8 Awesome Comics That Were Unbelievably Cancelled

6. Alex Ross' Fantastic Four

Fantastic Four Alex Ross
Marvel Comics/Alex Ross

Alex Ross is a supremely talented artist who's divided his time between DC and Marvel, but is perhaps most famous for his work on Marvels, a 1994 mini-series that showcased the evolution of the Marvel universe from the perspective of a photographer called Phil Sheldon. Ross would then go on to handle cover duties on a wide variety of different projects, only providing interior art on rare occasions.

He's the kind of artist you can't ignore, and one whose style is so strikingly real that the prospect of seeing it repeated throughout an entire comic is pretty exciting. Ross has also tried his hand at redesigning iconic superhero costumes, most famously providing an unused concept for Sam Raimi's Spider-Man films that would later inspire the Superior Spider-Man costume when Dock Ock inherited the title.

Fantastic Four Alex Ross
Marvel Comics/Alex Ross

While Ross' Spidey design was admittedly great, it's nothing compared to what the artist had in mind for the Fantastic Four. As was revealed in Marvelocity, Ross explained that he pitched a FF reboot to Marvel while the team were still embargoed as a result of the drama between Fox and Disney over the team's onscreen rights.

Ross came up with new costumes for the Johnny, Sue, Ben and Reed, and centred it all around a "pop-art" motif. The end result is something special, and yet Marvel still ended up rejecting the pitch.

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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.