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With the passing of Michael Jackson last month, it as brought me to a great "What If" story. What if Michael Jackson had been able to buy Marvel Comics like he and Stan Lee had wanted to?

Possibly the most notable connection between Jackson and the comics world, however, is how close the star came to owning Marvel, one of the industry's "Big Two" publishers, in the late '90s. As chronicled by The Comics Journal in an August 2005 article, Jackson met with Stan Lee and Peter Paul of the newly formed Stan Lee Media to investigate the possibility of buying Marvel Comics.

Michael Jackson - Stan Lee/Marvel"After we built SLM into a public company with a market cap almost twice Marvel's, we talked with Michael Jackson about teaming up to buy Marvel," the article quotes Paul. "I have a videotape of Michael in our offices for over two hours, seeing what we were doing."

Jim Salicrup, a former Marvel editor who was a writer-editor for SLM during the Jackson meetings, told TCJ that at one point, Jackson asked Lee, "If I buy Marvel, you'll help me run it, won't you?"

While the deal eventually fell through, it certainly offers an interesting "What If?" scenario for comics fans -- and an indication of exactly how close the worlds of Jackson and comic books often overlapped.