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In 2005 Marvel assembled the Young Avengers, a group of teenage heroes inspired by Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. However, the group almost showed up over a decade earlier. Jim Valentino and Rob Liefeld had approached Marvel with a pitch for Young Avengers, but the publisher had their own ideas for the creators.

“I had about five different proposals that I wanted to do,” Jim Valentino says during an episode of Robservations with Rob Liefeld. “I’d done some pick-up work at Marvel here and there, but I wanted a gig, a steady gig. So, I had prepared about five different proposals. One of them was with [Rob Liefeld]. We did one that I was going to write, [Rob was] going to draw, called the Young Avengers. And this was years before they did that book, like a decade before or so. The basic idea was Marvel’s version of the Teen Titans.”

However, Marvel wanted Liefeld on New Mutants, another team of young heroes.

“They had to beat me down on Young Avengers because I was pressing really hard for them to give it to us,” Liefeld says.

In the end, Liefeld and Valentino believe Marvel made the right call, because New Mutants did wonders for Liefeld’s career, while Valentino helped revive the Guardians of the Galaxy.

“[Marvel] was right. You needed to go to New Mutants for your own career in order to not only goose that book up, but also for what you needed to do for your career,” Valentino says.

It’s interesting to speculate on what the 1989 version of the Young Avengers would’ve been like, but then we may never have met Deadpool or Cable, two characters Liefeld created during his tenure on New Mutants. Without them, the Marvel Universe would be almost unrecognizable today.

Want more? Make sure you've read our list of all the best Marvel Comics stories of all time, and get ready for all the free Marvel comics coming as part of this year's Free Comic Book Day / Comics Giveaway Day events.