Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the six hundred and forty-second 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:

Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers took an issue of DC Comics Presents and instead made it an independent comic book story, with Superman becoming a little girl.

STATUS:

True

Steve Englehart has long been known to be a comic book creator who would stand on his principles if he believed that they had been violated. If he believed that he was being screwed around, he would not put up with it, he'd just quit. That's why he bounced around DC and Marvel a number of times over the years and why there are a decent amount of comic book stories by Englehart over the years that ended up being written under an alias as part of an objection to how he had been treated.

In any event, the story at hand today is about an issue of DC Comics Presents that Englehart had written. The story starred Superman and the Creeper. The problem was that after Englehart wrote the story and went to get paid for it, he had learned that the editor who had assigned the story to Englehart had accidentally quoted him a price that was higher than DC's regular rate and so they now refused to pay Englehart the agreed upon sum for the story, saying that it was a mistake all along.

So Englehart would not allow them to have the story in question. That is all fine and good, but the problem was that Englehart now had a Superman/Creeper story and nowhere to publish it, since there was only one comic book company that was in the business of making Superman and Creeper comic books.

Luckily, however, Jan and Dean Mullaney were just in the midst of launching their own independent comic book company, Eclipse Comics, and they were willing to pay Englehart the originally agreed upon rate for the story in question to help launch their first comic, the anthology Eclipse Magazine. Englehart just needed to bring in his longtime collaborator (even back then, they had already been collaborating for years), Marshall Rogers, to help turn his Superman/Creeper story into something else entirely (Englehart and Rogers didn't use aliases for the story - they were credited as themselves for the story) for Eclipse Magazine #1.

The comic now became a Foozle story, as Creeper became a bird-like character name the Foozle and the Superman stuff in the comic was now about an adult female reporter who transforms into a super-powerful little girl.

Look at the story and see how this was clearly just a Superman/Creeper story with new names...

Rogers continued to write and draw Foozle stories for Eclipse (Englehart gave Rogers full ownership to the character) and they all spun out of a re-written DC Comics Presents story! Hilarious!


Check out my latest Movie Legends Revealed - How Close Did Robin Come to Being in Tim Burton’s Batman?


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!

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batshark

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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!