Posted in: Comics, Marvel Comics, X-Men | Tagged: chris claremont, fabian nicieza, gambit, louise simonson
Fabian Nicieza’s Gambit Novel Only Exists On A Dead Floppy Disc
Fabian Nicieza’s Gambit Novel Only Exists On A Dead Floppy Disc… is this basically X-Men bitcoin?
Article Summary
- Fabian Nicieza revealed he wrote a 250-page Gambit novel in the 1990s, but Marvel killed the Byron Preiss deal.
- The unpublished Gambit novel now survives only on an obsolete 3M floppy disc Nicieza says he cannot access.
- Nicieza said the lost Gambit story focused on Remy LeBeau’s youth and New Orleans Thieves Guild origins.
- Chris Claremont and Louise Simonson reacted at Terrificon as Nicieza said he has no interest in recovering it.
At Terrificon this past weekend, Deadpool co-creator Fabian Nicieza casually dropped news of lost X-Men media in years; his own. He once wrote roughly 250 pages of an original Gambit novel that has never been published, never been read by anyone else, and now exists solely on an obsolete hard plastic 3M disc that he has no intention of recovering. And would have covered Remy LeBeau’s formative years in the New Orleans Thieves Guild.
The revelation came during the Uncanny X panel featuring Fabian Nicieza, Chris Claremont, and Louise Simonson, moderated by Word Balloon’s John Siuntres. The conversation had turned to Nicieza’s early-’90s Gambit solo series when the writer suddenly offered up the news. “I was contracted by Byron Preiss Books to write a Gambit novel. And I got about 250 pages into this novel, and Marvel pulled the plug on the whole Byron Preiss deal. The only place it exists, and I haven’t looked at it in 30 years, and I’m never going to look at it again, is a hard plastic 3M disc. It was all the things Chris would have hated the most because it was all about his childhood and his teenage years and who he was, and it drew a lot from a lot more from Howard Mackie‘s lore than it did from mutant lore, you know. And that was what the novel was.”
Chris Claremont added, “If you really want a cathartic end of something, you have the paper, you have fire, and you burn it.” Fabian Nicieza repeated, “I kept the plastic disc. It says Gambit novel on it. I kept the plastic disc. I can’t access it.” Louise Simonson agreed, “No, but you can’t access it. You really can’t”. And Fabian Nicieza qualified, “There are special services that will take that old stuff and turn it into a Word document, but I don’t want to.” Byron Preiss was known in the ’90s for packaging ambitious prose adaptations and original novels tied to Marvel and other properties. Many of those projects were ambitious; some were quietly cancelled when corporate priorities shifted. Nicieza’s Gambit book appears to have been one of the casualties…
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