Stories That Were Never Told That We Wish We Had Read

Gary Cohn and his longtime friend and writing partner, Dan Mishkin, entered the comicbook industry together in 1980 following correspondence with Jack C. Harris, an editor over at DC Comics. That first work—drawn by Steve Ditko—was the three-page short story On the Day of His Return" which appeared in Time Warp #3 (Feb.–March). This initial sale was soon followed by the team creating Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld with artist Ernie Colón then going on (with Paris Cullins) to create Blue Devil. Cohn and artist Ron Randall co-created the Barren Earth.

From there Cohn has gone on to write for several other comicbook companies, including Archie, Crusade, Marvel, Mattel, and Renegade Press. He also wrote several stories for William Tucci's Crusade Comics including an intercompany crossover between Crusade's Shi and Marvel Comics' Daredevil. Cohn also wrote three Hardy Boys and two Nancy Drew novels. After a while, Cohn left comics and became a teacher at the Information Technology High School in Long Island City, retiring in 2017.

Needless to say, just knowing what Gary did over the years as a comicbook writer, isn’t to know all of it, just recently he published a comicbook-sized “memoir” of work he pitch, but for one reason or another never wound up in publication. The book, The Will-Be’s that Weren’t is nothing short of an amazing look back into things that Gary had pitched to various publishers but were never published, even though (now that we’ve read this book) we wish that they had been.

This book is a collection of at least three projects that Gary pitched that got through various stages of production, from proposal, to outline, to script, to pencils, to inks, to lettered pages. Behind each and every project, Gary provides a backstory the names of his collaborators, as well as sketchy details about what company and editor passed on the project (all names have been altered to protect those that were involved). The three projects are referred to as El Demon, Hellrazers, and Bete Noire.

First up is El Demon. As Gary tells the talk, back when he was writing for Big Corporate Comics (which he refers to as BC—draw your own conclusions as to whom it really was). Gary pointed out that during those days there were essentially two games in town, BC and Phenomenal Comics about which he pitched story ideas. From there, Gary went on to obliquely describe a couple of BC characters before launching into his description of El Demon, whom he described as a Zorro copy with a supernatural gimmick.

To Phenomenal, he pitched an idea about their ghostly western character, “Weird Rider”, (again not the real name), that had been updated from riding a horse to a motorcycle. Unfortunately, his take on “Weird Rider” didn’t fly, so he revamped it into his El Demon concept and took it back to BC. This is one story that went from a pitch to a proposal, to an illustrated story, but that’s where it unfortunately ended, as the story was never published. Fortunately for us, Gry still had all of the various stages of this process which he reprinted in this tome with truly amazing art by Ron Randall.

Next up is Hellrazers, which was a pitch to add to Phenomenal’s futuristic 2222universe. According to Gary, the Hellrazers was based off a concept he had a decade earlier called The Others. Calling once again upon Randall, Gary pitched his revised concept to a Phenomenal editor (Bobby M). Once again, it unfortunately went nowhere (Gary doesn’t remember if the title was canceled, or the entire 2222 universe was scrapped), but a 20-page story was mostly fully illustrated, which he reprints without the dialogue which was apparently lost somewhere along the way.

Gary did include his proposal for The Others, which was about a group of children who were taken from their homes in 1916 by aliens and taken off planet, only to be returned some 70 years later each child (who were handicapped when taken) have become enhanced by the aliens, and this group of kids were to be turned into a superteam.

Finally, we come to The Dark Man, A.K.A. Blackheart, A.K.A. Blackheart in Nightown, A.K.A. Bete Noire (The Dark Beast). Here Gary suggested to Dan Mishkin that they develop a Batman-like character called The Dark Man. Unfortunately, it went nowhere, but a decade later, Gary developed a new wrinkle to the character, where he lived in an alternate 1890, where vampires had come over on the Mayflower, and now the New World was populated by a hoard of vampires.

Gary cast Bete Noire as a mysterious creature of the night, very much in the mold of Batman who is pursuing a serial killer with a vampire modus operandi, leaving his victims bloodless. While pursuing the killer, somehow Bete Noire finds himself transported to an alternate dimension where “his” city is now a Victorian nightmare that is controlled by vampires. With no way back Bete Noire must now do what he can to rid the city of its nightmarish curse. This pitch also comes with art by Ron Randall.

Each of the above pitches are wonderfully entertaining not just from the concept of the pitch themselves, but in the way that we get to see the entire process, from idea, to pitch, to plot, to script, to art. Very rarely do we get to see the entire process of how an idea comes about, and being ale to see these older ideas of Gary’s is a real thrill. We know that Gary produces a small batch of these comics, hopefully, when he runs out he will either reprint them, or create another book, with other concepts of his. We can only hope.