Dan pointed out this NEWSarama interview to me last night, with spider-scribe J. Michael Straczynski talking about an upcoming project of his called Bullet Points:
…in this story, I looked to the past to find probably the one most critical moment in the history of the Marvel Universe, which was the moment when Steve Rogers became Captain America. No sooner did he get the Super-Soldier Serum than a Nazi assassin killed Dr. Erskine and made sure there would be no more Captain Americas.
I then took that moment and, for this alternate history story, changed one thing – the assassin hits Erskine one day earlier. Not only does this incident prevent Steve from becoming Captain America, the murder kills another person caught in the crossfire, the MP escorting Erskine to a waiting jeep…an eighteen-year-old Ben Parker.
So with one attack, two lives are lost…and the repercussions of that event ripple out across the entire Marvel Universe like a cue ball sending everything into new configurations. Though the Super-Soldier Serum is gone, Steve Rogers still wants desperately to serve…and the military gives him that chance in an experimental exo-suit they’re still perfecting, a device that takes a continual toll on his health because it’s so difficult and hard to use…the first prototype in the army’s “Iron Man” program.
Similarly, Peter Parker, born years later, grows up without the stabilizing presence of Ben Parker, and ends up in a very different place emotionally and physically…a troubled teen, who falls into the wrong company, gets in trouble, runs away and is stranded in the desert when a certain Gamma bomb goes off.
(more…)
