Obscure Things I've Written
In which we examine one of my very few jobs writing something for Marvel.
In late 2014, or perhaps early 2015, Katie Kubert (of the noble and renowned Kubert Comics Clan) was an editor at Marvel Comics, in charge of a relatively new series called Guardians Team Up. Taking advantage of the popularity of the Guardians of the Galaxy movie, it was a series of one-shot stories wherein every issue features a team-up between one of the Guardians characters and some other non-Guardian Marvel character.
If memory serves, she emailed me out of the blue, asking if I’d be interested in pitching a few ideas for one of these one-shot stories. I was and I did. In fact, the three ideas I pitched are printed below:
Marvel Ideas
In each case I’ve decided to set the action in some far away place, so as not to run afoul of current Marvel continuity in our neck of the woods. And, as you can see, these are not yet fully developed ideas. These are just three elevator pitches to determine where, if any, your interest might best lie in a more developed story idea.
1) Doctor Strange and Rocket Raccoon
Tone: This one would be a comedy of errors, with a few serious and action parts in the mix.
Far away, somewhere in the Galaxy, Sardak the Summoner (new character), a powerful alien sorcerer who specializes in summonings (of course) is ready to try becoming The Sorcerer Supreme – not just of this realm, but of every realm. First though he needs the best possible familiar. He summons Rocket Raccoon, who objects to being imprisoned. He also attempts to summon many powerful artifacts to help him in his coming war of conquest, including the Eye of Agamotto. Unfortunately Doctor Strange shows up with it. Doc Strange and Rocket team up to defeat the upstart sorcerer and save the day.
2) Nightcrawler and Gamora
Tone: This would be a swashbuckling, adventure jaunt.
In some galactic center the 648th Interstellar Blade Fighting Challenge is once more taking place. Nightcrawler has come to compete (being quite the swashbuckler), and fights his way to the semi finals where he finds himself pitted against Gamora. The winner of that bout will go on to fight Lord (something like Murderhands – a new character) of the Kree, the best blade fighter of all space. It turns out Nightcrawler and Gamora are actually there as a pre-planned ruse, to capture the Kree champion for his part in the infamous (Something) Massacre and take him to justice.
3) Drax and Doc Sampson
Tone: Straight adventure with some thrilling science inquiry.
On some world we start right in the middle of the mystery, as some of Marvel’s best-known strong man and women characters are being offloaded from an alien transport, to their new home on an alien planet. We’ll see a few cameos of well-known Marvel strong characters, who won’t be part of the central action, plus Drax and Doc Sampson, who will be part of the story to follow. It seems they’ve been captured by powerful slave-traders who attach themselves symbiotically to host bodies for all of their mobility and physical needs. And these weak (but strong minded) masters prize physical strength above all else, which is why they grab up the powerhouses. Drax has an allergic reaction to his symbiont and breaks the mind bond. Doc Sampson’s symbiont knows his host body has vast medical knowledge of humanoid spiecies and forces Doc to develop a cure, so his pal can have his slave body back. In the process Doc, who needs some free will in order to do the work, manages to develop a cure to the symbiosis, not the allergy, freeing everyone. Along the way, he and Drax team up to break a lot of things.
These were not full story pitches. In lingo commandeered from our friends in Hollywood, these are what’s known as elevator pitches, which means a very short pitch that can be fully delivered in the time you have some poor executive captive during one short elevator ride.
I invited Katie to pick the best of the three, which is what she did, preferring the Gamora-Nightcrawler team-up to the other two. And we were off to the races.
I’d written Nightcrawler one previous time, and like then, I preferred the dashing, swashbuckling Nightcrawler to the brooding, depressed one. Then again I tend to prefer my superheroes dashing and daring, along the Errol Flynn template, to the grim-dark versions still popular today.
It was eventually published as Guardians Team Up # 6, which you can get a peek at here:
