Comic Book Resources

According to that TCJ cover, “Comics’ Greatest Mogul” is Jim Shooter’s cock.

Who knew?

As a relatively new comic fan (post 2000) You know what one of my only real thoughts reading through this was? I hit the Jim Shooter part and thought, hey, I’d like to see an editor like that again. Screw these modern editors who are up to their necks setting out stories and crossovers. I want an editor whose biggest concern is holding writers to their contracts and getting the stories out on time. Let the writers write, that’s what they are paid for. The editor should have better things to do.

Hear that Joe Quesada? Stop dabbling in your writer’s jobs and do your own.

Now, I wasn’t around then. I have no other experience with Jim Shooter other than this article. Still, wouldn’t mind having a release schedule I could count on.

The fights are so bitter because the stakes are so low.

I definitely miss the Shooter days at Marvel, precisely because the trains did run on time. I was reading back issues recently and, poking through the marvel checklist they’d have in each month’s issue, I noticed that every title was exactly spaced apart the same number of issues, month after month (Thor was always 100 ahead of Avengers, Iron Man one ahead of X-Men, etc.). In other words, no title ever skipped a month for years and years under Shooter’s tenure. Pretty unheard of, by today’s standards.

And best of all, the quality of the comics was great. Miller on Daredevil, Byrne on FF, Simonson on Thor, Stern, Gruenwald, Sienciewicz, tons of fun new series and limited series. The “anarchy” of the 70’s produced many gems close to my heart (Warlock, Avengers [especially Shooter’s run], All-New X-Men) but I think of the Shooter years as the best years to collect Marvel.

I agree with dhole about the quality of Shooter’s era.

Also I take issue with one thing:

You know what does hurt us in terms of image? The loud fights about the stuff. Just saying.

I disagree. Every hobby or pastime has it’s very vocal fanbase that loves to argue and debate until the cows come home, be it football, politics lovers, videogames, poker enthusiasts…I’ve heard all types of fanbases go apeshit. The problem with comics isn’t fans being vocal or anal, it;s that the industry has abandoned the casual fan. We have no casual fan anymore. With other hobbies, you have tons of casual fans so that the hardcore enthusiasts don’t stand out so much. With comics, since all the casual fans have long gone, the enthusiasts and arguers simply stand out more. But it’s not fair to blame them, I blame the industry for not building its fanbase better.

Maybe it’s as simple what Laura “Tegan” Gjovaag said to me at Emerald City last year. “I used to think we were the geeks. But really everybody’s geeky about something. You ever see knitting fans when they get together? Now those people are crazy.”

On a similar note, Kevin Church linked to this article on scrapbooking the other day. As bad as we are as a community (and, make no mistake, we’re awful), it’s always nice to see that there’re worse out there.

Great column as always, Greg.

But never having read a copy of Comics Journal #57, fill me in - exactly what did Byrne say about gay people?

I’m a bit ‘meh’ about this column Greg.
Sports fans, music fans, computer game fans etc all have debates and arguments that are kind of silly to anyone else.
You can even take it further than just fandom to ‘people who have knowledge on a subject’.
It’s just human nature.

As for movie adaptations, I’m sick of people assuming I don’t like something because I’m a fan of the original.
My dislike for the Spiderman*, Hulk, Daredevil and Superman Returns films have nothing to do with their treatment of the original source, just that they are poor movies.

*This one I find odd as I like Spidey, and this is pretty damn close to the source, but I just feel nothing for the film - even though it’s not as bad as the rest on my list.

First, what are those “Anything Goes” comics, Greg? I’ve never seen those before and they look rather interesting.

The answer to the question you and Kurt couldn’t come up with:

People today are seemingly most happy criticizing that which they don’t like or criticizing the likes of someone else, just for the sheer “entertainment” of it. Criticizing has become the equivalent of the lowest common denominator of expression.

It’s also a form of coping mechanism. As fans, some people can’t let go of something when it no longer holds their interests, and they don’t want to hold the blame for continuing to support it, so they blame the publisher, the creator, the retailer, the tv networks, the record labels, the sell out musicians, the overpaid athletes, etc.

And we revel in trying to show how we’re just as good as the stars are. American Idol, anyone? Pros Vs. Joes? And we as a society lap up the car wreck as some people are legit and the rest are laughable mockeries and most people who watch such shows are looking for the jokes, not the actual talent, and when the person actually succeeds, well if they weren’t your personal favorite, then we’re back to saying the winner is actually a hack who didn’t deserve to win or some nonsense.

And the ones who don’t make it? We see them as jokes half the time, regardless. Which is more a sad and pathetic statement about our social behavior, than it is any legitimate view of anyone’s abilities or production.

Wow, I feel old. That Byrne-interview issue of the Journal was the first issue I bought. It’s funny (now, for different reasons than it was then) the way Byrne blasts and mocks other creators left and right (I remember there was even a photo of Byrne doing an impression of a Perez character freaking out). Gee, why don’t more of your colleagues spring to your defense these days, John?
Looking back on it, it’s also funny the way they let him get himself into trouble. When he mentions having done a superhero parody character for his college newspaper called “Gay Guy”, they go “Oh, yes, tell us about Gay Guy!” which he clearly hears as “tell us your hilarious fag joke” rather than “here, have this nice piece of rope to hang yourself with”.
I think my second Journal issue was a big Shooter interview (not the one shown, mine had a Hembeck drawing of Shooter towering over a bunch of normal-height Marvel characters IIRC), from which I formed the basis of the main problem I still _do_ have with Shooter’s era. He talks a bit about his visual policies, particularly his policy of getting rid of what he called “murkiness” and how he insisted on a brighter color palette, so I still kind of blame him for all the washed out colors and (a particular peeve of mine) excessive use of white backgrounds in the middle and lower tier books during his reign. This is something I’m always planning to go into with greater depth on my own blog, if I ever get off my ass and start posting properly.
I’m less interested in the Shooter criticisms that focus on anecdotes about his personal failings and treatment of people (enough people have piled in on that, there’s plenty of it about), though I will say that is was the shock of discovering that Roy freaking Thomas of all people had left Marvel for DC that I realized that Marvel was not the special, family-like place Stan’s Soapbox had led me to believe. This marked the end of my childhood Marvel zombie-dom, and the start of my trying out DC (and later other companies than the big 2 entirely), and eventually buying books depending on the people doing them and their general quality than from some naive sense of loyalty to any given company.

Well, in the case of the 1990s “do artists need writers?” question, that was the natural growth of what happens when some artists just want to do their own ideas and write their own stories, or in the case of some artists, who WERE doing their own stories on occasion. Of course, this also is what got us the Marvel exodus into the first Image comics stuff (which we all are trying to forget).

Whining about whining is the whiniest stance of all.

I wasn’t reading comics during most of this stuff, so it was good to get some history.

I came in right after Kyle Rayner was created, so I missed most of that and I wasn’t on the Internet until years after it. I can honestly say that OMD is the biggest controversy that I remember, mostly because initially it seemed like everyone reading comics hated it (some have changed their tunes), and everyone at Marvel defended it in a “we know what’s good for you” way.

Roy Thomas, Marv Wolfman, Len Wein, I forget who-all else. DC was only too happy to offer them a new home — though, I don’t think anyone got an equivalent writer/editor position to what they’d had before

They didn’t at first– Len Wein edited Thomas and Wolfman, though Wein gave them both a lot of leeway. By ‘83, Thomas and Wolfman were writing/editing (Wolfman was co-editing New Teen Titans with Wein I think; Thomas did All-Star Squadron and Infinity Inc. himself). But all that went away by around ‘86 or ‘87 when new brooms took over DC editorially and changed the policy to something like Shooter had at marvel.

I actually subscribed to the Comics Journal in the early ’80s. I was barely 14 at the time, so something as blunt and explicit and four-letter-word ridden (with a Harlan Ellison column no less!) as that was a bit of a shock. But Greg is totally right about the total animosity it had toward Jim Shooter.

Christopher Priest has a great article where he tries to explain his time as Spider-Man editor(which I can’t for the life of me link to) and talks about working for Jim Shooter and how there was so much animosity toward him, some merited, but a lot of it not. It’s worth visiting his site to read it.

But even saying that, Shooter’s Hulk rape scene was wrong, even then. And I can see why it would get the dander up of the Journal’s editorial team. It’s so wrong-headed, and suffers the same conceit found in a lot of ’70s movies (you see a montage of this trope in the documentary Out of the Celluloid Closet): the idea that the only way to show gay men is as rapists or villains. If I’m part of a minority which is 100% invisible in mainstream comics at the time (still pretty much the case today– Batwoman and Renee Montoya make it about 99%) then I don’t want to see the only portrayal of my sexual orientation to be as creepy guy who makes Bruce Banner mad in a shower in the Hulk.

It’s not only wrong for that, but because it uses a lazy genre ripoff (and Shooter was doing that back then a lot, using Harlan Ellison’s story Soldier as the basis of Hulk issue without credit– another controversy in The Comics Journal of the time)

Speaking to the closing quote of Tegan’s, I’ve long argued that EVERYONE is a geek about something.

I used to have a co-worker who good naturedly kidded me about being a comic book and Star Wars geek. I told her my theory about how everyone is a geek about something. She disagreed, and insisted she wasn’t a geek about anything.

Then I found out that she was buying a new house and was excited because she’d finally have enough rooms to make one of them her pulp fiction room. Turns out she LOVES old pulp novels from the 20s and 30s, has enough to fill a room, hunts them down on ebay, and has covers reproduced and enlarged so she can hang them up on her walls.

I took one look at her and said “and you say you’re not a geek, too?”

Eventually, she saw my point.

Graeme Burk said:

“They didn’t at first– Len Wein edited Thomas and Wolfman, though Wein gave them both a lot of leeway. By ‘83, Thomas and Wolfman were writing/editing (Wolfman was co-editing New Teen Titans with Wein I think; Thomas did All-Star Squadron and Infinity Inc. himself). But all that went away by around ‘86 or ‘87 when new brooms took over DC editorially and changed the policy to something like Shooter had at marvel.”

To be honest, I can see both sides of this. On the one hand, I’ve been pretty solidly trained by my professional writing to believe that Editors Are Important: They’re a second set of eyes, a filter to keep a writer’s bad ideas from slipping out. Even the most talented writer in the world has some bad ideas; the percentage goes down, but it never reaches 0. A good editor makes a good writer better.

On the other hand, I’ve read some accounts of experiences at Marvel and DC over the years that suggest that a bad editor is worse than no editor at all; reading, for example, about some of the Teen Titans regimes made me understand pretty clearly why Wolfman preferred to edit himself where possible, if for no other reason than to protect his characters from the abuses of things like ‘Titans Hunt’.

Greg, it’s adorable how you think everyone’s over the organic webshooters.

Oh, and the “Marvel Hates Gays” thing is still going on, at least in some people’s minds. See Rawhide Kid, Freedom Ring, and for some bizarre reason, Young Avengers/Runaways threads from last year for how that one’s shaking out.

Man, if you’d told me in 1987 that one day comics fans would be nostalgic for Jim Shooter…

Why is it so hard to believe fans would be nostalgic for Jim Shooter one day. I was a kid at the time, but everyone I knew who was into comics thought the sun rose and set on Jim Shooter, those books were so damn good. Byrne’s FF, Claremont and Smith and Romita JR on Spidey, Miller on DD, Stern and Milgrom then Buscema on Avengers, Simonson on Thor, Simonson and Simonson on X-Factor, Sinciwiecz on New Mutants followed by Jackson Guice inked by Baker on New Mutants, JM DeMatteis on Captain America with Mike Zeck and others, Peter David on Spectacular Spider-Man….I can think of a lot to be nostalgic about.

Maybe because my friends and I were just reading the comics at the time and weren’t old or connected enough to be privy to all the behind the scenes bickering or didn’t have the 70s memories to compare it to, but i remember not having a single complaint in the Shooter days.

Oh, except for Secret Wars II. That was my only Shooeter-era complaint.

T, that’s all he meant, that the animosity against Shooter *at the time* , if you did read any magazines such the Journal at all, was so vehement and pervasive that the idea of a reappraisal and nostalgic feeling towards his reign was pretty much inconceivable.
Even if one had been Shooter’s number one defender back then, it would have been hard to believe that the general attitude towards him was ever going to change.
I’m no fan of him myself, but I can’t decide whether the recent little storm of hostility in response to his Legion writing gig (where he’s not even in charge of anybody) is better described as silly or ugly.

Just to add more to the Shooter love, I’m also reminded that those were the days of cool projects like Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, and entertaining one-shots like the No-Prize Book and Hembeck’s Fantastic Four Roast.

I also liked that continuity was respected, but not necessarily in an exploitative way (except for Secret Wars II and Mutant Massacre towards the end of the Shooter years, which marked the beginning of the crossover craze, probably following the lead of DC’s Crisis). The continuity I’m thinking of are events that bled across titles like Malekith’s winter storm blowing across the world, the Dire Wraiths War, and (my fave) the Scourge of the Underworld knocking off random villains. These elements gave Marvel a coherence, but you never HAD to buy other comics to enjoy the story you were reading, but very often you WANTED to.

I agree with T. that people like me might feel differently if the inside politics was more widely known at Marvel, but as a kid who was into his superheroes, these comic books were fun. And, to beat a dead horse, THEY CAME OUT EVERY MONTH.

I’m no fan of him myself, but I can’t decide whether the recent little storm of hostility in response to his Legion writing gig (where he’s not even in charge of anybody) is better described as silly or ugly.

there’s been a hostile reaction to Shooter’s Legion?

maybe within the industry, but all i’ve seen and heard amongst the fans is gushing, nostalgic affection… even from those who are nowhere near old enough to be nostalgic about Jim Shooter writing the Legion!

since we’re talking about Shooter, though: can anybody verify the rumor that early in his tenure he had planned to kill off the major Marvel heroes and replace them with new versions of themselves?

(or has this already been addressed in Urban Legends and i’m just forgetting?)

Politics geeks, sports geeks, and film geeks even have TV networks dedicated to them.

Comb & razor: I’m referring strictly to the professional response. I make no claims at special knowledge, I guess I just assumed that this had been so widely reported that if you were even _here_, i.e. you were online and following the goings-on in the comics world at all, you would have come across this story.
Apparently (I have no links, but I read it on several different comics news sites), getting Shooter back on the Legion is something that literally took years to get to happen; every time they floated the idea in the DC offices, people would freak out, nobody wanted to work with him or have anything to do with him.

I bought both of those issues of Anything Goes; which side did I support? And what was the issue at stake? I didn’t know anyting about anything back then, they just looked neat. (Plus I was buying all the #1-5s at the time - yeah, I was that guy.)

Jack Norris–

yeah, i knew that Shooter had originally pitched the idea of him coming back for “one last Legion story” to Levitz years ago, but that it fell apart because it seemed everybody was reluctant to work with him. i kinda assumed all that had been worked out since he’s on the book now, and i haven’t really checked out the recent professional reaction to it, so i might have missed that.

*shrug* the fans seem happy enough, though.

It’s so wrong-headed, and suffers the same conceit found in a lot of ’70s movies (you see a montage of this trope in the documentary Out of the Celluloid Closet): the idea that the only way to show gay men is as rapists or villains.

And because nobody asked for it, a link to the trailer I cut for that doco:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIz7E9GVgGM

So there was a massive exodus at Marvel of angry writers who were suddenly having their autonomy taken away — Roy Thomas, Marv Wolfman, Len Wein, I forget who-all else. DC was only too happy to offer them a new home — though I don’t think anyone got an equivalent writer/editor position to what they’d had before.

Roy Thomas certainly did as “Earth-2″ editor. Not sure about anyone else…

eah, i knew that Shooter had originally pitched the idea of him coming back for “one last Legion story” to Levitz years ago, but that it fell apart because it seemed everybody was reluctant to work with him. i kinda assumed all that had been worked out since he’s on the book now, and i haven’t really checked out the recent professional reaction to it, so i might have missed that.

*shrug* the fans seem happy enough, though.

Haven’t seen any industry reaction at all, but the fans have been very happy.

I do remember reading somewhere on CBR that the main sticking point at DC, regarding the “Last Legion Story”, was Mike Carlin. At the time he was in a senior postion and threatened to walk if Shooter was ever employed. John Byrne was also working on New Gods or Wonder Woman, I think, at the time, but no word on whether he had anything to do with sinking the story.

There’s a saying in science fiction fandom that the golden age of science fiction is twelve. Everyone remembers back when it seemed like science fiction was about mind-blowing ideas and a sense of wonder; everyone has a different idea of when that was exactly. The only thing we can agree on is that it’s not as good as it used to be.

I was twelve going on thirteen when I started reading “normal” comics. I’d been reading Archies since I was three, but when I was twelve I discovered the Transformers comic. In turn, I started reading Rom because it was sort of like Transformers, and it became my introduction to Marvel/superhero comics.

When I was thirteen, I discovered comics shops, and I was at just the right age to appreciate the explosion of independent and weird comics available in specialty stores in the mid-1980s. I read everything from Watchmen to Boris the Bear to Shatter to Electric Warrior and was able to take it all in with a completely open mind.

I was eighteen or nineteen when I began to feel that comics had lost their innocence and were going somewhere I wasn’t willing to follow them. I’d liked Todd McFarlane’s work on Amazing Spider-Man and Spider-Man, but in the early nineties everyone started trying to draw like him or Jim Lee or Rob Liefeld and it depressed me. I wanted everyone to go back to trying to draw like John Byrne, like they had in the 1980s!

Also, too many crossovers ruined the series I was following. I’d been a loyal reader of Quasar and Ghost Rider (Volume 2) since issue one of each, and now I couldn’t understand anything that was happening from issue to issue because in between issues the characters had to go do a crossover. So I’m picking up the new Quasar, thinking, “At last, I can find out how he gets out of last month’s cliffhanger!” and suddenly he’s on the other side of the universe or dead and in the afterlife.

For my own sanity I eventually had to adopt my friend Paul’s policy that as soon as that happened, I would drop a title. See what you did, comic companies? You lost a reader.

Where were we? Oh yes: fans’ outrage. I didn’t have any when I was thirteen. Now I do.

I don’t like the look and feel of most current movies. Science fiction and action were my two favourite genres when I was a teenager; SF and action movies from the present have an obnoxious quality to me. To paraphrase Peter Griffin, they insist upon themselves. Comics adaptations, or at least superhero ones, suffer from that problem, and from the problem that they aren’t faithful to their sources.

As for comics themselves, I don’t read many current ones. I still spend about $25 a month on comics, but it’s all from the four-for-a-dollar boxes at small local comic cons and swap meets. That’s where I can find lots of good, old comics from the era that I can relate to, and at 25¢, I can even afford to experiment with the occasional new comic and be pleasantly surprised.

However, overall, I feel that “they” are never going to “get it right” again. Of course, I realize that’s subjective, but I’m the one in charge of when I open my purse and when I don’t, and I don’t like what I see today. Maybe in another ten years styles will circle around back to where they were in the 1980s. Or maybe I’m going to be left behind with only my old comics to read.

Why does this lead to outrage? I think because fans are damaged, wounded people. We had bad childhoods. We had bad adulthoods. We’ve been abused our entire lives. One of our few comforts is comics (or animation, or science fiction, or fandom). Take that away, i.e. change it dramatically from what it was, and the pain becomes so deep that it has to be externalized.

I’d like to read that 1980 John Byrne interview. I’d like to read Jim Shooter’s Valiant Comics press release that was so filled with lies that it prompted a storm of letters to Comic Buyer’s Guide. I’d like to read those letters to CBG. I’d like to know more about this “Name Withheld” artists-as-writers thing.

About the retcon in Spidey…

Nonfans who ask about it really can’t wrap their heads around it. But an example I use is the Dallas episode that erased a whole season as a dream. My wife watches soaps and I find it amazing how similiar some of the ideas are…especially when it comes to bringing back dead characters.

For comparison, check out this post on “the top scrapbooking scandal of 2007″ (which by implication means there was *more than one* “scrapbooking scandal!”)

http://www.beaucoupkevin.com/2008/01/theres-always-crazier-hobby-out-there.html

I find Jim Shooter’s era looking better and better in retrospect (yeah, except for Secret Wars II. But I still say the first Secret Wars was pretty darn good for what it was.)

One controversy not mentioned here was the “Marvel should give Jack Kirby his original art back” kerfuffle. I think this was the touchstone for a lot of people to get all crazy-mad with rage (and in retrospect, you can really see a lot of people getting *seriously* unhinged.)

Shooter (seems to me maybe a bit unfairly, but stories differ) was Marvel’s point man for the unceasing barrage. I think the controversy gave a lot of people who didn’t really care one way or the other about Shooter reason to hate him (i.e., because they supported Kirby), and for people who *already* hated Shooter, it sent a lot of them off the deep end into incoherent rage.

My hunch is that a comprehensive objective history of the era would give this particular controversy a lot of importance beyond its own merits.

“But I still say the first Secret Wars was pretty darn good for what it was.”

Well, no, it really wasn’t.

suedenim mentioned the first big everybody-take-sides dispute that came to my mind - the Kirby artwork return issue. That one isn’t completely dead - it’s morphed into an ongoing debate about how much credit, and money, Kirby deserved for his work at Marvel. Subscribe to the kirby-l group at Yahoo to see the latest round of this fight.

The whole creator’s-rights movement of the 70s was pretty controversial in the industry, but the fans were pretty much on the creators’ side.

On Shooter, the thing that I remember is that most of the things people remember the Shooter years for actually started under his predecessor, Archie Goodwin. Marvel had been flailing for a few years after Roy left the top job; the nadir was Gerry Conway’s short stint as EIC. People called Gerry the “seagull editor” - he flew in, crapped all over everything, and flew away. Archie got things stabilized, and Shooter built on that. As far as I know, the decision not to renew any of the writer/editor contracts was made by corporate management during Archie’s tenure, but the contracts didn’t expire until after Shooter was EIC. I’ve also heard that Shooter made a bad situation worse by being less that honest with the writer/editors about this decision.

Shooter’s return to the Legion of Superheroes actually has be buying the book for the first time EVER. In recent years I’ve picked up some of the Legion Archives because I adore DC’s Silver Age stuff in general and also bought some beat up issues of the Grell/Cockrum run for the artwork.

Anyway…..

I too have fond memories of Shooter’s Marvel since it was the one I grew up with. Didn’t know much about the guy then but I admire his professionalism when compared to some current writers/artists.

So far I think the first two issues of his Legion run have been decent. There’s some really nifty ideas and some predictability and some cool retro moments. For now I”m on board only because I like the idea of one of the Legion’s “founding fathers” so to speak returning to write the book for its 50th Anniversary. I’m not expecting it to be the greatest comic I’ve ever read, but it should be fun and interesting (and come out on time).