Pete Wisdom's Origins Began at a Whole Other Company Than Marvel

In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, discover how the Marvel character, Pete Wisdom, was nearly a character at a whole other comic company

Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the eight hundred and fifty-fourth installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false. As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends.Click here for the first legend in this installment.

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COMIC LEGEND:

Pete Wisdom was originally intended to be a character at a British comic book company

STATUS:

True

The X-Men spinoff, Excalibur, was created by Chris Claremont and Alan Davis. Davis was British, and Claremont had been born in England, but moved to the United States when he was three. Still, there was obviously enough of a British connection there that Claremont and Davis made sense for the book (Claremont had also previously been one of the main writers for Marvel UK when it started, creating the character of Captain Britain for the company with artist Herb Trimpe). Especially since Claremont and Davis essentially co-wrote the book together. Davis would later take over writing and drawing duties by himself. When Davis left, the British writer, Richard Ashford, took over writing duties temporarily on the series. His tenure did not last long, and soon, the book fell to the very American creative team of Scott Lobdell and Ken Lashley, only Lobdell was writing so many other books for Marvel at the time that Lobdell had to work with different scripters. Chris Cooper did the bulk of the scripting during this period. Finally, in Excalibur #83, a British writer, Warren Ellis, was brought aboard to do a three-part story arc based on a Scott Lobdell plot idea. Once that was finished, Ellis took over the writing duties for good with Excalibur #86.

In that issue (which was the last issue of Excalibur before Age of Apocalypse forced the book to change its name to X-Calibre for the next four issues (always a fun way to start on a new series. "Hey, everybody! Oh, just one issue before continuity alters for four months? Okay, great!"). In that issue, though, Ellis began to really make his mark on the book by introducing the British intelligence agent, Pete Wisdom. He had a memorable introduction, being seen in a dream...

where we see that this new character has a very dark past...

Later in that issue, Excalibur is met by agents from a mysterious British intelligence agency (which debuted in that issue), Black Air, and Wisdom is one of the agents...

He is assigned to the team as a liaison, of sorts, but it is unclear at the time that Wisdom actually is a mutant himself (he has the ability to produce blades of energy that he would refer to as "hot knives"...

In the issue, we see the earliest banter between Wisdom and Kitty Pryde (they would later date. It was weird, since she was, like, 18 at the time)...

Wisdom would become a key part of the series during Ellis' run on the book, and he has been a recurring character in Marvel since, recently popping up as a fairly regular supporting cast member in the recently ended Post-House of X Excalibur series (I suppose he might pop up in Knights of X at some point, as well). The fascinating thing, though, is that he was originally intended for a whole other comic book company!

In 1989, the comic book distributors, Neptune Distribution, had become successful enough as distributors (having grown from just selling American comic books to British readers as a mail order company) that it got into comic book publication, as well, specializing in black and white creator-owned work. The new company was called Trident Comics, and it published work by Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison and the earliest published comic book work by Mark Millar.

It appears, though, as it was one of those situations where the company got too big, too quickly, as it was probably stretched too thin, with a number of delays that was exacerbated when the company worked out a new deal with Pat Mills to do a separate imprint, Apocalypse Ltd. Everything was done with the best intentions at mind, but it just was too much for too small of a company, and they ended up not publishing any new comic books after 1991.

Obviously, then, lost in the midst of all of this were any new projects that were going to be at Trident Comics, and one of those projects was Electric Angel, a series by Warren Ellis and the heavily underrated British indie artist, Ben Dilworth. Rich Johnston says that Ellis and Dilworth actually did an ashcan edition of Electric Angel, which sounds a bit like the Holy Grail of indie British superhero comics of that era.

When Trident went under and the Electric Angel project did not move forward, Ellis just took the character to Marvel, instead, only with new powers.

Of course, Ellis later introduced Jenny Sparks with Tom Raney in Stormwatch, who had electricity powers...

And it's worth noting that many years later, Ellis also had an Angel-One character who had electricity powers in his Black Summer series with Juan Jose Ryp (that's probably just a total coincidence, but Electric Angel/Angel-One with electricity powers seemed interesting enough to at least mention it)...