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COMIC LEGEND:

Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely nearly did a Silver Surfer comic book

STATUS:

True

In 2000, Grant Morrison was lured away from DC Comics to revamp Marvel's X-Men line of comics. He and artist Frank Quitely did just that with their run on New X-Men that began in 2001...

However, while Morrison's main priority at Marvel was their X-Men line of comics, Morrison was also intrigued at having the freedom to mess around with the rest of Marvel's collection of characters and put his particular stamp on them (he had done a TINY bit of Marvel earlier in the 1990s, but this was the first time that he had more or less free rein).

Two projects Morrison wanted to do were both Fantastic Four-related. One of the, Fantastic Four 1 2 3 4 (with artist Jae Lee) came out and was awesome...

but the other did not.

You see, Morrison was also going to do a Silver Surfer one-shot with Frank Quitely. Quitely, though, quickly feel behind schedule on New X-Men and thus could not do any extra work for Marvel and the project fell apart (Quitely never even did any published art for it, which is why I had to use a Moebius Silver Surfer for the featured image for this article).

Morrison DID explain what he was intended to do with the project to Newsarama back in 2000 (courtesy of James Pedrick, who wrote it up for Newsarama back then):

"Hopefully for release later next year," said the writer, "It`s got misery, madness and apocalyptic destruction on a cosmic scale so Christmas would be nice."

"It`s a whole new look at the Surfer. I found an angle with the character that I`m very surprised no one`s ever noticed or dealt with before to my knowledge. The bleeding-heart chrome plated space hippy of Stan`s 60s stories has seemed increasingly irrelevant with the passage of time and fashion so I`m trying to do something that`s a little closer to Jack Kirby`s concept of the Surfer as a chilling, inhuman angel of annihilation. Think of this as a weird kind of YEAR ZERO project where we get a look at what Norrin Radd and Galactus were doing before their fateful visit to Earth and their encounter with the FF."

Wow, I so need to see that comic book someday! Argh!

Thanks to James Pedrick and Grant Morrison for the information!


Check out my latest TV Legends Revealed - Did a Roman Numeral typo accidentally make the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer TV special public domain?


Check back later for the final part of this week's Comic Book Legends Revealed!