Whenever we link to Tom Brevoort’s blog, we always say we wish we had more time to read it, but Tom is such a natural storyteller, we usually wait until we have time to really enjoy it, which seems to come around only once a week or so. Anyhoo, Tom is posting a series of tales of big editing boo boos he made, and at least this one returns to some of the most well raked ground of recent comics history: the writing career of Chuck Austin, specifically what went wrong on the NEW INVADERS launch.

At around that same time, Joe Quesada had gone to a convention, where somebody had asked him why Marvel didn’t have a book like DC’s JSA, using the golden age characters. Joe thought about this on the plane ride home, and decided it might be a good idea for us to do a new INVADERS series. And he thought that Chuck’s storyline would be the perfect place to spin them out of AVENGERS for maximum launch potential.

Now, Chuck wasn’t all that interested in writing INVADERS, I don’t think–but he had a friend, Allan Jacobson, whom he’d worked with on KING OF THE HILL. And Allan was gung-ho about doing an INVADERS series. So the deal was that Chuck and Allan would co-write the series, and we made plans to spin the book out of a crossover set to begin in AVENGERS #500 (what would have been #85–we planned to return to the classic numbering at that point.) And Chuck’s new team of characters were transitioned to the New Invaders cast.

And it goes on from there. What is the statute of limitations on this stuff anyway? There are a few more recent comics where we’d REALLY like to know what went wrong!