Welcome to the five hundred and eighty-fifth in a series of examinations of comic book legends and whether they are true or false. Click here for an archive of the first five hundred (I actually haven't been able to update it in a while). This week, was The Killing Joke originally meant to be out of continuity? Was the 1991 X-Men comic first intended to be part of a single bi-weekly X-Men team? Did Wally West's friend Chunk nearly have his own series?
Let's begin!
NOTE: The column is on three pages, a page for each legend. There's a little "next" button on the top of the page and the bottom of the page to take you to the next page (and you can navigate between each page by just clicking on the little 1, 2 and 3 on the top and the bottom, as well).
COMIC LEGEND: The Killing Joke was originally not meant to be in continuity.
STATUS: False
The Killing Joke is released today as a DC animated movie. Therefore, I thought today would be a good time to address a very common legend about the Killing Joke, specifically whether or not it was ever intended to be in continuity in the first place!
There is a long history of graphic novels that were never intended to be in continuity that were later added to continuity, like Mike W Barr and Jerry Bingham's Son of the Demon, which was later written into continuity with the introduction of Damian Wayne.
However, that was not the case with the Killing Joke. Alan Moore requested permission to make a permanent change to Barbara Gordon. He might not have felt that DC was going to stick with it as long as they did, but the idea at the time was that the events of The Killing Joke occurred in the DC Universe.
Barbara Kesel has confirmed this a number of times that she was hired to write the Batgirl special where Barbara Gordon retires as Batgirl specifically to set up The Killing Joke. It came out a week before The Killing Joke (March 22nd for the Batgirl Special, March 29th for The Killing Joke).
The Killing Joke was intended to be in continuity, the issue just was that no one had any concrete plans to follow it up, so it took John Ostrander and Kim Yale to step up and do it. I covered their invention of Oracle here.
Thanks to Barbara Kesel for being so open with this story over the years! I did a variation of this legend in my first book of Comic Book Legends Revealed.
Check out some entertainment and sports legends from Legends Revealed:
Did Batman Actually Kill Anyone in The Dark Knight Returns?
Did Vladimir Nabokov Work an Actual Baseball Headline Into One of His Novels?
Did a Blacklisted Writer Write for Lassie Using His Wife as a Front?
COMIC LEGEND: The 1991 X-Men spinoff series was originally going to star the same team as Uncanny X-Men!
STATUS: True
Everyone knows that in 1991, the original members of the X-Men, who had formed their own team called X-Factor, rejoined the rest of the X-Men, forming a huge team of X-Men, a team so big that they had to form two squads, with the Blue team starring in the new title, X-Men...
and the Gold team starring in Uncanny X-Men....
However, originally Marvel Editor-in-Chief Tom DeFalco intended that the new series would essentially work as a SECOND X-Men title, with both books starring the same characters.
Chris Claremont, however, objected, which he explained in Comics Interview # 98:
We had a dozen or more really superb characters: To have to cull them down to a half dozen – first of all, you’d be casting six characters into comic-book limbo, who would immediately be picked up for some other series, which would perpetuate the X-Factor mess.
Claremont is definitely correct that they would have been snapped right up. Whether that would have been for the better or the worse, I suppose, would depend on what books the characters would have ended up in.
Check out my latest TV Legends Revealed at Spinoff Online: What color shirt was REALLY the most dangerous one to wear if you were a crew member on the starship Enterprise?
COMIC LEGEND: Scott Lobdell's first comic book series was nearly a Chunk mini-series!
STATUS: True
Chunk is right up there with one of the most surprising supporting cast members of the late 1980s/early 1990s.
He was introduced by Mike Baron early in Wally West's Flash as an odd ball villain.
However, when William Messner-Loebs took over the title, he brought Chunk back and redeemed him, revealing that he was more misunderstood than anything (he was a morbidly obese guy who sucked things into another dimension - he was not the type of guy that a lot of people would easily get to know). He also used his powers to become a well-paid disposal of industrial waste (he'd just send it to the other dimension) and befriended Wally and became one of his best friends (either him or Pied Piper, also a reformed villain).
Mark Waid wrote Chunk out of the book when he took over (Loebs set it up well by having Chunk end up with Wally's estranged girlfriend) and he's been mostly in limbo since (Geoff Johns brought him back briefly during his Flash run).
However, for a brief time, Chunk was popular enough that he almost had his own series, which also would have been Scott Lobdell's first comic book series! Greg LaRoque revealed the information in this great SpeedForce interview by Greg Elias:
Here’s a bit of info from back then. Before Scott Lobdell hit it big at Marvel with his X-Men work, he & I developed a Chunk series for DC that got up to a final signature for approval when DC decided to hold off & it never got done.
Odds were that even if that had been approved, it wouldn't have exactly set the sales charts on fire, but who knows, maybe Lobdell would have been too busy for his early Marvel assignments and who knows how X-Men history could have been changed!
Thanks for the info, Gregs!
Okay, 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!
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!
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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!