10 Jaw-Dropping Comics Cancelled Before They Were Published

4. JLA/Avengers (1982)

You might be saying "huh?" to this if you know there was a comic called JLA/Avengers or Avengers/JLA from 2003-2004. However, there was another such inter-company crossover, intended for release 21 years earlier, and its failure is a curious footnote in comics history. DC and Marvel may have a bitter 75-year rivalry going, but by the early 1980s they'd realized they could make a lot of money by putting the knives away every so often, and leaving the fighting to their characters. Superman and Spider-Man had had two separate crossovers, as had the Hulk and Batman and the Teen Titans and the X-Men. The Avengers and JLA were natural picks to be next, especially since the rising star artist George Perez had done work on both. Unfortunately, the scripting had more issues. Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter rejected Gerry Conway's original script as poorly written with plot holes and weak motivations. DC commissioned Perez to start drawing it anyway on the theory that any problems could be fixed by changing dialogue. Shooter disagreed strongly. Roy Thomas, who had a long history with both DC and Marvel characters by then, reworked the plot in a way that required minimal redrawing by Perez. Shooter has claimed he was fine with this new plot. But by then, Perez's workload was becoming impossible and he felt Shooter was impossible to please. Thirty-odd years later, virtually all the creators involved continue to put the blame on someone else. Shooter has a reputation for being hard to work with, but given what we know, he may have been right this time. In any case, the experience was sour enough that DC and Marvel stopped doing inter-company crossovers for about a dozen years after that. How Regrettable Is Its Loss? Perhaps for the best. Perez always regarded JLA/Avengers as unfinished business until he got to finish it in that later series, with an all-new, much longer story scripted by Kurt Busiek. The later work is almost inarguably better than the first one would have been: a hungry market after the twenty-year wait meant DC and Marvel spared no expense and Perez spared no effort. Moreover, the original plot, reproduced in the JLA/Avengers collector's edition, does seem kind of a mess. Still, it would have been an interesting and well-drawn mess. Get that collector's edition if you want to see more of the work Perez finished before it was called off.