FAILED-PROJECT FRIDAY: The X-FORCE: JUNK MAIL pitch

For this week's Failed-Project Friday, we're going all the way back to 1993 to check out my very first unsuccessful pitch to a mainstream comics company. Huzzah!

 In the summer of '93, I was approached by a Marvel editor about penciling an X-Force annual that would've been scripted by another writer. However, at that time I wasn't interested—and still aren't, today—in drawing any comic that I didn't write myself, as assuming strictly the artist's role just wouldn't work for me. (Note that the same issue forced me to bail out of a proposed Terminator miniseries in 1991, as I detailed in an early Patreon post a while back.) 

So I counter-proposed a very different idea for an annual that I would write as well as draw—and lo, the proposal for X-Force: Junk Mail sprang into being! 

The short version of the pitch was that the superteam of young mutants would find themselves flung into an extraordinarily violent infomercial touting the wonders of nanotechnology by an Advanced Idea Mechanics splinter group from the far future—with the initial seeding of nanomachines being delivered to the team's HQ inside a piece of junk mail, hence the title.

For good or ill, the editor didn't go for the pitch. I might have tried to pursue another project at Marvel, but during the summer of '93 another comic I was working on was rapidly spiraling out of control, schedule-wise—namely, Bubblegum Crisis: Grand Mal—so I had to devote all my time to salvaging that book. By the time that BGC was safely wrapped up, my editorial contact was gone, as was my opportunity to pitch anything to Marvel.

Re: the design below: Note that, exactly 20 years later, I would wind up writing and drawing a 10-page story featuring Domino teaming up with the Scarlet Witch for Marvel's A+X anthology series. 

Gotta say, I quite forgotten that I designed my version of X-Force's Feral as an alarmingly straightforward knockoff of Shirow's Artemis from Appleseed. Then again, by that point I'd drawn Artemis roughly a bajillion times as con sketches for "furry" aficionados, so perhaps this just felt natural:

As you might have guessed, the head salesmen for the AIM nanotechnology infomercial were named after John Woo's first two A Better Tomorrow films, a flourish which I still find strangely amusing.

Not sure where my brilliant comics career might've gone if I'd worked for Marvel back then; I didn't end up doing any major work for the company until I wrote a Mangaverse one-shot in 2000. My first mainstream work wouldn't hit until 1997, when I wrote and drew successive projects for Wildstorm and DC Comics. Then again, my utterly foolish devotion to continuing Dirty Pair at all costs might well have torpedoed any such theoretical Marvel work.

Years later, I would reuse the plot of Junk Mail for a similarly ill-fated Gen13/ Dirty Pair proposal—but that's a subject for another Failed-Project Friday, folks!