Missing Episode/Comic Books

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• IDW's Classic Transformers trades, which collect Marvel's Transformers series, exclude issues featuring characters owned by Marvel, specifically Spider-Man and recurring antagonist Circuit Breaker.
• Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster produced the first full-length Superman comic in 1933, five years before his official debut in Action Comics #1. When the publisher pulled out, Shuster threw the whole thing in the fire out of frustration. The only part that survived was the cover.
• Similarly, there was an issue of the Warren Ellis run of Hellblazer that was set to be published during the days when school shootings were the latest panic... and implied that some students, due to the rundown nature of modern life and teenage pressures, wanted to be shot. That one hit the bin quickly.
  • As of 2010, it's been pulled back out and published in a compilation book of lost and rare Hellblazer stories.
• Many comics that feature licensed non-Marvel/DC Universe characters (For example, Marvel's Star Wars, Star Trek, Ren and Stimpy and Tiny Toons comics, and DC's own Star Trek comics) are not reissued most of the time due to licensing disputes with the character owners (these types of comics had licenses that had expired at a certain point in time; the publishers and/or artists still hold the comics' copyrights, but they do not own the characters themselves). Some may never be published again (So far, Marvel's Star Wars comics have not gotten a reissue by Marvel themselves, and attempts to reissue Tiny Toons comics are blocked due to Marvel's rivalry with DC) unless the character owners reach a deal with the publishers. Archie's Sonic the Hedgehog comics, however, continue to be reissued (Archie Comics has a long-term contract with SEGA).
• Gotham Knights #12 was originally supposed to have an Elseworlds-style story by Devin Grayson about Mr. Zsasz killing Batman, but it was changed at the last minute after being deemed too graphic for an all-ages book. You can read about it here.
• The Judge Dredd "Cursed Earth" epic had two arcs that, for legal reasons, could not be reprinted in the phone books. One involved a war between McDonald's and Burger King, which had attained power greater than medium-sized countries. In the other, Dredd and his companions are kidnapped by a Mad Scientist who looks and acts exactly like KFC's Col. Sanders, and had an army of mutants identical to various 20th century corporate mascots. Both drew complaints from the trademark owners.
• The comics business is always changing, with canceled series, editorial changes, and Executive Meddling all frequent. As a result, a number of comics stories are commissioned and completed (or nearly so), without ever seeing print. This includes "inventory stories," which are intended to be published only if the regular team is late. After a while, unused inventory stories tend to "go stale" due to subsequent changes in continuity. Some examples:
  • One of DC Comics' rarest titles fits, even though it was published... technically. DC canceled a large number of books in the "DC Implosion" of 1978, so suddenly that a large number of completed stories remained. Canceled Comics Cavalcade put many of these stories into publication for copyright purposes, but the series "ran" for only two issues, each with a print run of only 35 issues. A few of these stories eventually saw publication in "regular" DC titles, but most remain effectively "lost" to this day.
  • The Marvel/DC crossover title JLA-Avengers was first scheduled for publication in 1983. The story was plotted, and George Perez completed 21 penciled pages of art. Due to editorial disagreements between the two companies, the project was canceled. In subsequent years, as editorial regimes changed, there was occasional talk of reviving the project, but to no avail (likely due to, among other reasons, changes in the teams' rosters during the intervening years.) Eventually, the project was revived, but with a new story and completely new art by Perez, in 2005.
• Some Golden Age comic books have been entirely lost to time, due to poor quality paper, limited print runs and nobody saving them for posterity. Many were lost in the paper drives of World War 2, with the first thing to go was the old comic books that been gathering dust. This is also why copies of Action Comics #1 have sold at auction for over a million dollars; only 50-100 copies are thought to exist today.
• In 1989, as part of a time travel storyline, Swamp Thing was going to meet Jesus of Nazareth in issue #88 of his title. Writer Rick Veitch wrote the script, penciller Michael Zulli at least partially completed the artwork, and the story was approved by editorial, but then DC's publisher killed the story, deeming it too inflammatory. Veitch ended his relationship with DC over the controversy, and neither the Jesus story nor the resolution of Swamp Thing's time travel adventure was ever published. The script and existing artwork for the story, "Morning of the Magician", can be seen here.