Welcome to the five hundred and seventy-ninth in a series of examinations of comic book legends and whether they are true or false. Click here for an archive of the first five hundred (I actually haven't been able to update it in a while). This week, were Cyclops and Madelyne Pryor really going to live happily ever after? How did Neal Adams change the ending of the famous Green Arrow/Speedy drug storyline? Finally, was Bruce the Gargoyle on the Spider-Man Animated Series a Batman reference?

Let's begin!

NOTE: The column is on three pages, a page for each legend. There's a little "next" button on the top of the page and the bottom of the page to take you to the next page (and you can navigate between each page by just clicking on the little 1, 2 and 3 on the top and the bottom, as well).

COMIC LEGEND: Chris Claremont invented Madelyne Pryor strictly as a way to give Cyclops a happy ending to write him out of the X-Men.

STATUS: True

Recently, we've been looking at the troubled relationship between Cyclops and Madelyne Pryor, including how messed up it was that Cyclops ditched her and their kid to go running once he found out his ex-girlfriend, Jean Grey, was alive. And then how weird it was for the X-writers to then decide to blame Madelyne for the whole thing.

To recap, in Uncanny X-Men #168 (by Chris Claremont, Paul Smith and Bob Wiacek), Cyclops met Madelyne Pryor, who, of course, looked exactly like Scott's dead girlfriend, Jean Grey...



He and Maddie work fast, as he already tells her he is a mutant by Uncanny X-Men #170...



And then he accepts a rather major red flag in the next issue...



and they're married within seven issues of meeting each other...









The question a number of readers had, though, was basically, "Okay, so let's say X-Factor never happens. Does Cyclops seriously end up with Madelyn Pryor, living in Alaska with their kid?" In other words, "What was Chris Claremont's PLAN exactly?"

Here are a sample reader question (courtesy of commenter Green Luthor):

Did Claremont ever actually have a plan for Maddie before all this? It seemed like he went out of his way to establish that she wasn’t a clone of Jean, and then the big payoff turns out… she’s a clone of Jean. I have to assume that wasn’t his original plan, but what was?

As it turned out, it was, indeed, to just give Cyclops a happy ending. Claremont explained it all in an interview with a Danish comic book site:

The original Madelyne storyline was that, at its simplest level, she was that one in a million shot that just happened to look like Jean Grey, [a.k.a. the first Phoenix]! And the relationship was summed up by the moment when Scott says: "Are you Jean?" And she punches him! That was in Uncanny X-Men #174. Because her whole desire was to be deeply loved for herself not to be loved as the evocation of her boyfriend's dead romantic lover and sweetheart.

I mean, it's a classical theme. You can go back to a whole host of 1930s films, 1940s, Hitchcock films—but it all got invalidated by the resurrection of Jean Grey in X-Factor #1. The original plotline was that Scott marries Madelyne, they have their child, they go off to Alaska, he goes to work for his grandparents, he retires from the X-Men. He's a reserve member. He's available for emergencies. He comes back on special occasions, for special fights, but he has a life. He has grown up. He has grown out of the monastery; he is in the real world now. He has a child. He has maybe more than one child. It's a metaphor for us all. We all grow up. We all move on.

Scott was going to move on. Jean was dead get on with your life. And it was close to a happy ending. They lived happily ever after, and it was to create the impression that maybe if you came back in ten years, other X-Men would have grown up and out, too. Would Kitty stay with the team forever? Would Nightcrawler? Would any of them? Because that way we could evolve them into new directions, we could bring in new characters. There would be an ongoing sense of renewal, and growth and change in a positive sense.

Then, unfortunately, Jean was resurrected, Scott dumps his wife and kid and goes back to the old girlfriend. So it not only destroys Scott's character as a hero and as a decent human being it creates an untenable structural situation: what do we do with Madelyne and the kid? ... So ultimately the resolution was: turn her into the Goblin Queen and kill her off





Now while I certainly feel for Claremont to have his story disrupted like that, on the other hand, it's awfully hard to believe that Marvel would just let one of their major X-Characters just sit on a shelf like that. Even by this point in time, Angel, Iceman and Beast had formed their own Defenders team, so everyone at Marvel was hot to use X-characters, so one of them just living happily ever after seemed unlikely. In addition, having her be identical to Jean Grey was just weird, as it forever made Madelyne a Jean Grey substitute, even if the character had remained her own character and Jean never returned. "Oh phew, my girlfriend is dead. Luckily, I met someone who looks just like her! Close enough for a happy ending!"

But there ya go, folks, that was Claremont's original intent.

By the way, the little girl version of Madelyne that showed up in Avengers Annual #10 was just a coincidence based on the fact that Claremont just really liked the name Maddie Pryor.

Thanks to Green Luthor and a bunch of other commenters for asking what the original deal was going to be! And thanks to Chris Claremont for letting us all know what the original deal WAS goign to be!

Check out some entertainment legends from Legends Revealed:

Was a Joke In An Issue of Cable/Deadpool Really the Inspiration for Ryan Reynolds Playing Deadpool?

Were TV Dinners Invented Due to Swanson Having Too Many Thanksgiving Turkeys Left Over?

Did Terry O’Quinn Accidentally Actually Stab Matthew Fox for Real in the Lost Finale?

Did the First Song About Baseball Somehow Pre-Date the Civil War?!

Go to the next page to find out how Neal Adams changed the ending of the Green Arrow/Speedy drug storyline pretty dramatically!

COMIC LEGEND: Neal Adams re-wrote the ending for the famous Green Arrow/Speedy drug two-parter

STATUS: True

"Snowbirds Don't Fly" is a famous two-part storyline from the pages of Green Lantern during the famous Green Lantern/Green Arrow team-up years by Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams (with Dick Giordano being the primary inker on the run). It is especially well known for the cover for Green Lantern #85, showing Green Arrow's sidekick, Speedy (Roy Harper), doing drugs...



When Oliver "Green Arrow" Queen discovers Roy shooting up at the end of #85, he does not take it well.





Poor job there, Ollie.

Anyhow, Roy has to turn to Dinah "Black Canary" Lance to help him get through it.



And at the end of the issue, Speedy is seemingly fine...



But he has some reservations with what Green Arrow did to him...





As it turned out, that was NOT how the story was supposed to end. O'Neil and Adams, you see, worked in the old fashioned way where they did not even really communicate with each other at all at first. O'Neil would write a script and then Adams would draw O'Neil's script. There was no real shared communication the way that there was at Marvel where the artists would often confer on plots (heck, Stan Lee eventually got to the point where he expected his artists to come up with the plot more or less on their own, as he was so busy as the company's Editor-in-Chief). As time went by, they started to talk more, but O'Neil still viewed himself as primarily the guy who decided how the story went. And in fact, those last two pages? The story originally ended right BEFORE them! But when Adams reached the original ending of the script, he had a problem. He recounted to Comic Book Marketplace:

I read this and thought, no...what has changed? Somebody has to learn something. GA had to learn soem kind of lesson. He had to learn to respect this person that he had beat up at the beginning of the story. I felt the strongest possible climax was necessary, considering how we started the story. I made my feeling perfectly clear to Denny, that I thought his ending was anti-climactic, but he let me know, basically, it was fine as is. Well, I thought it was important enough to bring it up to the editor, so I wrote two extra pages where Speedy punches GA back, let him in on his pain, and then splits. GA, the father figure, knows the kid's right and realizes that he [GA] was an ass. This ending made all the sense in the world to me. I brought the pages to Julie and said, 'I honestly think this is how the story ought to end.'He read them and said go aheasd and do it.

O'Neil was not a fan. He told the Amazing World of DC Comics (and this was DC's own magazine, so this was interesting he would give such a candid answer), "I disapprove of the implied conclusion of that story. What’s implied is that a punch in the mouth solves everything."

Fascinating stuff.

Thanks to O'Neil and Adams (and the Amazing World of DC Comics and Comic Book Marketplace) for the info!

Check out my latest TV Legends Revealed at Spinoff Online: Which episode of the Simpsons actually has helped save lives over the years?

On the next page, learn whether the Spider-Man Animated Series really had a fun reference to Batman on the show.

COMIC LEGEND: Bruce the Gargoyle on Spider-Man: The Animated Series was a Batman reference.

STATUS: False

On the classic Spider-Man animated series from the 1990s, which was notable in how well in captured the feel of the actual comic books despite having to deal with some pretty restrictive limitations (like no blood at all - so that vampires were extremely tricky), there was a funny recurring bit where Spider-Man would talk to a gargoyle on a rooftop. He named the gargoyle "Bruce" and he would talk his problems out. This was a way, of course, to avoid doing voiceovers as voiceover narration can really take a viewer out of it.





Over the years, there has been a rumor among fans that the reason the gargoyle was named Bruce was as a reference to Batman, whose real name is Bruce Wayne, don't you know. Spider-Man was airing the same time as the famed Batman: The Animated Series, so it was seen by some as a bit of an acknowledment of their "distinguished competition."

However, John Semper, the showrunner of the series, explained the truth:

One rumour that I come across from time to time is that “Bruce,” the inanimate stone gargoyle that Spider-Man occasionally “chatted” with up on the top of a building, was named after “Bruce Wayne” (aka Batman). That is WRONG. I named Bruce the Gargoyle after my late, good friend, Bruce Hepler who was an accomplished, Emmy-nominated film editor here in Hollywood.

So there ya go!

Okay, that's it for this week!

Thanks to the Grand Comics Database for this week's covers! And thanks to Brandon Hanvey for the Comic Book Legends Revealed logo!

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is cronb01@aol.com. And my Twitter feed is http://twitter.com/brian_cronin, so you can ask me legends there, as well!

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Here's my book of Comic Book Legends (130 legends - half of them are re-worked classic legends I've featured on the blog and half of them are legends never published on the blog!).

The cover is by artist Mickey Duzyj. He did a great job on it...(click to enlarge)...



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Was Superman a Spy?: And Other Comic Book Legends Revealed

See you all next week!