Comics that never were

This thread is dedicated to all comic that for one reason or another, never came to fruition. For instance, here's Grant Morrison on his Hypercrisis pitch.

>"My one regret about my brief falling out with DC after the 'Superman Incident' is that I didn't get to do my Hypercrisis series at DC to explain all this stuff and set up a whole new playground." said Morrison in a 2002 interview, "It's the one thing I could still be arsed doing with classical superheroes. If I ever go back, I'll explain the whole Hypertime thing and recreate the Challengers of the Unknown as Challengers: Beyond the Unknown. It's one thing I still want to do. It had a monster eating the first few years of the 21st century and Superman building a bridge across this gaping hole in time. A bridge made of events. The Guardians of The Multiverse and a new Green Lantern Corps made up of parallel reality Green Lanterns, the Superman Squad and the mystery of the Unknown Superman of 2150 etc, etc. There's a huge synopsis filled with outrageous stuff"

Other urls found in this thread:

sites.google.com/site/deepspacetransmissions/universe-b
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

Here's another Grant pitch. This time for Marvel!

Part 1

>Alongside their prematurely cancelled Srull Kill Krew collaboration, Grant Morrison and Mark Millar were asked in early 1995 to submit a number of potential series pitches by Marvel's top brass. The duo pitched two new series in the briefly successful 2099 line, a futuristic cyberpunk-inspired spin on Marvel's most iconic heroes. Set in the far future of the Marvel Universe, Captain America 2099 and Iron Man 2099 were intended to lead into a third series - via a multi-part storyline entitled 'Apocalypse' - the long mooted Avengers 2099.

“Marvel heroes were always characterized by their less-than-super alter-egos,” Millar wrote in the series outline, “We had the lame Donald Blake, the puny Peter Parker, the blind Matt Murdock and so on. This is what made these secret identities so much more interesting than their counterparts at other companies.”

Based in part on Professor Stephen Hawking, Morrison and Milar's Iron Man was, "completely spastic power-wise,” said Morrison in an interview with Overstreet's Fan in 1996. “We dreamed him up as the most fantastic scientific mind on Earth who had created this wonderful war suit. Imagine, when he’s in the war suit, when he’s Iron Man, he can do anything. He can change shape, become intangible, travel through space…anything. But the minute something happens to that suit, he’s just a guy whose body is completely worthless.”

“A man with a super-brain trapped inside the body of a disfigured invalid." added Millar, "A handicapped superhero would seem genuinely fresh in an industry still cluttered with successful yuppie super-people.”
The pair wanted to take Tony Stark, or a thinly veiled future descendant of the same, out of the Iron Man equation. The new Iron Man, though working for Stark Industries, would not be Stark himself under the helmet. Stark would probably appear in the series as a villain.

Part 2 (maybe green text wasn't the best choice)

Captain America 2099 would be a broken war veteran, returning home to search for the American Dream and working as a janitor at Stark Industries, obsessed with the Living Legend of the original Cap.
“We had Atlantis rise up from the ocean floor,” said Morrison “All the Atlanteans, except Namor, are dead because of pollutants from the surface world, so it’s now just this mysterious jungle world covered with weird ruins that were built thousands of years ago. And with Atlantis re-surfaced, both America and some unnamed Eastern super-state try to claim it as their own, resulting in this terrible, messed-up war.

“Our Captain America was a Marine who fought in that war, and now his life is completely shattered. He fought the war thinking that (the legendary) Captain America would come back to save them. But with no sign of Cap, and with America losing, he’s lost everything. His mind’s gone and he has nothing left to believe in. He doesn’t believe in America. He doesn’t believe in anything.”
In his country's hour of greatest need, “The guy decides that he wants to be Captain America,” says Millar, “so he goes to the bombed out ruins of Avengers Mansion, and digs up Captain America’s corpse. There he finds Captain America with the costume still on him, still holding the shield….”

“And like Arthur finding Excalibur,” Morrison adds, “he just pulls out the shield (from Cap’s skeletal hands), holds it up, and that’s it. Suddenly, he thinks, ‘I’m going to be the dream.’ Even with his mind shattered and his confidence completely gone, he sets out to become Captain America and suddenly finds the dream again.”

Part 3

The revitalized Iron Man and Captain America would emerge just in time for a Martian invasion of Earth; the same Martians that plagued Don McGregor's Killraven series in the 1970's, a long time favourite of Morrison's. The invasion would bring the heroes of 2099 together to form a new Avengers, bent on repelling the alien invaders.
Further into the storyline, Galactus descends from deep space once more to consume the Earth, and all seems lost in the face of the combined might of Galactus and the Martians. Fortunately, the heroes of 2099 have an ace up their sleeve.

“Giant-Man is still around,” Morrison said, “although he’s been comatose for over one hundred years. He’s reached this huge size, and he just stands with his feet straight in the Hudson River. He’s just this huge monolith. I mean, kids paint slogans on his feet and stuff. He’s just been there forever. His heart beats once a day, and it resounds through the gates and ships; it makes the Earth shake.”
“Captain America gives an impassioned plea at the feet of this mighty Goliath,” Millar said, “but Giant-Man just stares out into space, hearing and feeling nothing. He’s beyond the cares of humanity, lost in the lonely worlds of gods.”

“The team has been beaten down, and all the heroes are just lying there bloodied and battered,” Morrison said. “All of a sudden, Captain America gets up and starts rallying everybody. He holds up his shield and cries out, ‘AVENGERS ASSEMBLE!’”

“From off panel, we hear the sound of thunder,” Millar said, “enormous footsteps getting closer and closer. Captain America and the others look up, wiping the blood from their eyes and hope radiates from their faces. The reader turns the page and we have a big, double-page spread where a two-hundred foot Giant-Man stands before a two-hundred foot Galactus, ready to fight.”

Part 4 (the finale)

“He then just walks over and decks Galactus,” Morrison laughed.The Martian threat is eliminated by offering Mars to Galactus as a consolation at missing out on eating the Earth. The storyline would have lead into an Avengers 2099 ongoing series that Morrison and Millar would have co-written, but the whole proposal was rejected.

Along with its similarly unpublished companion piece Marvel Tales: End of the World, and indeed the aborted Srull Kill Krew, Apocalypse 2099 reads very much more like a Mark Millar comic than a Grant Morrison one with the benefit of hindsight. Its entirely possible given Morrison's comments in Supergods and elsewhere, that all of these works were intended to get Millar's foot in the door at one of the Big Two in a period where Morrison was putting most of his energy into the creator-owned Invisibles. Some of the story beats, the broken heroes, Galactus' return, the immobile giant in the Hudson River, bear more than a passing resemblance to Alex Ross and Jim Krueger's (excellent) Earth X, published almost 10 years later.

To be honest, this made me hard as an adamantium.

Here's a site that's collected a bunch of other pitches for DC and Marvel

oops, forgot the link.

sites.google.com/site/deepspacetransmissions/universe-b

I still would have liked to see Moore's "Twilight of the Gods"

It'd been fun but I feel like it's waaaay too dark for DC. Maybe even Marvel. DESU he should of just gone to Image or Dark Horse and made it of pastiches, it always read more like a parody of superheroes than an actual Justice League story. Then again they're all just imaginary stories so what does it matter.

Not The Punisher Armory (pic related)
Punisher & Nick Fury - Rules of the Game (drawn by Jim Lee, Marvel promoted the SHIT out of this in the early 90s, but Lee was busy with X-Men and then left for Image and never finished it)
Shotgun ongoing (obscure minor character from Daredevil who's mostly associated with The Punisher who he acted as a supporting character to a couple times, would have been drawn by prime John Romita Jr., no idea why this ended up being cancelled, but it absolutely was intended for publication and was even promoted in Bullpen Bulletins at one point as an upcoming new ongoing series in the early 90s)

>Not The Punisher Armory (pic related)

>Then again they're all just imaginary stories so what does it matter.

Aren't they all?

Yuck.

Morrison, Millar, Waid and Peyer's Superman 2000. It would've returned Superman to who he was rather than a Spider-Man wannabe and the generic superhero who he has been since decades.

Wait, what is the "Superman Incident"?

FunFact: Stan Lee set up a storyline for Professor X to be the secret arch-villain of the X-Men comic, and seeded hints of the big plot-twist from issue #1 onward.
My personal favorite hint was the flashback that showed Xavier agreeing to inform on mutants to the FBI, during the J. Edgar Hoover years! A close second was the flashback of him erasing the memories of Beast's parents so they would forget that they ever had a son.
(always makes me laugh)
It's true, he even tried to do a villainous turn for Xavier that was watered down into a "bad dream" story. And after that failure he tried to just kill Professor Xavier off, but the very next issue Charles Xavier was written back to life.
Stan quit the book soon after.
Ironically, various writers have revisited that story over and over again over the years with several different explanations for why Professor X wasn't really the bad-guy despite having tried to kill the X-Men over a half-dozen times in his history. But none of those alien infections, multiple personalities, evil doppelgangers, imaginary adventures, or whathaveyou ever explained why Xavier was always such an asshole 24/7.
This actually gets more plot-twisted: Xavier's arch-nemesis, Magneto (the guy flying around in a cape and wearing primary colors) was originally set up to be the secret hero of the comic. He does fight for a world that hates and fears him ... and what's the comic's tag-line?
His original appearance depicted the villainy of single-handedly capturing a military base and proving to the world that mutants do exist then making a call for mutantkind to reveal themselves and unite. And his next big crime was overthrowing a South American dictatorship in order to create a mutant homeland. I believe Rightclops would have approved ... if not for Xavier's brainwashing.
It was only after the Xavier plot-twist fell apart that Magneto devolved into standard cartoon villainy and then eventual anti-hero status.

(not them)
I don't know, but Morrison always burns his bridges behind him by insisting on writing stories that haven't been fully approved.
I bet it's something like that.
And DC (rightfully) excessively freaks out every single time their flagship character has his reputation even vaguely besmirched.

Cringe

DC didn't allow A lister to write Superman and as a result has less good runs than Iron man of all things.

That was the Superman 2000 incident.

Morrison, Waid, Millar, and Peyer wrote up a pitch, and it didn't get approved because the person who was supposed to approve it, DIDN'T approve it, because he got upset about them trying to go over his head to get the pitch approved or something.

yeah remember when magneto heroically set up a genetic purity police. what a swell guy.

Also this in turn not only pissed off Morrison but also Waid and Millar.

After the Superman 2000 incident and the Matrix thing, Morrison made a show about leaving comics that year which may or may not have been sincere but then he did Marvel Boy (and also helped Millar out on Authority) and then was asked by Quesada to do New X-Men.

Millar helped script a few Immonen issues of Superman and was wrapping up his run on Superman Adventures. But from there he was also busy with The Authority, which was starting to rustle Paul Levitz. Between the Superman 2000 incident and the censorship being done on Authority, it made it easier for Millar to take Quesada's offer to jump over to Marvel and do Ultimate X-Men.

Waid was pissed off because his main goal at that point was to write the Superman titles. And he vented that frustration in an interview Warren Ellis did with him. His last thing for DC at that point was a run of JLA with the Authority art team of Hitch, Neary, and Martin. Then he jumped to CrossGen for a while. Of course, that place eventually had its own problems, too.

Learn to read and then go read some Stan Lee era X-Men.
It's not funny to even pretend to be as stupid as you're being here.

>It would've ruined Superman and made him unpopular and 100% unlike any previous characterization

get over it faggot

waid should never be allowed to touch superman

Learn to read and then go read some Stan Lee era X-Men.
That did not happen in that story.
It's not funny to even pretend to be as stupid as you're being here.

>100% unlike any previous characterization
You know that Superman existed before the 80s and was a lot more famous than anything that came afterwards? Also, All Star Superman and Superman adventures prove otherwise.

It also would have retconned away Clark's marriage to Lois in a way which bares striking similarities to how Spider-Man's marriage to MJ was retconned away.

The backlash of One More Day is still being felt, while DC have earned a lot of good will with fans by not only returning Superman's married status, but doubling down on it by having Superman's son be a major influence in the comics.

I feel that had they kept the marriage the Morrison, Millar, Waid, Peyer Superman stuff could have been really great.

Swamp Thing meets Jesus