Most obscure inside reference ever...

A couple of posts back, I was writing about Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa's work in theatre and comics, and I mentioned that this connection led to one of comics' most obscure inside references ever. Here's the story.

As I mentioned, the cast of the Dad's Garage Theatre production of Aguirre-Sacasa's "The Weird" included Scott Warren and Sloane Warren.

In Nightcrawler #5, Kurt Wagner and the other X-Men try to stop a runaway subway train, and discover the conductor dead at the controls:


After the X-Men manage to stop the train and save the passengers (with Kurt encountering a bizarre ghost during the incident), Kurt investigates the mystery, playing a visit to the conductor's widow:

"I remembered something Sloan (sic) Warren, the conductor's widow, told me."

"This last week before he died, Scott told me he thought that the ghosts...that maybe they need help."

Yes, there they are...the Scott and Sloane Warren of Earth-616.

It's worth noting that Aguirre-Sacasa did not have Darick Robertson draw the characters to resemble the real Scott and Sloane Warren; most significantly, they're both much younger than their Marvel Universe counterparts. Oh yeah, and the real Scott isn't dead; I guess that's a pretty major difference too.

You can see our world's Scott Warren at his MySpace page; I don't know whether the real Sloane has any public on-line presence to link to, though.

So there you have it...