In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, discover what happened when a Solo Avengers story was paid for but had become 'unusable.' Hilarity ensued.

Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the eight hundred and thirty-fifth 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 part of this installment's legends. Click here for the second part of this installment's legends.

NOTE: If my Twitter page hits 5,000 followers, I'll do a bonus edition of Comic Book Legends Revealed that week. Great deal, right? So go follow my Twitter page, Brian_Cronin!

COMIC LEGEND:

After paying for a Solo Avengers story, another issue of Solo Avengers rendered the purchased story unusable, so Marvel gave it to an artist to go crazy with it in the pages of Marvel Super-Heroes.

STATUS:

True

As you may be aware of, there was a Marvel ongoing series called Solo Avengers that ran for a few years in the late 1980s/early 1990s. The concept was just what it sounded like, short solo features starring members of the Avengers who otherwise didn't have their own titles. The whole thing was built around a lead feature of Hawkeye, perhaps the most popular Avenger at the time who never had his own series. Eventually, when Marvel decided, "Hey, shouldn't we have the Avengers books next to each other on the comic book racks?" West Coast Avengers and Solo Avengers were re-named Avengers West Coast and Avengers Spotlight, respectively.

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In any event, as I detailed in a post awhile back, Solo Avengers #18 was used to address an open-ended plotline from West Coast Avengers. You see, there had been a superhero team known as the Texas Rangers, consisting of Texas Twister, Shooting Star, Red Wolf (from Roy Thomas' Avengers), a version of the Phantom Rider and a new character, Firebird...

Steve Englehart started using Firebird as a character in West Coast Avengers (back when the team was looking for a sixth member). In West Coast Avengers #8 (by Englehart, Al Milgrom and Joe Sinnott), Firebird's old team came to find her and presumably take her back to them...

However, right when Firebird was about to go back to her old team, she suddenly sensed that Shooting Star was possessed!!

The Avengers thought that the Rangers would try to resolve things peacefully, but instead, they all attack the Avengers!

In the end, Firebird is able to get through and cancel out the spell that "Shooting Star" had used on the other Rangers to get them to follow her...

As I noted in that earlier post, the story was resolved in Solo Avengers #18, in a Hawkeye story. However, BEFORE that, Marvel first paid artist Paul Neary and an unknown writer to do a Solo Avengers story starring Doctor Druid that would have resolved the story. The issue, of course, is that as I've pointed out before, Doctor Druid sort of went evil and was written out of the Avengers, so I suspect that the timing didn't work out. And once the Hawkeye story came out, now you couldn't do the Druid story later on, when Druid was brought back and sort of redeemed, since it would no longer make sense since the other story had already resolved the plot in a whole other way.

So Marvel, hilariously, just let Rick Parker (the longtime Marvel letterer who was about to become the artist on Beavis and Butthead) take the pages that Neary had drawn and come up with a new plot based on the pages (along with drawing some new pages of his own and altering Neary's art at times) and Parker came up with a delightfully bizarre story that was finally published in the final issue of Marvel Super-Heroes (#15) in 1993.

Rick recently recalled how it all went down on his Facebook page:

About 30-something years ago, after lettering comics for Marvel for years and feeling a need to let off a little creative steam, I approached the late executive Editor of Marvel Comics, Mark Gruenwald and asked him if he had any stories Marvel wasn't using and that were just collecting dust in a drawer somewhere...........for which I could write some humorous dialogue.Mark liked trying new things. He was good that way.Anyway...this wound up being the first --or one of the first multi-page stories I ever wrote for Marvel. I just had the pencils--so I studied them and then fashioned a story from what Paul Neary had drawn and my own imagination.I also lettered and inked it.

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Texas Twister just finds Doctor Druid chilling in Fiji and fills him in on the problem with Shooting Star...

marvel-super-heroes-15-1

The following page was clearly meant to be on the Avengers headquarters at the time the story was originally drawn, Hydrobase, but Parker just has some fun with it (as well with Druid's incantations)...

marvel-super-heroes-15-2

Here, Parker even works in a nod to Paul Neary...

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Daimon Hellstrom (called "Heckstorm" here) helps out and it is interesting, as Parker seems to clearly alter Hellstrom here, but otherwise the rest of the page seems to be by Neary...

marvel-super-heroes-15-4

And an original art fan has the original page and you can see that it literally has Solo Avengers crossed out!

solo-avengers-paul-neary

Interestingly, the #15 ISN'T crossed out, so it would be funny if it was meant for Solo Avengers #15 and instead ended up in the 15th issue of ANOTHER series entirely, four years later!

Anyhow, Druid saves the day and Shooting Star is back...

marvel-super-heroes-15-5

Parker, at the time, had been doing this regular comic strip bit for Marvel's Bullpen Bulletins starring Tom DeFalco and Mark Gruenwald, so, of course, they make a cameo appearance at the end of the story!

marvel-super-heroes-15-6

Funny stuff. I'd love to find out who wrote the original story! Thanks to Rick Parker for the extra behind-the-scenes parts of the story!

CHECK OUT A TV LEGENDS REVEALED!

In the latest TV Legends Revealed - See how Colorforms started a little revolution when Strawberry Shortcake wouldn't let companies license it for different kinds of toys, like Colorforms.

MORE LEGENDS STUFF!

OK, that's it for this installment!

Thanks to Brandon Hanvey for the Comic Book Legends Revealed logo, which I don't even actually anymore, but I used it for years and you still see it when you see my old columns, so it's fair enough to still thank him, I think.

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is cronb01@aol.com. And my Twitter feed is http://twitter.com/brian_cronin, so you can ask me legends there, as well! Also, if you have a correction or a comment, feel free to also e-mail me. CBR sometimes e-mails me with e-mails they get about CBLR and that's fair enough, but the quickest way to get a correction through is to just e-mail me directly, honest. I don't mind corrections. Always best to get things accurate!

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