Was One of Spider-Man's Untold Tales Classmates Always Meant to Die?

In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, learn whether one of Spider-Man's Untold Tales classmates was always destined to die in the series.

Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the eight hundred and thirty-eighth 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's legends.

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COMIC LEGEND:

Sally Avril was always destined to be killed off in Untold Tales of Spider-Man.

STATUS:

False

For many years, there have been fans who have insisted that a way to get comic books to sell at the same level that they used to sell circa 1991/1992 was to make their cover prices lower, arguing that people just don't want to pay more for a comic book. However, the comic book companies have tried various tests over the years with that concept, and they don't really appear to bear that theory out. For instance, in 1994, Marvel began offering two versions of its X-Men titles, a $1.50 version with regular paper and a $1.95 "Deluxe" version with fancier paper. Comic book stores almost invariably ordered the Deluxe version instead, as fans were fine with paying the extra 50 cents and the comic book stores were happy to make that extra 25 cents' worth of profit on the popular X-Men comic books (it was similar to how the Superman books, when they were as hot as they could be following the Death of Superman, started charging $1.50 due to higher production qualities in the books, including full bleed coloring, and the sales continued to do very well).

The more famous example, though, was when Marvel launched a line of 99 cent comic books in the fall of 1995 (with a second round of books launched a year later). If people felt that comics would sell like they did in 1991 if they were cheaper, then Marvel was going to find out by charging what they charged in 1991 (actually, a penny cheaper)!

Not only were the books 99 cents, but while most of the titles, admittedly, were not what you would call "must buys," one of the 99 cent titles was Untold Tales of Spider-Man, which was one of the best Spider-Man series of the 1990s!

Kurt Busiek, Pat Olliffe and a series of inkers (Al Vey, Pam Edlund and Al Williamson primarily...perhaps even entirely) did a brilliantly entertaining series that filled in the pieces of Spider-Man's past with all-new stories set between the pages of Steve Ditko and Stan Lee's epic Amazing Spider-Man run. It was an amazing, spectacular, sensational, even web of series and...it didn't sell that well.

Tom Brevoort, who edited the series with his assistant editor, Glenn Greenberg, recalled last year:

UNTOLD TALES was one of a series of comics designed to retail at a 99 cent price point. There was a ton of complaining in the 1990s about the cover prices of comic books having grown too high, and so this was an attempt to see if there might be some value in releasing a cheaper alternative. Spoiler warning: there wasn’t. The newsstand accounts, for whom the initiative had been created, didn’t want 99 cent comics–they weren’t going to be able to deliver enough profit to make the books worthwhile when they could stock a $1.95 comic in the same space. So the whole idea was doomed from the beginning–but UNTOLD TALES was the one book among the line to outlast its origins and to continue on for some time. Eventually, that 99 cent cover price caused its cancellation–nobody wanted to bump up the price to $1.95 and continue, it seemed.

It was a real shame, but hey, we got two years' worth of excellent comic books out of that series!

In any event, one of the interesting things about the series was how Busiek took the background teen characters that Ditko and Lee just tossed in the early days and gave them full names and personalities...

Perhaps most notable of them all was the Sally who rejects Peter for a date in Amazing Fantasy #15...

Although for the sake of posterity, Busiek literally creating Jason Ionello and Tiny McKeever has led to those characters (Ionello, in particular) becoming background characters at Peter Parker's school in various Spider-Man media adaptations (the issue for Busiek about male classmates of Peter is that Lee and Ditko never really paid much attention to them, as they all seemed to share the same name and there was no consistency in their appearances, so Busiek just felt it better to make new characters up)...

Starting with the sixth issue of the series, Jason and Sally started to get involved in more and more dangerous stunts. First they tried to discover Spider-Man's secret identity and inadvertently helped take down Electro...

and then that led to Sally deciding to become a superhero herself called Bluebird in Untold Tales of Spider-Man #11...

Clearly, Sally was taking the wrong approach to becoming a superhero, as she was more concerned about becoming famous than anything else...

In Untold Tales of Spider-Man #13, Spider-Man allowed a crook to get off a good shot on Sally as Bluebird...

That successfully convinced her to stop being a superhero....

However, she then just decided to become a freelance photographer like Peter Parker, pushing Jason to drive her around at high speeds in his car...

It did not work out so well...

And tragically, Sally was killed. The whole thing was so well done that people have naturally always assumed that this was Busiek's plan the whole way through, that Sally was essentially created TO die. However, last year, Busiek explained on Twitter that that was not the case, noting, "She wasn’t, even to the extent that Pat and I created her. Once she became Bluebird she was doomed, but before that she was just hey, let’s use Sally and make her a character!"

Knowing the whole plotline developed on the fly is even more impressive! What a great series Untold Tales of Spider-Man was.

Thanks to Kurt Busiek for the fascinating information!