Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the six hundred and tenth 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! And here's Part 2. Let's continue!

COMIC LEGEND:

An Ultraverse character almost appeared in a Marvel comic book after the Ultraverse ended.

STATUS:

True

The Ultraverse was a line of superhero comics produced by Malibu Comics beginning in 1993. By the end of 1994, Malibu Comics was purchased by Marvel. By 1996, the line was defunct and the Ultraverse characters have not appeared in comic books since.

But one of them ALMOST did!

Barry Windsor-Smith's contribution to the Ultraverse was Rune, a very bad alien dude who had magical, well, you know, runes.

When Marvel purchased Malibu, Marvel allowed a few of their characters to crossover with the Ultraverse. Mostly low level characters who weren't being used by other Marvel writers, like Black Knight. One of the more prominent Marvel heroes in the Ultraverse was Adam Warlock, who began appearing in a re-launched Rune comic where Warlock was practically the star of the comic (since Rune was pretty much a villain, the heroic Warlock took on more of a protagonist role in the comic book).

The Infinity Gems ended up in the Ultraverse and Rune wanted them...

rune-silver-surfer

He faced off against Warlock and, well, kind of kicked his ass...

rune-vs-warlock

So anyhow, it obviously didn't end up really going anywhere, since the Ultraverse went under in 1996.

In the early 21st Century, Jim Starlin returned to Marvel after a bit of an absence and he naturally gravitated towards the same cosmic characters he had written before, like Warlock and Thanos. He had them both appear in "Infinity Abyss."

He then did a "Thanos" ongoing series, but split with Marvel after just six issues (Al Milgrom inked him on the series, which Starlin both wrote and drew).

His first story arc involved Galactus looking for Infinity Gems, which Galactus believed could be used to satiate his hunger.

In "Thanos" #3, Galactus was going to come across the dead body of Rune in an inter-dimensional portal, who would have an Infinity Gem on him...

thanos-3-1
thanos-3-2

However, after beginning the story, Starlin discovered that the Ultraverse characters were off-limits, even the SKELETON of an Ultraverse character, so Rune had to be re-drawn so that his skeleton didn't look totally like that of Rune (so no wings, stuff like that).

So that's the closest the Ultraverse came to continuing in comic book form!


Check out my latest Movie Legends Revealed at CBR: Was Captain America originally going to die on "Captain America: Civil War"?


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!

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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batshark

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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...

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!