Posted in: Comics, DC Comics, Marvel Comics | Tagged: Jenny Sparks, Mark Millar, marvel, new warriors, warren ellis

When Marvel Turned Down Jenny Sparks for New Warriors, And Wanted

In his most recent newsletter, Marvel EVP Tom Brevoort was asked "Was there a great project, for whatever reason you or you/Marvel passed on that went on to be a huge hit somewhere else?" and he had answers for his turning-down-the-Beatles moment. Because Warren Ellis pitched for New Warriors.

"Not really, not exactly. But there were ideas that were pitched to me in a prototypic form that creators later refined and turned into something greater elsewhere. Two examples spring to mind, one of which I've mentioned previously; When Fabian Nicieza left NEW WARRIORS, I held an open call for pitches to replace him. One of the ones I received (and directly sought out) was from a new writer whom Marie Javins had brought on to write HELLSTORM, Warren Ellis. As you'd expect, Ellis's pitch for the series was very well-written. But it was also bold in a way that I wasn't ready to be yet (he planned to kill off 2/3 of the characters in the first issue as a way of clearing the decks, something I didn't necessarily want to do.) But buried there in that pitch was a character called Jenny Sparks, a proto-version of the character Warren and Bryan Hitch would later introduce in STORMWATCH/THE AUTHORITY."

That's right, folks, Jenny Sparks would have been in New Warriors. Can you imagine?

So Wildstorm, and then DC Comics got Jenny Sparks and the rest. Weirdly, the power set of Jenny Sparks had previously been introduced by Warren Ellis for a British small press comic book featuring the Essex superhero character and self-insert Pete Wisdom, originally in a pitch for Electric Angel for Trident Comics which published Mark Millar's Saviour. With Stormwatch and The Authority, Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch changed superhero comics, but not was all lost for Marvel, they were able to get Bryan Hitch to do similar on The Ultimates with Mark Millar, who had followed Warren on The Authority and wrote the Jenny Sparks spin-off series. And talking of Mark Millar…

Along similar lines, while I was working in the Spider-Man office, a young Mark Millar (with whom I'd worked on SKRULL KILL KREW) pitched me a series called SHOCKER in which the young nephew of the Spidey villain would inherit his costume and identity after the villain had died, and would be ushered into the underworld of super-criminals, one with its own rules and mores. But this was right around the time that Marvelcution was about to happen, and that pitch got scuttled in the crossfire. Undaunted, Mark completely rethought a bunch of the notions that he'd had for that book and turned them into WANTED over at Top Cow some years later. So Marvel could have had Jenny Sparks and Wesley Gibson, but neither one would have quite been the character they became under other circumstances.

Don't feel too bad, Tom, DC Comics also turned this down when it was the Secret Society of Super-Villains. When Mark Millar got JG Jones to draw Wanted and picked up by Top Cow, later becoming a movie starring Angelina Jolie using some truly-world class media manipulating shenanigans, Millar would say that some people called Wanted, the "Secret Society of Super-Villains meets Watchmen". Those people were Mark Millar.

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