Outsiders

Around 1972, Dave Cockrum was the regular artist on the Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes backup in Superboy. Among other things, he updated the costumes of many of the Legionnaires, introduced new characters, and created several others, including a hero team called the Outsiders and a villain team called the Devastators. Only a single page of promotional art with the team's picture was created for each team, with a few characters' model sheets.

Cockrum never got to introduce the Outsiders and Devastators into Legion continuity, though. He left DC for Marvel around 1974, where he co-created a group called the All-New, All-Different X-Men. Some of his designs for these proposed Legion-spinoff characters appeared over at Marvel.

Outsiders

The Outsiders was to have been a Legion hero team spinoff, consisting of Nightcrawler, Power Boy, Quetzal, Reflecto, Trio, and Typhoon.

• Nightcrawler, of course, became a popular member of the X-Men.
• Power Boy apparently bore no relation to the one seen later at the Legion Academy, named Jed Rikane.
• Quetzal was a winged and feathered woman (much more bird-like than Dawnstar), whose name evokes the Aztec flying god Quetzalcoatl.
• Reflecto, only seen on the cover of Adventure Comics 354 years before, was to have been introduced here, but appeared only ephemerally throughout the rest of the Legion's pre-Zero Hour run (as a character created by a strange amalgam of Superboy and Ultra Boy, as a member during the Five Year Gap, etc.).
• Trio was a Carggite.
• Typhoon's powers and history remained unrevealed but presumably had wind and/or water based powers.

According to the X-Men Anniversary Magazine (Marvel Comics, Sept. 1993):

"The wholly unique Nightcrawler wasn't even conceived as an X-Man, he was meant to be in DC Comics' Legion of Super-Heroes and, later, of a Legion offshoot called The Outsiders. But according to artist Dave Cockrum, DC editor Murray Boltinoff felt the character was too funny looking. Cockrum eventually placed his pointy-eared, blue-skinned swashbuckler into [writer] Len Wein's all-international X-Men!"

In his own message board [1], Cockrum described Nightcrawler:

"[The original version of] Nightcrawler wasn't a nice guy. He was nasty, vicious and animalistic. He ran up and down the sides of buildings, and bayed at the moon like the Hound of the Baskervilles. He came and went in bursts of flame and brimstone--I kept that part, later on--and he had a prehensile tail. He was a very frightening character. The Legion Nightcrawler was no longer a demon, he was an alien. His name was Balshazaar. He came from another dimension, and his people were the source of Earth's legends and mythology about demons. He kept most of the original demon's characteristics, though he wasn't quite as nasty as the original Nightcrawler. He also gained the ability to disappear in shadows."

For the development of the X-Man Storm, there's a picture in the X-Men Anniversary Magazine of a proto-Storm character named the Black Cat, a shapeshifter.

"Storm is perhaps the best example of how a character's look develops from creative conception to creative result. In the early 1970's, Dave Cockrum had hoped to create a new super-group for use in DC's Legion of Super-Heroes. Before that happened, he moved to Marvel and the X-Men project. For the new X-Men, Wein and [editor] Roy Thomas had conceived of a male X-Man with the power to manipulate weather. Cockrum had already designed an alluring female named Quetzal, but everyone thought Dave's design for an African-American shape shifter named the Black Cat better fit the X-look, so the took the Black Cat's powers, and Quetzal's beautiful features, and combined them into Storm. The white hair was one of Dave's last-minute inspirations (just as long as it doesn't make her look like somebody's grandmother, warned Wein), and the cloak was a holdover from the go-go Marvel Girl design. Nothing creative ever goes to waste."

Devastators

Not much is known about this group other than its membership and its villain status. The team would have consisted of Belladonna, Manta, Sidewinder, Tyr, and Wolverine.

• Belladonna, a vampire, would have apparently been the leader or co-leader.
• Tyr had actually seen print shortly before Cockrum left (in Superboy v1 197), as a Legion solo villain.
• Wolverine (who predated Marvel's X-Man of the same name by a year or so) became the Imperial Guardsman Fang at Marvel, who was a Timber Wolf analogue. As a Devastator, he was a werewolf and the brother of Belladonna.
• Manta and Sidewinder were a humanoid manta-ray and a humanoid lizard, respectively, with powers unknown.

See Also

• Dave Cockrum's Outsiders & Devastators - primary source material for this article, contains black & white images
• The Original DC Outsiders by Dave Cockrum - contains colorized artwork plus original character model sheets