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From Comics International:
Q - I read recently about a possible apocryphal story regarding Chris Claremont using Alan Moore’s Captain Britain ideas in X-Men circa #200. Is this true?
A - PH again, hogging the limelight: Okay, my time frame here might be a little screwy but I’ll have a go at this.
One big can of worms here. Alan Moore fell out with Marvel after they reprinted his Doctor Who backup strips in the US Doctor Who editions without his permission (tisk, tisk!). Moore wasn’t happy about this and vowed never to work for the company again. Later adding DC to the “never again” folder, this might explain his work for Rob Liefeld as he’d already ruled out Fleetway and didn’t last too long at Image.
Chris Claremont, who was unaware of the political problems brewing, introduced Sir James Jaspers into Uncanny X-Men #200. His intention was to have the Alan Moore Captain Britain support character infiltrate and eventually have a Jaspers’ Warp in this reality with the X-teams as the main thrust in the line-spanning story.
Moore was unhappy about the Jaspers appearance and severed any chance of a reconciliation.
Now I get hazy because while I know what I was told, I’m not sure of the legalities. There is a glaring difference between US and UK copyright laws and Marvel’s lawyers allegedly recommended to Marvel that they avoid Moore’s creations and story ideas. Legalising would cost Marvel a lot of money and wasted time so the upshot was they dumped the X-Men: Jaspers’ Warp idea. A friend of mine interviewed John Romita Jr who said that he was “really looking forward to playing with some of the cool characters that Moore and Alan Davis had created for the Captain Britain strip”. Amazingly, Claremont had intentions of not only introducing Jaspers from the UK Captain Brain stories, but also the Special Executive and the Fury (which at one point was firmly on the cards, as Alan Davis and Mike Collins had resurrected the Fury in Sid’s Story and there was more of a haze around the character’s ownership).
So, the Special Executive became the Technet, but what happened to the Fury? Romita also said there would be hints and subplots in other Marvel comics. I was out of the loop at the time, but perhaps others noticed odd things happening in their Marvel comics during 1986.
I have also heard that Marvel insisted on a reference to the Jaspers Warp in a post-Moore Captain Britain (I think this was Mike Collins’ Sid’s Story again) and there was also a mention of Jaspers’ Warp in an early issue of Excalibur. Then Claremont became privy to all the politicking and immediately rewrote his impending blockbuster and subsequently what Romita had suggested might be the equivalent of a DC Crisis story (hot on the heels of the real one) was laid to rest.
Around 1990, I stumbled across a lot of stuff about Claremont and Marvel’s plans. I was putting together a column called Hypotheticals: What might have happened in Alan Moore’s Marvel Universe. From what I can remember, the Marvel Jaspers’ Warp storyline was to begin in X-Men #200.
Jim Jasper was introduced as the typical English baddie. The only person capable of stopping him, Charles Xavier, was exiled back to space because his cloned body was packing up. The issues went very much the way they were planned to for six months, but then changes were made. Originally, Nimrod – the futuristic sentinel living as a Hispanic good bloke in the ghetto, was to stumble upon the remains of an entity that entered our reality through a hole in the spaceitime continuum. Nimrod was to accidentally merge with the Fury and become not only indestructible, but also very smart. “Doc Doom times a googolplex” was one of the lines I read.
From this point on, you’ll see what did happen in between the cracks of what didn’t: Romita was leaving, so Alan Davis was asked to do it. He declined because of the creative restrictions. The Mutant Massacre was to have been committed solely by the Nimrod/Fury hybrid. He would eventually be stopped by Kitty phasing through him and disrupting his circuits. However, Kitty, Nightcrawler, Colossus and new character Longshot, were to have been relocated to Muir Island for medical attention and to work with Captain Britain.
Kitty was to be critically injured, as was Nightcrawler. Colossus was sent as protection and as a perfect foil for Brian Braddock, who Kitty would develop a crush on. Mutants, good bad or indifferent would begin to flock to Xavier’s and with Phoenix II conveniently out of the way and Kitty and Braddock in Scotland, there were no members to see the parallels with Days of Future Past or with the Jaspers’ Warp.
America would be in the thralls of mutant hysteria and Magneto – now in charge of the X-Men – would have to make some decisions that would affect the status quo. Allegiances would be formed with villains and new players, including Mr Sinister and others, would become prominent mutants through their covert ways.
The UN would decree mutants a menace and Jaspers would meet Nimrod and subsequently become aware he too was a mutant. Unlike the Jaspers’ Warp, these two would become allies, or at least that is what Jaspers would believe. With reality falling apart and Nimrod culling mutants, Forge would be drawn into battle and what happened in the Fall of the Mutants story is essentially what was written, with the exception of the big fight scene and the denouement. Instead of being impervious to detection, the mutants who ventured into the Seige Perilous would return, with the warps they had undergone (some of this was used in Inferno, too).
X-Men was going to be a much darker comic and Excalibur the lighter side. X-Factor and New Mutants would pick up the pieces and rebuild mutant/human relations. And so now you know! (Whew!)" |
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