There’s a reason that superhero stories are so much more effective when the seemingly unstoppable hero gets the snot kicked out of them at some point. It’s humanizing to know that even the most powerful among us can be humbled, told “no.”
So, too, is it somehow calming to know that one of the biggest movie studios on Earth can still be defeated – that there are still things out of their considerable reach. Sure, they can get Jim from The Office to show up for a two-day shoot where he gets turned into spaghetti and dies, but they can’t make a ROM: Space Knight movie no matter how all the ROM heads weep and wail.
The truth is, there are plenty of characters from Marvel Comics that’ll never make it into the MCU, whether it be because of complex character rights, or just due to the fact that they’re weird and gross. Here’s a look at a few of them.
The Imperfects
Stars of both the video game and tie-in comic of the same name, the Imperfects were a grimy little corner of Marvel continuity that flashed all over the pop culture pan back in 2005. Consisting of the deformed, injured, and vulnerable, the group of metahumans got their powers through the experiments of a mad scientist who was equal parts extraterrestrial and super German. There was John “Johnny Ohm” Ostrum, the wrongfully convicted murderer sent to the electric chair and given the ability to control electricity. A paralyzed Russian ballerina named Maria Petrova got new cybernetic legs and the power to create seismic waves. The game’s high-contrast Jae Lee artwork and bizarre, grim narrative made for some exciting new additions to the Marvel universe.
Then Marvel and EA dissolved their partnership and the new characters wound up in rights limbo. Womp womp.
Princess Diana
Mainstream comics have a long and baffling history of introducing characters with what you could, if you were being as generous as possible, call “a short cultural halflife.” Still, even some of the most (again, generously) tonally challenged heroes and villains have managed to find a new life through carefully considered re-imagining. Shang-Chi’s Mandarin started life as a pulp Sax Rohmer villain with all the sensitivity of a World War II poster about the war in the Pacific, and M’Baku, who rules when he’s played by Winston Duke in the MCU, wasn’t… Wasn’t always awesome, guys.
Still, it’d be hard to make lemonade out of the fact that Marvel got within spitting distance of adding Princess Diana to one of their X-teams, a move that would have been more puzzling than offensive if it hadn’t happened six years after her death.
The basics went like this: Writer Peter Milligan was making a splash with X-Statix, his comic book deconstruction of superhero politics and celebrity culture. The main characters were nasty, weird, and so much more expendable than you’re probably thinking.
So it was something close to par for the course when Milligan let slip that issue 13 would introduce the newest member of his team: The ghost of Princess Diana.
The story wound up being rewritten and the character renamed once the feeling in the room hit critical levels of “don’t do that.” Generally speaking, the biggest casualty of the debacle was the title of the arc, switched to “Back from the Dead” from the objectively perfect “Di Another Day.” Long story short, Marvel never got their superpowered dead celebrity all the way to comic shelves. Putting her on the big screen post-mortem would be more DC’s bailiwick, anyway.
Combo Man
The ‘90s were a heck of a time to be involved in the comic book industry. Marvel got a good, close look at bankruptcy, while DC managed to tread water thanks to their willingness to kill their star players for as long as it took to pay the rent. Money was tight.
On a related note, in 1996, Marvel introduced Combo Man, a superhero granted the abilities of 14 separate Marvel characters thanks to some super science, a stack of comics, and delicious Combos Baked Snacks. He has something close to no artistic value. He is universally ignored, except in places where he’s hated. If we play our cards right, we can probably get Jared Leto to play him.
NFL SuperPro
Another in a series of cash-in characters introduced as part of Marvel’s 1990s “Whatever It Takes To Avoid Insolvency” campaign, NFL SuperPro got his NFL SuperPowers by putting on science-drenched football equipment. That’s the whole story. Fun fact: First drafts pay exactly as much as second drafts if nobody involved in the project cares enough to tell you to try again.
The Kool-Aid Man
Perceptive readers will have noticed subtle allusions to the fact that Marvel Comics was pretty broke for a while, and that their money struggles kind of turned them into the corporate version of the kid from elementary school who would eat weird stuff for money. For a hot minute, that meant publishing Adventures of Kool-Aid Man, an Alan Moore-tier story about the Kool-Aid Man fighting aliens that shot people with space guns that made them thirsty. The Kool-Aid Man would stop this nefariousness by slaking the citizenry with the stuff that the inside of his body was made out of, like if Dazzler saved people by feeding them her stomach acid.
It’s not that I don’t think Disney could afford the rights they’d need to put the Kool-Aid Man in the MCU, I just think it’s too late at this point. It’d be one thing if they’d plugged him in early enough for us to see him standing solemnly at Tony Stark’s funeral, but bringing him in post-Phase Four just doesn’t feel narratively organic.
Ren and Stimpy
Yes, Ren and Stimpy had their own Marvel comic for four years in the ‘90s. They teamed up with Spider-Man for an issue. And while, without having checked, I would be genuinely alarmed to learn that there isn’t a fan edit of Avengers: Endgame somewhere where Powdered Toast Man and Log fight in the Battle of Earth, the chances of Kevin Feige signing off on an official Ren and Stimpy and She-Hulk Disney Plus series are… Well, actually not as bad as I imagined when I started typing this sentence. Man, stuff has started to slip over at Marvel Studios, huh?
M&Ms
It was 2013, the same year that the MCU’s Tony Stark was dealing with PTSD and America’s concepts of terrorism. Marvel Comics had some hits that year – Peter Parker died, being replaced by Otto Octavius in Superior Spider-Man’s long-form story of cruelty, obsession, redemption, and sacrifice. In another case, Iron Man teamed up with the red and yellow M&Ms to fight M.O.D.O.K.
I’d love to be able to tell you more. I’m a big fan of M.O.D.O.K. because we have similar body types, and there’s nothing I enjoy more than a shameless comic book advertising tie-in. Unfortunately, most records of the actual plot of the one-shot “Armored… and Irresistible” seem to have been lost to time, presumably on account of how it was that one thing. What’s the word? Bad. Please email me about the plot of this comic, especially if it involved taking down supervillains by exploiting their crippling peanut allergies.
Ash Williams
The second most heartbreakingly unmakeable Ash Williams comic book movie adaptation, next to that Freddy vs Jason vs Ash story from about a decade back. There was a brief and beautiful moment when the star of the Evil Dead franchise gutted the Marvel Zombies universe. I’d never say that there’s such a thing as too much Bruce Campbell, but with Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man joining the MCU, plus Sam Raimi’s Multiverse of Madness cameo bone-throw, we’ve already got at least four iterations of the guy floating around. Between that and, you know, movie rights, the S-Mart money is on Ash staying off of Earth-616.
Skip
So, listen.
There have been some really incredible moments in comic book storytelling dedicated to painting beloved characters in more humanized shades. When Tom King made Bruce Wayne a suicide survivor, he told readers that their struggles didn’t make them less like Batman – less heroic, less determined. Tony Stark and Carol Danvers both battled substance abuse. These stories can be powerful.
In 1984, Spider-Man told the Power Pack about the time when he was a kid and an abusive older kid named Skip molested him. It’s a broad story that’s understandably light on details, and the message is a beast: Even one of the most popular, smartest, strongest heroes in pop culture was vulnerable. He was still popular, still smart, still strong. It didn’t make Peter a worse person, or an embarrassment, it just made Skip a monster. A+ moral. Nicely done.
“But will it play in Poughkeepsie?” Even if Feige decided, presumably after not sleeping for about a week, that the best follow-up to No Way Home would be a $200 million recounting of this deeply upsetting PSA, who would Disney hire to play Skip? Which actor wants to be remembered as a force that destructive and despicable in the Spider-Man movie universe? The answer; probably nobody.
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