Land of the Lost

Suppressed Prince album...or Obsidian fighting Nebula Man during a solar eclipse?

The Milligan post is still coming (I radically overestimated my capacity for non-essential work during August, aka Laziness Awareness Month), but here's something looser while that particular brew percolates. I recently re-read this post by Jones of the Jones boys, a list of desirable comics that are currently unavailable in English, and it got me wondering: what are cartooning's equivalents of that moldy musical chestnut, the fabled lost record? Tantalizing works that remain unpublished, unfinished or unrealized potential? So here's a cursory list of lost albums BD. I can already see the obvious gaps (that final issue of Winter Men never actually materialized, right?), so feel free to expand on it in comments.

Big Numbers, by Alan Moore and assorted victims
Approaches the Beach Boys' SMiLE in both mystique and ambition, only with less cheeseburger consumption and no contemptible Mike Love figure for everyone to hate. Even though the series will probably never be completed in any form, I still hope that all the pages from its completed third issue are published some day - Frank Santoro makes the first two sound like a fascinating exercise in masochistic formalism.

Bizarre Boys, by Peter Milligan, Grant Morrison and Jamie Hewlett
Not much is known about this abandoned project, just that it was supposed to be published under Vertigo's Voices banner (a mid-90s bid to encourage more radical personal expression from the imprint's creators, which inspired Kill Your Boyfriend and two thoroughly obscure Peter Milligan one-shots before ending its brief life) and involve much Joycean metafiction in riotous style. But the lineup alone is reason to rue its dissipation. (There were once scans of some unreleased promo art to pine over right here, and they seem to have floated into the same void.)

"Doctor Strange," by Steve Ditko
In Blake Bell's excellent new study Strange & Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko, he writes that a couple issues' worth of completed pages from Ditko's Doctor Strange serial went unpublished after the artist left Strange Tales and Marvel. My copy of the book is currently packed up in a box, but I'm pretty sure Bell also discovered that said art remains in Ditko's hands, so who knows when/if it'll see print.

Sweeney Todd, by Neil Gaiman and Michael Zulli
I know nothing about this beyond the basic primer in Jog's essay on Taboo (where it was originally going to be serialized), and I'm lukewarm towards most of Gaiman's comics except Sandman. But I love musicals, and I'd probably agree with Terry Teachout, who called Sondheim's Sweeney the greatest post-WWII Broadway debutante there is. So how to deal with his shadow? Ignore the stage interpretation, ubiquitous as it is, or engage with it directly? A towering, operatic howl about capital's gore-flecked maw in the hands of Neil Gaiman...yeah, that could be an unintentionally hilarious debacle in the making. I'd still like to have seen how it turned out.

Tintin and Alph-Art, by Herge
Another famous example. I haven't read this either - the posthumously published versions are all incomplete sketches rather than finished work - but it sounds deeply weird. I don't know what represented a greater departure for Herge: dispatching Tintin to tussle with a sinister impresario in the world of, um, modern art, or actually having him meet a girl during the adventure. Tom McCarthy's Tintin and the Secret of Literature contains some great theorizing about this book.

Until the Day of Victory, by Osamu Tezuka
There's probably enough unseen Tezuka comics to fill up a whole list like this. I would guess, however, that only one of them features Mickey Mouse machine-gunning Osaka in his adorable fighter jet. And it's apparently still extant. Can some swashbuckling manga scholar please bootleg this slab of genius?