Poorly Disguised Pilot / Comic Books

• In Fables, Jack goes to Hollywood and makes a trilogy of LOTR-ish films about himself. He eventually gets caught and exiled from Fabletown, leading into the Jack of Fables series.
• Justice League of America had this happen at least twice: First when DC acquired Quality Comics' characters and lumped them all together as the new team, the Freedom Fighters, and then when Earth-S, the home of Captain Marvel, was introduced. Both appeared as guest stars in the yearly Justice League/Justice Society crossovers; both got their own titles afterwards. A test run for Captain Marvel had already been done with the Suspiciously Similar Substitute "Captain Thunder" in the pages of Superman, but the Big Red Cheese was still ultimately deemed too silly to be in the main DC earth.
• The first three issues of the Retool of Adventures of the Fly, called Fly-Man, is basically this for the original version of the Mighty Crusaders.
• Lampooned in Cable & Deadpool #38.
  Deadpool: "Bob, Agent of Hydra". One would almost think we were forcing you down our readers' throats as some kind of possible limited series pitch or something.
• Bloodlines: The early 90s DC Comics crossover event is basically one massive series of Poorly Disguised Pilots, with that year's "annual" issue for each ongoing series showcasing the origin of a new superhero. Although a few of these "New Blood" characters were later featured in mini-series or ongoing series, the only one that managed any kind of success was Garth Ennis's Hitman, which spun out of The Demon.
• Marvel Comics tried a similar tactic with their 1993 annuals, which each introduced a new character. Of the 27 new characters created, the only one who really caught on was Legacy, who fronted his own series for a while as the new Captain Marvel.
• DC tried this again in 2000 with their Planet DC event, where, once again, a bunch of annuals introducing new characters were launched. The only new heroes who saw any real use were Nemesis (introduced in the JSA annual) and Bushido (introduced in the Titans annual), and even those two ended up being killed off.
• Likewise, an issue of The Mighty Thor during the "Acts of Vengeance" crossover in Marvel Comics showcases the New Warriors, who received their own book months later.
• Fantastic Four #536 and #537 were used to set the stage for J. Michael Straczynski's Thor relaunch. The plot had the FF trying to prevent Doctor Doom from claiming the deceased Thor's hammer, which was revealed to have landed near Broxton, Oklahoma after the events of Ragnarok.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 9 introduces Billy, a teenage gay male Slayer-wannabe in his own story Billy the Vampire Slayer. However, Billy has only made a few reappearances since then and is forgotten about in season 10.
• Heroic Publishing occasionally uses its Champions title in this manner. Likewise, Heroic Spotlight.
• Daredevil #7 guest-starred Namor and ended with him returning to Atlantis to quash a coup led by Warlord Krang, directly setting up the Sub-Mariner feature that began running in Tales to Astonish several months later.
• Marvel Comics, at the start of the Silver Age, had what are now called "tryouts". For instance, one Human Torch story features a Captain America impostor and asks the readers if they wanted to bring back the real Captain America. On the other hand, the fevered imagination of fans (and/or the greed of comic book speculators) has been prone to see tryouts in Marvel's pre-superhero era even when links between the precursor and later characters are tenuous at best (e.g., a '50s monster character who happens to be called "Hulk" and was renamed Xemnu the Titan once The Incredible Hulk showed up to avoid confusion).
• Superman:
  • DC Comics occasionally tried out the idea of a character before going forward with "the real thing." DC's first Distaff Counterpart characters to Superman (Lois Lane temporarily getting powers and operating as "Superwoman" and Superboy turning into a girl and operating as "Claire Kent, Super-Sister") were probably not tryouts so much as one-shot story ideas. But 1958's Superman #123: "The Girl of Steel" was clearly a dry run for Supergirl. In that story, Jimmy Olsen uses a magic totem to wish for a "Super-Girl" who would be a companion and helpmate for Superman. It doesn't work out all that well, and Jimmy ends up wishing the girl out of existence at her own request. Reaction was positive enough that DC introduced Kara Zor-El, the real Supergirl, shortly after in The Supergirl from Krypton.
  • The last arc of the 1996 Supergirl series was a storyline where Linda Danvers met the original '59 Supergirl. This storyline ended exactly one year before DC decided to reintroduce a new version of Kara Zor-El.
  • Supergirl (2005): Nick Spencer's Aborted Arc would've seen Kara teaming up with Robin (Damian Wayne), Static, Batgirl (Stephanie Brown), Blue Beetle (Jaime Reyes), Miss Martian and Impulse (Irey West). According to Spencer, the plan was to use the storyline as a backdoor pilot for a new Young Justice relaunch starring those characters, but he ended up being replaced on the book before his first issue was released.
  • DC Comics Presents #47 "From Eternia— With Death!" introduced the world of Eternia from the Masters of the Universe. About sixh months later, "Fate Is The Killer" was published as a backup story in sixteen titles published by DC Comics, being followed by the first Masters of the Universe comic series later that year, and then by the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983) original cartoon.
• Both Marvel and DC often launched features from titles that had no "regular" star. Those features would then, if popular enough, get their own titles:
  • Spider-Man is perhaps the most famous case. He first appeared as the cover character of the fifteenth issue of Amazing Fantasy, an anthology series that was being canceled, despite an editor's note promising that Amazing Fantasy would be continued in a new format with a Spider-Man story every month. That promise would be fulfilled by a new title, The Amazing Spider-Man.
  • Marvel would revive Amazing Fantasy in the 2000s as, essentially, an entire series of potential pilots: Anya Corazón got her own book shortly afterwards called Araña: Heart of the Spider. She would later become the sidekick of Ms. Marvel (Carol Danvers) before being retooled as the new Spider-Girl. More successful than her is probably Amadeus Cho, who co-starred in The Incredible Hercules and eventually became the Totally Awesome Hulk and then renamed himself to Brawn. Only a few other characters, such as Dr. Monica Rappaccini, Death's Head 3.0, Monstro, and Vampire by Night, ever showed up anywhere after the series, and even then mostly in supporting roles.
• Speaking of Greg Pak's Totally Awesome Hulk run, one arc had Amadeus team up with a group of fellow Asian and Asian-American superheroes like Shang-Chi, Ms. Marvel, Silk and Jimmy Woo. Several of these characters later reunited during War of the Realms as the new Agents of Atlas, with Pak returning to write their book.
• DC's Showcase anthology series, which famously did this for The Flash and Green Lantern's silver age incarnations, has its own page.
• DC tried to get a second try-out book off the ground in the mid-70s, partially as a replacement to the by-then-canceled Showcase. It's called First Issue Special, and it started because publisher Carmine Infantino realized first issues sell better and wanted a series where every issue was the first (seriously). Incidentally, this means that each premise was only afforded one issue, whereas most often in Showcase a feature would headline for two or three issues. It only ran for 12 issues, and it only launched one comic, Warlord. Warlord ended up running about ten times as long as First Issue Special did — from 1976 to 1988. About half of the other issues feature established characters like the Creeper or Dr. Fate; the non-Warlord characters created for First Issue Special mostly disappeared after their headlining ish, though the Green Team received a quickly-canceled revival in 2013.
• For various convoluted reasons, Marvel was limited to printing a certain number of titles in the '60s. When no longer under that restriction, Marvel launched several of its own Showcase-style titles, such as Marvel Spotlight, which launched features such as Werewolf by Night, Ghost Rider, and Spider-Woman.
  • Some of this was due to the introduction of The Comics Code. Moral Guardians convinced comic publishers to ban horror-related subjects like vampires, ghouls, and the undead, and those titles floundered for awhile, eventually throwing out different subjects and characters to see what would stick. This was easy enough to do, as many of them were anthology comics with 3-4 stories per issue. Journey into Mystery started telling the story of Thor, and the Hulk (after his one-shot series was canceled) started to guest star in Tales to Astonish. In Tales of Suspense, the stories introducing Iron Man and reintroducing Captain America spawned their own titles.
  • Earlier, in the late 1960s, Marvel did it with Marvel Super-Heroes, a larger-than-normal comic whose lead feature launched such stars as Captain Marvel, Ka-Zar, and the Guardians of the Galaxy, with classic 1940s and 50s stories backing it up!
    • The Guardians of the Galaxy got this treatment twice. First they were introduced in Marvel Super Heroes in the late '60s, and nothing came of it. A few years later they made guest appearances in Marvel Two-in-One and The Defenders before they got their own book as the stars of Marvel Presents.
  • Likewise, Doctor Strange debuted in Strange Tales, a former horror anthology series that had been turned into a split book featuring various characters like the Human Torch. The feature became so popular that the series was eventually retitled Doctor Strange with issue #169. Another feature, Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. (which had ReTooled Fury from a WW2-era soldier to a James Bond-esque Cold War super spy), was also spun off into its own book.
• Archie Comics tried to salvage their failing 1960s superhero line by using "Mighty Comics" as their "Showcase", featuring such heroes as The Web, The Shield, The Black Hood, and Steel Sterling. It wound up killing the line for about 15 years.
• One Story Arc in Runaways is this for "Excelsior", a support group for former teen heroes that ended up getting sent to chase the main characters. It was eventually launched as The Loners, after it turned out that the trademark on "Excelsior" belonged to Stan Lee, who had put out a book about his experiences in comics by that title.
• Jack Kirby famously begin planting the seeds for his upcoming Fourth World family of titles in the pages of Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen. This included the first appearance of Darkseid in issue 134, who would go on to be the Big Bad of the Fourth World books.
• Spider-Man:
  • During the nineties, Spider-Man meets during a battle with Hydra a superhero named "Shoc", obviously meant to appear in his own series. It's also pretty obvious who his Secret Identity was. Fortunately, he was quickly forgotten.
  • Speedball first appeared in a Spider-Man Annual that depicted him on the cover, soaring over both Spidey and Daredevil. The annual shoehorned Speedball into the main story and featured a solo back-up tale. This led to a short-lived solo series, Speedball The Masked Marvel. Despite this, the character has been around for about 30 years, was a prominent member of New Warriors, and played a large role in Civil War.
  • The Amazing Spider-Man (1963): Issue #86 was meant to set up the short-lived Black Widow solo series that appeared in Amazing Adventures.
  • The Amazing Spider-Man (1963): Issue #92 featured a guest appearance from Iceman of the X-Men. The story was apparently testing the waters for an Iceman/Doctor Strange split-book that had been planned, but the series never materialized.
• Issue 99 of Gerard Jones's Justice League of America run is clearly an attempt to drum up support for a series about the altered children who took over the issue, the Strangebrood. This didn't pan out, and the Strangebrood never showed up again anywhere.
• JLA has several arcs that serve as preludes for new series.
  • The "Crisis Times Five!" arc from Grant Morrison's run ended with several former members of the Justice Society of America deciding that it might be time to put the team back together and mentor the newest generation of heroes, leading into James Robinson and David Goyer's JSA relaunch.
  • The "Obsidian Age" arc ended with Aquaman resigning from the team and being put on trial for sinking Atlantis, leading directly into Rick Veitch's Aquaman relaunch.
  • Kurt Busiek introduced the Power Company in the 61st issue before quickly spinning them off in their own series.
  • The "Tenth Circle" storyline by John Byrne and Chris Claremont served to set up John Byrne's Doom Patrol relaunch, establishing revamped versions of the team's original roster of the Chief, Elasti-Girl, Robotman and Negative Man as well as adding Justice League member Faith and new characters Grunt, Nudge and Vortex as additional recruits for the team.
• The penultimate issue of the New 52 Justice League series was a Whole Issue Flashback detailing Robin's first encounter with the League. The story served as a lead-in to the DC Rebirth Titans book that launched not long after (although this technically doesn't count since the Titans book was preceded by the maxi-series Titans Hunt).
• In 2005, the anthology series Star Wars Tales featured two stories taking place in the Knights of the Old Republic era. One is issue sized while the other lasts only six pages. Two months after the release of the issue featuring the first story, a Knights of the Old Republic comic series was announced. It was likely that both ideas were created around the same time, however.
• The notorious 'The Punisher Goes Black' story arc in 1992 that guest-starred Luke Cage served as a pilot for the 1990s Cage series.
• X-Factor, the reunion of the original 5 Silver Age X-Men members, was set up by events that occurred in several other Marvel titles at the time:
  • A crossover of sorts between The Avengers #263 and Fantastic Four #286 revealed that Jean Grey, who had seemingly died at the end of The Dark Phoenix Saga, was actually alive in a cocoon at the bottom of Jamaica Bay.
  • Uncanny X-Men #201 saw Cyclops leave the X-Men after losing a duel for leadership of the team to Storm.
  • The final issue of New Defenders ended with most of the team being killed off, with former X-Men members Angel, Beast, and Iceman left as the only survivors.
  • The Dazzler series ended with the title character seeking a new beginning, with Beast recommending that she join the new team he was putting together.
  • All (or most) of these plot points led to Cyclops, Jean, Angel, Beast and Iceman reuniting and forming a new team, X-Factor. Despite the tease, Dazzler did not end up as part of this new series, as the initial plan to have her be the fifth member of X-Factor was abandoned when editorial decided to resurrect Jean.
• Speaking of The Defenders, they also got their start this way. Prior to the launch of the series, the three future core members of the Defenders (Doctor Strange, The Incredible Hulk and Namor) teamed up in a crossover that ran between their solo books, followed by a second crossover where Namor partnered with the Hulk and the Silver Surfer in his own series. The final stretch of the original New Defenders series also featured two prominent guest appearances from a pair of husband and wife private detectives known as Cutlass and Typhoon, who were seemingly being teased for a potential spin-off that never went anywhere.
• The Punisher: The Punisher himself has his own pilot in the pages of Spider-Man (man, Spidey is popping up a lot).
• Another famous case is Wolverine. He first popped up in an issue of The Incredible Hulk. The creators wanted to use him in other titles but didn't have a clear idea what they wanted to do with the character. They ended up tossing him onto the X-Men, in large part because he had been identified as Canadian and they wanted "international" characters for the new team.
• Patsy Walker was resurrected in a storyline that ran across the 2000 annuals for Thunderbolts and The Avengers, before receiving a Spin-Off Hellcat limited series. The mini-series was even advertised at the end of the Avengers annual.
• Chuck Austen's final few issues of The Avengers serve as a springboard for the New Invaders. This is a particularly egregious example, as the finished product reads like an Invaders story that just happens to guest star a few of the Avengers.
• Avengers World had an AXIS tie-in that ran in issues #16-17, where, after undergoing a temporary Character Alignment change, Doctor Doom formed his own team of heroes to stop the evil Scarlet Witch. The story ended with the heroic Doom using the Witch's power to resurrect Cassie Lang, a plot point that had very little to do with the story at hand, but existed to set up the new Astonishing Ant-Man series that launched soon after, and under the same writer to boot.
• The Fear Itself: The Home Front mini-series had a 3-part story featuring X-23, Amadeus Cho, Spider-Girl and the new Power Man and Thunderstrike. The story was clearly meant to build momentum for a new teen superhero team featuring the characters, but it never got off the ground.
• This wasn't even the first time this happened to Amadeus Cho. During the World War Hulk crossover, the main Incredible Hulk series did an arc about an eclectic team of heroes that consisted of Amadeus, Hercules, Angel, Namora and the Carmilla Black version of Scorpion. The characters were meant to be spun-off in a new team book called The Renegades, but the pitch ended up being turned down by Marvel. However, the arc did successfully springboard another series: The Incredible Hercules.
• The second and third issues of the original Youngblood (Image Comics) series give one of the flip-sides to Shadowhawk and Supreme, respectively. The fourth issue features a prelude to Pitt, but without the flip-book format.
• Transformers:
  • Near the end of its run, The Transformers gave heavy focus to the super hero team, the Neo Knights, even giving them their own spotlight issue and having them play a fairly large role in defeating Unicron in the final issue. It would later be revealed that the Neo Knights were Simon Furman's attempt to become one of Marvel's main writers, with Furman admitting in the last issue's letters page that he believed that the Transformers were finished as a franchise and that trying to get a Neo Knights spinoff was his new focus.
  • The plot for Transformers: Generation 2 is kicked off in a Crossover with G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero (Marvel), which had an earlier crossover with the Marvel Transformers comic, but otherwise ignored the other comic.
  • Transformers vs. Visionaries was likely one for the Visionaries. Hasbro and IDW revived a short lived and long forgotten '80s property to prominently debut in their shared comic universe through a crossover with the Transformers. What's more, the crossover came right as said universe was preparing to be discontinued and IDW made it's plot required reading for the final event comic. It's almost certain that IDW was testing the waters to see if a Visionaries standalone comic was viable.
• The final issues of the Superman: Grounded storyline were intended by writer Chris Roberson as (among other things) a backdoor pilot for a "Supermen of America" series.
• Christopher Priest has admitted he only added the Korean heroine Mystek to the Justice League Task Force during his run to set her up for her own mini-series. When plans for the mini-series were axed, Priest quickly killed her off.
• Teen Titans:
  • The New Teen Titans Annual #2 introduces us to Vigilante, who got his own comic book the following month.
  • Gail Simone and Rob Liefeld had collaborated on a two-issue Teen Titans filler arc that saw the Titans team up with Hawk and Dove to battle Kestrel. According to Liefeld, the arc was testing the waters for a Titans East spin-off series that never got made.
  • Geoff Johns' run had a two-part crossover with Legion of Super-Heroes titled "Superboy and the Legion", which entailed the two teams battling the Fatal Five Hundred (an Alliance of Alternates consisting of the Legion's enemies the Fatal Five and 99 alternate counterparts thereof) and served as the beginning of the Threeboot era of the Legion run by Mark Waid, with the Threeboot continuity being created by a Cosmic Retcon resulting from the energies unleashed by destroying every Persuader's Atomic Axe.
  • The second-to-last Teen Titans storyline by Felicia Henderson was meant to be a backdoor pilot for a new Static comic book series. The DC relaunch delayed the series, and by the time it launched a year later, it had been retooled to the point that it literally abandoned every bit of set-up introduced in the Teen Titans arc, and had a new writer as well.
• There was a phase of The Brave and the Bold, after its historical fiction era but before the Team-Up Series one, where it did this for team books. Notable teams introduced during this period were the Justice League, the Teen Titans, and the original, army book version of the Suicide Squad. The former two got their own books, the Squad wasn't so lucky, at least not until their more famous retool.
• The Blue Beetle and Hardware team-up in The Brave and the Bold includes an extremely obvious set-up for a new Hardware solo series.
• U.S. Marshal J.D. Hart features prominently in issues 42-44 of the original series of Jonah Hex, essentially acting as a co-star to Jonah in those issues. Hart was going to be spun off into his own book, unofficially titled Dakota, but that book never eventuated and Hart eventually returned as a supporting character in Jonah Hex.
• What If?:
  • The ninth issue of the original series was probably intended to be this for a series starring the various heroes from Marvel's 1950s comics. Which did happen, albeit 30 years later, with Agents of Atlas.
  • A much later issue of What If is the basis for the entire Marvel Comics 2 universe and Spider-Girl.
  • The last issue of the second volume, based on the original Secret Wars, focuses entirely on the next generation of heroes who were born from the survivors of the original war when it ended with them trapped in Battleworld. It introduces a whole team, shows off their relationships and personalities, and even ends on a clear Sequel Hook where they return to Earth to fight the Sentinels that have now taken it over. Unlike either of the above two, though, it's never been revisited.
• Nova has a story arc where Sam meets Justice and Speedball, two of the washed-up former members of the New Warriors. Around the same time, Superior Spider Man Team-Up features an arc where Otto encounters a new heroine named Sun Girl. The characters involved later meet and team up for the Marvel NOW! relaunch of New Warriors.
• Uncanny X-Men #358 (August 1998) is a spotlight issue for the Odd Couple of Bishop and Deathbird, established earlier, with them gaining a new ally and getting involved in a struggle against another version of The Empire in space. The issue is often commented on, in retrospect, as seeming to serve as a pilot or sales pitch for a Space Opera series or storyline, but if so the plans never materialized.
• The crossover between Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) and Image Comics serves as a pilot episode for writer Ken Penders' incredibly short-lived, creator-owned The Lost Ones series.
• Secret War featured a team-up between many of the characters who would go on form the core cast of New Avengers, and also set up several plot threads for that series.
• The final arc of Ultimate Spider-Man features a team-up between Spidey (Miles), Cloak and Dagger, Spider-Woman, and Bombshell. This same group appears in the Cataclysm: Ultimate Spider-Man mini-series before being spun-off in their own book as the All-New Ultimates.
• Early 00's Crisis Crossover Maximum Security is clearly an attempted launching pad for a few concepts, including a cosmic Avengers team and former stand-in Captain America US Agent. Agent did get his own series, but it was short lived.
• The first arc of Avengers Assemble was set-up for a new Guardians of the Galaxy series. It brought the Guardians out of Comic-Book Limbo, teased the mystery of how Star-Lord and Thanos had escaped the Cancerverse, and ended with the Badoon vowing vengeance on the Earth.
• Avengers #684 (part of Avengers: No Surrender) was a lead-in to Immortal Hulk.
• Whether intended as one or not, the Fantastic Four three-parter that introduces Galactus serves as a backdoor pilot for the Silver Surfer. The same run also introduced Black Panther and The Inhumans, who would later receive their own titles.
• Mortadelo y Filemón: Another Ibáñez character, Tete Cohete, is introduced in a Mortadelo comic of the same name.
• Following the end of James Tynion IV's tenure as the writer of Detective Comics, Bryan Edward Hill was hired to write a short Filler arc before the start James Robinson's run. The arc saw Batman bring Black Lightning to Gotham in order to help train Cassandra Cain and Duke Thomas, with the group later encountering Katana as the story progressed. Unsurprisingly, it was eventually announced that the storyline would lead into a new volume of Batman and the Outsiders, with Hill as the writer.
• The Mega Man (Archie Comics) series had an arc that focused on the cast of Mega Man X prior to the events of the first game. By Ian Flynn's account, it was an attempt to gauge interest for a comic focused on X. Unfortunately, Mega Man itself was starting to slip in sales by that point, which made the prospect of a series focused on his less iconic counterpart a bit of a crapshoot.
• Issue #100 of Nightwing (Infinite Frontier) set up the 2023 Titans series for the Dawn of DC initiative, pulling together the team and creating a new Titans Tower in Bludhaven.
• The miniseries Marvel Versus DC serves as the starting point to Amalgam Universe by ending with the DC and Marvel Universes merging to create a new universe inhabited by mash-ups of the DC and Marvel characters.
• The back half of The Children's Crusade (Vertigo) gives prominence to Timothy Hunter to serve as a reintroduction to the character prior to John Ney Reiber's run on The Books of Magic.

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