Abandoned stories they should revive?

[Riv86672]

This was a great loss.

Peace

^^^Yes it was.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Walt Simonsin did a GREAT job on the original crossover; it was beautifully drawn, but I’d have loved to see George Perez's take on the All New All Different era X-Men!

Outside of X-MEN ANNUAL 3…

…he never really got a chance to play w. them, which is a real shame.
Seeing him get to draw them AND the Teen Titans interacting? Wow that would’ve been something.

[K7P5V]

^^^I know, right?! They gave him another chance during the Heroes Return era, though...

[HestiasHearth]

Wow, Brother Blood and the Hellfire Club?? That sounds awesome.

[marhawkman]

Yeah the era of DC and Marvel collaborating was interesting.

[K7P5V]

Yeah the era of DC and Marvel collaborating was interesting.

Agreed. Too bad it couldn't last. Truly a sad loss.

[Crimz]

Fantastic Four vol 3 #2 had a plot where an assassin tried to take down Sue because only she could see him. I find the idea of an invisible foe in which only Sue could see pretty interesting, and he is just out there.

I'm really hoping to see him return... yet there's a lot from Lobdell's short (but actually decent) FF run that went nowhere.

Was gonna say this. The Iconoclast story has potential with her dooming his people in the future. It would be an interesting story for her and could lead to more complexity for the character. With the event that leads to him trying to kill her being in the future, it’s a storyline that can be easily picked back up anytime.

[Riv86672]

^^^I know, right?! They gave him another chance during the Heroes Return era, though...

^^^I think the Beast’s treatment since then by the X-office and culminating in the Krakoa era gives a lot of credence to that middle panel.

[Nomads1]

Rafael Suarez - Lazerfist. Was he slated to become a FF member?

I've always wondered why they didn't do more with that character.

^^^I hated that he (Mantlo) and Byrne switched books, only for Byrne to leave way too soon, and Mantlo stay on Alpha Flight way too long.

Yeah, Mantlo's Alpha Flight was, to say the least, an aquired taste. It did introduce me to Dave Ross' art though, which came to be a favorite of mine.

^^^Yes it was.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Walt Simonsin did a GREAT job on the original crossover; it was beautifully drawn, but I’d have loved to see George Perez's take on the All New All Different era X-Men!

Outside of X-MEN ANNUAL 3…

…he never really got a chance to play w. them, which is a real shame.
Seeing him get to draw them AND the Teen Titans interacting? Wow that would’ve been something.

IMHO, one of the X-Men's best issues ever (it was an annual, I know). I loved it.

^^^I know, right?! They gave him another chance during the Heroes Return era, though...

For all I care, the X-Men could have kept Wolverine and left the Beast with the Avengers. The X-office has ruined the character in such a way, that they've had pratically to reboot 40 years of his existence. And they'll probably ruin that too.

Peace

[FFJamie94]

Was gonna say this. The Iconoclast story has potential with her dooming his people in the future. It would be an interesting story for her and could lead to more complexity for the character. With the event that leads to him trying to kill her being in the future, it’s a storyline that can be easily picked back up anytime.

Marvel should hand the keys to Fantastic Four to me and I'll tell a story that would rival Hickman's and Kirby's.

All joking aside, I'm surprised it hasn't come back up yet, especially as we tend to get more stories surrounding how Reed is kind of an ass.

[Riv86672]

Yeah, Mantlo's Alpha Flight was, to say the least, an aquired taste. It did introduce me to Dave Ross' art though, which came to be a favorite of mine.

Peace

^^^Ha, so true.
He did ‘Alpha Flight in space’ w. Jim Lee art, which I really enjoyed.

For all I care, the X-Men could have kept Wolverine and left the Beast with the Avengers. The X-office has ruined the character in such a way, that they've had pratically to reboot 40 years of his existence. And they'll probably ruin that too.

Peace

^^^Quoted for truth. Lousy X-bastiches.

[shooshoomanjoe]

The Mutant Wars. I was so stoked for this crossover but we got X-Tinction Agenda instead (which I actually liked). This reddit post has the info on the Mutant Wars xover that I copied and posted:

The year is 1990. Marvel Comics is at the height of its popularity in the era, the speculator boom has only just begun and hasn't collapsed the comic industry yet, and the X-Men titles are the best selling books in pretty much all of comics.

In the era before the popular adoption of home internet, previews and hints for coming events were few and far between.

But fear not, True Believers... enter: Marvel Age.

The Age of Marvel... Age
Marvel Age was a magazine that ran from 1983 to 1994, which contained several different sections, parody comics, etc, but most notably included a section on Coming Attractions, previews and announcements for future stories and books. If you wanted to know what was going on with Marvel, this was one of the best ways to get the information. But even the normal Marvel Age wasn't quite enough, so there was a brief release of a secondary book, only two issues ever released: Marvel Age Preview.

And it's in the first issue, Marvel Age Preview 1990, that our story begins.

It's 1990, Do You Know What Your Children Are?
The X-Men had been the best selling book at Marvel for a while, the book that everyone wanted to read. This was in no small part to Chris Claremont's role as the head writer and overall director of the X-Men line, responsible for the last sixteen years of storytelling (aided by former editor Louise Simonson, nee Jones) that was tightly controlled and managed, dancing between editorial mandates and making the most of them when they were enforced on him.

However, nothing lasts forever, and a new influence was finally managing to push back against sixteen years of momentum - a new crop of creative influence from a young crop of eager artists. Their artwork, a sharp contrast to what had come before, was new and dynamic and drawing far more attention than others had before. Classic and traditional artists were pushed aside for these new and exciting young kids, ready to stake their claim in the world of comics, full of energy and ambition and that invincibility of youth that made them sure they knew better than the "old crew" at comics.

This will matter later.

The Mutant Wars
However, in June 1990, at least at the time, it still seemed like Claremont was in control, as the first issue of Marvel Age Preview 1990 teased readers with the next big X-Men crossover: The Mutant Wars.

X-Men crossovers had been a nearly annual staple since the Mutant Massacre crossover of 1986, Fall of the Mutants of 1988, and Inferno of 1989. The first major X-Men event of 1990 was part of the "Family Ties" thematic crossover of Annual issues (books often published on a month with 5 Wednesdays to fill out the schedule), Days of Future Present. The ad for it promised the return of the Franklin Richards from the Days of Future Past timeline, heralding doom and that the presumed avoidance of that dark timeline had not worked, and their future was still in peril.

But most interestingly, the bottom of that ad revealed that Days of Future Present was merely prologue:

"Days of Future Present" sets the stage for The Mutant Wars - coming this Fall.

And readers would only need to turn a few more pages before finally learning what this mysterious new event, The Mutant Wars, would be: the seeming culmination of plot threads throughout the years, diverging groups of mutants on both the sides of good and evil coming into climactic battle with one another, with the future of mutantkind at stake!

Mutant against mutant, faction against faction, each trying to be the strongest - the survivors. As seen on "Days of Future Past," the future is bleak. The lines have already been drawn, and the mutants in the Marvel Universe have formed their allegiances:

The Hellfire Club

Apocalypse's forces

Sebastian Shaw's renegade faction of The Hellfire Club

The re-formed X-Men

X-Factor

The Marauders

The New Mutants, led by their mysterious new leader, Cable

Legion, controlled by Farouk, in turn controlling Moira McTaggert

A Tight Crossover: The first salvo in the Mutant Wars will cross from X-Men into New Mutants to Excalibur to X-Factor for three months this fall. The action will run in a tight continuity from each issue to the next.

Only the four mutant titles will be directly involved. The heroes will try to stop the other mutants from splitting warring factions. But for most, survival is the issue, even if it means sacrificing fellow mutants.

Questions Answered: Before we reach "The Mutant Wars," we have to answer some key questions and resolve some major storylines. The new X-Men team will have to be established, and the world will have to learn that they are still alive.

A New Beginning: Once begun, "The Mutant Wars" will continue to effect the lives of every mutant in the Marvel Universe for years to come. It will be the most important event in the mutant milieu since the death of Phoenix.

The story was promised to take place over a dozen issues across three titles:

New Mutants #95-97

Uncanny X-Men #267-269

X-Factor #60-62

Excalibur #28-30

With about five issues to go from the time of Marvel Age Preview 1990's publication, everyone was incredibly excited to see this culmination of years of stories, and who would stand tall at the end of The Mutant Wars!

The Crossovers We Got
Unfortunately... The Mutant Wars never came to be. As mentioned above, the new crop of artists were taking more and more control of the books. And while the full details aren't known of why it happened, we know what happened - that when the issues that were supposed to be the story for The Mutant Wars came around, the promised event was nowhere to be found.

Uncanny X-Men #267-269 wound up being a trio of one-shot stories about Storm, Wolverine, and Rogue. Excalibur #28-30 were completely disconnected from the rest of the X-Men line, telling stories focusing around Meggan. As for the New Mutants and X-Factor issues, they along with Uncanny X-Men #270-272 are part of a crossover that did happen: X-Tinction Agenda, a nine-part crossover across the three books focusing on the fictional anti-mutant apartheid state of Genosha.

The promised massive inter-mutant conflict never came to be. Some elements, including the return of a new team of X-Men and the battle against the Farouk-controlled Legion were later used in the Muir Island Saga, the storyline that truly was the handover from Claremont and Simonson to the new creative teams, having been effectively forced out of control of the books they'd written for now seventeen years. The plot threads leading to The Mutant Wars were either pivoted into other stories or simply left hanging and ignored, and the full details of what disrupted a story that had been promised only months ahead of time has never been fully fleshed out.

All that we know is that when X-Men #1, the promised best selling comic of all time (which would succeed in its promise at over 8,000,000 units), artist Jim Lee's name took top billing over Chris Claremont, who would write three issues before leaving Marvel altogether in 1992.

The End of a (Marvel) Age
To this day, Marvel Age Preview 1990 is the only published, official references to The Mutant Wars, a crossover that never happened. If not for this odd, obscure book published in one of the most contentious and controversial periods of Marvel's history and the X-Men in particular, it would have been lost to time. We'll never know who would have stood triumphant at the end of The Mutant Wars. The X-Men line is still going strong and many of the characters involved are still top billing to this day, so perhaps the true victors, even if the Mutant Wars never truly happened, have been the readers in the decades since, still enjoying the X-Men.

[Cap808]

It's a damn shame that we never got to see Richard Rider lead the Annihilators.

[Sutekh]

Rafael Suarez - Lazerfist. Was he slated to become a FF member?

Oh wow, I have never heard of this guy! He sounds interesting!

[Blunt Guy]

Anybody remember the elf knocking on front doors and shooting people in the early Defenders issues? It was never explained.

[Riv86672]

Anybody remember the elf knocking on front doors and shooting people in the early Defenders issues? It was never explained.

^^^Ha, I remember that damned Elf!
Other ppl do too, this is worth a look…: