Welcome to the four hundred and ninety-eighth 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 ninety-seven. As I mentioned last week, I'm in Paris this week doing a Comic Book Legends Revealed exhibit at the Paris Comics Expo, so I thought it'd be fun to tie in this week's legends with the Paris Comics Expo. Therefore, each legend this week will be tied in to an artist appearing at the show! How did the size of Batman's gun lead to Alan Davis quitting Detective Comics? Did Elliot S! Maggin get fired from DC over Superman's appearance in Loeb and Sale's Challengers of the Unknown series? And how do we owe MySpace for seeing Adi Granov's artist vision on the Iron Man films?

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: Alan Davis quit Detective Comics over the size of Batman's gun on the cover to Detective Comics #575.

STATUS: Basically True (at least in terms of it being his proverbial last straw)

First up is Alan Davis.

Alan Davis was already a successful comic book artist in his native England (famously drawing Captain Britain and Marvelman) when he got his big break in the United States taking over for Jim Aparo on Batman and the Outsiders with writer Mike W. Barr when Aparo left to launch the Direct Market version of the title, The Outsiders (just like how Keith Giffen and George Perez each stopped drawing the newsstand versions of their titles, Legion of Super-Heroes and New Teen Titans, to also launch Direct Market versions of those titles). The stint on Outsiders was inherently limited (as the plan was for the Direct Edition to run new stories and then a year later those stories would appear in the Newsstand edition - thus, there was only the need for a year's worth of stories from another artist before Aparo's Direct Market stories would take over - as it turned out, there was no market for this approach and all three books were canceled very soon after they switched to the reprint format) but it worked to launch Davis' career in the States.



After Crisis on Infinite Earths led to DC shuffling their editorial offices, Denny O'Neil took over the Bat books and while he was working on doing Year One with Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli over on Batman, he brought Barr and Davis over to Detective Comics for what proved to be an awesome, if sadly short-lived run on the title.



You might be thinking, "but WHY was it so short?"

There were a couple of factors. While it was perhaps not the biggest one, Davis WAS being wooed by Chris Claremont to come over to Marvel even before the Detective Comics run began. It is hard to resist when a guy is offering you a gig drawing the X-Men, ya know? But Davis had committed to DC, so he stuck with them.

The bigger factor was that he felt that he and Barr were running into editorial problems on Detective Comics. The biggest problem is that Davis was such a fast and professional artist that he was beginning to be sort of ignored by editorial, as they tended to set their sights on the late artists while ignoring the guys getting in work on time. In fact, the bigger issue is that Davis was so fast that he was getting in work well ahead of deadline.

This led to a problem with Batman: Year Two.

In the story, which featured Joe Chill, Barr wanted Joe Chill to have a really big gun. He asked Davis to draw Chill with a Mauser (like the one Manhunter used...



)

So Davis did so, all throughout Detective Comics #575 plus the cover to the issue. However, Davis then came across copies of the pages for Batman #404 (set to come out months before Batman: Year Two - that's how far ahead Davis was) by Miller and Mazzucchelli.

In it, Joe Chill uses a different gun...



Davis suggested that they change Mazzucchelli's panels, as it was only in a few panels.

Instead, DC decided to have Davis re-draw all of his drawings of Chill's gun, including the cover to Detective Comics #575...





Davis refused and Dick Giordano ended up doing it instead. And that was the last straw for Davis. He quit and took Claremont up on his offer (the two launched Excalibur soon after, although Davis eventually went back to DC and has done a number of projects for DC over the years).

Thanks to Eric Nolen-Weathington and Alan Davis for this great story from Modern Masters: Alan Davis from TwoMorrows. Be sure to go out and buy a copy! It's a great read!

Check out my latest TV Legends Revealed at Spinoff Online: Why did Michael Landon REALLY blow up the Little House on the Prairie sets?

On the next page, did an editor get fired for allowing Superman to appear in Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale's Challengers of the Unknown?

COMIC LEGEND: Elliot S! Maggin was fired by DC for allowing Superman to appear in Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale's Challengers of the Unknown.

STATUS: False (but really close to True)

Next up is Tim Sale.

The 1991 mini-series Challengers of the Unknown by DC is famous for being the first comic book project that Jeph Loeb wrote while also being the beginning of the long-running and massively successful creative team of Jeph Loeb and artist Tim Sale.

The concept of the series is that the adventurers known as the Challengers of the Unknown are now mostly retired. Their mountain headquarters is now the site of a theme park and a local town has built up around it called Challengerville. Well, a malevolent entity causes one of their old enemies to destroy the mountain. The explosion seemingly kills a couple of members of the Challengers (Prof and June) and causes widespread destruction to the citizens of Challengerville. So the Challengers are taken to court and we get the following sequence...











I asked the editor on the comic, Elliot S! Maggin, about why this scene was so controversial. As it turned out, the editor of the Superman titles at the time, Mike Carlin, took issue with three main problems with Superman's appearance:

!. He didn't think that the jury box would stick together

but more importantly...

2. Superman didn't really know the Challengers, so why was he involved? and

3. Superman is a busy man, so why was he involved with this?

Maggin thought that the jury box was just sturdily made, he thought that the comic addressed the "not knowing them" part and he felt that Superman did all sorts of different things in the pursuit of justice. As Maggin noted, "He does things based on moral judgements, not schedules."

However, Maggin backed down and had Loeb and Sale alter the pages so that it is revealed that the Superman who testified was actually a sophisticated robot that the Challengers had built to save themselves.

Maggin then showed the art (the new pages plus the original art) to DC Executive Editor Dick Giordano and he overruled Carlin and told Maggin to go with the original pages. Giordano just forgot to actually TELL Carlin this, so Carlin was surprised to learn that the Superman appearance he had vetoed was suddenly in print.

This obviously led to some major tension, but Maggin insists that he was not fired over the situation, but he rather decided to avoid any further blowback and just leave. He moved from New York to Los Angeles and quit his editor gig.

Now would Maggin have been fired if he had stuck around? Probably, but not for this specific situation. Things just weren't great for him there period. He had problems with Jenette Khan, as well.

So it is really close to being true, but I think it is close enough for a slight false.

Thanks so much to Elliot S! Maggin for the lowdown on what went down!

On the next page, how did MySpace play a role in the design of the Iron Man films?

COMIC LEGEND: Adi Granov and Jon Favreau came together to work on the first Iron Man film through MySpace.

STATUS: True

Finally, we have Adi Granov.

It seems hard to believe it now, but less than ten years ago, MySpace was THE MOST VISITED SITE IN THE UNITED STATES (it's so nuts that I had to go full caps). It is now a music news site but another part of its now mostly forgotten past was that it helped give us the visual look for the Iron Man movies!

Adi Granov first worked on Iron Man when he did covers for the title in 2004, including what has now become in the last five years one of the most iconic Iron Man covers of all-time...



Cut to 2006, the year that MySpace passed Google.com for being the most visited site in the United States. Director Jon Favreau has been tapped by Marvel to helm their upcoming Iron Man motion picture. Favreau posted frequently on MySpace, creating an Iron Man group on the site for the film. One thing Favreau did on the site was to post various Iron Man covers that he felt best fit what he thought of as the look for "his" Iron Man.

And sure enough, a lot of the artwork was by Granov.



So he decided to message Favreau through the MySpace group.

Favreau told SuperHeroHype about it in 2006:

He said, “Hey, all the artwork you’re putting up on your page is stuff I’ve done.” I knew who he was, and I considered at some point approaching him, but he sort of made the introduction formally over MySpace. We sniffed each other out over a few emails, figured out we were the real people, so I reached out to him and asked Marvel if it was okay that I bring him on, so he’s been doing development work.

And (working with artist Phil Saunders), Granov ended up designing the Iron Man costume that was used in the hit film that launched Marvel's current string of blockbusters.



Isn't it amazing to think if Favreau had not started an Iron Man MySpace Group the Iron Man we know and love from the films might have looked a WHOLE lot different?

Thanks, MySpace! And thanks to Favreau and SuperHeroHype for the info!

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!