The JLA/Avengers Missing Moment That Still Bugs Tom Brevoort, Revealed

Posted in: Avengers, Comics, DC Comics, Justice League, Marvel Comics | Tagged: Dan Raspler, tom brevoort

The JLA/Avengers Missing Moment That Still Bugs Tom Brevoort, Revealed

The JLA/Avengers missing moment that still bugs Tom Brevoort, revealed... or, rather, revealed three years ago

Published Sun, 15 Mar 2026 07:57:09 -0500
by Rich Johnston
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Article Summary

• Tom Brevoort reveals his biggest regret about the 2003 JLA/Avengers crossover event plot changes.
• An original organizing principle for the story was cut, impacting the use of classic League and Avengers rosters.
• Brevoort describes editorial clashes with DC, particularly about Flash and Green Lantern character choices.
• The lost sequence would have showcased evolving team lineups as heroes fought through Krona’s base.

Thanks to Bleeding Cool reader Matthew O'Hara, for reminding me of this one. While Marvel Executive Editor and SVP Tom Brevoort may not have wanted to go into detail about his problems with former DC editor Dan Raspler and "one specific mechanism of the plot" of the 2003 crossover event JLA/Avengers in his Word Balloon podcast interview with John Siuntres, Tom was a bit more forthcoming a few years ago in his much-missed Substack newsletter (that may have gotten a few fans more angry than apathetic, and so had to go on pause.) In that, he wrote about the missing aspect of the published version that still bugs him.

"See, when we began, there was an overall plot outline that everybody had agreed to and signed off on, Marvel and DC both. But in cutting that sequence from it, we were deviating from that agreed-upon plot. And this provided the opportunity for the DC editor, Dan Raspler, to start to question everything else that we were doing in the rest of the series, since the precedent had been established. Dan had a bunch of issues, but his main one seemed to stem around the use of Barry Allen and Hal Jordan. Likely because he'd been involved in some of the storytelling involved, Dan was very much invested in DC's then-position that Wally West and Kyle Rayner were now the Flash and Green Lantern and would forevermore be."
"He also felt that there was an aspect to the back half of the story that read to him like the comic books of old had been great, but everything that had happened since, through the 1980s and 1990s, had damaged the characters. I didn't necessarily disagree with him, but it was a concern, and one that we now had to address."
"In the original plot for the final two issues, there was an organizing principle: as you see at the beginning of the published issue, the League and Avengers that we started off with was the classic versions, the ones who would have been in George's aborted JLA/AVENGERS project of the 1980s. And the idea was that they'd realize that they had to storm Krona's Galactus-derived base in order to stop them, but if they did so, all of the stuff that had happened to them since that time would once again be restored. So Hank Pym would strike Jan, Barry Allen would give his life in the Crisis, the Vision would be dismantled and his marriage to the Scarlet Witch undone, and Hal Jordan would go murderously crazy."
"And the heroes would have to decide that the greater good was more important, and go ahead with the assault. Thereafter, as the united teams breached barrier after barrier towards the center of Krona's base, they would jump forward in time—meaning that the cast would shift to the League and Avengers rosters for those appropriate eras. You'd begin with the classics, then they'd take a hill and suddenly be the Roger Stern-era Avengers and the Giffen/DeMatteis League. After another hill, it's be the Bob Harras/Steve Epting Avengers and the Dan Jurgens JLA. And so on."
"Until, once they reached the center and the climax, you'd be back to the modern League and Avengers for the finale of the fight. This was a way to allow George to draw all of the alternate versions of the characters that he wanted to do, and provided an organizing principle for the whole thing. In the final book, it's all random, with Leaguers and Avengers swapping in and out without any particular rhyme or reason, and it felt much more like random inconsequential fan service than anything else. I hate it, it really bugs me."
"But in trying to be a good partner with DC, I let things go too far when I maybe could have put a stop to them earlier, and we killed a week or two revising and re-revising that #3 script endlessly and winding up with a final result that wasn't just a compromise, but which was compromised. A complete failure on my part, and one that I should have prevented."

Will a new Justice League/Avengers and Avengers/Justice League for 2028, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the original, fix that?

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