Welcome to a special On Writing/Tales of Development Hell crossover event!

Yesterday, we celebrated Stan Lee’s 93rd birthday with my tale of how The Man and I worked on a short-lived comic book project called Stan Lee’s Alexa—short-lived, as in the proposed three-issue miniseries was canceled after the first issue was released. A lot of that had to do with the sudden death of ibooks, inc. publisher Byron Preiss in a traffic accident, in July 2005, shortly after that one issue hit comic shops—without Byron’s involvement, the momentum for producing the balance of Alexa slowed to a halt. The rest of it had to do with the administrators left in charge of the company—they didn’t want to spend further money on a comic project they weren’t fans of, and whose lone issue didn’t sell all that well.

(By the way, Alexa #1 found its way back to comic shops in 2012—in France—when publisher Organic Comix released a French-language edition, with additional pages of new art and story, written by me and drawn by Chris Malgrain. It still ended on a cliffhanger, though, and Organic never had the funds to pay for completing the miniseries, so to this day I still scratch my head and wonder why they bothered.)

But even though Alexa ended with issue one, that didn’t mean I hadn’t been working on the script for issue two—I’d just reached the halfway mark on the second 48-page issue, when I learned of Byron’s death—and plotting out the issue-three finale. (This, by the way, qualifies this story as an official entry in my Tales of Development Hell series of blog posts, covering projects I was hired to work on but which never made it to the final stage.)

The beginning of issue 2 would involve repurposing art from a canceled-but-linked-to-Alexa project called The Ex-Wives: the adventures of three women who, at various times, had all been married to the same superhero…and who had gained superpowers from him through sexual transmission. It was a carryover from Stan Lee’s Riftworld, a trio of novels by Stan and author Bill McCay that were published in the early 1990s, and which served as the basis for Alexa—only in the novels, the protagonist was male. (As the back cover of the third novel, Odyssey, explained: “The Rift, an interdimensional wormhole connecting many worlds, can be traversed only through the power of the mind. And the only person on Earth who can manipulate it is John Cameron, new artist at the Fantasy Factory, a comic-book company headed by legendary mogul Harry Sturdley. But when John transports to Earth a group of 20′-tall giants, all hell breaks loose.”) It was Stan’s idea to make the lead character female, because he felt it would be a better sales point with which to entice potential movie producers; thus, John Cameron became Alexa Moran. (If I remember correctly, I came up with the new identity; I know I certainly designed her.)

The first-issue covers of (l. to r.) The Skul, The 6, and The Suit, Virtual Comics’ launch titles.

Anyway: The Ex-Wives. Like Alexa and Sunn (a canceled comic that, years later, got turned into a YA graphic novel that I wrote), it was part of Byron Preiss Multimedia Company’s new Virtual Comics imprint, launched in 1995 and headed by former Spider-Man group editor Danny Fingeroth. The comics were “virtual” because the titles were going to first be published on the VC website, before being collected and released in print editions. (In retrospect, you come to realize that Byron was something of a trailblazer in what came to be known as web comics.) Three miniseries were done this way: the Spider-man-esque The Skul, written by Danny, with pencils by Ron Lim and inks by Jimmy Palmiotti—the odd spelling of the character’s name a way of trademarking the word “skull” (think the same kind of reasoning behind the Sci-Fi Channel becoming the SyFy Channel); the X-Men-like The 6, by writers Fabian Nicieza and Louise Simonson, penciler Greg Luzniak, and inker Andy Lanning; and the lower-grade Iron Man The Suit, by writers Dan Chicester and Greg Wright, penciler Shawn McManus, and inker Dan Panosian. Stan Lee’s Alexa and Sunn were next in the queue, with The Ex-Wives to be Alexa’s spinoff series. (I just realized that, with the exception of The Ex-Wives, every Virtual Comics title started with an S—what was up with that?)

But first the wives needed a bit of retooling. In the Riftworld novels, they were presented as three attractive but fairly normal-looking women—basically, surburban mom types. They, like all of the other characters “published” by the fictional Fantasy Factory—Mr. Pain, The Human Torpedo, The Petulant Lump—were designed by a post-Watchmen Dave Gibbons, and had the sort of 1960s aesthetic one would expect from an equally fictional publisher based on Stan himself. But for a late-twentieth-century take on the Ex-Wives, Byron and the Virtual Comics editors wanted to cast aside the quaint versions and come up with something more mainstream…more commercial.

The stars of The Ex-Wives: Power Dive, Quick Shot, and Blood Claw, ready to take on the villainous Silicon Savage. Art © 2015 ibooks, inc.

Enter: artist Steven Butler, who’d worked with Danny on various Spider-Man titles, including Silver Sable and the Wild Pack. With editorial guidance, he set aside Gibbons’s designs and turned the surburban moms into…scantily clad bad girls, which at the time was a major moneymaking genre for comic publishers. So, in the tradition set by Vampirella, Lady Death, Shi, and many other femme fatales, gone were the yoga pants and culottes and cocktail dresses, replaced with thongs and thigh-high boots and copious amounts of cleavage. Even then I kinda rolled my eyes at it—and remember, I’m the guy who publishes the scandalous adventures of a succubus named Lorelei—but Steve was a great guy to work with, so you just sorta chuckled at the T&A he had to draw and moved on.

Eventually, though, Virtual Comics folded, and Alexa, Sunn, and—yes—The Ex-Wives wound up at Byron’s ibooks, inc. company. Sunn got published in 2004, and Alexa got revived, but The Ex-Wives got shoved into a drawer and forgotten; if I remember correctly, Byron was a little embarrassed by the T&A art.

But I didn’t forget them…

In my script for Alexa #1, our heroine was the very popular writer/artist of The Ex-Wives, a slightly sarcastic take on superheroines—in modern terms, think Amanda Conner and her collaborations on Power Girl and Harley Quinn—and her designs were based on the Gibbons art. Hausfrau superheroines of the suburbs! Such an off-kilter take on the genre in today’s comics market would have it sharing shelf space with Marvel’s The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Ms. Marvel, and Patsy Walker aka Hellcat, and Valiant Comics’ Faith.

Of course, the “bad girl” style Butler used would be at complete odds with Alexa’s “artwork,” but I still wanted to find some use for his pages (hey, they were paid for), so I decided that, for Alexa #2, we’d open the issue with three pages of it, and discover on page 4 that we were looking at a fill-in issue of The Ex-Wives by one of the other Fantasy Factory writer/artists, Marty Burke—who was completely into the whole bad-girl thing…and who was also a self-absorbed jerk marginally based on a real-world artist (not Butler—Burke was another pickup from the original novels, and had already appeared in Alexa #1). It would be a “fill-in” because Alexa was busy working on another FF title, with Burke commissioned by publisher Harry Sturdley to avoid having the series run into the “dreaded deadline doom”…which was an old Marvel editorial saying for when an issue’s production schedule fell apart and they had to publish something to get it out—either a fill-in story or a reprint. (For example, see that Ghost Rider #10 cover, from 1975? It hides the fact that inside you’ll find a reprint of the Rider’s origin story from 1972’s Marvel Spotlight #5, instead of the Hulk/Rider match-up originally scheduled, which got bumped to GR #11. But since they already had the completed cover, they just slapped it together and got it out.) In the case of The Ex-Wives, Alexa would naturally be outraged by her series being turned into a T&A comic, but was given no vote in the matter.

Of course, since Alexa got canceled with issue 1, no one ever got to see what the start of issue 2 would have looked like, or Steve Butler’s fantastic art—until tomorrow, that is…

To be concluded!