In the spirit of this weekend’s “Spider-Mex” kerfuffle, in which dozens of fans and comics professionals learned for the first time the long-standing open secret that Marvel Comics had licensed a Mexican publisher to create original Spider-Man stories in the ’70s, leading to an entire parallel continuity with the “real” Marvel Universe, we’ve got another bizarre tale of comics’s past to share today.
Apparently, at one point, the late comics and animation icon Dwayne McDuffie was tasked by Marvel with putting together a pitch for a licensed comic based on the adventures of Joe Camel, the Camel cigarettes mascot who was shelved amid lawsuits alleging it targeted children for cigarette sales. This wasn’t a crazy idea dreamt up by somebody in Marvel editorial but rather something generated at the request of RJ Reynolds (the tobacco company behind the Camel brand) and apparently nixed before it saw publication, either by Marvel or Reynolds or both.
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Titled “The Monte Carlo Adventure,” pop culture writer Matt Adler shared the pitch document on Facebook — including both text and art, complete with notes in the margins apparently from Marvel editor Bob Budiansky (by his own recollection). According to Budiansky, the several pages of interior art included were apparently drawn by Frank Springer.
“Here’s what made the pitch meeting so surreal,” Budiansky offered in the comments below the images. “We (editorial) were being told that we could produce this book that was specifically aimed at kids, but it wouldn’t encourage kids to smoke since it would be a spy story about Joe Camel, not an advertisement to smoke, ignoring the fact that Joe Camel was the well known corporate symbol for Camel. Talk about blowing smoke up someone’s ass!”
Budiansky suggested that everyone in editorial seemed to think the book was a terrible idea, but that as long as the higher-ups were entertaining the idea, they had to go forward and try to make the comic in good faith.
[Start Gallery Call-to-Action Key=7743]Apparently the documents (which you can see in the attached image gallery) were provided by Marvel editor Glenn Herdling, who gave Adler permission to take them public. Marvel veterans Gregory Wright and Fabian Nicieza joked that Herdling was a treasure trove of such things, and “a human blackmail machine.”
The story would have been an adventure story in the vain of James Bond, with some of Springer’s images directly homaging Bond images.
The last revisions on McDuffie’s pitch indicate that this document comes from 1990, seven years before RJ Reynolds settled out of court in a lawsuit brought by consumers, government and non-profit organizations claiming that RJR had targeted kids with Joe Camel. The character had a ten-year run from 1987 until 1997 as the company’s official mascot, and has since beenreplaced by a regular, non-anthropomorphic camel.
What’s the next bizarre comic from the past that social media will unearth…?
