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  1. #976
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    Quote Originally Posted by Shadowcat View Post
    Ahhh. Reusing plot ideas. Something Harras would do with Claremont’s rejected plots throughout the 90’s.
    Think everyone does that, but I can't imagine Michelinie, or for that matter Claremont, were happy with seeing ideas they pitched or got turned down being reintroduced after they've gone.

  2. #977
    Extraordinary Member TheCape's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Revolutionary_Jack View Post
    According to him, it was a combination of burnout, artistic disputes, and editorial disagreements. Michelinie worked a long time at ASM and obviously after a time juices start to dry up. That was also coupled with editorial arguments and disagreements with Danny Fingeroth. Fingeroth is not an entirely bad editor but he's also someone who has some set ideas that go against what the author wanted. Michelinie started his run with Jim Salicrup, the best editor on Spider-Man by a country mile and more. Then he left and Fingeroth came later on.

    Michelinie had the following issues with Fingeroth:
    -- Against his wishes, Fingeroth allowed Venom to start featuring outside of ASM and allowed other writers to put their spin on it, which Michelinie didn't want to happen for the duration of his run on ASM (after his run, he had no issues). Michelinie felt that Venom's main characteristics got diluted and watered down by other writers.
    -- Fingeroth also agreed and allowed Venom to become a solo title which again Michelinie didn't want, leading to Venom being an anti-hero. To maintain some control, Michelinie agreed to write the original series and it was during this time that he created Carnage to be the full-time villain that Venom was no longer allowed to be.
    -- Fingeroth foisted on him the "Robotparents" story. That was a story that Fingeroth thought would be cool as a concept and he imposed that on him, and Michelinie didn't care for or understand that entire concept and it was this that made him finally step away.

    Another issue is that Michelinie's pitches for big ambitious storylines were rejected. Michelinie came up with a story where Peter gets unmasked in public and outed as Spider-Man. This was to be a yearlong status-quo shift and change. Michelinie planned for the identity to become secret by using the same trick he used in his OGN Emperor Doom i.e. strap Purple Man to a power amplifier and use that to brainwash the world into forgetting Peter's secret. This would have led to the US government giving Peter and his family protection in exchange for him becoming a US sponsored operative and Peter gets uncomfortable with that. Yep, we could have had CIVIL WAR in the 90s by a writer who knew what he was doing.*

    Another issue for Michelinie was disputes with Erik Larsen, at least that's what he said or hinted in interviews. Obviously Larsen would give another side to that story. Apparently Michelinie felt, rightly or wrongly, that Larsen was undermining his scripts. He had some hiccups with Mark Bagley at first but they got along better eventually.



    * I think the connection between CIVIL WAR and Michelinie's rejected pitch isn't a coincidence. Tom Brevoort was in office at Marvel at the time, not as senior as he would become later on. It was Brevoort who suggested to Mark Millar to unmask Spider-Man in Civil War, which wasn't a plot that Millar had in mind at first. So that might be case of reusing vetoed ideas.
    Charles Soule also used the Purple Man thing to make Daredevil's identity a secret again during his run.
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  3. #978
    Y'know. Pav's Avatar
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    I'm excited to report that I've finally begun reading the Morbius Omnibus, and so far I'm really enjoying the earliest stories featuring ole Fang Face!

    The omnibus starts with Morbius' origin story, the classic Amazing Spider-Man issues that also feature the Lizard and Six-Armed Spidey! To be honest, I'd never actually read these issues before, although I was obviously familiar with them, and as a kid watched the cartoon adaptation of them -- and I gotta say, I really liked them a lot! I especially enjoyed how much of the story featured Curt Conners utilizing the body of the Lizard. But more importantly, I thought that Morbius was given a compelling, if brief introduction.

    The next couple stories are Marvel Team-Up issues that essentially retell the same story: Spidey tries to stop Morbius from bothering some scientist -- except in one story we get the Human Torch, then we get the X-Men.

    Luckily, these stories are soon replaced with comics in which Morbius himself gets to act as though protagonist! And as someone with strong ideas about what makes for a good Morbius story, I was pleased to find that even in his earliest forays as a lead character, his stories fit the dimensions that I believe work best for the character: walking a tightrope between horror stories with magic and demons and science fiction stories featuring all manner of monster and alien. Let me summarize the events of Steve Gerber's initial work with Morbius:

    1) Morbius is brainwashed by an evil priest to kill for him.
    2) The targets of the evil priest are able to help Morbius and reveal they are aliens acting as ancient human caretakers.
    3) Morbius attacks the evil priest, who summons a demon to protect himself and his thrall, Martine -- Morbius' true love!
    4) The demon reveals that it's not an unthinking beast, teleports away with Morbius, and reveals that he comes from a race of cat people created by human magicians and then banished to an inescapable world.
    5) Morbius is given the opportunity to prey on the cat people by their king but instead chooses to escape by river.
    6) Eventually, Morbius learns he's on a distant planet whose population is made up of genetic freaks who want to die (thanks to those original alien Caretakers) and, apparently, tribes made up of human women and robot men. The leader of the freaks, Lord I -- whose head is just an eye, of course! -- travels with Morbius back to Earth to stop the Caretakers.
    7) The rocket crashlands and is discovered by, of all people, Blade the Vampire Hunter, who finds Lord I dead with fang marks in his neck.

    What a crazy ride, right?!

    But, to me, this is what Morbius should be all about: insane adventures that make a living vampire seem almost normal by comparison! Nothing wrong with appearances from Spidey or Blade, but give me weirdos like alien eyeball men and demon-summoning sorcerers any day!

    -Pav, who looks forward to continuing on with the omnibus...
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  4. #979
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    Quote Originally Posted by TheCape View Post
    Charles Soule also used the Purple Man thing to make Daredevil's identity a secret again during his run.
    Interesting. Maybe he picked it up.

    But then Michelinie established the concept in his OGN Emperor Doom which was published in the late '80s. In that story, Doctor Doom kidnaps the Purple Man and straps him to a power amplifier to telepathically brainwash the world into accepting Doom as their Emperor and dictator. So the conceit of using Purple Man as a battery for a brainwashing machine was set up there, and after that it was open for any other writer to use that to get themselves out of any fixes they need to.

    Soule needed to have Daredevil's identity be secret again, Purple Man was a Daredevil or DD-adjacent villain, and it doesn't take much to think yeah Purple Man hypnotizes people checks out.

  5. #980
    Jewish & Proud Feminist Shadowcat's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Revolutionary_Jack View Post
    Think everyone does that, but I can't imagine Michelinie, or for that matter Claremont, were happy with seeing ideas they pitched or got turned down being reintroduced after they've gone.
    Oh, absolutely, but they were using Claremont’s rejected plots almost immediately after he left. From Fatal Attractions, and Wolvie losing his adamantium, to the use of the Phalanx, etc.
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  6. #981
    Loony Scott Taylor's Avatar
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    Claremont got to do a lot of his concepts the way he wanted to in Forever X-Men. Many of the things that happened in that series were familiar from stories we had seen previously, leading me to think that, yah, Marvel ran with a lot of those unused pitches sooner or later.
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  7. #982
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    Quote Originally Posted by Scott Taylor View Post
    Claremont got to do a lot of his concepts the way he wanted to in Forever X-Men. Many of the things that happened in that series were familiar from stories we had seen previously, leading me to think that, yah, Marvel ran with a lot of those unused pitches sooner or later.
    Claremont and Bob Harras had a big tiff and feud yeah. As an editor and later EIC, Harras is generally considered flawed and weak though I don't think everything he did was wrong.

    Rejected pitched and unused ideas being recycled later on is quite common.

    For instance back in the mid-90s, Tom Brevoort tried to pitch Roger Stern on an AU concept about Spider-Man if he grew up in real time. Stern didn't think he could make it work so he passed on it. Later Chip Zdarsky on his own pitched a concept for the entire Marvel Universe if it aged, and he wanted to do it as a maxi-series. Instead Brevoort convinced Zdarsky to focus on Spider-Man and make it a miniseries. And that led to LIFE STORY.

    Bill Mantlo tried to pitch the Spider-Man editors at the time and later to Jim Shooter himself on a plot of Spider-Man having a kid out of wedlock with Felicia Hardy but Shooter turned him down flat because it would upset many morality clauses they signed with licensees. That concept got revived for the Spider-Man DLC where Felicia lies to Peter about her pregnancy and his possible paternity of her child as a con.

    Arguably the most consequential example is of course the Rejected Superman 2000 Proposal where Mark Waid, Grant Morrison and Mark Millar proposed a story to shake up Superman and bring up a setup closer to what, they (a Southerner and two Scotsmen), thought was Superman's roots. Their idea was to have Superman's identity revealed, Lex Luthor and Brainiac attack him at the Fortress, Lois gets injured and Superman can't save her, so Mxyzsptlk offers to restore reality and undo what happened in exchange for Superman and Lois' marriage. As a parting gift, Mxy allows Superman and Lois, "one last, perfect day" together. That pitch didn't take and later Waid, Morrison and Millar came to Marvel and Mark Waid was a consultant of Joe Quesada and a supporter of OMD, and Morrison hinted that Waid was the one most big on nuking Superman and Lois' marriage. So yeah, OMD owes itself to a rejected Superman story.

  8. #983
    Loony Scott Taylor's Avatar
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    Oof! Wonder if that pitch for Superman has quite a few elements of Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow. Pretty derivative, actually, even if it ends completely differently.
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  9. #984
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    Quote Originally Posted by Scott Taylor View Post
    Oof! Wonder if that pitch for Superman has quite a few elements of Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow. Pretty derivative, actually, even if it ends completely differently.
    If you read the proposal they do mention Moore though in a different context:

    "Our absolute conviction is that we’ll have failed in our job if readers cheer when Lois and Superman are split. Everyone will be EXPECTING this to be the first thing we do. We have to make them love Mrs. Superman and THEN take it all away. This has to be universe-shattering romantic overload and when it’s over, it has to break every heart in the land. If it doesn’t, if we do it and nobody cares, we do a disservice to the Superman/Lois relationship. Now that this has happened, we can’t and won’t treat it as just a mistake without making it at least as meaningful a farewell to the Byrne/Jurgens era as Alan Moore’s Krypto deathscene was to the Weisinger legacy. We honestly feel pretty strongly that Lois Kent and the marriage deserve our best efforts before we get rid of them."
    https://sites.google.com/site/deepsp...-2000-proposal

    I'll give them props for at least a pretense of niceness to fans of the Supermarriage. Because there was no such niceness at all by Quesada and others when they did that story. The use of Mr. Mxyzsptlk is definitely based on what he did in the Moore story.

  10. #985
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    Quote Originally Posted by TheCape View Post
    I wasn't consistent reading, but i guest it was around four to five weeks, it was really hard to get througth some parts. Amd yes i'm planning on reading Ben Reilly trades next.
    Lol im worried about potentially the lows and having to slog through it. All the trades have so many pages too. I was able to read through tmnt idw collections and walking dead omnibus in a few days because i enjoyed it but I dont think thats a fair comparison of how long those will take.

  11. #986
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    Quote Originally Posted by Revolutionary_Jack View Post
    Arguably the most consequential example is of course the Rejected Superman 2000 Proposal where Mark Waid, Grant Morrison and Mark Millar proposed a story to shake up Superman and bring up a setup closer to what, they (a Southerner and two Scotsmen), thought was Superman's roots. Their idea was to have Superman's identity revealed, Lex Luthor and Brainiac attack him at the Fortress, Lois gets injured and Superman can't save her, so Mxyzsptlk offers to restore reality and undo what happened in exchange for Superman and Lois' marriage. As a parting gift, Mxy allows Superman and Lois, "one last, perfect day" together. That pitch didn't take and later Waid, Morrison and Millar came to Marvel and Mark Waid was a consultant of Joe Quesada and a supporter of OMD, and Morrison hinted that Waid was the one most big on nuking Superman and Lois' marriage. So yeah, OMD owes itself to a rejected Superman story.
    ...Holy f!*$(*# sh!t.

    You blew my mind. My god, thats insane. That might be the funniest bit of trivia in modern comics history. The worst Spider-Man story of all time is cribbing off of a rejected Superman pitch.

    I forgive Mark Waid tho. Superman: Birthright and his Daredevil run were good enough to give him a free pass on any future bad stories.

  12. #987
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    Quote Originally Posted by Matt Parker View Post
    My god, thats insane. That might be the funniest bit of trivia in modern comics history. The worst Spider-Man story of all time is cribbing off of a rejected Superman pitch.
    JMS confirmed in interviews that the main concept of OMD -- "Have Aunt May shot and Spider-Man trades his marriage to Mephisto" was Quesada's idea and mandate and not something that he came up with. So obviously the question is where did Joe Q get the idea from?

    Because Quesada is not a professional writer by trade or vocation (and as OMD and OMIT show, there's a reason for that) so obviously he picked up ideas and concepts in the ether. Quesada in interviews and stuff he put out in 2003-2004 said that he felt Spider-Man's marriage was a mistake but he didn't want to kill off Mary Jane (mostly because when he became EIC in 2000, she was "dead" in the comics and he saw that the titles didn't work without her and readership sunk) or divorce them. After it came out, he talked about wanting to find the right "methodology" which was his word for it. So obviously Quesada was shopping for retcon pitches and picked up suggestions and ideas wherever he could. And the Superman 2000 pitch conceived as it was for solving a similar problem to his, would have come to his attention. OMD was first conceptualized and outlined in 2004 or so.

    I forgive Mark Waid tho. Superman: Birthright and his Daredevil run were good enough to give him a free pass on any future bad stories.
    I like his story JLA:Tower of Babel, it was my introduction to the Justice League and the DC mainline continuity. It was good. I didn't care for Superman Birthright though. I hear good things about his Daredevil run but I haven't read it. A lot of people like Waid's story for BND -- "Unscheduled Stop" but I don't, and his other issues in that run failed to impress. His voice for Peter generally felt off...and there was certainly an air of condescension in it.

  13. #988
    Incredible Member Spidey_62's Avatar
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    All this stuff about the Superman pitch and Michellinie wanting to do the unmasking story is wild, yo. Really fascinating.

    I think Michellinie could've handled the unmasking really well. He had a great handle on the character through his long run, I think a story like that would have benefited from more focus like keeping it a Spider-Man story rather than making it part of an event like Civil War. I know some like the Civil War/Back in Black Spider-Man stuff but I don't care much for it. I think part of the problem was that internally it was always meant to end with One More Day which... doesn't help giving a satisfying resolution to the unmasking.

  14. #989
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    For years I blamed Civil War for OMD because I thought the unmasking created the perfect opportunity to do a retcon. It wasn't until recently that Millar confirmed the opposite was true. The unmasking only got approved because they knew OMD would happen. I remember being shocked at how coordinated and planned-in-advance a bad story like OMD was.

  15. #990
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    Quote Originally Posted by Kaitou D. Kid View Post
    For years I blamed Civil War for OMD because I thought the unmasking created the perfect opportunity to do a retcon. It wasn't until recently that Millar confirmed the opposite was true. The unmasking only got approved because they knew OMD would happen. I remember being shocked at how coordinated and planned-in-advance a bad story like OMD was.
    Yeah you would think if they had that much time they would take effort to make a good job out of it. In actual practice one of the reasons for why OMD was such a s--tshow was that there were many improvisations and left turns happening after that which took turns in different directions and all of that sabotaged that story. The broad idea of the plan for OMD was hatched in 2004. The first story that JMS wrote with full knowledge of the reboot was Sins' Past and he wrote that extreme of a story with the idea of it being an experiment that if it fell flat would be retconned out anyway in short order. Or so he was led to believe, and he has said multiple times he wanted OMD to retcon it. Then other stuff got in the way. Obviously the "unmasking" wasn't planned at the start and was an improvisation.

    JMS in interviews said that he had many objections to how OMD turned out. Originally he wanted Aunt May to get shot and then immediately lead into OMD feeling that the short time window would help explain the desperation that would justify Peter doing what he did. Instead for some reason (I think partly to give a longer window to BND's writing team to get the first issues out on time), editorial asked him to delay it and pad it out so you had an entire bunch of stories for months which took place across multiple Spider-Man titles while Aunt May was in the hospital on her deathbed. On one hand this was good because we got Back in Black (a story that is basically JMS expressing his frustration and finding some catharsis at the stupid mess he said yes to) and also Matt Fraction's "To Have and to Hold" which Fraction said was a pre-emptive protest against OMD which he knew was coming and which he disagreed with. But on the other hand, JMS was absolutely right in that it killed any tension to May's death because audiences no longer felt emotionally invested in if she was hospitalized in a dying state while at the same time Peter and MJ have romantic idlylls atop ESB and Peter goes smorgasbord on the Kingpin, and gets into a boxing ring with Jonah. JMS also wanted Peter to be the one to say yes to Mephisto and objected to Quesada's idea of MJ being the one to do it. There was also the other objections that he wanted to explain the changes at the end, and even then he wanted to use it to retcon out Sins' Past and so on. Quesada also let JMS believe for a long time that he could actually alter stuff so Gwen could live, and this was an idea that Quesada was open to for a while but he didn't manage that message well. And that's why JMS took his name off the final issues which were entirely written by Joe Q.

    But fundamentally I think the truth is that Marvel simply didn't care for OMD. Quesada approached that story nihilistically as a means to an end, obviously not caring that it turn out good or not so much as what he can get out of it. And I think that attitude, the nihilism and insincerity of it all, that was so manifest in the content of the final story that it pretty much damage and ruined morale for the fandom and poisoned the well for BND that came afterwards and that's why the controversy of it never died. OMD is the last truly important story in 616 Spider-Man. Everything that comes after whether in Slott's run or even in Spencer's run isn't lasting or permanent in terms of status-quo. But OMD is. It's a story far more important than anything that came after and it's also the single worst story in the last two decades or so. Marvel Universe villains are always considered villains for believing "the ends justify the means" but this was a case where Marvel Editorial openly and blatantly practised that and got away with it.

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