Was Jim Starlin Kicked Off of a New Gods Follow-Up to Cosmic Odyssey?

Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the six hundred and sixty-second week where we examine comic book legends and whether they are true or false.

As always, there will be three different posts for each legend this week!

COMIC LEGEND:

Jim Starlin was kicked off of a New Gods follow-up to Cosmic Odyssey before the first issue even came out.

STATUS:

True

Cosmic Odyssey was an awesome prestige format miniseries from Jim Starlin and Mike Mignola that teamed DC superheroes up with the New Gods to fight against Darkseid.

It ended with an awesome sequence where Forager, of a “bug” species that Orion was super racist against, ended up saving the universe and Batman decked Orion, as he needed to learn more about tolerance…

It seemed like it was set up well for a follow-up series by Starlin, just like how Warlock and the Infinity Watch launched out of Infinity Gauntlet.

And there WAS a new New Gods series that launched out of the book, but New Gods #1 was by artist Paris Cullins and writer…Mark Evanier…

Yes, while Starlin had originally been chosen to launch an ongoing series out of Cosmic Odyssey, he was then on bad terms with DC Comics due to the aftermath of the Death of Jason Todd, an event that was not conceived by Starlin, but he had certainly been pushing to get rid of Jason Todd for a long time and clearly his pushing for Todd’s exit eventually inspired the “Hey, why not let the fans decide if he lives or dies?” idea. Starlin then became the scapegoat when the whole thing became a bit of a bad piece of PR for DC Comics.

So before Starlin’s first issue came out, he was replaced by Evanier. However, bizarrely enough, since Starlin already had FINISHED his first arc, DC still decided to have Starlin’s arc come out, but just have it AFTER Evanier’s first issue…

Which, of course, introduced a new Forager, to follow up the plot from Cosmic Odyssey.

So Evanier was put into an IMPOSSIBLE position. Look at the end of the first issue. He had to set up a new story to get people to show up for the series, but then, “Oh, by the way, here’s another story after ours for a few issues”…

Evanier recalled the situation to Keith Dallas, “What happened was that I was brought onto a series that had already been started and I had to step into someone else’s storyline and work with an artist who had his own ideas about the comic. His ideas were probably fine but they weren’t my idea and the book was already on the schedule so we were immediately racing deadlines with no time to sit down and reconcile my concepts with his.”

Evanier took over the series full-time with issue #5…