Spider-Man/Gambit: The Lost Novel

Some of you folks out there already know that I’ve written for licensed properties. For those of you who don’t, here’s a quick rundown: the novels X-Men: The Chaos Engine Trilogy and Final Destination: Dead Man’s Hand; short stories for the anthologies Untold Tales of Spider-Man, The Ultimate Hulk, and Doctor Who: Short Trips: Farewells; and the script for the Marvel Mini-Mates direct-to-DVD animated short, X-Men: Darktide. But not every project that I was meant to write got past the concept stage…

Welcome to “Tales of Development Hell,” in which I occasionally spotlight licensed writing projects in which I was involved—and the reasons why they wound up being tossed into the pit.

In 1998, I was involved with Byron Preiss Multimedia’s line of original novels based on Marvel’s characters. Having already written one novel that Marvel Licensing enjoyed, Spider-Man Super-Thriller: Warrior’s Revenge, I pitched the idea of a redheaded woman’s corpse found floating in the bayous near New Orleans. Her face is so badly disfigured, there’s no way to tell who she is; a New York driver’s license in her purse, however, identifies her as Mary Jane Watson-Parker.

WHAAAAAA?! Spider-Man’s wife—dead?! 

Suspicion immediately falls on her husband, Peter, who was seen arguing with her the night before. He has no real alibi for his whereabouts, unless he wants to reveal that he’s Spider-Man, who was seen swinging around the city at the time MJ was allegedly murdered…

And if that novel had proceeded, you would have: seen what really became of MJ; been thrilled as Spidey teamed-up with the Cajun X-Man, Gambit, to hunt her “killers” through the Louisiana swamps; and gasped in astonishment as it all tied together with an ancient cult trying to resurrect its dark gods—and an issue of Marvel Team-Up co-starring Red Sonja that you see here. (Only I wouldn’t have been able to mention Sonja by name because the Robert E. Howard estate owns that license.)

For reasons I never really understood, however, the book was cut by Marvel during license renegotiations. It all worked out in the end, though—the consolation prize for losing that project was my being offered X-Men: The Chaos Engine Trilogy. And that book series I actually got to see published!

Tomorrow: another Development Hell story, only this one involves a demon on wheels…