On the Naughty List: Slaybelle, the No-Hit Wonder

 

♪Sleigh bells ring, are you listening? In the lane, snow is glistening♪

♪A beautiful sight, we're happy tonight♪
♪Walking in a winter wonderland♪

-Winter Wonderland

 

 

It’s nearly that time again, merry people! With the holiday season upon us and with me recently having trawled back through my old notes on unused concepts in the MC2, I’ve got a gift for one and all: Slaybelle, the villainess who (almost) stole Christmas.

 

I enjoy the unused concepts conceived by the creative teams of the MC2, particularly Spider-Girl co-creator Ron Frenz, who has kindly shared a plethora of unpublished pitches through the years. Among these, we have this tantalizing titbit from Ron’s own facebook post:

 

“NOPE.

So The Legendary Tom DeFalco and I were working on an issue of Spider-Girl that would be on sale around Christmastime and needed a villain to give Mayday a warm-up battle at the beginning of the issue, you know, an opening bank robbery kinda thing. We put our heads together and came up with THIS young lady,

SLAYBELLE (Get it?)

Tom and I: Pretty cool, huh?

Editor: Nope.

Oh well.”

 

For those who don’t get it, Slaybelle is a punny bit of wordplay on ‘sleigh bell,’ which is another term for a ‘jingle bell’ which were often found on sleds or sleighs and are closely associated with the folk story of Santa Claus and his flying sleigh. Slay, meaning to violently kill is a homophone of sleigh. Belle is a term for a beautiful woman. Honestly, I’m probably overexplaining this. But it’s a clever joke!

 

On the podcast Make Mine Mayday Episode 43, Ron mentioned the situation:

 

‘The only thing I remember an editor saying we couldn’t do was Slaybelle. A young woman in a Santa suit with a big gun and we were going to use her for an opening sequence, like a bank robbery or something like that. I forget whether it was Nicole or Molly or who it was, whoever was our editor at the time said ‘No’. And we went ‘why?’ and they said ‘No. Just no.’

 

As for what issue of Spider-Girl this Miss missed, Ron notes Slaybelle was conceived for an issue published after Spider-Girl #54, which was of course pencilled by MC2 alumni Pat Olliffe. I’ll let you theorize!

Until I can come up with something for next this time next year, I remain a very merry

 

frogoat