerous (and controversial) to name here, the writer who succeeded Stan, Gerry Conway, wrote the now iconic comic The Night Gwen Stacy Died while Stan was away. Many fans still wonder what might have been had Gwen Stacy survived.
  • Too numerous? The only reason I've heard was that the only direction the creative team felt that Gwen and Peter could go was to get married, and they didn't want to marry off their protagonist just yet. So they instead killed her. If there are other complex reasons, I would like to hear them.
    • There was also Gerry preferring Mary Jane and not liking Gwen Stacy at all and also Gerry Conway and John Romita wanting to kill off a major character to shake things up (and show anyone could die) and at first considering Aunt May before settling on Gwen. I guess three different reasons counts as too numerous?
      • John Romita confirmed the last one, mentioning that part of his reason for suggesting Gwen instead of Aunt May was that with Aunt May dead Peter would no longer have a convincing reason to maintain a secret identity. Also, everybody involved except Stan Lee (whose memory is by his own admission notoriously bad) agreed that Stan okayed Gwen's death beforehand.
• DC's 1991 Crisis Crossover, "Armageddon 2001," promised to reveal that a currently-active DC hero would eventually become the villainous Monarch, who would eventually kill all of his or her colleagues and rule the entire planet with a Dr. Doom-like iron fist, all by the summer of 2001. When the story was finished, the editorial decision was that Monarch would be revealed as Captain Atom, but then the ending was leaked to the public. A hastily-cobbled-together ending recast Monarch as Hawk, the one character it couldn't have been. One anticlimax later, two regular books were canceled and the entire thing was rendered moot by Comic Book Time (in 2001, it was no more than two years later in the DCU). Captain Atom into the Monarch anyway.
• The ending of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac was open-ended enough to admit a continuation, to say the least. Personally, I still have the first printing of Squee!#4, in which Jhonen Vasquez mentions his burning desire to get to work on the new JTHM series, and also recalls a mention in I Feel Sick of how Satan (who had been providing Rikki Simons and Vasquez with emotional support and sandwiches)was still hoping for a new Johnny series. From all appearances, the Prince of Lies is destined for disappointment, as are a good number of JTHM's fans...
• Miracleman provides another Neil Gaiman example. A bit of the story of the fold of Eclipse Comics and the subsequent abbreviation of the comic is rehashed on the Miracleman page, but it doesn't mention that the series practically ended in the middle of a sentence. The frustrating lack of closure, tantalizing hints of what was coming provided in the unpublished pages so easily found online, and Gaiman's immense talent made the demise of the series agonizing.
  • But with Marvel now owning the series and Gaiman being on decent enough terms with them, things might change.
• In Fables, The Adversary was Gepetto, the puppeteer. However, Willingham actually had a much different plan for The Adversary's identity beforehand. Originally, he wanted the Adversary to be revealed as Peter Pan, who would come to the human world and kidnap children so they would remain young and corrupt. There would also be a hero attempting to save the children, and this would be none other than, of all people, Captain Hook. (Given the fact that Captain Hook was, in the original tales, a former Sadist Teacher, that's definitely irony) However, this was changed to Gepetto because Peter Pan wasn't public domain in the UK, and the characters of Fables all have to be public domain.
• Mark Millar, Mark Waid, and Grant Morrison's infamous 2000 Superman pitch, which among other things would have erased the Superman marriage via Lois being mindwiped after Lois is infected with a brain disease that threatens to kill her (on top of Lois being put on a bus out of the country by the three writers, to soften fans up for the purging of the marriage and restoration of the love triangle), Lex Luthor and Brainiac returning to their Silver Age roots (with the addition that Lex being revealed to be a world-class sculptor who finances his crimes via his art, which also double as a hiding place for his weapons of mass destruction), and the resurrection of the original Fortress of Solitude. The whole thing was so reviled by DC editorial that unfortunately it was outright rejected. Millar and Waid were officially blacklisted from ever writing the main Superman books after they went public with their rejection (though they were later allowed to do non-canon Superman stuff in the form of Red Son and Birthright). Grant Morrison didn't burn his bridges so badly however, and was later allowed to write "All Star Superman", which was a semi-sequel to his Crisis Crossover DC One Million...
  • It appears the post-Flashpoint DCU reboot is using some concepts from this proposal (namely Superman having no red trunks, both Johnathan and Martha Kent being dead, and Lois and Clark's marriage being nonexistant), though the actual extent remains to be seen.
  • The "New 52" reboot ended other stories before they could start. For instance, the finale of the Titans series hinted at Red Arrow and Jericho rebuilding the team... only for the title to end and an entirely new continuity to start the next month.
    • This also happened in a "dream vision" manner at the end of Stephanie Brown's run as Batgirl. Thanks to Black Mercy, she got a vision of a possible future (which the author wrote as ideas he had for the title if it continued). Everyone agrees, they would have been awesome.
• China Mieville's aborted Swamp Thing run which got canceled before ever seeing print in order to bring a lot of the DC characters that made the move to Vertigo back into the fold at DC.
• Hulkling of the Young Avengers was originally pitched as a girl who posed as a guy when fighting crime; Wiccan was going to struggle with the fact that his love interest was sometimes male. It's been speculated that creator Allen Heinberg thought this was as close as Marvel would let him get to putting an openly gay couple on the team. Eventually he had a change of heart and asked for permission to make Hulkling 100% male.
  • On the other hand, Brian Bendis and Tom Brevoort's steadfast refusal to allow Heinberg to outright overturn Avengers Disassembled via bringing back Scott Lang as Ant Man and redeeming Wanda is why Heinburg bailed upon the title after the first 12 issues. Story notes however, such as Heinberg's plans for a rookie villain version of the original Masters of Evil led by an android version of Egghead were ultimately written by other writers, and the Children's Crusade miniseries seems to have accomplished the goal of resurrecting Ant-Man and bringing Wanda back.
• Star Raiders was originally intended as a 120-page-long limited series. Unfortunately, due to The Great Video Game Crash of 1983, Atari canceled the deal with DC Comics midway through development. With 40 pages of painted art already completed, DC decided to cut their losses by commissioning an additional 20 pages to finish the story, then released it as a graphic novel. Needless to say, the story suffers from the compressed story arc, and many characters and plot points are Left Hanging as a result.
• The Red Circle: The original plan was that JMS was going to debut them in the pages of The Brave and the Bold in their original forms and team them with DC's big names. But apparently DC felt that the spots on The Brave and the Bold would be better served with the Milestone Comics heroes instead, so DC and JMS did four one-shots reviving some of them (mostly radically altered) before launching The Shield and The Web into their own titles (with the other two heroes introduced in the one-shots in back-up stories: Inferno and Hangman, respectively). The books lasted 10 issues each, but not before DC publishing a Mighty Crusaders Special at the same month as the ninth issues of the two books! The only major appearance of any of the Red Circle guys in another DC book was when the Shield showed up in two issues of Magog. Currently, they are publishing a Mighty Crusaders six-issue mini-series in order to try to wrap up all loose ends that the earlier Red Circle book had left behind!
  • Also, according to Mark Heike, he planned a proposed 25-page special featuring almost every single REAL costumed hero Archie created (No Pureheart or Captain Sprocket) battling the best of MLJ's Golden Age villains, with each chapter drawn by an AC Comics artist. It was slated to revive interest in these heroes, but Archie Comics did not consider it workable. The material was re-purposed as AC's 2003 one-shot Sentinels Of America!
• According to James Fry, if Marvel had approved of more Slapstick stories after The Awesome Slapstick, his Rogue's Gallery would have included established Marvel villains such as The Toad Men and the poultry-based team-up of The Black Talon, Gamecock, and Bantam -- revealing them to be rival siblings in a battle that would have ended with all the heroes doubled over with laughter at their expense...
• Dave Stevens sketched and scripted a three issue The Rocketeer/Superman mini that never saw the light of day. It would have been set in The Thirties on the day of Orson Welles' infamous War of the Worlds broadcast.
• The West Coast Avengers: After the original mini-series, the original plan was to use the regular Avengers book to feature BOTH teams in alternating stories (as seen in issue #250). But the team's popularity put the kibosh on the whole idea. Plus The Shroud would have been part of the team!
• Heroic Publishing, around 2006 or 2007, was trying to get people interested in Fantastic Girl, a planned multi-media sensation who would diversify their line-up by being a Token Black heroine that would appeal to the old-school Blaxploitation fans. Fan reaction who totally negative, due to the limited info of her seemed to establish her as an Ethnic Counterpart of their Flare character, and as a result the character was quietly dropped!
  • Fantastic Girl has just been Saved From Development Hell, and is scheduled to debut as the back-up feature in Heroic Spotlight #10, slated for release in September 2012.
• The original six-issue adaptation of the Champions role-playing game was originally going to be 48 pages per issue and was going to feature solo stories of the individual heroes on the team as well as subplots ultimately cut out of the actual books: The search for the new Giant, The Winter Wonderlass, and many others!
  • The first four issues would introduce the heroes individually, with the fifth issue revealing many of the menaces being connected, gathering the heroes together! Also, Flare was originally not going to be part of the team!
• Another Heroic Publishing example: Eternity Smith was considered for Eclipse's line of 16-Page 50-cent bi-weekly comics, but creator Dennis Mallonee declined. DC was also interested in it, but Mallonee took the book to Renegade Press for five issues before becoming part of Heroic Publishing!
• More Heroic Publishing info: Icicle got her solo title by accident: Heroic was planning to use League of Champions as an anthology book for most of their characters, but George Perez was interested in doing the book, so they slapped together Icicle on short notice!
• Nightwing almost got killed off in Infinite Crisis.
  • It's interesting how close this came to happening. Dan Didio handed the death down as an editorial mandate, but Geoff Johns flat-out refused to kill Dick Grayson off (seeing as he is one of the longest-existing comic book characters in American comics). Superboy was eventually killed off instead (and he got resurrected later on).
• Paul Dini wrote a Zatanna Prestige Format one-shot for Vertigo, which sold out in a short time. Vertigo had plans for a miniseries and eventually a series. Then, Grant Morrison got the bid for Seven Soldiers and snatched Zatanna away...
• The JLA/JSA: Virtue and Vice graphic novel was clearly intended to be a three or four-issue miniseries. The story breaks into almost perfect twenty-two page segments. Why it was released as one book was unclear, but DC possibly wanted to test out releasing more stories directly as graphic novels.
• In the original proposal for the Fantastic Four, Susan Storm was supposed to be permanently invisible and had to wear a mask resembling her face in order to be seen, as well as being an Invisible Streaker. Apparently having two heroes unable to depower is a bit much, and the proposal itself had this bit of reconsideration:

Stan Lee: I hope this won't seem to sexy in art work. Better talk to me about it, Jack-- maybe we'll change this gimmick somewhat[.]

• • Likewise, the Four's costumes were originally supposed to include masks!
  • More recently, during the late '90s, when Chris Claremont was writing the Fantastic Four, he had planned to have Reed and Sue hire Kitty Pryde as a live-in nanny for Franklin Richards(this taking place after the cancellation of Excalibur), but then X-Editor Bob Harris wanted Kitty to rejoin the X-Men.
• Jack Kirby's New Gods were originally going to debut in Marvel, and would have either tied in with The Mighty Thor or The Inhumans. However before plans had taken their final shape, Kirby got fed up with his situation at Marvel (being co-creator of at least half their money-makers with no creative custody of them) and jumped ship to DC, taking them with him.
  • Likewise, Jack created Kamandi because DC failed to get the license to do a Planet of the Apes comic!
• Captain America (comics)'s original name was 'Super-American'.
• There was supposed to be a legitimate prequel series to Watchmen, The Minutemen, which would have been of equal length and created by Alan Moore and David Gibbons. Moore's falling out with DC ended the prospects of this. Stranger still, going by comments made by Gibbons and Moore at the time, the tone would have been very different, attempting to recreate Golden Age comics as realistically as possible (if not an actual Reconstruction). This would have had far-reaching effects, since imitation of Watchmen's style was responsible for some of the worst excesses of the Dark Age of Comics.
• In 1962, DC Comics published a Dr. No comic, which failed to garner attention. Only 10 years later, as the rights were about to expire, DC noticed they had the rights for more James Bond comics. Jack Kirby and Alex Toth were even contacted, but the higher-ups ultimately discarded as Sean Connery left the series and they did not know if 007 would still be popular.
• Runaways went through a few changes before publication. One of the big ones was Nico's source of power. Originally, she found a book of dark magic hidden in a shed in her backyard. Being heavily Christian, she hated it but sacrificed her beliefs to use one of the spells during the first fight with the Pride. Some aspects of this were left, including her being a former alter girl and a comment when she first sees her parents as dark magicians ("This isn't like you, Mom! We go to church every Sunday!") Also, Chase's name was originally "John".
• Marvel 2099 was originally planned to have kept going after a certain point, being rebranded Marvel 2101 and featuring many of the characters living in the Savage Land after a great disaster.
• Tom DeFalco had intended to reunite Peter and Mary Jane with their daughter at the end of his run on Amazing Spider-Man, but his successors, Howard Mackie and John Byrne, wanted to bring Spidey back to his classic everyman roots and requested his long dead Aunt May be brought back to life instead. As luck would have it, Mackie and Byrne's stint on ASM was a critical and commercial disaster, and Tom was given the oppertunity to produce a one-shot "What If?" based on the premise of the daughter being alive and well inheriting her father's legacy. The "What If?" was a success and led to a twelve year run for Tom on the Spider Girl book, which fast became the longest running female-led superhero book in the history of Marvel Comics.
• When Alan Grant wrote the first issue of Batman introducing Anarky, it was shortly after the death of Jason Todd, and he planned for Anarky to become the next Robin, plans to introduce Time Drake were in the works, but Grant didn't know that until he pitched his idea to DC. Of course, YMMV on whether having Anarky as Robin would have been better or worse, but it would certainly have been different.
• Giant Sized X-Men #1 gives the impression that right before the original X-Men series got canceled, both Havok and Polaris were active members of the X-Men. However if you go back and read those issues (along with the X-Men's guest appearances while the comic was in reprints) you'll see that they never actually went out with the rest of the X-Men on missions. Which is unfortunate, since this is one of the few things that could've made the Thomas-Adams era even better.
• Alex Ross came up with a mini-series idea called Batboy, who would have focused on the son of Bruce Wayne and his ally, Superman, Jr. Most of the original heroes would have been retired save Green Lantern Hal Jordan with the Teen Titans becoming the Justice League. As the story progressed, Batboy would realize his world was too perfect before learning the truth - this was Hal Jordan's perfect Earth from Zero Hour!

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Back to What Could Have Been

1. ↑ Much more acceptable would be to turn one of the most innocent characters in the history of comics into a cheater, thereby tainting the most fondly remembered relationship in comics.