Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the six hundred and twenty-second week where we examine comic book legends and whether they are true or false.
Click here for Part 1 of this week's legends. Click here for Part 2 of this week's legends.
COMIC LEGEND:
Squirrel Girl was originally going to join the New Warriors in the 1990s.
STATUS:
True
I've been writing about the New Warriors and Squirrel Girl a lot this week (like this list and this list), due to the awesome news that Squirrel Girl will soon be starring in her own TV series as a member of the New Warriors.
A number of fans were a bit surprised, due to the fact that Squirrel Girl hasn't actually been a MEMBER of the New Warriors in her comic book career. Most likely, the New Warriors are serving as substitutes for the team that Squirrel Girl has been most associated with over the years, the Great Lakes Avengers (as it seems unlikely that Marvel would want to do a comedic version of their popular "Avengers" brand).
However, amazingly enough, Squirrel Girl almost DID join the New Warriors about twenty years ago!
This was during a period where Squirrel Girl went without a comic book appearance for over a DECADE following her debut in 1990 and her joining the Great Lakes Avengers in 2005.
I asked Fabian Nicieza about it, and he explained that before he stopped writing "New Warriors" after issue #53, he first had a general plan for the book through issue #75 (he tended to plot out his series in VERY basic terms for 25 issues ahead of time and then in more definite terms 12 issues ahead of time, so Squirrel Girl's debut would have been during the VERY basic plotting stages).
I asked him what his plans were, and he explained:
I had always planned to get to Squirrel Girl eventually because I thought the idea of her idolizing Speedball and him having to deal with a girl liking him (who he didn't necessarily like in return) would be a fun thing to do. Plus I thought by that point in the run, the book and characters would need some innocence and renewed optimism introduced into it and she would fit that bill as well.
Nicieza later used the concept, to a certain extent, in a 2005 one-shot for Marvel dealing with superhero romance called "I (Heart) Marvel: Masked Intentions"...
(Nicieza also used that issue to break-up a couple that he had established in his "New Warriors" run, Justice and Firestar).
How funny is that that the TV show accidentally did something that the famed writer of "New Warriors" was going to do himself, twenty years ago!
Thanks so much to Fabian Nicieza, for the low down on how this would have worked.
Check out my latest Movie Legends Revealed at CBR: Learn the story of how one of the stars of "Aliens" accidentally auditioned for the film!
OK, 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!
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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!).
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Was Superman a Spy?: And Other Comic Book Legends Revealed
See you all next week!