Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the six hundred and sixth week of examinations of comic book legends and whether they are true or false.

Here's Part 1 of this week's Comic Book Legends Revealed! Let's continue!

COMIC LEGEND:

Marvel almost followed up their "Transformers" series with an X-title.

STATUS:

Basically True

Earlier today, I did a list for CBR about fifteen of the most obscure superhero teams out there. One of the rules for the list was that none of the teams could have had their own title. Oddly enough, though, one of the teams almost DID have their own title, and it was going to take over from the "Transformers" when that series ended!

The Neo-Knights were a team created by Simon Furman that was formed by three new super-powered humans, Dynamo, Thunderpunch and Rapture, who joined forces with a super-powered human, Circuit-Breaker, that Bob Budiansky had introduced during his run on "Transformers."

979447-neo_knights

They were basically an attempt by the U.S. government to get humans involved into the Autobot/Decipticon war.

Well, when the "Transformers" series ended, Simon Furman thought that he could then spin the Neo-Knights off in a new series, which would be drawn by Andrew Wildman, who had been drawing the series towards the end with Furman. The new book would be called Techno-X, because it was the 1990s, so every book had to have an X in the title (EDITED TO ADD: My buddy werehawk1 wanted me to note that most of the heroes on the team WERE mutants, so it sort of worked in that regard).

techno-x_concept_art

The concept would have been that all of the Transformers stories were just virtual reality and it was all training for these heroes to fight REAL robot threats in the Marvel Universe, like Ultron.

A new character would have been introduced and Dynamo would have been phased out of the title.

However, while I don't know if Marvel liked the idea or not, a major issue was that while Circuit-Breaker was very carefully introduced in another Marvel comic book so that Marvel could gain the rights to her, the other characters all made their debut in issues of "Transformers" and the deal Marvel had with Hasbro was that any character introduced in the actual "Transformers" comic book would belong to Hasbro (you could tell Marvel tried to get the rights to the characters as the indica initially claimed the rights to the other Neo-Knights).

So it was not to be. Luckily, Transformers proved to be a resilient intellectual property.

Thanks to the Transformers wikipedia for the great promotional image of Techno-X!

Check out my latest Movie Legends Revealed at CBR: What is the bizarre story of how Cameron Crowe got Peter Gabriel to approve the use of "In Your Eyes" for "Say Anything"?

Check back on Sunday for part 3 of this week's legends!

And remember, if you have a legend that you're curious about, drop me a line at either brianc@cbr.com or cronb01@aol.com!