Neil Gaiman Pitched a Marvel 1602 TV Show

Neil Gaiman’s works are finding are having quite the resurgence on television, thanks to Amazon’s Good Omens and Starz’s American Gods. As Gaiman recently revealed, one of his projects – the comic miniseries Marvel 1602 – was almost among them. On Wednesday, Gaiman took to Twitter to share that he asked Marvel TV about a possible Marvel 1602 show last year, but that they “weren’t interested”.

For the uninitiated, Marvel 1602 was a 2003 miniseries by Gaiman and Andy Kubert, which reimagined the Marvel Comics heroes as if they existed in the Elizabethan era. The series, which featured the likes of Nick Fury, the X-Men, Daredevil, and Spider-Man, ended up being a hit, spawning three proper sequels in the years since.

While there’s no telling exactly how a Marvel 1602 show would have worked – especially with a large number of the show’s characters already existing in Marvel’s movies and television series – some fans will surely be unhappy that an adaptation never came to fruition. (Especially since a What If? animated series is currently in the works for Disney+.) In 2012, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige was asked about the possibility of a 1602 adaptation, and he didn’t seem opposed to the idea.

“Something like 1602 I think would be really cool to do at sometime down the line. I love it. It is spectacular,” Feige explained. “But the key to it, the fun of it, is that you need to know those characters very well. You need to know each and every one of those characters and who their present-day reincarnations are in order to enjoy and understand and appreciate how Neil was able to reinvent them and do that period spin on them for 1602. If you don’t know them yet and if they haven’t had their own stories yet, I don’t think it would be as much fun. If you don’t know them well and you haven’t been introduced to them in a similar medium in their traditional environments, plucking them out of that won’t seem as unique or different. “I’d love to do stuff like ‘1602’ or ‘What Ifs’ or something like Marvel’s ‘Earth X,’” he continued. “But somewhere down the line. You need the audience, or the movie-going public to have a great understanding of who they are before you alter it like that.”

What do you think of Gaiman’s tweet? Would you want to see Marvel TV make a Marvel 1602 series? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!