How the New Warriors might have been the Young Avengers.

Oliver De Guzman posted a photo snipbit from the Marvel: The Untold Story which talks about Liefeld, Valentino, Larsen, McFarlane, and the rest of the folks who would go on to begin Image Comics.

This started a conversation about New Warriors volume 2 which included Nova, which at the same time, had Nova being written and drawn by Erik Larsen. This evolved into Tyler Ouellette pointing out that Liefeld was involved in a pitch for Young Avengers which would have used Marvel Boy (now Justice) and Firestar.

Digging into this, I found Rob’s site that discusses this on Rob Liefeld Creations where he discusses the Young Avengers pitch that he and Valentino were interested in doing. (Click the Young Avengers pitch to go to Rob’s site).

I wanted to capture some of it here –

The blog was posted April 26, 2010. And Rob specifically mentions that Tom Brevoort posted it on his blog on Marvel.com (which no longer works) and that he’d not seen it in 22 years. Which means this was pitched around 1988, pre-dating the New Warriors, we would eventually go on to see in Thor #411/412.

The roster to what they proposed is uncannily similar to what we see in New Warriors…

It was a pitch that Jim Valentino and I produced back in the late 80’s for a YOUNG AVENGERS title. Marvel editorial had suggested that they were looking for a Young Avengers title and Jim and I jumped at the chance to land what f0r us was a dream gig. At the time I had just completed two issues for Marvel’s Atlantis Attacks storyline, one of which featured NAMORITA, the cousin of Namor, Sub-Mariner. I love drawing youthful characters and minor characters with untapped potential and wanted to continue drawing Namorita in some fashion. I also have always loved underwater characters such as Aquaman, so our pitch heavily featured Namorita and the Atlantean supporting casts. The rest of the proposed cast, Speedball, Vance Astro, Nova, Speedball and Firestar were favorites of both Jim and myself, we really thought we could have produced a popular new series with a cast that marvelous! We filled the pitch with tons of new characters, Cougar, Brahma, Rebound, Gridlock, Spectra, Lynx, Combat and Photon, many of whom would eventually find their way to Youngblood, Shadowhawk and many other titles from Image comics. Valentino and I shared a studio at the time, one of my favorite periods of my comics career, and we the week that we took to create the Young Avengers proposal was filled with powerful energy and enthusiasm that I can recall even to this day. It was a blast.

I was offered New Mutants as a permanent gig while we waited for word from Marvel about the status of our proposal. I had been offered the Hulk during that period as well, but ultimately turned that gig down in hopes of landing either Young Avengers or keeping the New Mutants assignment which still had a few months before I would need to begin work on it. Both Jim and myself were gainfully employed by Marvel at this point, we were working regularly, but were determined to at least try and create this unique opportunity for ourselves.

Then one day the phone rang and on the other line was Mark Gruenwald, the man who had hired me on the spot a few years earlier at Wonder Con. Mark was one one of the brightest, wisest people in the comics industry. He was also refreshingly bold. He reminded me that I had been offered a plum assignment on New Mutants and that I should in his words ” take the bird in hand rather than the one in the bush.” Powerful words even to this day. I stressed to him my passion for Young Avengers and he said that even if Marvel were to proceed with a Young Avengers title, it would be a ways down the road, at least a year’s time. He reiterated his statement about “the bird in the hand” and stressed that I focus on that upcoming assignment. Message received loud and clear. I understood Mark’s point and confirmed that I would accept New Mutants and committed to a long and healthy and somewhat unexpected run on that title. Jim and I combined our efforts on an issue of What If that featured Wolverine as an Agent of Shield. It remains a fan fave to this day, I see that issue of What If as often as Youngblood, New Mutants and Captain America’s when I sign at shows. Valentino and I had a great chemistry, he was very much the teacher and I was the eager student.

Turns out that by splitting the baby as it were, Marvel received not one but two successful books as Valentino was handed the reigns of Guardians of the Galaxy which resulted in the longest and best selling run that title had ever seen. So by not accepting our Young Avengers, Marvel received Guardians, New Mutants and X-Force in return. Not a bad swap but I can’t help but wonder What If?

I was able to confirm with Rob, that this pre-dated what the Editors had planned for New Warriors.

We were grabbing the young heroes available to us. As you know this predates New Warriors by quite some time.

(I had to do it through my Comic Relief Podcast page, because it would seem, for some reason, he has blocked my New Warriors Twitter account? Not entirely sure why, I don’t think I ever engaged in conversation with him from the New Warriors account).

Using Archive.Org – I was able to access Tom’s blog post, that Rob refers to. He notes something that seems to contradict that Rob & Jim’s plan for Young Avengers was something before the New Warriors were planned.

Back around 2005, we made a bit of a splash with a series titled YOUNG AVENGERS. Before the series launched, fearful fans decried it, expecting it to be terrible. But the proof was in the pudding, and fandom as a whole quickly came around to embracing Allan Heinberg and Jim Cheung’s new young characters.

But this was not the first time that a YOUNG AVENGERS series had been pitched.

Over to the left you’ll find a document that’s been sitting in my files for decades, since the time I first inherited the editorship of NEW WARRIORS back around 1993. It’s a pitch submitted by Jim Valentino and Rob Liefeld for a series to be called YOUNG AVENGERS. At the time this was written in 1989, while both of them had dabbled in doing Marvel work, neither creator had really had a break-out hit. Sharing a studio at the time, they hoped that YOUNG AVENGERS might be it, with Jim writing and Rob illustrating a series they would co-plot.

As it turned out, work was already underway on the book that eventually was entitled NEW WARRIORS, which prevented this incarnation of YOUNG AVENGERS from moving ahead. It’s actually pretty extraordinary to see how close the line-up for what Jim and Rob proposed was to the eventual NEW WARRIORS team. Mark Gruenwald’s internal memo to proposing editor Craig Anderson letting him know about this is also reproduced on the left.

Many of the ideas, characters and concepts that Jim and Rob conceived for this pitch eventually wound up in the assorted projects they later worked on–NEW MUTANTS, GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY, X-FORCE and even a couple of Image titles. So the conceptual work they had done here didn’t exactly go to waste, even if this turned out to be the wrong pitch at the wrong time for reasons unbeknownst to them.

But it does show what a series pitch for a new Marvel title more-or-less looked like at around the time I started. Special thanks to Rob Liefeld for allowing me to share this document with you. (I also still have Warren Ellis’s pitch to take over NEW WARRIORS circa 1993–I’ll have to check with him and see if he’;d have any objections to sharing that document with the world as well.) More later.

Tom B

Jim Valentino also responded to Tom’s blog post –

With Tom’s kind permission, I’ll respond.

Rob and I had no clue about the New Warriors (as I recall the introductory Thor story was just being penciled at the time). We did exactly what I assume DeFalco did and just cobbled together every teen-age hero at Marvel at the time that WASN’T in the X-Men or New Mutants.

The coincidence was shocking to ALL sides. I do not believe that there was any subtext to Mark’s note to Craig, either. Sorry to blow holes in your theories, but there it is. These things happen more often than you can imagine as Tom B will no doubt attest. And, yes, MyWords, you’re correct–as noted above. This preceded Fabian and mark’s involvement with the characters.

jc, I doubt it had any bearing on the creation of the later book (which was excellent)–as Tom notes, it had been lost in a drawer for over two decades!

Rob and I had no clue about the New Warriors when I wrote this. The fact of the matter is, as Tom points out, we were both looking for a break-out book, we wanted to collaborate on something and this was one of five or six pitches I had for Tom and Mark (including the Guardians of the Galaxy). Sometimes there is no conspiracy, merely coincidence. This was one of those times.

Thanks to Tom for posting this–I haven’t seen it since it left my hands (it was typed on an old Royal typewriter!).

Interesting to see a blast from the past.

Thank you for resurrecting it, Tom.

Very strange to see it after all these years.

best, jim

Unfortunately, Archive only had one of the images of the proposal that it could access:

Just thought that was some interesting history, of what almost was.