Ulysses Bloodstone - Publication History

Publication History

John Warner has explained the development of Ulysses Bloodstone: "Len Wein and Marv Wolfman came up with the spark that would become Bloodstone—the premise of a man who fights monsters—and together he and I began to develop a series idea to take up ten pages of Where Monsters Dwell." Mike Vosburg was the artist assigned to the first installment, and then Pat Boyette was to do the rest of the series. Warner developed ideas for the ongoing story describing the planned ideas as "grand and epic and sweeping in scope" and "very cosmic and complex." Unfortunately, Where Monsters Dwell was cancelled at the same time as The Living Mummy, another title Warner was working on.

However, he was informed that he'd get the chance to run part of the story in the first two issues of a new title, Marvel Presents. The first two parts were finished and would run in issue one and Warner had to draw everything to a satisfactory close in the second issue. He says "in the first two episodes I had laid the groundwork for this grand sweeping epic ... and all of a sudden I had to tie it off in eighteen pages" This left a lot of story untold and he could only introduce two of the characters he wanted to bring in, Brad Carter and P.D.Q. Warner. Due to the delays Boyette wasn't available for the second issue, which was drawn by Sonny Trinidad.

Most of the rest of the planned stories would appear in the back-up story in The Rampaging Hulk (1977) which led up to Bloodstone's death. This was told in #8, after the feature was replaced in #7 by an unrelated feature, and now written by Steve Gerber rather than Warner. Other parts of his history would be told through flashbacks in titles like Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty (1999), and more of the background to his death was filled-in by The Bloodstone Hunt storyline in the regular Captain America comic (1989). His adventures with the Monster Hunters were told in Marvel Universe (1998) and Marvel: The Lost Generation (2000).