What
If…Kurt Busiek Had Unmasked the Crimson Cowl?
In July 2002, Reverend Meteor, one of the regular
posters at Comicboards.com’s Thunderbolts message board, exchanged e-mail
messages with T-Bolts creator Kurt Busiek.
Question: I'm a big fan of Thunderbolts
and was curious about who you originally intended for the Crimson Cowl's secret
identity?
Answer: We were going to do a
Norman Osborn kind of revelation -- Osborn didn't appear in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN
until after the Green Goblin, and was slowly built up as a major character
before it was revealed. My plan was
that Alice Nugent, who had been an associate of Hank Pym's after his fall from
grace, had been employing him in hopes of finding a way to give herself
super-powers, and when he abruptly vanished to join the Avengers West Coast,
she'd have sought out other ways. We
brought her into AVENGERS during "Ultron Unlimited," which was the
beginnings of a thread that would have led to the revelation that her Cowl
powers came from Ultron.
But
she'd have been built up into a major character before the revelation -- as it
is, we didn't get to any of that.