Cullen Bunn’s run on Uncanny X-Men saw Cyclops, Jean Grey and the other time-displaced teenaged originals joining forces with their longtime nemesis Magneto … but that wasn’t Bunn’s original pitch for the series.
His original pitch was to send some of the X-Men into space on a spaceship powered by the Siege Perilous. How cool is that?
“In 2015, I was asked to take over Uncanny X-Men,” he wrote on Twitter. “We all know that yielded the Magneto-led team. My first pitch, however, was a cosmic team with Rachel Summers in charge and a new Captain Britain.”
The team would have faced “alien mutants” across the galaxy, and, of course, Magneto would have played a role. “Why didn’t it happen?” Bunn asks. “It almost did. Then one editor really pushed a case against anything cosmic.”
“Or maybe it would’ve just been too awesome,” he added.
Bunn’s The Sixth Gun collaborator, Brian Hurtt, actually did a few character designs for Bunn’s pitch, which include Captain Rachel Summers, Chief Engineer McCoy and Sunspot:
Some of the best X-Men stories out there involve the team in space, including the Brood saga and a lot of the early Phoenix stories. And what about that time Paul Smith drew X-Factor on an alien world? It’s a shame this never came to fruition, but it’s fun to see what might have been.