Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the six hundred and fifty-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.
COMIC LEGEND:
An issue of Star Wars was destroyed because of an Avengers movie spoiler that wasn't actually a spoiler.
STATUS:
True
This second legend for this week was delayed because I needed to put this week's Movie Legends Revealed out first, as this ties into that legend.
Few comic books had quite as many variant covers for it than Marvel's 2015 release of Star Wars #1, which celebrated the return of the Star Wars comic book license to Marvel Comics after being away for many years at Dark Horse Comics (Disney owning Marvel and then purchasing Lucasfilm obviously led to this new arrangement).
All sorts of stores did their own special variant cover for the comic. Here's just four picked at almost random...
Heroes Haven...
Loot Crate...
Rebel Base...
The Cargo Hold...
Anyhow, one of the bigger stores to get their own Star Wars variant (one of the many that helped this comic sell a MILLION copies!) was Hot Topic, who had their own variant by Paul Renaud...
The issue came sealed up, but at the end of the comic book, there wan ad for FunkoPop figures to tie in with the then-upcoming Avengers: Age of Ultron film...
As you might notice, they were specifically promoting a grey Savage Hulk. Like a recent list that I did about toys that didn't ACTUALLY spoil the film, this turned out to not be an actual spoiler for the movie. No, as I noted in this week's Movie Legends Revealed, the film decided in the end to NOT make the Hulk grey in the movie.
However, I guess no one knew that at the time, so Hot Topic was forced to pull the book from the shelves, pulp it and then release a new version without the offending ad.
Thanks to Rich Johnston, who covered this as soon as it happened, back when it seemed like this was pulled because it was a legitimate spoiler for the movie. It'd be hilarious if this had been an Armageddon 2001 situation, where the FunkoPop reveal led to a change in the movie, but no, the movie had already decided against using a Grey Hulk (as explained in that aforementioned Movie Legends Revealed).
Check out my latest Movie Legends Revealed - Why wasn't there a Grey Hulk in Avengers: Age of Ultron?
Part 3 will be up in a little bit. Since I had to delay Part 2, I obviously had to delay Part 3, as well. So I'll make it tie in with this legend, in a way. Feel free to write in with suggestions for future legends to either cronb01@aol.com or brianc@cbr.com!