Mark Millar and Greg Land were going to be the ones to relaunch Thor, but then decided to do the Ultimate Fantastic Four run instead. JMS did the Thor relaunch instead.
Things That Almost Happened
Austin Collins
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Hunter Moore
Jeph Loeb was going to be the writer on All Star Batman, with Jim Lee doing the first six issues, and Art Adams doing the second arc, which would've been about Man-Bat. They even had Art Adams start work on pages (because he'd get a head start), but then Loeb decided to go over to Marvel.
Adams posted some pages years ago:
Ryder Rodriguez
Lilith Clay's father Loren Jupiter (who financed the silver age TT team) was originally going to take Maxwell Lord's role in Infinite Crisis cause he was mad at his daughter dying in Titans: Graduation Day.
Which really just makes more sense than Maxwell Lord who was just evil the entire time (?).
>his daughter dies
>nobody even cares she died, unlike Donna who died in the same event and even got Outsiders created because of her death
>the Titans keep on trucking as a team
>he blames superheroes for failing to stop her death
>steals Brother Eye and tries to kill all superheroes
>surprise her father is actually where Lilith got her powers from and her dad is 10x better than her at using them
Some old fogies like me may vaguely remember some teaser to Infinite Crisis that looked like Batman holding a dead body (which would've been Dick due to being Titan's leader), but unless they had Jupiter killing Kord (which makes no sense) or didn't originally have Kord dying (which is unlikely considering his death was actually important to later stories), my guess is they replaced Dick with Kord due to changing it to Maxwell and then moved Dick's death to later on (which got replaced by Superboy).
Ian Baker
Superman 2000.
I imagine Superman wouldn't have been some has been had it happened.
John Rodriguez
Millar seems to have soft spot for the FF. Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch were originally going to do Astonishing X-Men after Ultimates 2 ended, but passed on that to do Fantastic Four. And McNiven would have done a different X-Men book with Millar, but ended up doing Old Man Logan instead.
Hunter Cruz
I don't know for sure. Patrick Zircher talked about Loeb's conflicts with DC when he was on Superman:
bleedingcool.com
>So Our Worlds at War was a kill fest. The teams lost the readers' faith. People who never read Superman suddenly hated the Superman teams. Sales dropped. As sales dropped, the writers lost clout and had pre-approved stories axed.
>DC management was also changing. More on this in a second. But the Loeb teams had a multi-year arc approved by Jennette Khan and Eddie Berganza that went out the window around the time Loeb quit [in 2002, around the same time Khan left]. They just had Luthor discover Superman's identity and were told… NO. Can't advance that plot. Have to reverse it. This threw out years worth of planning while Loeb was dealing with his kid's cancer.
>So he walked. And he came back to Superman/Batman but he had a lot of demands (choosing collaborators, pay for collaborators) and was basically able to do whatever he wanted so long as DiDio didn't veto it. And that's what it reads like. This is a guy handed carte blanche. And then his son died towards the end and some drama happened and Mark Millar invited him to go to Marvel.
Bentley Gonzalez
>In some ways, Loeb and DiDio got along super-well. DiDio greenlit stuff Levitz probably wouldn't have. He hired Loeb for All-Star Batman. (Frank Miller was a replacement hire. There's a first issue in a drawer somewhere of a Loeb/Art Adams All-Star Batman #1.) But he also made Loeb's job harder and kept wanting to tinker with some things in the opposite direction.
>Loeb was always trying to fuse the Byrne continuity with the Silver-Age so that you'd just have one 75 year Superman continuity like what Morrison later did with Batman. DiDio wasn't keen on that and neither was Waid, exactly. Waid loves the Silver Age as a fan but he's the first guy to throw it into the woodchipper if he thinks something is silly, unrealistic, or embarrassing. (Johns shared an office with Loeb.)
>The tug of war gave us Superman origin reboots about every 18 months. And Loeb more or less walked from the monthly Superman book at the start of that because he wanted a stable run.
I think it'd all depend on if Didio gets the job overseeing DC or not.
Elijah Gonzalez
What was Superman 2000 gonna be about?
Evan Ross
Oh it's also worth noting how it fits with how Didio said Graduation Day is where everything started.
With Maxwell Graduation Day is nothing but "why Dick is a massive ass and is leading Outsiders" but with Jupiter it's easier to see the snowball effect.
Robert Walker
It used a lot of things that you later see in their other respective projects.
One draft of the outline was going to get rid of the Super-Marriage. Another draft (that came out of the argument that the first draft meant that the villains won against Superman in a way) had the marriage intact.
But a lot of it was about doing new spins on certain things. Like Metallo would have Red Kryptonite instead of Green, and the Red Kryptonite would give Superman more horrifying transformations (you see this in Waid's Brave and the Bold run). Toyman was going to be Winslow's ghost possessing a figure, or something.
The origin would be changed somewhat too, like a young Clark seeking out the JSA to train under, or something like that. Vegetarian Clark from Birthright also came from this pitch (ironically, both Morrison and Millar, who I think were both vegetarians at the time started eating meat years later anyway). The description of the Fortress seems kind of like the Fortress in All Star Superman, although in the pitch they replaced the Bottle City of Kandor with Qwewq (which Morrison later used in JLA Classified, Seven Soldiers, and All Star Superman) and had the idea that Superman sometimes traveled to that Earth as Hyperman.
Zachary Lopez
Hey, remember when Jeph Loeb was going to do a spider-man series with J Scott Campbell? but then it just disappeared? Good stuff
Chase Russell
Probably editorial at that time was aware of Campbell's slowness
Alexander Perry
Loeb and J Scott Campbell completes three issues of what was going to be Spider-Man’a Long Halloween but Peter revealing his identity got it scrapped
Parker Gomez
I can't even remember what that Millar run was about.
Isaiah Clark
Shit, I wrote Zircher instead of Patrick Gerard
Anyway, that link leads to the CBR thread:
Gerard mentioned this later in that thread:
>He had some stuff planned circa his Superman run I was excited about. A giant monster/Pokémon mashup that became a subplot but which was going to be a treasury book with McGuiness.
I assume that was what some pages like this one in Superman #177 was foreshadowing.
Easton Evans
Millar's Ultimate Fantastic Four was the one that introduced the Marvel Zombies/Zombie Fantastic Four.
Charles Perez
McGuiness is one of the best Superman artists he gets his face so good
Ryder Martinez
I came across another thread where Patrick Gerard talked about Didio approving certain pitches:
community.cbr.com
>Dan was bombarded with pitches from people who wanted to bring back Kara, Barry, Hal, etc.
>Those pitches never stopped. Jurgens would have brought back Kara in 1992 if they'd let him. Jeph Loeb had to get approval from Jenette Khan to bring back Krypto. Paul Levitz wanted some of the old characters back but didn't have the power to do it on his own.
>Dan was granting pitches that never stopped coming in going back to 1986 because he had a special power arrangement to say yes to these things.
>And he would say "yes" if it installed a character that was easier to explain to his bosses at WB because WB didn't want to have to literally adapt characters and storylines. They wanted characters who could be summed up in an image and 1-3 sentences that could be handed off to a director who never has to do research.
Didn't Jurgens' Superman/Aliens introduce a version of Kara?
Jose Powell
Rick Remender was going to take over the X-Men line after Secret Wars, but ended up leaving Marvel for good instead, apparently in part because he didn't want to deal with the Inhuman editorial mandate.
Jace Rogers
Gillen was originally going to do Thor for Marvel Now!, but Jason Aaron got the book instead, and he stayed there for 7 years.
Joseph Peterson
We almost got a Mort movie.
Hudson Fisher
>>So Our Worlds at War was a kill fest. The teams lost the readers' faith. People who never read Superman suddenly hated the Superman teams.
What about Our Worlds at War pissed people off?
Jaxson Roberts
Speaking of the Inhumans push, Matt Fraction was supposed to have written the ongoing Inhumans series but was taken off the title prior to release due to creative differences
Isaac Phillips
Who would watch a movie about that gross animal with the foot fetish
Luke Gutierrez
Joe Casey being a retarded drug addict
Jace Scott
Damn, crazy to think Maxwell's character was so close to being saved
Sebastian Roberts
>Gillen was originally going to do Thor for Marvel Now!, but Jason Aaron got the book instead, and he stayed there for 7 years.
>Marvel Now! was 7 years ago.
What the actual fuck.
Luke Watson
New 52 was 9 years ago
DCYou was 5 years ago
Rebirth was 4 years ago
Tick tock user
Landon Kelly
The creative differences being that Matt Fraction had a long complex Game of Thrones-style run mostly focusing on the Royal Family politics planned out while Marvel just wanted a safe vehicle to create not-mutants that they could push in other books.
Bentley Flores
And clearly it payed off, everyone loves the Inhuman Torch, I mean Inferno.