Welcome to the three hundredth and twenty-fifth in a series of examinations of comic book legends and whether they are true or false. This week, learn the story of the amazing Brave and the Bold hidden teasers! Plus, could there have been a Young Avengers...in 1990?!!? Also, was Xorn really supposed to be Magneto?

Click here for an archive of the previous three hundred and twenty-four.

Let's begin!

COMIC LEGEND: The Brave and the Bold for a time had hints hidden in their issues revealing who the team-up would be in the following issue.

STATUS: True

Reader Chris G. wrote in about this remarkable series of "teasers" in The Brave and the Bold when Dick Giordano was editing the title. These series of "Easter Eggs" makes a perfect tie-in for our Month of Comic Book Easter Eggs, which ends this Sunday! Check out the archive of this monht's Easter Eggs here.

As to the Brave and the Bold Easter Eggs, you see, from #177, when Giordano took over (it may have been even before him, although I don't believe so - the hints were definitely artist Jim Aparo's idea, so it could have predated Giordano) through I dunno when they stopped, honestly, the artists on the book would put in a hint toward who was the guest star in the next issue!

#177 shows the shadow of Creeper...



#178 shows a Legion cruiser...



#179 has Jim Corrigan show up (a letter writer wrote in to say that the reflection is intended to look like Corrigan, and the editors basically said "yes", so I'm going with it)...



#180 has Hawk and Dove make an appearance...



#181 has Robin's symbol appear...



#183 has Huntress' symbol appear...



#184 has a green arrow...



#187 has a rose and a thorn...



Isn't that awesome? Jim Aparo was the artist on most of the above issues.

I can't find the hints in Brave and the Bold #185 or #186 (#182 accidentally didn't have one). Can anyone share them with me? I stopped looking after #187 as it was taking up more time than it was worth as I already had a bunch of examples to demonstrate.

If you know of any other hints, let me know and I'll add them to the piece!

Thanks to Chris for the great suggestion!

COMIC LEGEND: Rob Liefeld and Jim Valentino pitched a Young Avengers series before New Warriors debuted.

STATUS: True

Reader Stan wrote in to ask if it was true that Rob Liefeld and Jim Valentino did a pitch for a book like New Warriors back in the 1980s.

Amazingly enough, Stan, they DID do a pitch for a book like New Warriors, only it was INDEPENDENT of New Warriors! Tom Brevoort wrote about it on his blog here.

And yet, check out the similarities...



Isn't that amazing?

That they came up with nearly the same cast by total coincidence is uncanny (and Valentino confirms in the comments section that it was, indeed, coincidence)!

Still, imagine Young Avengers nearly twenty years before we got the Young Avengers!

Valentino was going to write the book and Liefeld would draw it (and Liefeld would co-plot it with Valentino), but unbenown to them, Marvel had already greenlit New Warriors, so they passed on the project. Liefeld and Valentino ended up appropriating some of their ideas for Young Avengers into their own books (X-Force and Guardians of the Galaxy, respectively).

Liefeld shared two sketches he did of the possible Young Avengers, as well as his insights on the pitch here.





Thanks to Stan for the suggestion, thanks to Tom Brevoort for posting the pitch and thanks to Rob Liefeld for sharing the sketches. What a neat piece of comic book history!

NOTE: Amusingly enough, way back in the #20s, I did a Comic Book Legends Revealed about ANOTHER pitch for "Young Avengers" before the actual Young Avengers came about. You can check that out here.

COMIC LEGEND: Grant Morrison did not originally intend for Xorn to be Magneto.

STATUS: False

Commenter TNT138 said the other week, "xorn was a great character and I still find it hard to believe that xorn was initially intended to be magneto."







This is something that I've found a lot around the internet (well, some of it I found after I specifically went looking for it, but still!) - the notion that Xorn being revealed as Magneto in disguise was an after-the-fact decision by Morrison that was different from what he had intended.

This is not the case.

We have Morrison's actual "Manifesto" for his New X-Men run and it includes a basic plot line for how his run would go, and remarkably enough, while there are some changes here and there, Morrison followed the outline pretty darn well (and that's especially impressive when you consider all the characters he couldn't use). In any event, in the outline for his run, he makes it clear that Experiment X (his early name for Xorn) is not who he says he is and that that reveal will lead into the ultimate Magneto story ( "Who knows what lies beneath the mask of Experiment X? Will the self-styled MAN FROM ROOM X turn out to be hiding more than just his face?" )

The next pages in the manifesto were blacked out for readers when it was published with the E is for Extinction trade and this is because he expressly states that yeah, Experiment X/Xorn is Magneto.

Don't get me wrong, you can poke some holes at Morrison's set-up of Magneto as Xorn. Some things don't make total sense. Like what are the X-Men seeing here?



But he clearly had the reveal planned from the get-go, especially since, you know, he had the pitch written before he did the series.

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)...



If you'd like to order it, you can use the following code if you'd like to send me a bit of a referral fee...

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

See you all next week!