In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, learn whether Marvel really insisted that a Thunderbolts team member be killed off due to a rights issue.
Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the eight hundred and thirteenth installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false. As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends. Click here for the first part of this installment’s legends. Click here for the second part of this installment’s legends.
NOTE: If my Twitter page hits 5,000 followers, I’ll do a bonus edition of Comic Book Legends Revealed that week. Great deal, right? So go follow my Twitter page, Brian_Cronin!
COMIC LEGEND:
Marvel forced Fabian Nicieza to kill off Charcoal of the Thunderbolts over rights issues.
STATUS:
False
When I first started doing Comic Book Legends Revealed, it was specifically due to a comic book legend that I, myself, had spread in an article that Walter Simonson had contacted me about to correct me over the mistake. So I’m certainly not perfect, and so, for this legend, we’re revisiting one of my earliest legends (which I somehow wrote over 16 years ago. I am too old) where I got the basic gist of the legend correct, but was off on an important enough detail that I wanted to revisit it to give further details.
To recap, in the pages of Wizard, there was a contest held to let the fans figure out who would be the next villain faced by the Thunderbolts.
The winning entry was introduced in the pages of Thunderbolts #19 (by Kurt Busiek, Mark Bagley and Scott Hanna), and his name was Charcoal, the Burning Man (created by Wallace and Nadja Frost).
However, this character, invented to be a one-shot villain, turned out to be TOO good of a creation, as Kurt Busiek created a secret identity for Charcoal of a teenager named Charlie Burlingame….
and Charcoal was quickly added as a MEMBER of the Thunderbolts for the next almost 40 issues, but was abruptly killed in a battle with Graviton in #56 (by Fabian Nicieza, Patrick Zircher and Al Vey)…
Now, in that old legend, I wrote that there was some sort of debate over whether all of the necessary rights had been acquired for the use of Charcoal (not that they definitely WAS a problem, but as I have shown just recently with regards to the use of Blue Beetle on Justice League Unlimited, companies often want to be extra cautious about stuff like this), so Marvel had Nicieza kill him off for now.
As it turns out, that wasn’t the right sequence of events (while, again, the gist of the story was true).
Fabian explained it all on the CBR forums a number of years ago:
I was NEVER asked by ANYONE at Marvel to kill Charcoal off. I had decided to do that all on my own completely independent of any contest problems (at that time on TBolts, I was single-handedly trying to give every reader and editor in comics a reason to want a “no-killing” or “dead means dead” rule :-).
It was AFTER I provided a multi-issue outline where I explained when and how the character would return that I was informed by my editor not to worry about his return, since there were RUMBLINGS of legal complications with his use. Nothing definite just grumbling. So I continued with my story, killed Charcoal off, knowing I had a plan to bring either him or his alter-ego Charlie Burlingame back if I were able to.
During that interim after his “death” was when I was told because of hassles with the contest legalities, it wasn’t worth bringing him back, so I didn’t. End of story.
So Charcoal was not killed off because of a possible rights issue, he just remained dead because of said rights issue, but the “death” was planned either way.
Thanks so much to Fabian Nicieza for the information!
If Wallace and/or Nadja Frost want to reach out about how things went down from their side of things, feel free to drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com! It could be a whole other article!
CHECK OUT A TV LEGENDS REVEALED!
In the latest TV Legends Revealed – Find out whether the idea for the TV series, Kung Fu, was stolen from Bruce Lee.
MORE LEGENDS STUFF!
OK, that’s it for this installment!
Thanks to Brandon Hanvey for the Comic Book Legends Revealed logo, which I don’t even actually anymore, but I used it for years and you still see it when you see my old columns, so it’s fair enough to still thank him, I think.
Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is cronb01@aol.com. And my Twitter feed is http://twitter.com/brian_cronin, so you can ask me legends there, as well! Also, if you have a correction or a comment, feel free to also e-mail me. CBR sometimes e-mails me with e-mails they get about CBLR and that’s fair enough, but the quickest way to get a correction through is to just e-mail me directly, honest. I don’t mind corrections. Always best to get things accurate!
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