Welcome to the four hundred and forty-third in a series of examinations of comic book legends and whether they are true or false. Click here for an archive of the previous four hundred and forty-two. This week, did Marvel and DC both TURN down buying Marvelman in the early 1980s? Plus, was there really a supervillain powered by...cocaine? Finally, was John Byrne's X-Men: The Hidden Years a finite series or what?

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: Marvel and DC Comics both passed on Marvelman in the 1980s.

STATUS: True

One of the biggest announcements at the most recent New York Comic Con was the news that Marvel Comics would officially be reprinting the original Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman Marvelman comic books from the 1980s (only calling the character by the name Miracleman, which was coined when the comics moved to Eclipse Comics in the mid-1980s because Marvel took issue with the name Marvelman)







However, did you know that Marvel had the opportunity to do Marvelman stories roughly thirty years ago...and PASSED on the chance? As did DC Comics, as well!

To set the scene, Marvelman was the lead feature in the British anthology series Warrior (published by Dez Skinn). Originally written and drawn by Alan Moore and Garry Leach, it soon became Alan Moore and Moore's acclaimed Captain Britain artist partner, Alan Davis.



The series was a success in England and was admired in the United States, as well. Eventually, though, Moore and Davis split up over some philosophical differences (as written in a past Comic Book Legends Revealed, Moore took issue with Marvel Comics reprinting some of his work without his permission and his response was to tell them that they could not reprint any of his work in the future. That included all of the Captain Britain stuff he did with Alan Davis. Davis, on the other hand, thought that Moore should have taken a different approach with Marvel. In the end, Davis decided to leave the Marvelman feature with Warrior #21.



Without its star feature, Warrior was in trouble, so Skinn began searching out American publishers who he could sell the rights to the various characters for the American companies to reprint the Warrior stories and, depending on whatever deals the American companies cut with the creators, continue the original series (Davis, for his part, agreed to let Marvelman continue without him if that's what everyone else wanted to do).

To put this into perspective, time-wise, Warrior #21 came out the same month as Alan Moore's eighth issue of Saga of the Swamp Thing...



So while Moore had certainly gained a lot of attention for his early Swamp Thing issues ("Anatomy Lesson" in #21 was a bit of a critical sensation), he was not yet ALAN MOORE, to the point where you likely were not revolving a series just around the fact that Alan Moore was writing it. Not like you would just a couple of years later.

So if a comic book company wanted to bring over Marvelman, they'd pretty much have to be making the decision based on the work in Warrior less than the star power of Alan Moore. And when Skinn made the offer to DC Comics, they passed on buying Marvelman because they had recently worked out a deal with Fawcett for Captain Marvel, the character Marvelman was originally based on. DC at the time wasn't quite sure how to work Captain Marvel into the DC Universe, so they were not particularly interested in trying to work in Captain Marvel AND a character so similar to Captain Marvel.

DC did, though, purchase another Warrior feature, V for Vendetta.

Marvel, too, decided to pass. Jim Shooter was a big fan of the series, but he just didn't see the character working for Marvel.

So eventually Pacific Comics bought it but then they went out of business before printing an issue and then Eclipse Comics took over and the series finally saw print under the new title Miracleman in 1985 (reprinting the Warrior material before going to new material by Alan Moore and Davis' first replacement, the artist later known as Chuck Austen)....



Imagine how different things would be if either Marvel or DC had bought Marvelman. I presume Moore would not have written it for Marvel at the time, so what would have happened there?

Thanks to George Khoury for all of this great information, courtesy of his excellent book, Kimota!: The Miracleman Companion. Go read it, people! Lots of fascinating interviews about Marvelman/Miracleman in there.

Check out some Entertainment Urban Legends Revealed!

Was the Assistant in Frankenstein Really Named Igor?

Did Jamie Foxx Take the Name “Jamie” Because it Sounded Like a Woman’s Name?

Was Denise Crosby Fired From Stark Trek: The Next Generation Because She Posed Nude in Playboy?

What Strange Approach Did Frank Capra Use to Get Claudette Colbert to Show Her Legs in a Film?

COMIC LEGEND: There was a DC Comics supervillain in the 1980s who was powered by cocaine.

STATUS: True

Reader Steven W. wrote in about this one literally one month ago, asking if it was true that

DC during the late 80's debuted a super villain powered (or power of?) by cocaine in the New Guardians.

New Guardians was a book that spun out of the Millennium crossover in 1988. Steve Englehart created it and was the initial writer on the series and Joe Staton drew it. It starred a multi-ethnic team of heroes and Englehart clearly made a point of trying to bring in edgy real world issues into the title, although with a superhero twist, of course.



One of the first plots was the heroes dealing with the fact that they all might have been infected with HIV (two of the members, Jet and Extrano, ultimately WERE infected). However, instead of by more traditional means of infection, they got infected when a villain named Hemogoblin bit them...





Similarly, in the second issue, Englehart dealt with the cocaine boom of the 1980s by introducing a new villain named Snowflame, a cocaine-addicted drug lord...





Wait until you see how he powers up...



Okay, that's all sorts of strange.

#2 was Englehart's last issue on the series.

The series ended up being short-lived, lasting just twelve issues, but it has certainly left a mark on American comic book history.

Thanks to Steven for the suggestion!

Check out some classic Comic Book Legends Revealed related to drugs!

Was the famous Speedy story in Green Lantern/Green Arrow really the first Comics Code-approved story involving drugs?

Was Mary Jane Watson's first name a sly reference to marijuana?

Did a government agency pay DC to do an anti-drug storyline in Batman: Shadow of the Bat?

Did Steve Skeates work in a whole bunch of drug references into an Aquaman storyline?

Was a week's worth of Get Fuzzy comic strips censored because of marijuana jokes?

COMIC LEGEND: John Byrne's X-Men: The Hidden Years was a finite series designed to replace the issues of X-Men that were reprints during the early 1970s (before the All-New, All-Different X-Men took over)

STATUS: False

Last week, I discussed John Byrne's Marvel series from the early 21st Century, X-Men: The Hidden Years, which filled in the blanks on what the X-Men were up to between the end of their original adventures in X-Men #66 and the beginning of the All-New, All-Different X-Men in X-Men #94 (#67-93 were reprints).



In the comments of last week, reader Brian from Canada repeated a common misconception about the title:

what really stung about the series is that it was cancelled abruptly, just nine issues away from its natural conclusion anyway: each issue was supposed to replace the reprints in Uncanny X-Men #67-93 (31 issues), and Quesada killed it at issue 22.

That was an extremely common idea at the time, but apparently it was not the truth. John Byrne did not plan on stopping with 31 issues. He was going to keep doing the book as long as he could, as obviously due to comic book time, ten issues can take place in a single week, so there was no time constraint in that regard.

Byrne, though, did play a bit of a role in confusing people, as he cleverly hid the issue number of where the book WOULD be in the covers of the new series.

Like issue #3 would be #69 if you continued the original numbering, so here is the cover to #3...



and a detail showing where Byrne hid the number 69...



So naturally enough, some readers presumed that that meant that he was just going to do #67-93 and be done with it.

But that was never Byrne's intent.

Thanks to Brian from Canada for bringing it up and thanks to John Trumbull, Edo Bosnar and Blade X for correcting Brian before I could moderate the comments until now. ;)

Check out the latest edition of my weekly Movie/TV Legends Revealed Column at Spinoff Online: Did vampires seriously not have fangs in movies until the 1950s?!

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

See you all next week!