Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the six hundred and forty-fifth 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.
COMIC LEGEND:
Jughead was considered for being a New Teen Titan.
STATUS:
False
Once he was given the go-ahead to do a New Teen Titans series, Marv Wolfman quickly went to work on what the new team would look like. On his website, Marv writes in depth about his process and he also shares the memo about the book that he worked on at the time.
The three columns on the top are as follows. First, they are "celestial names," as Wolfman was planning in including an alien in the group, so he wanted a far out name for that character (he noted "shucks" next to Ariel as Chris Claremont and John Byrne had just snatched up Ariel for their new Kitty Pryde character in X-Men, taking that off of the list)
The middle column were the characters who were definitely going to be on the new team.
The third column were possible new members. And wait...is that seriously Jughead Jones there??!?
Yes, he's there, but no, it was not a case of DC Comics working out some sort of avant garde licensing deal all the way back in 1980. No, it was just a joke as Wolfman simply listed a bunch of teen characters. He also included Binky, DC Comics' own Archie rip-off.
(to be fair, Archie Andrew is, himself, a riff on Mickey Rooney's famous Andy Hardy character, so it's not like they're pure here, either)
So no, Jughead was never going to be on the Teen Titans. However, now that the idea is in your brain, you all totally NEED for it to happen for real now, right? Me, too!
Check out my latest Movie Legends Revealed - Did Peter "Chewbacca" Mayhew need special protection while filming in the Redwood forests of California to make sure people didn't shoot him, thinking he was Big Foot?
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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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!