10 Fascinating Comic Moments That Almost Happened

10. Captain Atom Was Almost A Supervillain

'Armageddon 2001' was a 1991 DC event based around the entire concept of "What If?"

In the year 2001, one of DC's heroes went insane. Donning a suit of power armour and dubbing themselves 'Monarch', they killed all the other heroes and took over the world. The only one left was the time-travelling Waverider, who went back to 1991 to discover who Monarch really was.

The story played out across annuals for each series, with each adhering to the same basic plot. Waverider would appear and use his powers to see a potential future for each character (including Superman as President and Flash as a father).

Over the course of Waverider's investigation, various clues pointed to Monarch being the nuclear-powered hero Captain Atom. That's because he was who DC intended to be the one behind the helmet. However, just before the final issue was released, the ending was leaked. DC desperately scrambled to write a new ending, and changed Monarch's identity to the superhero Hawk, of the crime-fighting couple Hawk and Dove.

The only slight problem was that the Hawk and Dove annual had already come out and showed Hawk dying in battle against Monarch. To put it into perspective, out of every single hero in the DC Universe, they chose to make Monarch the only hero it couldn't possibly be.

Monarch was set to be one of the biggest villains of the DC Universe and it's interesting to think about how popular he could have been if DC hadn't completely screwed up his origin story.