Marvel’s comics link together to craft a grand universe from an endless array of ever-continuing titles. They blend hundreds of characters and dozens of comics together to create a single, coherent reality that everyone inhabits. It’s definitely not perfect, and it often gets in its own way with convoluted events and messy contradictions, but the 616 universe is a beautiful lovechild made possible by every writer who has worked with Marvel putting in their own ideas. This type of universe was crafted one storyline at a time, with each one influencing what came after. We wouldn’t have Knull and the rest of the symbiotes without Secret Wars (1984). Each individual story can be the first step towards something much grander.
Unfortunately, not all stories get the chance to finish what they started. Sometimes, factors outside of anyone’s control prevent storylines from finishing. Be it editorial mandates, writers leaving to fulfill other contracts, or any other number of infinite possibilities, there are some comics that we’ll never get to see completed. Those stories might not be complete, but that doesn’t mean they should be forgotten. Today, we’re looking at five awesome Marvel storylines that were cut short before their time, and talking about exactly what awesome stories they were building up to.
5) Doc Green versus Red Leader and Gammon
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When Bruce Banner was injected with Extremis, it granted the Hulk Banner’s intelligence. He called himself Doc Green and went about curing other gamma mutates. He designed an AI that called itself Gammon to ensure Bruce would transform back into Doc Green if he ever refused. After Doc Green’s intelligence started to wane, Gammon struck out on his own, intent on fixing the world in the way Doc Green originally intended. He teamed up with the Red Leader, one of Hulk’s greatest foes, and the two were prepared for all-out war against Doc Green, whose intellect was rapidly diminishing.
Unfortunately, this storyline was cut short by the end of the multiverse in Secret Wars (2015). After Reed remade reality, Doc Green vanished, with Hulk reverting to his usual savage levels of smarts. Gammon disappeared for years, until it was revealed in Immortal Hulk #34 that he was absorbed into the Leader’s intelligence. The final battle between the world’s smartest and strongest never occurred, which is a darn shame, considering that Doc Green could still be rooting around in the Hulkscape somewhere.
4) One of the X-Men Isn’t a Mutant
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The X-Men have always been a team dedicated to creating peace between humans and mutants, but this storyline threatened to upend the identity of a major hero by revealing that they weren’t a mutant at all. This was set up in The Hunt for Wolverine: The Adamantium Agenda, when Tony Stark got a look at Mister Sinister’s DNA files on the X-Men. He didn’t see whose DNA it was, but Iron Man saw that one of the X-Men had been genetically altered to resemble a mutant, but wasn’t actually one at all. This plot thread never actually went anywhere, but Jordan White revealed the original idea behind this during an interview.
Kitty Pryde was going to be revealed as a non-mutant, set to shake up her status quo, as her entire identity has been built around learning how to live as a mutant. The seeds for this can be seen blossoming during the Krakoan Age, where Kitty couldn’t pass through the mutant-only gates to the nation. Somewhere along the way, this idea was dropped, and Kitty’s inability to traverse the gates was handwaved. I definitely think that Kitty should be a mutant, and that changing such a classic character so drastically almost always goes bad, but there was a whole lot of potential in this type of revelation. It would have been very interesting to see who did this and why, at the very least.
3) Superior Iron Man
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After Red Skull stole Professor Xavier’s brain, Scarlet Witch and Doctor Doom used a morality inversion spell to stop him. This led to Tony’s own morality being flipped, and while everyone else’s ideals returned to normal, Tony shielded his mind to retain his new, villainous outlook. He was a menace like no other, living purely for greed and proving that he was the smartest person alive. He infected all of San Francisco with Extremis 3.0 and created an app that let people remake their bodies in their perfect image. After a month, he started charging people one hundred dollars a day to use it. Tony stood as a villain who would need a whole Avengers team to take down.
Unfortunately, this is another story cut short by the end of the multiverse in Secret Wars (2015). Superior Iron Man’s final scene was a brutal battle against Captain America as the last Incursion destroyed their world. He shouted that he regretted nothing even as a Hellicarrier crushed them both. After Reed remade the universe, Tony was back to his heroic self. The true Iron Man coming back was definitely welcome, but it’s a shame that we never saw him overcome his own evil. Especially because he was almost immediately flung into Civil War II, which would have been way better if Superior Iron Man were a villain. I mean, they basically killed Tony anyway. At least this way it would have been satisfying.
2) Krakoa’s Dark Secrets
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The Krakoan Age is very contentious in the X-Men fandom. On the one hand, it was the biggest and most successful reinvention the team has had since Morrison’s run. On the other hand, its closing act was more of a convoluted fizzle than a grand narrative explosion. Jonathan Hickman was the architect for the Krakoa saga, and he planned three acts. Unfortunately for everyone, Hickman left the X-office at the end of the first act, meaning that the guiding hand was gone and other writers were forced to make it up as they went along. Hickman was clearly designing a grand epic that would shake the X-Men to their core, but instead of a multi-year narrative, we got a messy conclusion that pleased no one.
The worst part is that Hickman’s departure cemented a fundamental misunderstanding about Krakoa. He planned for the nation to fall relatively early on in his epic, but given that it was the biggest X-boom since X-Men (1991), Marvel wanted to extend Krakoa’s stay. They did just that, but in doing so, ignore all the plot threads Hickman set up. Hickman clearly portrayed the nation as a dark, morally ambiguous place on the best day. I mean, Xavier looked like the Maker and Apocalyse and Mister Sinster were on the ruling body, for Christ’s sake. Marvel ignored all the nuance and portrayed Krakoa as a utopia instead of a mutant ethnostate founded on lies. We’ll never see the Krakoa Hickman imagined, which makes Marvel’s nostalgia for the era even worse.
1) Quicksilver’s Arc and the Inhuman Invasion
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Following House of M, Quicksilver was a broken man. He lost his reputation, his powers, and his sister, meaning that he had nothing left to live for. In desperation, he stole Terrigen Mist from the Inhumans, inadvertently setting in place a war between the United States and Attilan in Silent War. In the end, Maximus took control of most of the Inhumans’ minds, Attilan was in ruins, and Black Bolt was a shattered, broken man. Maximus promised to invade Earth, while Black Bolt sat and did nothing. Unbeknownst to anyone, Layla Miller was secretly pulling Quicksilver’s strings, saying she wanted to build him back into a hero. Worryingly, Quicksilver and Crystal’s daughter, Luna, saw a great darkness in Layla, teasing that she was this event’s mastermind.
We never saw the conclusion to David Hine’s epic reinvention and redemption for Pietro. The next time we saw the Inhumans, Black Bolt was in charge again with no explanation. We’ll never know if Layla was truly planning something or how Maximus’s war on humanity would have gone, and that’s a major shame. Quicksilver was in a very precarious position after his betrayals in House of M, so seeing him pull himself together or break apart even more would have been such incredible catharsis. This was clearly building to an explosive third chapter that would have made this a Marvel epic, but as it stands, we can only speculate on what may have been.
What’s your favorite Marvel storyline that will never be resolved? Leave a comment in the comment section below and join the conversation on the ComicBook Forums!