Posted in: Comics, Comics Publishers, Current News, Marvel Comics | Tagged: new warriors, warren ellis

When Warren Ellis Planned To Kill Off Most Of New Warriors

When Warren Ellis planned to kill off most of the New Warriors... but it was just too much for Tom Brevoort

Two years ago, in his Substack newsletter, Marvel SVP and Executive Editor Tom Brevoort talked about when Warren Ellis pitched for New Warriors, after being recommended by now-DC EIC Marie Javins.

"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."

Last week, Brevoort revised that pitch with greater detail.

"At the very end of my search, I did get one very good proposal, though. Editor Marie Javins (now DC EIC Marie Javins) suggested that I reach out to a relatively new writer with whom she'd had some critical success retooling the HELLSTORM. This was Warren Ellis, not yet the figure that he'd eventually become but already extremely adept at writing. I called him up and he was interested in taking a shot at a pitch—but he warned me ahead of time that this was inevitably going to be his kind of pitch, so it wasn't going to be very centrist or traditional at all. I needed something good, so I told him that I was open to at least looking at whatever he might come up with. So Warren went away, and after a while he wrote up a pitch entitled "Live Through This." And it was a really good pitch—well thought through, with a clear articulation about what the central theme of the book should be, and how to get there. It also included a new character, a prototypic version of what eventually became Jenny Sparks of the Authority, here called simply Spark."

"The problem for me, though, was that it was exactly what Warren had promised: a Warren Ellis pitch. And that meant that his solution to the problem of having way too many New Warriors in the group was to brutally kill off most of them by the end of the first issue, leaving a core team of just six: Nova, Speedball, Firestar, Turbo, Justice and Pretty Persuasions from Psionex—Warren did love his bad girls."

Might that have meant the death of Night Thrasher, Rage, Kymaera, Darkhawk, Hindsight Las, PowerPax, Dagger, Silhouette and Bandit? Maybe… Tom continues;

"And by the end of the first four-part story, Justice would have sealed the deal on the group's new status quo as a force for change outside of the control of governments or authorities by using his telekinesis to break every bone in Henry Peter Gyrich's body, either killing him or crippling him permanently, depending on what we could get away with. If I'd been more of a risk-taker, I do wonder what might have happened if I had moved ahead with Warren's pitch. But the fact of the matter was that I didn't really think NEW WARRIORS was broken, so I wasn't looking to overhaul the property quite so drastically. So I wound up calling Warren up, telling him essentially what I said above, and we parted ways amicably."

Not the first time a version of Jenny Sparks would have appeared though, a decade before, Ellis and Ben Dilworth created a pitch comic called Electric Angel for British publishers Trident Comics. It didn't go anywhere as the publisher folded but Ellis published it as an ashcan, featuring Pete Wisdom, as a young Essex man with powers involving electricity… Warren Ellis would also go on to turn Speedball into Penance, over in Thunderbolts. 

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