Thread 149856565

Can we talk about Jim Shooter and whether he was good for Marvel and whether his departure was good or bad for the Company?

>>149856565 (OP)
We've had this kind of thread before
The consensus that I've found here was he was good at the time but he wouldn't have been good for the company if he continued his practices over the years

>>149856565 (OP)
>>149856622
can I get a QRD? all I heard is that he was a Gigachad that enabled a lot of good shit/creators back in the day

>>149856719
He's an editor for Marvel that got artists and writers to get off their asses and work
But he also wanted them to do stories he wanted which the artists and writers working under him didn't like

>>149856565 (OP)
We need a guy like him now more than ever.

>>149856719
Essentially is he was a fixer. He got everyone back on track and doing their jobs but also tended to try to fix things when they weren't broken. All the same though marvel wasn't ever better than they were with him.

>>149856565 (OP)
Secret Wars 2 makes him shit.

>>149856751
>he wanted which the artists and writers working under him didn't like
he could've found the ones willing no? but I undertand
>>149856784
>but also tended to try to fix things when they weren't broken.
such as?
>>149856791
he enabled SW1 so that's ok
>>149856765
all in all what a legend

>>149856926
>such as?
Dictating that Jean Grey needed to die at the end of the Dark Phoenix Saga, which ultimately drove Byrne off the book and put Shooter on Claremont's shit list. Eventually it was retconned, but not after almost a decade of Claremont trying to write around stories he had Jean planned for, hence Madelyne Pryor and Rachel Summers

>>149856926
>he could've found the ones willing no? but I undertand
He could have but those people are more lap dogs or interns that will do what their boss says but won't have the same quality he would be looking for when it comes to the art or writing

>>149856926
>he could've found the ones willing no? but I understand
You hear a lot of artist and writers today being drama queens on social media but this isn't a new thing. A lot of the creatives back then were super huge divas. John Byrne springs to mind especially. Effectively there was a huge issue of people not doing their jobs because they thought they were special. They were on Marvel's payroll they were gonna have to play by Marvel's rules.

>>149856991
>but not after almost a decade of Claremont trying to write around stories he had Jean planned for, hence Madelyne Pryor and Rachel Summers
see I don't mind that, if you have a crush on your favorite characters you can always work around to bring them back, so what's one editor saying "no do something else with someone else" until then
>>149857018
>>149857036
ahh I see, he sounds definitely stricter than the norm back then

>>149857146
>see I don't mind that, if you have a crush on your favorite characters you can always work around to bring them back,

yeah but see we joke about comic death and retcons and stuff now but back then outside of some silver age shenanigans it wasn't really as common. When Jean died for all intents she was D-E-A-D DEAD. And she didn't die nobly or heroic. She became a monster. And frankly he was right. There did need to be more accountability beyond "I'm sorry."

>>149856765
My guy we needed a person like this a decade ago.

>>149857680
If that was sent a decade ago there would just be memes about how out of touch editors are or how he might get cancelled for saying that

>>149856565 (OP)
He was nothing but good for the company and him leaving was nothing but bad for the company.

>>149856751
>which the artists and writers working under him didn't like
Based. Now a days all these artists and writers want to draw porn/write erotica. We need a chad directors to tard wrangle these coomers to do the right thing

How would have Shooter reacted to the Liefelds and Mcfarlanes of the world?

>>149856565 (OP)
I hate to agree with John Byrne but this is the most foxhole agreement this ever was:
>Shooter came along just when Marvel needed him -- but he stayed too long. Having fixed just about everything that was wrong, he could not stop "fixing". Around the time I left to do Superman, I said that I thought Shooter and Dick Giordano should trade jobs -- it was DC that needed fixing then -- and do so about every 5 years or so. Shooter had put Marvel into a place where all that was needed was a kindly father figure at the helm -- and that was not Shooter!

>>149857703
If we had some even half as strict as he was the children they got writing comics now would be on social media talking about their fascist boss faster than a Spider-Gwen book gets renumbered

>>149856565 (OP)
>>149856784
Modern Marvel and DC comics could use a Jim Shooter now more than ever. Sadly that can't happen because both companies are captured by people who hate everything big Jim stood for.

>>149856565 (OP)
I just don't like Marvel.

His blog is still up and makes for interesting reading.
https://jimshooter.com/

Wow so surely there were comics as great and legendary as Watchmen, DKR, Batman Year One, or Alan Moore's Swamp Thing made under his tenure right?
Right?

>>149857979
Yes. Actually. During this time Marvel's flagship titles were all the best they've ever been.

>>149857979
apparently yes

>>149857036
Marvel rules were that they were the free love hippies with real artististic expression and freedom to fuck around while the Distinguished Competition were 9-5 boring office workers with suits and ties despite the fact that at the end of the day they were making comic books for preteens to young adults.

Christopher Priest loves Jim Shooter and by God, that's good enough for me.

>>149858112
DeMatteis liked him too

>>149857905
It's more that a modern Jim shooter would be someone who was raised on 90's and 2000's comics and trying to fix things without understanding too much about what readers want in the 2010's beside no woke shit
Not only that but they'd need to have a business man's mind when working on stuff like this

>>149857979
Watchmen sucks. Deal with it.

>>149857997
>>149858072
like?

>>149856765
Why didn't we listen?

>>149856565 (OP)
>his departure was good or bad for the Company?
how is this a question look how quickly everything to shit after he left

>>149858237
apparently
>Claremont and Byrne on X-Men
>Miller on Daredevil
>Secret Wars
>Simonson on Thor
amongst others

>>149857979
Marvel’s always been more focused on their ongoing stuff rather than limited series stuff done by superstar writers. Still, Shooter’s Marvel saw the absolute peak of Daredevil (Miller), Spider-Man (Stern), the Avengers (Stern) and X-Men (Claremont). It marked the first time Hulk (Mantlo), Iron Man (Layton) and Daredevil were ever even good. Not to mention consistently great runs everywhere else, like Fantastic Four (Byrne), Thor (Simonson), Power Man & Iron Fist (Priest) and the start of Gruenwald’s Captain America. Sure, it’s not as prestigious or whatever, but they’re all great comics, and I don’t think any company has ever had such a large amount of quality stuff put out simultaneously they way Shooter’s time there was.

>>149858237
>like?

LIKE ALL OF THEM.

>>149858278
>>Secret Wars

bad example

For me, Miller on Daredevil is the only thing that rivals DC's peak output. I am somewhat less enamored with Miller's Batman work compared to others, although I do like it.

Claremont X-Men is equivalent to NTT if we are being honest
Byrne on FF is great, and much better than his Superman, but it doesn't reach DC's peak stuff.
COIE > Secret Wars

>>149858237
you have shit taste, so there'd be no point

pearls before swine, and all that

>>149858408
Others already answered him though

>>149858163
was it DeMatteis who wrote the letter calling out everyone for backstabbing Jim after he was one the best editors for getting creatives their rights back?

>>149858483
I think that was Colleta

>>149856991
>Dictating that Jean Grey needed to die at the end of the Dark Phoenix Saga
For good reason
>When I read the X-Men make-ready that included the scene in which Phoenix destroyed a Shi’ar starship, killing hundreds, and an inhabited planet, killing billions, curious, I asked Jim Salicrup to show me whatever else was done on the storyline. Because Claremont and Byrne were very efficient, on time and professional, the next several issues were well along. The climactic issue was still in the plot stage, I think. I think Byrne had not yet begun to pencil it. At any rate, I discovered that Chris (and John) had backed down from the idea of Phoenix becoming the X-Men’s Doctor Doom. The plot indicated that Phoenix would somehow be mind-wiped and let go. Back to living at the Mansion, hanging around with Storm and company, sitting at the same table for lunch, etc.

>That, to me, would be like taking the German army away from from Hitler and letting him go back to governing Germany.

>Did I have a “moral” issue with that? Yes. More than that, it was a character issue. Would Storm sit comfortably at a dinner table with someone who had killed billions as if nothing had ever happened? Nah.

>I don’t know whether most people grok this idea, but the Editor in Chief is charged with governing, managing and protecting all of the characters. It was my job to make sure the characters were in character, and I was the final word on what “in character” was. Not Chris, not John, not any freelancer. The company relied upon me to manage and protect the company’s intellectual properties.

>Anyway….

>>149857750
He would have banned from applying for jobs at Marvel.

>>149858519
There it is

"Marvel Editors, you are the droppings of the creative world. You were destined to float in the cesspool till urine logged and finally sink to the bottom with the rest of the shit but along came Jim Shooter who rolled up his sleeves and rescued you.

He gave you a title, respectability, power and even a credit card that you used and abused. He made you the highest payed Editors in the history of the business. He protected you against all that could tamper with your rights, your power and your pocket book.

He backed you against all Prima Donna freelancers no matter how big… his pockets were always open to you, No cry of help was too small for him to turn his back on.

As heard in the "Brass" section of the company… "He never asked for anything for himself… always for his men."

The roof over your head, the clothes on your back, the car you drive and the tickets you buy for your blind wives and girlfriends you owe to the Pittsburg Kid

For all he did for you… you repayed him by attacking him like a pack of yellow priceless faggots. Ripping away his flesh from his body and laughing and pounding your chest like conquering ghouls and long after his bones were dry, you continued to pour salt on them to squeeze every ounce of pain out of him,

Not the slightest whimpers or cry or tear came out of this man. With you still biting at his ankles, he put on his coat and walked away…Displaying more class and poise in defeat than all of you did in victory. Jesus had one Judas, Jim had many, those that speared him and worse, those that watched…

I stick by him and for that you've nailed me on the same cross… I thank you for that… It's an honor to be crucified with Jim Shooter, a man who none of you will ever be.

Vince Colletta."

>>149856991
>>149858533
Also he didn't specify that she needed to die
>I told Chris that the ending proposed in his plot didn’t work. It wasn’t workable with the characters, and in fact was a totally lame cop-out, storywise. I demanded a different ending. Chris–enraged–asked me just what that might be. I suggested that Phoenix be sent to some super-security interstellar prison as punishment for her crimes. Chris said that the X-Men would never stop trying to rescue (?!) her and that the story would become a loop. I said that then he should come up with an ending.

>I wasn’t privy to Chris and John’s conversations that night, but whatever.

>The next morning, Chris stormed into my office and said that there was only one answer–they’d have to kill Phoenix. I said fine.

>I don’t think he expected me to say that, since killing characters just wasn’t done in those days. Chris waffled a bit, but then I became insistent! She’s dying. That’s it.

>Chris left my office, obviously found a phone somewhere and, a few minutes later, I got a call from John that started with him asking me if I was insane.

>I insisted on the “solution.” It was done–brilliantly, if reluctantly–by Chris and John. And that’s was the issue that propelled the X-Men to the top for, what, two decades?

WHAT IF... Jim had managed to buy Marvel in the 90s, when it put up for sale?

>>149858567
At the very least we wouldn't have gotten Bendis.

>>149857750
McFarlane was at Marvel when Shooter was there. And he talked about his experience with Shooter.

https://www.cbr.com/the-evolution-of-the-art-of-todd-mcfarlane-part-1/

>The editors were sort of living in fear of Jim Shooter. I remember having a meeting with Jim Shooter and Bob Harras was there and he had said, "Whatever you do, don't ask him about any of the art stuff." So, of course, being who I was, I asked him about the art stuff. He had the reaction I knew he was going to have. He said, "Huh? What are you talking about?" I knew that the editors at that point had taken one or two sentences that he might have uttered and turned it into this whole big set of rules that were squishing the creative juices of their entire line in terms of some of the cool, funky stuff. He said, "No, no, no, Todd. I'm not saying you can't do overlaps and having people bursting out of panels and craggy borders. I'm saying you can't do bad overlap panels, bad bursting out of panels and bad craggy borders." Ding, ding, ding -- that's exactly what I thought! And he sat there and drew bad examples of it, I said I got it and that was it. After that, you can see a marked difference in the way I lay out the pages because I could put a little fun back into the layouts.

McFarlane was at Marvel like during the final year or so of Shooter's EIC reign. If Shooter stuck around I think he and McFarlane might've argued but enjoyed the arguing

Jim Shooter was mentored by this guy. It's a wonder he turned out as well as he did on the Creative's side.

>When Will Rogers said that he'd never met a man he didn’t like, he had never met Mort Weisinger.

>In my dealing with the various people I met during the Golden Age, I always try to follow the Golden Rule of treating them as I would like to be treated. In most cases I think I succeeded, but I make an exception for the editor of the Superman comics. In Latin the saying is, "De Mortuis nil nisi bonum"--speak no evil of the deal. De Mort is a different matter, and it is long past time to let the full truth about him be known.

>I first met Mort through my wife Dorothy (nee Rubichek), who had worked with him on Superman at DC Comics.

...

>Within an hour, Mort was pressing me for a contest in which we'd plot new stories for our respective super-heroes. I saw this as a transparent attempt to formulate plots he could then offer to his writers, so I didn't go along with his "contest." As is now well documented, Mort made a habit of enticing writers to give him plot ideas which he would turn around and give to other writers as his own. He was addicted to the thievery of ideas.

>If Mort had lived in ancient Rome, he'd have been feeding writers to the lions in the arena. His chief victim was the very talented but very undisciplined and financially irresponsible Bill Finger. Mort was also editing BATMAN at the time, and Bill Finger was the writer who, with artist Bob Kane, had made BATMAN the most exciting and imaginative comic book feature of the time.

>>149858545
The fuck you talking about, McFarlane was at Marvel during Shooter's time as EIC

He drew backups forSteve Englehart's Coyote for Epic in 1985, went over to DC for Infinity Inc, came back to Marvel in 1986. Shooter didn't leave Marvel till April 1987.

>>149856565 (OP)
I've always defended him since I found out he was a tard wrangler, wanted cohesive stories, and introduced new Marvel heroes as a precaution to losing the mainstays. he was smart and made sure comics could be both kid and teen friendly, while not being disney slop. he was a good writer as well. ultimately the company went to great heights in the 90s, he went his own way and had his own success, and then it all fell down for everybody. greed did it, expensive comics, hype and speculators ruined it. I'll stick to the message of this: comics will only do well if they have a cartoon/movie presence (you can add video games as well). but those things dont come about unless there is a foundation of great comics coming out to create some hype. if you fail at any of those, it doesnt matter. shooter did well to retain order as well as take marvel to better heights in the 80s, and I commend his efforts.

>>149858661
I feel like people always took what he said purposely out of context. Like the whole "treat every comic like someone's first." He was not banning multi part stories. He was banning BAD multi part stories.

>>149858692
>I admired Bill Finger's work and knew he was having a rough time paying his bills, largely because he took so much time over his stories that he earned comparatively little money. He borrowed money from everyone he met, including from my wife Dorothy during the funeral of a well-beloved DC editor whose name I think was Bernie Breslau [note: actually, Breslauer].

>Mort reveled in telling tales about Bill Finger’s financial difficulties. And he took every opportunity to humiliate him. He made Bill wait in the anteroom for an hour while he discussed plots with other writers who had arrived later. On one occasion Bill arrived in his shirtsleeves because he’d told his wife he was just going for a pack of cigarettes and that time Mort kept him waiting for more than two hours. I was present when Mort laughingly joked about Bill’s predicament. I went out and lent Bill the ten dollars he needed so badly, and Mort reproached me, saying I was a "bleeding heart" and shouldn't have done that because Bill needed to be taught a lesson. "After all, he can sit down and write a page and get the money, but he’s too damn lazy." I said that not all writers could turn out pages like links of sausage.

>Most writers who worked for Mort Weisinger would probably have paid to buy a ticket to his hanging, but they could not afford the price that scalpers would have charged. His fellow editors in the same large office -- Jack Schiff and Murray Boltinoff -- always looked forward to my arrival because I mocked Mort as a modern Dracula who liked to suck the lifeblood from writers.

...

>The last time I saw Mort he told me, "Bill, you're the only one who's going to cry at my funeral." He was wrong about that. I didn't rejoice at his passing because I believe with John Donne who said, "Never send to learn for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

https://thecomicsdetective.blogspot.com/2012/04/woolfolk-on-weisinger.html

>>149858714
He was writing Legion since he was like 14 years old. Could have sued the crap out of DC too apparently.

>>149858237
>Claremont X-Men
>John Byrne Fantastic Four
>Frank Miller Daredevil
>Roger Stern Spider-Man
>Simonson Thor
>Larry Hama G.I. Joe
>Transformers

>>149856622
>>149856784
>Jim Shooter leaves Marvel
>it goes down the shitter and bankrupt by the latter half of the 90s

>>149858742
Jim Shooter, musing on his editor Mort Weisinger:

>First of all, my family needed the money. Badly. Second, my editor, Mort Weisinger, mean as a snake at his nicest, would have screamed at me more than usual if I was ever late.

>Mort would call me every Thursday night, right after the Batman TV show to go over whatever I’d delivered that week. He’d call me other times, too, whenever, but Thursday night was our regularly scheduled call. The calls mostly consisted of him bellowing at me. “You fucking moron! Learn to spell! What the hell is this character holding? Is that supposed to be a gun? It looks like a carrot! These layouts have to be clear, retard!” When you’re 14 and the big, important man upon whom your family’s survival depends calls you up to tell you you’re an imbecile, it makes an impression….

>It got to the point where any time I’d hear a phone ring I’d clench up, white knuckled. Very Pavlovian. Even in school, or some other place that was ostensibly safe, a ringing phone jolted me.

>Mort used to tell me I was his “charity case.” He said that the only reason he kept me on was because my family would starve otherwise.

>The net effect of Mort’s honking at me was slowing me down. I’d sit there for hours, immobilized, useless, unproductive, because I was sure that anything I put on the paper would be wrong and therefore, Mort would scream at me. My mother would occasionally plead with me. She’d say, “We really need a check.” I started working in my room, sitting on my bed to keep my lack of production more private. Every once in a while she’d come upstairs, look at the blank page on my lap board and start crying. That was tough. She meant no harm. But that was tough.

>>149858729
>>149858692
Man, Finger got it every which way.

>>149858742
>>149858753
thank you based Jim Shooter. it seems like we'll never get another one

>>149858790
>At some point, my fear of delivering work that Mort would rip me to shreds over was eclipsed by the fear of failing to deliver, or delivering late, which would be worse. Then the stuff would flow…! I could go like the wind!

...

>Sometimes, airmail special delivery wasn’t fast enough. I had to get on a plane, fly to New York and hand the envelope to the National Periodicals (DC) receptionist, escape before Mort knew I was in screaming range and fly back home. Round trip airfare, student standby, was $25. That hurt, but, again, no choice. I did it often enough that TWA gave me a special ID card to speed up check-in.

...

>Years later, I found out he used to brag about me to other DC editors. I was his “discovery,” a “prodigy,” to whom he could give any assignment, any book, any character, and always get good material, never a rewrite needed. I was the young hotshot he was grooming for big things. Not bad for a fucking moron/retard, I guess.

>>149858802
>Round trip airfare, student standby, was $25.
Man let that sink in for a while.

>>149858724
I feel like McFarlane might've challenged Shooter some. The editors would get frustrated at both Shooter and McFarlane but are kind of glad about it being Todd getting into an argument with the EIC. Shooter would allow McFarlane to get away with some things but not some others (don't forget, Sienkiewicz's style developed during the Shooter years; it's atypical of what you'd think Jim Shooter would want)

>>149856622
more specifically he had a massive dude of a line (new universe) that he intended to cancel mainline comics for, and that the tipping point where even the bullpen turned against him

>>149858790
Jesus Fucking Christ, that is terrible. I have that same fear of the phone for similar reasons, but I thank God though that my parents never depended on me for money. I feel bad for Shooter.

>>149858742
I think reading this I can guess what specific things he disliked about the Brand New Day stuff he read

>>149858802
How much was 25 dollars worth in those days? Cars were only worth a few thousand dollars at the time right?

ouch

>>149858802
>Years later, I found out he used to brag about me to other DC editors. I was his “discovery,” a “prodigy,” to whom he could give any assignment, any book, any character, and always get good material, never a rewrite needed. I was the young hotshot he was grooming for big things. Not bad for a fucking moron/retard, I guess.
lmao

>>149856784
saying this is reductive.
Shooter personally oversaw the expansion of the line from just superhero comics to all manner of things
>epic
>graphic novels
>franchise licenses
>toy oriented licenses
>non-capeshit mainlines
>events
>new universe
are all his ideas.

He had DC absolutely beat until DC revived with the movies and that vertigo editor girl.

>>149858891
Adjusting for inflation it's about 250 bucks. Which again, just holy hell.

>>149858802
>>149858790
>The net effect of Mort’s honking at me was slowing me down. I’d sit there for hours, immobilized, useless, unproductive, because I was sure that anything I put on the paper would be wrong and therefore, Mort would scream at me. My mother would occasionally plead with me. She’d say, “We really need a check.” I started working in my room, sitting on my bed to keep my lack of production more private. Every once in a while she’d come upstairs, look at the blank page on my lap board and start crying.
>Years later, I found out he used to brag about me to other DC editors. I was his “discovery,” a “prodigy,” to whom he could give any assignment, any book, any character, and always get good material, never a rewrite needed. I was the young hotshot he was grooming for big things. Not bad for a fucking moron/retard, I guess.
This fucking industry

>>149858847
Shooter allowed all kinds of art. He messed with plots.

>>149858940
He seriously could have sued DC like this post said >>149858742 but at some point he got like Stockholmed into thinking that working for the good of the Company was better because all the abuse from Mort sank in.

Christ, imaging reading all those goofy ass Silver Age comics and in the background are the meanest sons of bitches around breathing down people's necks and threatening violence so they could print and sell 12 cent comic books featuring Superman eating a thousand hamburgers before punching a gorilla.

>>149858954
>>149858847
I think Jim liked to fuck with the talented people, like his mentor did to him when he was young. we pick up on habits of our mentors, even if his wasn't as extreme. if you poke fun of or suggest something different to someone and they spaz out, they are not good team players. you need to learn how to defend yourself and youll go places

Christopher Priest on Jim Shooter

https://lamerciepark.com/legacy/comics/spidey.html

>I don't talk much about my years as editor of Marvel's Spider-Man line. There's a good reason for that. It was a terribly unhappy time of my life, both personally and professionally. The office politics were ugly, as Editor In Chief Jim Shooter came under increasing fire from his own staff as he turned the screws on us to be timely and to increase the quality of Marvel's books.
>There was a lot of bad writing going on in those days, a lot of cronyism, a lot of writers grandfathered in by pals and former co-workers. Before Shooter took over, mis-ships were routine and there was quite a bit of, well, stealing, as vouchers were often submitted for jobs that were never done. Stan Lee was now bi-costal, spending as many days in Los Angeles as he did in New York. He needed someone solid and reliable to run the shop. Archie Goodwin didn't want the job.
>He did it, he told me, because Stan asked him to but he never wanted it and was glad to be rid of it. The Marvel EIC chair has a certain curse that goes along with it: it tends to drive people insane and, ultimately, out of the business altogether. It is the notorious last stop for many staffers, as once you've sat in The Big Chair, your pariah status is usually locked in.

>>149859055
>Jim was very good at being the boss. He certainly knew his stuff and he knew how to move projects from "A" to "Z." Moreover, he didn't care whether people liked him so much as he cared whether they liked Marvel. Coming from the Mort Weisinger school of Screw 'Em If They Can't Stand The Heat, Shooter was a kinder, gentler, smarter, more touchy-feely version of his mentor, the legendary DC Editor who kicked ass and took names and built a solid reputation for making the trains run on time.
>Jim made deals and threw money at people who couldn't stand him. He routinely bought big-ticket Christmas presents for staffers he knew were plotting behind his back. He didn't care about being the heavy: somebody had to be the heavy. But, for Marvel to survive and grow, the kids would have to grow up. And Shooter became the avatar of our painful adolescence.
>Shooter hired me as an intern from the journalism program of The New York School of Media Arts in 1978. I was awed to be at Marvel and be in his presence, so much so that I started calling myself "Jim," so I could be more like him (no one had ever called me "Jim" before Marvel). I so embraced his teachings, so religiously processed his philosophy, that, in many ways, I became a shorter, blacker version of the guy. I was absolutely in Shooter's inner circle, along with Vinnie Colletta, Bob Layton, and others. Jim spent a lot of time tutoring and encouraging me. He made me believe in me, and all of this kind of took me outside of the mainstream of office life at Marvel. Larry Hama, my immediate superior on CRAZY Magazine and later CONAN, was an outsider as well, preferring the company of artists from National Lampoon and Mad. Larry was friendly to Marvel staffers, but we, Larry and I, were just not in the clique. And my loyalty to Shooter didn't help matters any.

>>149859070
>If I had it to do over again, I never would have accepted the appointment as editor of the Spider-Man franchise. I made a lot of mistakes. I hurt a lot of people. I lost a lot of friends. It's a difficult thing for me to discuss. We'd all like to be heroes of our own stories, and it's hard to tell the story of when you were a chimp.
>I spent two and a half years of my life being an incredible chimp, paralyzed by my own chimp-ness and chimposity, and wholly convinced that, if I lost my job at Marvel, the world would end. Well, I did and it didn't. And now, nearly two decades later, I have some maturity and experience under my belt.
>Not that I'm any less of a chimp at 40 then I was at 22, but I have the perspective and, yes, the wisdom now to be horrified by the choices I made.
>Jim Shooter was not a villain. People like to paint him as a villain, but that speaks more to the "good versus evil" mindset of people in our business. Shooter was and is a genius. It is difficult to dispute that.
>The man has a brilliant mind and, ultimately, the heart of a Boy Scout. If people got hurt by Jim, it was largely because Jim's greatest flaw is his inability to communicate with us non-genius types. Jim is a guy who's always been several laps around the track ahead of us, and, like most truly gifted folk, his People Skills sucked.
>He was ambitious and driven in those days and, while he unquestionably revolutionized this business and turned it from a niche hobby to a powerful industry, he is largely dismissed and not liked among a great many pros working in those days..

>>149859094
>Jim loved the business. He idolized Stan Lee. He loved Marvel and, I truly believe, he loved all of us. Whatever other shortcomings the guy had, he fought for us and threw himself on the corporate railroad tracks in front of speeding locos for us time and again.
>We are, all of us, making more money now than we would have had it not been for people like Shooter, Neal Adams, Paul Levitz and others who fought to change the way this business works and the way it treats the talent.
>Jim wanted to be one of the guys. We wouldn't let him. If there's any place where he could have been accused of being naive, it was here, in the realm of office politics. For instance, I had a really crappy office chair, so Jim said, "Go pick out a new one." Well, I picked out a really nice faux-leather executive chair that drove many staffers absolutely nuts. Who does this guy think he is with his fancy chair?!? Jim should have told me, "Jim— if I buy you a new chair, the books will suffer because people will be more angry about the chair and how you got it than they will be concerned about editing comic books."
>The NBC sitcom Newsradio was so similar to Marvel in those days it seemed plagiarized. There was this episode where one of the characters got a new desk, and it derailed the entire operation because now everybody wanted a new desk. Marvel was peopled by colorful and eccentric personality types, a broad group of voices and experiences and sensibilities, and Shooter was the keeper of the asylum.

>>149858278
Miller is the only decent one

>>149859108
>What most staffers didn't realize was, rather than grouse about it, they could have asked Dad for their own damned chair. It wasn't so much that I was his protégé or his favorite son, it was that I knew him maybe a little more and, ultimately, a little less than others did.
>But many staffers actively disliked Jim, not for any specific thing he'd done, but because he approved my new chair. They disliked him because he was tall., They disliked him because he went from assistant editor to chief editor. They disliked him because he fired Alan Dulles and Henry Cabel (Jim moved a lot of sacred cows out). But, most of all, they disliked him because that was the thing to do in those days, dislike the EIC.
>Jim wanted to change that. He naively figured improving our work situation, making more money for everybody, would earn him our trust and our respect (and, yes, we all got raises and bonuses and, gasp, royalties— true profit sharing on the books we edited, unprecedented before that time). Jim figured those gains would offset the animus he inured simply by being the boss. In the history of the world, no one has ever been more wrong.

>>149858998
all dramas re jim and work for hires basically go like this

jim goes to the office
it's 29th of the month two days before new comic day
he remembers at the last minute that he has to actually read the finished pages whose papers he ruber stamped 3 weeks ago
realized that literal fucking jezzus was guest starring the pheonix murdering planets while ms marvel was marrying a dude in the same plot published last week
immediately runs to softly tell the writer who was actually coming to deliver next month's script that THERES NO WAY THIS CAN MAKE PRINT AND HE HAS TO FIX THIS ASAP
since he's literally 3 meters tall he actually manages to vibrate glass in the office
>b-but
>NO BUTTS, HANDLE IT
the writer screams (internally because jim could slap him and he'd die on the spot) because that means he has to work overtime for the new script and never forgives jim for it

>>149859127
>The rapid and massive expansion and explosion in sales and profits at Marvel under Editor In Chief Tom DeFalco were unquestionably the fruits of Shooter's labor and the harvest of the hard work and bloodletting of Shooter's tumultuous turn as Marvel EIC.
>Which is to take nothing away from Tom, who was savvy enough to know how to move with the market and not cut off his own nose to spite Shooter's face, but made the deals that needed to be made and made the calls that maximized Marvel's advantage.
>To DeFalco's credit, he didn't step on Marvel's (and the industry's) chances to expand the market (by a modest guess of at least five fold— it was a huge expansion in those days) just to play office politics and distance himself from his predecessor. Tom saw the harvest of Shooter's seeding and, rather than get lost in resentment for Jim, he did what was best for Marvel. Which takes nothing away from Tom while also pointing out the enormous gains Marvel as a company reaped as a result of Jim's EIC tenure.
>Within days of my promotion, Shooter called a meeting to divvy up the Marvel line and figure out what I would be doing. The new kid on the block usually gets licensed books, like The Transformers and The Dazzler and so forth.
>But nobody wanted Spider-Man. Everyone was happy doing their thing: The X-people wanted to stay X-people, Roger Stern was happy with the Avengers (Tom Brevoort) slot, Mike Carlin had Fantastic Four and, yes, The Dazzler among other things. Nobody wanted Spider-Man.

>>149859133
That is to say, Jim had the bad habit of never paying attention at the early stages of publishing. he doesn't read scripts or the originals, meaning he demanded a lot of last second changes that he's contractually allowed to demand but really, really vexxing on the w4hs.

>>149859149
> Under previous editor Danny Fingeroth, the Spider books had seen enormous growth with the introduction of the symbiotic black costume, a gorgeous bit of design work by Mike Zeck and ingenious marketing ploy by Shooter, who was selling a fairly mediocre maxi-series called Secret Wars by the truckload. Head writer Tom DeFalco was paired with Ron Frenz, a huge Spidey fan, who was doing a hip Ditko-meets-Romita style under Joe Rubinstein's expressive inks.
>It was a solid franchise, about to birth its third book, a new title called WEB OF SPIDER-MAN. As the new kid, I absolutely should not have been given Spider-Man, the corporate high-profile franchise, but Shooter ultimately found himself in the position of either having to force somebody to take the line, or give it to the new kid.
>I am told the thinking was that I couldn't do any harm,. The books were all being written by veteran Marvel staffers: Executive Editor DeFalco on AMAZING Editor Al Milgrom on SPECTACULAR and X-Men Editor Louise Jones (now Simonson) on WEB, soon to be replaced by exiting Spider-Man editor Fingeroth. With these pros solidly in place, all I had to do was play traffic cop. And, had I done that, I'd probably still be at Marvel today, instead of out here in Colorado, shooing away moths.
>Giving me the Spider-Man line was an incredibly bad call. Saddling me with several beloved staffers as creative talent on books that constituted over two million dollars of Marvel's bottom line was a very bad idea. And it was criminally stupid to have a 22 year-old neophyte editor edit his own boss (DeFalco).

A little too long to go on from there, but more interesting stuff is there for sure.

>>149859176
Also, one last tidbit, something from the 'enlightened offices of Marvel'

>I was the office mascot. The little black kid. The co-key operator for the Xerox machine (with John Romita, Jr., who enthusiastically relinquished the top slot to me). My how liberal we are. Jim, go grab this, "In a jig." Staffers, some still in the biz, used to come by and rub my head "for good luck." One staffer kept little jigaboo figurines on his desk: warped, offensive little gnomes in white face eating watermelon. Denys Cowan stole one off of this guy's desk and gave it to me as a Christmas present. I keep it on my desk here to remind me some of these people still work there.

>Ski trips and pool parties were routinely planned in secret to avoid being forced to invite undesirables (not just me; Jim Shooter was routinely not invited to these gatherings). Nobody meant any harm, of course, but that's exactly my point. To them , this was good fun, not racism. We were all beyond racism, comfortably in the echelon with George Carlin and Richard Pryor, where we can make racist jokes without necessarily being racist.

>I never made a big deal out of any of this. I wanted this job. I wanted in this business, and I was willing to eat as much crap as I had to, to have my head rubbed as many times as it took for me to get a toehold on Marvel Comics, every kid's dream job.

Also, Priest hated the idea of Spider-Man getting married to MJ

>>149858998
A lot of people assume that under Shooter, McFarlane would've instantly quit or got fired or something but they misunderstand how Todd does things and it's the key of why he did Spawn, launched McFarlane Toys and so on.

Look at the story McFarlane told in >>149858661
not just the green text but the rest in that link. Harras was telling McFarlane that he couldn't do the wild layouts because Shooter didn't want those kinds of layouts. When Harras and McFarlane had to meet with Shooter, Harras advised McFarlane not to bring up the art stuff (out of fear)... but Todd brought up the art stuff, and got Shooter to clarify. Todd doesn't seem fazed by Shooter's reputation. I think they'd still butt heads but either McFarlane eventually leaves, or Shooter recommends him for some higher position at Marvel.

>>149858745
>Larry Hama G.I. Joe
>Transformers
what a legend

>>149859237
I actually kind of feel like that if Shooter stayed in charge Todd and the boys might never have left to form image to start with at all. Or at least not like they did. A lot of writers like to talk about him being a task master but he was one who got them paid. Todd probably would have gotten too big for his britches but I dunno I think the whole market would be different.

>>149859297
I wonder if Shooter would have forced Todd to become a better writer

>>149859115
shit taste

>>149859297
At the very least, Claremont would've stayed on X-Men, unless he eventually would've had a "last straw" with Shooter.

>>149859297
And Liefeld?

>>149859297
>>149859311
I definitely think the Spider-Man ongoing by McFarlane, if it exists at all, would be very different if it had been under Shooter.

>>149859335
I'm not gonna say Rob didn't make bank but he wouldn't be doing it with out the Image guys backing him.

>>149859335
Would have likely resigned from comics altogether out of frustration over Jim never letting him skip deadlines.

Or who knows, maybe he could have coached him into a real work ethos and unliefelded liefeld

>>149859297
Imagine if the Image line up gets published under Marvel, so they can get their creator's rights and still be under their umbrella. Jim got guys paid, and that would have been EPIC.

>>149859297
The Image boys were getting paid, Todd retired a millionaire at Marvel and didn't need to come back, he was planning on being a stay-at-home dad. They left because they felt they could get an even better deal, because they were shown they were valuable already.

>>149859335
Liefeld didn't get in Marvel until 1989 so he never really worked under Shooter. I think that he would've had conflicts with Shooter but maybe work with him for a few years. But he'd probably make impulsive decisions (think back to him originally wanting to draw a Hawk and Dove issue with the sideways format or drawing the Wizard #10 cover with Shaft from Youngblood and Cable that got Wizard in trouble for some years)

If he sells really well Shooter may get hands-off for a while but they definitely would've clashed more heavily than Shooter's possible clashes with McFarlane

>>149859216
>Also, Priest hated the idea of Spider-Man getting married to MJ
Why?

>>149859878
probably saw it as a very drastic change to the status quo. People are always defense of that at the times.

>>149859259
Apparently, we got Cobra thanks to him.

>>149859878
>>149860361
At the time each team on a Spider-Man book was mostly able to go and do their own thing thanks to the "man about town" status quo for Peter, including how they wanted to handle his personal life and such.
Then Stan Lee, wanting to marry Peter and MJ in the Newspaper comics blanket used his authority to make the decision across all Spider-Man ongoing thus unifying them and altering the sandbox..
While in retrospect most fans understand this as ultimately a good thing, it planted a seed or resentment in much of the staff that never went away.

>>149860970
Based Stan Lee.

>>149856991
X-Men has always sucked.

Reminder that the real reason Shooter was fired wasn't because the Bullpen rioted and somehow magically got him thrown out. It was because he went to Management demanding that they pay their creatives what they were owed and got the sack for it.
https://jimshooter.com/2025/07/why-jim-shooter-was-fired-from-marvel.html/

How about we talk about Dick Giordano, Shooter's contemporary at DC?

During Giordano's time as EIC, we got :

Dark Knight Returns
Watchmen
Crisis on Infinite Earths
Vertigo line
Byrne's relaunch of Superman
Teen Titans by Wolfman and Perez

and other fondly remembered titles. Plus people actually liked him.

>>149858988
>in the background are the meanest sons of bitches around breathing down people's necks and threatening violence so they could print and sell 12 cent comic books featuring Superman eating a thousand hamburgers before punching a gorilla.
That kept going on, just in a different way. Remember all the horror stories that came out about DC since n52? Not just the fuckery with deadlines and writing and shit. Just treating people badly. Screaming at writers over the phone like a insane person and what not. Hell, just go look at any story about Mark Waid, that psychotic retard. Dude so often threw screaming and violent tantrums that the people in the office GOT USED TO IT like it was just the sound of the printer whirring and wouldn't bat an eye.
Working in comics is and always has been a hellhole for most creators.

I apologize if this has been discussed itt but how much impact did Jim Shooter have on Transformers?

>>149859216
>Priest hated the idea of Spider-Man getting married to MJ
BASED PRIEST

>>149856565 (OP)
Can we talk about the fact the "Jim Shooter" you see here is actually Szabó Boldizsár, a Soviet assassin of Hungarian origin who adopted the "Jim Shooter" identity to evade capture sometime in 1980? Nobody knows what happened to the original Jim Shooter - but his imposing stature and acre-scarred face made him the perfect cover for Szabó, who had suffered intense chemical burns at some point in the past.

Boldizsár seems to have found his skill at intimidation, infiltration, deception and choking people to death people with his bare hands - his KGB alias was дyшитeль - a perfect match for executive editorial duties at a Big Two American comic company. He went rogue and adopted the Shooter persona permanently, for all intents and purposes fully replacing the original and taking on a new life within the comics industry. And we don't know, and we will probably never know, what happened to the real Jim.

>>149858197
Mark Millar would be the best choice. But he went independent and doesn't really want to deal with Marvel or DC anymore.

>>149862226
>Dark Knight Returns
>Watchmen
Comic books that inevitably went on to ruin the DC comics universe and superhero comics in general because of their influence. The dark serious grounded tone? The 'deconstruction' and 'muh realism' of comics like The Boys? All because of these two comics.
>Crisis on Infinite Earths
A good comic that ruined DC comics. Because it's influence went on to make it so that DC had no consistent '616' continuity like Marvel. Because if DC ever finds itself in a corner where the fans don't like a story decisions, or they write a character into a corner? Rather than sticking to them and making the best of it like Marvel does. They can just reboot and wipe the slate clean.

>>149862226
Oh boy, CoiE. The comic that ruined comics.

>>149863788
It ruined DC specifically. Because the consistent reboots and multiverse bullshit is what made people stop caring about DC comics continuity and go all in on Marvel.

>>149856565 (OP)
>Can we talk about Jim Shooter
nope
/thread

really interesting thread, thanks anons.

>>149863722
>>149863788
The thing that ruined DC was establishing a continuity and then having every creator or marketing exec ignore it to do their own thing. And it all started going to Hell after Giordano left.

As for Marvel, their own bloated universe and over-reliance on Spider-Man and the X-verse makes them no better than DC currently is.

>>149856719
He created everything you love and hate about comics

>>149864618
woah :O

>>149863722
>Rather than sticking to them and making the best of it like Marvel does
Marvel intends to do that, rather than keep doubling down and fucking up? Can't wait.

>>149863834
>refuses to elaborate
>leaves

>>149863656
Millar has no clue what readers could possibly want. Besides his clique fucked up Marvel to begin with. They had sale spikes, but caused huge damage to the characters that are still going, Shooter would probably have shot most of it down.

>>149858533
>>149858557
>no, my genocidal snowflake can't possibly face the consequences of her actions
The more things change...

>>149863812
People stopped caring about DC Comics long before this happened. They rebooted the line and started making edgier comics for mature readers because Marvel was wiping the floor with them.

>>149863722
>Rather than sticking to them and making the best of it like Marvel does.
Do they though? They did shit like the Ultimate line for a reason.

>>149863812
That's a really autistic take. Continuity should be what you personally have read.

>>149865094
Ultimate was in part so they could go as stupid as they wanted, too bad they couldn't help themselves and pulled those writers to regular Marvel.

>>149864964
>genocidal snowflake
Fuck you.

>>149865133
Really? In just about every interview I read hyping it up they were always taking about bringing in new readers who were scared of decades of continuity.

>>149865066
>started making edgier comics for mature readers
That shit only start to actually sell after they become "classics" and on their way to their third or fourth hardcover.
This discussion is nice but in the end it's kind of pointless.

Can't we just simply stop reading cape comics altogether? Sounds like the more sane choice for the medium.

>>149865236
They're perfectly fine when they're not all edgy and grimdark and attempting to be realistic.

>>149865179
That was the initial plan. Then Millar doing what he did, still sold and they just tried to play it off as if they always wanted a side line for people to do their own thing

>>149865322
What did Millar do?

>>149865236
DKR was a breakout and selling well from the beginning. You weren't even born when it came out lmao.

>>149865370
Writing Ultimate X-Men and Ultimates

>>149858802
That's like the story of porn star who was estranged from her family only to return home after her father's death only to find he had all of her movies unopened in a closet

>>149865370
Breathing, existing, making me having to acknowledge such existence, being in the same space-time continuum as me.
Yuck.

>>149865406
Were you?

>>149865262
1986-1992 was DC at its creative peak though. They fell off when they started getting more juvenile with the edginess starting with the Death of Superman. They course-corrected a bit in 1996-2002, but then went into it even harder.

>>149865164
Jean blowing up an entire inhabited planet and walking off with no consequences would be fucking retarded.
Sadly now that Shooter is gone and there's no replacement, the X-Men LITERALLY ARE SITTING DOWN AT THE DINNER TABLE WITH HITLER LMAO. Mister Sinister literally worked shoulder to shoulder with Josef Mengele in WW2 but was pardoned of all crimes and put on the ruling government of Krakoa. Storm literally ate at the dinner table with him and they all put on fancy suits and ties to have gay dress up parties and ballroom dances at the hellfire gala together.

>>149865614
But Storm is black so it's not racist.

He was 100 percent good for X-men, Jean grey should’ve never came back and her return was the start of the end

>>149865614
Aren’t they hanging and harboring apocalypse too? That shit doesn’t make sense because apocalypse is the reason why cable is or was slowly dying and enslaves the world in the future and did in the past

>>149865642
Shooter was responsible for greenlighting X-Factor.

>>149865602
Oh, I thought you were talking about the genre as a whole.

>>149865370
>Tastes like chicken..

>>149865674
Hickman retconned Apocalypse into being a henpecked wifeguy. He had a specific story to tell and wasn't going to let a little thing like continuity or previous characterization get in his way.

>>149865674
Yes, Apocalypse is so monstrous with such an enormous body count that he is canonically the marvel universe's inspiration for the biblical antichrist and four horsemen of the apocalypse and has been trying to exterminate humanity for thousands of years.

just a few years ago, X-Force was literally doing shit like assassinating child clones of apocalypse because of the mere possibility that the clone could grow up to be half as monstrous as the real apocalypse. Angel merely being exposed to some of his influence turned him into Archangel and nearly destroyed the x-men. But X-Men fans are allergic to accountability and want the only bad guys to be an endless parade of disposable sentinels and AMERICA BAD government agents to dunk on so all mutants have to be turned into allies no matter how monstrous, murderous, or even the literal rapists (it's okay, they raped people but now they're LGBTQIA++ icons so it's okay!!!!)

X-Men fans are beyond parody at this point, they self insert as mutants so much they unironically use "flatscan" as an insult for real life human beings who think the X-Men are stupid lmao

>>149865780
So, X-men fans are mostly lgbtq and autistics?

>>149858753
Marvel financial problems were little to do with Shooter leaving or the comics and far more to do with retarded financial decisions overleveraging the company. Buying a distributor, buying trading card companies and loading the company with debt. If Marvel hadn't done these things then even with the comics bubble bursting it would not have been in financial distress.

>>149861704
>went to Management demanding that they pay their creatives what they were owed
>got the sack for it
LAND OF THE FREE

>>149865780
>Fantomex pulls the trigger with no hesitation when even Wolverine is second-guessing the mission
at the time I thought it was harsh but the right call, now years later and knowing all that follows and all the Krakoa bullshit I can say he's 10000% right.
If I had Cable's time machine I'd go back and hand that saucy fake frenchman a bigger gun.

>>149865704
That was Loeb.

>>149859878
>>149860970
MJ wasn't even really dating Peter at the time, so they had to hastily set them up and make them endgame

>>149865370
Wrote The Unfunnies and got an MBE for it.

>>149865986
>this ends up giving us 'totally not clark kent' kansas-raised apocalypse kid
>completely forgotten about because Hickman's x-men wanted to use original apocalypse, who's clearly the "most hopeful mutant"
There aren't enough words

>>149858911
>that vertigo editor girl
"That Vertigo editor girl" is Karen fucking Berger, and she is literally one of the 5 most influential DC editors of all time. Without her, Swamp Thing, Sandman (Dream), Animal Man, and Shade would not even exist as we know them today, and the whole British Invasion would have been 1/10 of what it became at best, only Moore and Bolland would've been heard of. No Grant Morrison, no Mark Millar, no Garth Ennis, no Warren Ellis, no Peter Milligan, no Jamie Delano, no Neil Gaiman, no Paul Jenkins, and so many others, all of them probably would have stayed at 2000 AD and Eagle without Berger's obsession with British comics.

>>149866472
Evan was totally wasted, probably because the Nature vs Nurture argument surrounding him, and the fact that the story acknowledges Apocalypse has a legitimate corrupting and evil influence that needs to be kept at bay lest shit like Archangel go wild, is at odds with the modern hugbox X-Men have become. The whole shit with Warren infected and transforming into a new Apocalypse, how they had to go on a sidequest to Dark Beast's home dimension from Age of Apocalypse HAD won and destroyed the world to get a Life Seed to fix him, all of it is too inconvenient for Krakoa's sex cult island.

Evan wanting to grow up and be a good person and genuine hero in spite of his origins is just tossed out so we can have fucking Mister Sinister, Mystique, and Actual-Apocalypse running an unelected shadow government. Great. Cool. Thanks.

>>149859108
I read the chair thing and inmediately though of The Office, so I laughed when he mentioned a sitcom also did that.

>>149865969
>Jim Shooter fought for Marvel's staff.
>They hated him for it because they actually had to work.
>Now the staff at Marvel is openly hated with a passion by Kevin Feige and the other heads of the MCU, who think they should only be seen but never heard.
Ironic.gif

>>149867241
>no Mark Millar, no Warren Ellis, no Paul Jenkins
Nice.

>>149865677
Not that anon, but was it him? I'm more than OK with X-Factor, but I thought it was the following editor that greenlit it.

>>149856565 (OP)
SEVEN FEET TALL, A REAL BIG GUY
VOICE THUNDERIN' DOWN FROM THE SKY
BIG JIIIIIIIIIIM, BIG JIM
KEEP THE SHIP RUNNIN', THAT WAS HIS PRIDE
COULD CROSS MANHATTAN IN FOUR FULL STRIDES
BIG JIIIIIIIIIIM, BIG JIM

>>149867929
I heard that mother fucker had like 20 goddamn dicks

>>149867917
X-Factor #1 was released November 12, 1985. Shooter was fired April 15, 1987.

>>149867241
>the whole British Invasion would have been 1/10 of what it became at best
You're really not selling your point.

>>149858163
A lot of people did or at least with hindsight were able to let go of grudges. Maybe not Gerber, I don't know, but Gerber was caustic and acerbic by nature.

>>149867968
John Byrne gave a pretty professional response but part of me feels like he did a little jig in private.

>>149867960
If you took off his boots, you could see the dicks growing out of his feet

>>149867962
Big man keeps looking more and more based.

>>149865614
>>149865674
Don't forget Selene and Vulcan.

>>149858567
It would have been fucked because his partner was still Steven Massarsky, the guy he'd later found Valiant with and who kicked out Shooter when Shooter found out he was fucking one of their investors and then drove the company into the ground.

>>149867962
>>149867917
the x-factor most people care about is the one with polaris/havok/quicksilver/etc and val cooper, which was 1991-1998.
OG x-factor with the contrived jean/mister sinister/madelyn shit and cyclops being tricked by a fake dead body of his wife and, for some reason, no telepaths at any point looking for madelyne when she wasn't in hiding and it was literally just "oh no, cyclops' phone line was cut and he missed her call!" and they never ever bothered looking for her again was really dumb.

>>149868059
"There needs to be a revival of the original five X-Men, a title that was so middling that it went into reprints" was always a lousy idea, misplaced nostalgia. Something that catered purely to the preferences of Kurt Busiek.

>>149868059
Turning Jean into a villain and having to kill her off and rushing a marriage to a chick who looked a lot like her was also dumb. Giving the original team fans a book to read sounds decent to me, at least.

>>149865780
Sounds like you're butthurt at xmen fans for some reason.

>>149868212
Yeah if I was gonna do anything while in charge I'd probably have put the kibosh on Maddy to start with. Let Scott be a lone for a long while then maybe hook him up with someone different.

>>149858907
And it's hard to know if Mort did it out of being genuinely impressed with Shooter or simply as a means of dressing down other writers/editors by basically saying a retarded kid could do their job better.

>>149868241
the cleanest way would have been just pulling a Crisis/Rebirth and saying "oh actually madelyne and jean were the same person all along via phoenix bullshit/actually she was subconsciously astral projecting a second body/some time travel bullshit" and just fusing them together.
The fact that, TO THIS DAY, it's 100% canon that THE WOMAN CYCLOPS MARRIED AND IMPREGNATED is NOT the Jean Gray he's in a relationship with/Phoenix, and that the actual mother of his child was banished with her baby fucking stolen and given to Jean to raise instead, with her now being a D-lister stuck in literal Limbo/Hell, is like beyond parody. Cyclops has been a deadbeat asshole who STOLE A WOMAN'S BABY for like 40 years now.

the truly based result would have been Cyclops simply accepting and banging Jean AND Madelyn and being a selfcest throuple but Marvel editorial are cowards who adore love triangles but are terrified of threesomes so everyone needs to constantly be cheating on each other and breaking up and getting back together instead of just being pole sisters

>>149868212
Despite the contrivances, Dark Phoenix and From the Ashes are classic stories. X-Factor didn't give us any classics. Angel getting screwed by his friend Cameron and selling himself to Apocalypse was interesting, but that has nothing to do with Jean or even any of the others. Jean's resurrection gave us Inferno, a bloated mega-event most notable for Madeylne Pryor's sexy costume and forcing every other hero in the Marvel Universe to fight demons for one month.

>>149865642
>>149867917
Bob Layton and Jim Shooter greenlit X-Factor behind Claremont's back, X-Factor #1 is patient zero why comic book characters don't age and are treated like evergreen IP.
basically Claremont's idea for the X-Men was it was a school and the characters would age out of the book, Cyclops being the first character to really get to move on, Bob Layton had a pitch to celebrate the then 25th anniversary of the X-Men by reuniting the original team, and Shooter went with Layton's idea, they made the messy Jean retcon and brought her back to life to have Cyclops leave his wife and child the next month to start X-Factor.

>>149868384
Correction, they had to fight them for three months. Thanks, X-books.

>>149868412
cyclops could have been a grown up with a government job and wife and kids in x-factor though, the entire point of being a separate book was it wasn't regular x-men.

>>149865707
Hickman, in his disregard for continuity and characterization, is just as bad as Bendis.

>>149868187
>There needs to be a revival of the original five X-Men, a title that was so middling that it went into reprints
The funny thing is that narrative makes people think that X-Men was a failure. It was outselling a lot of DC books in the late '60s including shit like Flash and JLA. Sales during the Thomas/Adams run were, apparently (if you want to believe Thomas), actually going up. So it was doing well but relative to Marvel's big sellers not so well so presumably Goodman decided it'd be more cost effective as a reprint book. It then got revived because Wein saw it as a place to add more international characters at a time where Marvel was trying to expand more aggressively into international markets.

>>149868540
>>149868412
Yeah it's easy to write this off now with hindsight but moving the original 5 to their own book for their own adventures actually is the grownup thing to do. It kept them out of the main title while still letting their fans have them. That is development.

>>149868206
>a logical course of action, considering that if they became unhappy, they wouldn't read the book and it-and we-wouldn't be here
Incredible

>>149868241
Madelyne was created in 1983, 3 years before X-Factor and 3 years after Jean died in 1980, she was just an ordinary human being until 1989, even Mr. Sinister was created in '86
There was no plan to make her evil from the start, or that Jean was ever coming back to life, Madelyne and Nathan are gone from the books til Inferno and the retcons happen, there was no foreshadowing of events. Then 6 months after Inferno they Dump baby Nathan in the future forever, until future writers retcon that he was Cable ,and not simply Stryfe which was Liefield's plan.

>>149869057
yeah its basically the same logic as Nightwing growing up from Robin and going off on his own as Nightwing. In capeshit the only real way to ensure continuity changes stick is to make them no longer part of the status quo, and the best way to do THAT is giving them a NEW and separate status quo. If the X-Men had just retired as background characters they wouldn't have made it a year before someone would have dragged them out for a world-ending threat or reunion episode or whatever.

Grown-Up X-Men being "boring" straights with government associated jobs in X-Factor who the younger generation of X-Men considered squares/retired old fogies would have made for an interesting dynamic. Actually seeing a mutant work 9-5 and deal with a wife and family and friends and growing apart from old coworker and friends as your life circumstance changes would've been really interesting. Now everyone is an X-Man forever and they're LITERALLY just in one big sex cult fucking each other forever with """"retirement""""as a laughable joke

>>149869421
The worst part is that every new writer wants to have their own NEXT GENERATION of X-men but most of them aren't allowed to grow up.

>>149869524
The writers want their OCs to become big for ego and royalty reasons.

>>149869524
ironically most of the "new" x-men characters that actually DO stick or are popular often even aren't regular mutants.
Laura/X-23 is a Weapon X clone of Wolverine the same way Deadpool was an experiment to replicate his healing factor.
Fantomex is a techno-organic test tube baby made by weapon plus, he's not a mutant.
Ellie inherited Deadpool's healing factor that had been stolen from Wolverine
The Stepford Cuckoos are cloned daughters of Emma the same way X-23 is of Wolverine

the actual "younger generation" of regular mutant kids never stick around

>>149869544
>royalty reasons
Barely a thing at Marvel. The only time things changed for the better was in the late-80's / early-90's, which is why Rob Liefeld created a bunch of new characters for Marvel like Cable, Deadpool, X-Force team etc, he owns a stake of ownership in those characters to this day, which is why Marvel almost immediately changed their policy after the Image guys left.

This is also why there haven't been any real "new" characters in decades, just variants of already existing heroes and Gwen variants.

>>149869544
The big problem is we've been stuck in a perpetual loop of NEW X-KIDS and the continued nostalgia boner for Kitty or Jubilee so hard not a single one of them ever got a chance to really latch on. Even Hope was basically dismissed entirely despite being hyped up as the biggest deal ever.

All you have to do is check out r/xmen and realize that type of moron is the average X-Men fan now thanks to Krakoa. They want the books to be giant manifesto about bad bitch queer socialists owning the chuds and centrists with the power of their undeniable Queen Bitch attitudes and sass.

>>149870079
Is it? Because retailers have reported that despite the number of fans praising Krakoa in the final year it didn't translate to sales

Then again they've also reported a lack of interest in From the Ashes, too

>>149870229
It's a combination of nobody but the most obsessive still buying Brevoort being a moron/asshole only putting out one book with one good writer (Adjectiveless) and Queerkoans going out of their way to sabotage FTA via constant unending and loud badmouthing and downplaying. They were calling FTA a failure from the first announcement anywhere they could, even on here.

>>149867929
>>149867960
KILLED HIS EDITOR IN A DUEL
AND HE NEVER SAID WHY

>>149856765
>this memo was written after Claremont/Byrne/Austin's X-Men, after Miller/Janson's DD, during Byrne's FF, during Simonson's Thor, during Stern's Spider-Man

the man had standards if nothing else

>>149870229
>Is it? Because retailers have reported that despite the number of fans praising Krakoa in the final year it didn't translate to sales
That's the other big thing. The people who praise the X-men just want to have panels to post on social media with. They never actually buy shit outside an omnibus they'll leave in it's packaging but post a selfie with

>>149870229
That's a false situation based on perception of social media. It's been happening all the time. IMO, basically a form of survivorship bias. You're only looking at the fans who are stupid/dogmatic enough to stick around and blindly praise the shit direction. Think about it:
>series/franchise/marketable IP has a dedicated fanbase of 10 million
>pulls some stupid shit
>only a portion of the fanbase actually likes the change, become even more dedicated
>most fans leave in droves; the dedicated fans now provide only a 2 million strong audience
>except 2 million still seems like a higher number of fans to an online observer
>and even then you're only seeing the actively online fraction of that 2 million
You can't visualise the difference between 2 million and 10 million, let alone see any significant portion of either figure in a day of doomscrolling. Nobody can.

>>149867241
The only Brit Invasion writers I liked were Jamie Delano and Neil Gaiman.

>>149871433
This is really one of the worst aspects of the internet age. It makes it too easy for a vocal minority to make it seem like they're the entire face of the fandom when most readers are content to just, you know, read. It's the quite majority. If people like something or generally don't have a problem they tend to just stay the course. An old book might get some hate mail but if sales were up then that's all that matters.

>>149867697
The reality is Paul Jenkins under a stable, pre-2000 Marvel would've thrived better as a writer because there'd be people who could shoot down bad ideas. Most of the stuff in his work people complain about the most came from the Quesada era.

>no Warren Ellis
Despite what >>149867241 would have you believe, Ellis didn't start out at DC. He started out at Marvel before he went to DC. He probably would've had approximately the same career.

>No Mark Millar
This probably might've been true, but then again you could also go "What if Grant Morrison never met Mark Millar" or "What if DC accepted the Superman 2000 pitch" which would've prevented him from working at Marvel in the 00s anyway

>>149856565 (OP)
Goat.

>>149858710
Also, in the early 90s Shooter and Liefeld were in negotiations for Shooter to write a Youngblood comic, that got far along enough for Rob to be advertising it in his books. The project fell apart, but that it almost happened means Shooter wasn't fundamentally opposed to Liefeld like some people assume he would've been.

>>149873315
People meme on Rob pretty hard but the ultimate truth is still that he made the company money.

>>149873315
Yeah he would have given them work, but he wouldn't have let them get big heads like DeFalco did. Shooter loved to micromanage the artists, showing everyone he was the guy in charge.

>>149859380
Like most of the Image guys, he usually met his deadlines on Big 2 books, and when he couldn't, a filler artist was scheduled in advance. It's really only when they left Marvel and became their own bosses that they stopped worrying about deadlines. Todd and Larsen did keep to a monthly schedule for the first few years though IIRC.

>>149860865
Hasbro's people met with Marvel to discuss a GI Joe comic, and they brought with them the toys of the original 13 Joes and their vehicles. There weren't any bad guy toys planned, but the Marvel people in the meeting asked who they were going to fight, one of them pitched the idea of calling an enemy faction 'Cobra'. IIRC it was Archie Goodwin.

>>149862651
>how much impact did Jim Shooter have on Transformers?
He would've been one of the people involved in Marvel getting the Transformers comic license, and putting the specific people in place who wrote a lot of the early lore, and the artist who drew the original character models.

>>149865900
This is all easy enough to find out and well documented, but Marvel's bankruptcy happening at the time it did means there are a lot of people who prefer to ignore the facts and blame it on the comics talent or storylines they hated, and you can't convince them they're wrong.

>>149862651
Here, anon. Shooter's original Transformers treatment. Just copy and paste the tiny text into something. https://transformingseminarian.blogspot.com/2010/06/jim-shooters-original-transformers.html

>>149856565 (OP)
>Can we talk about Jim Shooter
Yes.
>and whether he was good for Marvel
Yes.
>and whether his departure was good
No.
>or bad for the Company?
Yes.

>>149868412
>why comic book characters don't age and are treated like evergreen IP.
Nobody sane in the industry actually wants the popular characters who sell books to actually age and retire and pass the torch. It's purely the mad dream of writers who want their own OCs to take over as the new main stars, and readers who don't get that they're supposed to just stop reading when they get older, superheroes aren't supposed to all get older with you, and some teen heroes being allowed to reach adulthood are the exception, not the rule.

>>149873742
>Nobody sane in the industry actually wants the popular characters who sell books to actually age and retire and pass the torch.
Why the hell not?

>>149872530
Even pre-2000 Jenkins' Marvel work was all Marvel Knights material, under Quesada as editor, and outside of regular Marvel editorial.

As for Ellis, Marvel basically hired him so they could finally have their own edgy British Invasion writer. If DC hadn't started the trend, maybe Marvel don't want that guy so much.

>>149873764
>For the last year or two, Lee had conveyed to his writers that Marvel's stories should have only 'the illusion of change,' that the characters should never evolve too much, lest their portrayals conflict with what licensees had planned for other media.
They have merchandise to think about. Stan the Man was the one who slammed on the brakes. He thought superheroes were just a quick fad, when it had legs, they had to slow down.

>>149873764
Because it's a business, anon. In the interests of continuing to be in business and to make money, Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, the Hulk, etc are not going to get old or retire or die so your crappy OC can replace them and most of the audience will just tap out.

>>149868412
All this to say, they were right.>>149868317
>the cleanest way would have been just pulling a Crisis/Rebirth and saying "oh actually madelyne and jean were the same person all along via phoenix bullshit/actually she was subconsciously astral projecting a second body/some time travel bullshit" and just fusing them together.
I can't tell if you're joking because I heard some Phoenix book from recent years apparently did some stupid retcons

>>149868384
Well you say there are no classics, but Apocalypse wouldn't be a thing without the book.
And what about Inferno? Which book should we consider it part of after all?

>>149869826
>Fantomex is a techno-organic test tube baby made by weapon plus, he's not a mutant.
Bizarre that they even keep him around at all.
>Ellie inherited Deadpool's healing factor that had been stolen from Wolverine
Who?

>>149869957
The usual speculation is royalties are even why Miles Morales exists.

>>149873645
>the artist who drew the original character models
Wait, weren't they just a japanese toy line? Did that precede the cartoon, too?

>>149873983
>Wait, weren't they just a japanese toy line? Did that precede the cartoon, too?
It did, but the toys were for separate Takara toylines (Diaclone and Micro Change) with no particular story or characters to hang on. Hasbro basically had the toys from Takara's lines and asked Shooter / Marvel to come up with names and backstories for them. Marv Wolfman was also heavily involved with early TF lore as well.

>>149873865
>Who?
eleanor camacho, deadpool's kid

>>149873850
>I can't tell if you're joking because I heard some Phoenix book from recent years apparently did some stupid retcons
goblin queen/madelyn prior is still Cable's canonical mother and she really is stuck in fucking hell/limbo for the most part (Magik got too popular and spends all her time earthside these days so the administration got dumped on her as a way to keep madelyn out of sight out of mind)

>>149873645
>the artist who drew the original character models.
Based on toy mock ups, though. Some of it is a little off compared to the 80s cartoon even. I would say Budiansky did more for Transformers lore than Shooter.

>>149874072
Oh ok

>>149874155
Ok but, back at the end of Inferno turns out she -was- a piece of Jean's soul that the Phoenix borrowed and they sort of fused. I'm not sure I ever looked up how she came back in the 90s to become a Summers town bike.

>>149874432
Remember when she fucked X-man Nate?

I wonder how Mark Waid would deal under him.

>>149874444
Yeah, I was thinking about that and her time with Havok.

>>149867241
>No Grant Morrison, no Mark Millar, no Garth Ennis, no Warren Ellis, no Peter Milligan, no Jamie Delano, no Neil Gaiman, no Paul Jenkins

So what yu are saying is that after I kill HItler with a time machine I should go after Karen Berger?

>>149875642
No he's saying that after you kill Hitler with a time machine that he wants you to go after yourself next. You gonna take that shit from him?

>>149859108
>Jim wanted to be one of the guys. We wouldn't let him. If there's any place where he could have been accused of being naive, it was here, in the realm of office politics.
I honestly kind of feel bad for him. I feel like Jim never found a place where he could belong. Mort Weisenger gaslit him to the nth degree, and the Marvel people did not support him despite all that he did for them. Sometimes, the outsider remains the outsider no matter what they try.

>>149868412
>X-Factor #1 is patient zero why comic book characters don't age and are treated like evergreen IP.

Really? Patient zero?
X-Factor started while Crisis on Infinite Earths was happening. Shit, at that point Lois didn't even know Clark was Superman in the comics yet.

>>149872999
Can you name all these marvel bullepen folks?

>>149856565 (OP)
Alright, shoot.

Jim was amazing. He laid out the tracks for Defalco to run gangbuster on sales and our childhoods.

GOAT of Marvel

>>149856565 (OP)
I have never heard of him, until that announcement of him passed away. RIP

>>149873805
>As for Ellis, Marvel basically hired him so they could finally have their own edgy British Invasion writer. If DC hadn't started the trend, maybe Marvel don't want that guy so much.

Moore was gonna end up writing in the US and start the trend anyway on account that people in the industry were already talking about his Marvelman, V For Vendetta, Captain Britain stuff, so I can believe Ellis might've ended up writing for Marvel.

One thing people forget about the British Invasion was that it wasn't initially a way to get "better" writers, it was a way to get writers at then-current US comics salaries because UK comics paid way less than US comics. Getting hired by DC would look like a godsend to British creators at the time.

If Karen Berger weren't there I think something like the British Invasion would've still happened but probably only some writers would've made it in and we'd also have some other different ones.

>>149856565 (OP)
Only thing I didn't agree with Shooter on, is he wasn't a fan of stylized art and it's why while art good, most those Marvel books just had the standard like comic book grounded styles during his era with very simple layouts, I'm all for stylized art if it looks good. Only exception was like Bill Sienkiewicz but I don't know if Shooter would be for or against someone like Sam Keith art he worked for Marvel after he left I believe but it funny artist always have the nicest stuff to say about him, complaining seem to be only from writers.

>>149881564
Wrong picture kek.
ar

>>149862651
blog coming through:
Scott Rienbeck:
>Jim Shooter's importance to Transformers in the 1980s was highly significant, arguably foundational, for the franchise as we know it. He wrote the original Transformers pitch document: As Editor-in-Chief of Marvel Comics, Hasbro approached Marvel to develop a backstory for their new transforming robot toy line. It was Jim Shooter who personally wrote the initial pitch document, outlining the core premise of alien Autobots and Decepticons coming to Earth to fight for resources. This established the fundamental narrative that would launch the entire franchise. He established the core concept of Cybertron and the war: Shooter's vision for the Transformers was that they were two warring factions of alien robots from a metallic planet called Cybertron, who brought their conflict to Earth. This central conflict and origin point became the backbone of all future Transformers media.

>>149881576
>He oversaw the creation of key character profiles: While Dennis O'Neil initially worked on character profiles (and famously coined "Optimus Prime"), Shooter was ultimately unsatisfied and assigned the task to Bob Budiansky. Budiansky, under Shooter's direction, created the names and personalities for many of the beloved first-wave Transformers characters, including Bumblebee, Starscream, and Megatron. These profiles were used not only in the Marvel comic but also on toy packaging and passed along to the cartoon writers. Marvel's comics provided the initial lore: The Marvel Comics series, which Shooter oversaw, was crucial in establishing the early continuity and expanding upon the concepts he laid out. While the cartoon eventually became more prominent in the minds of many fans, the comic book served as the original source of the lore that Hasbro used to launch the toy line. In essence, Jim Shooter, through his role at Marvel Comics, provided the crucial narrative framework and initial character development that allowed the Transformers franchise to become the multi-million dollar property it is today. Without his direct involvement in creating the initial pitch and overseeing the early creative development, the Transformers might have had a very different origin story, or perhaps not even achieved the same level of success."

>>149881564
People kind of forget that under Shooter there was still very stylized art. Sienkiewicz is the one example, there was also McFarlane as mentioned earlier, Michael Golden, Art Adams, Walt Simonson. It is likely that they had restrictions under Shooter and editors fearful of Shooter, but they still stood out against the regular Marvel stuff

>>149873850
Cyclops left his wife 3 years before the retcon that made Madelyne a clone of Jean. Hindsight is 20/20

>>149881427
Moore was hired to write Swamp Thing when Len Wein was still editing yes, Berger just inherited the title.

>>149873742
Shooter wanted to, but the New Universe and Starr Comics were massive flops, his original plan for Secret Wars 2 was he'd end the Marvel Universe and replace it with the New Universe, thinking superheroes had gone stale and continuity had become an albatross, they launched 50 new books and they were all canceled in 2 years

>>149875892
The actual reboot merged Earth happens in COIE #11 cover date April '86, 3 months after the Jean/Dark Phoenix retcon January '86 and X-Factor #1 is February of '86

>>149858724
We need to get back to one shot style story telling and we needed to do it fifteen years ago. Modern arcs are slow bloated and go nowhere. Find teams of writers and artists who have 12 ideas for 12 issues and do it that way. The problem is the modern writer they hire is so goddamn lazy all they know how to do is copy "prestige" TV and stretch out a mediocre plot.

>>149882192
While I like them as well, the market just doesn't respond well to done-in-ones. The people who buy comics want long arcs.

>>149881564
>>149881789
On the one hand I get why this is annoying but also I kind of understand Jim's pov. Stylization is cool sometimes but there are a lot of instances where characters, especially in their civilian guise can look drastically different depending on who's drawing. And while I don't know that this calls for a stricter house style I do feel like if you're selling a brand then some uniformity might be essential.

>>149882593
The people who STILL buy... I think that's exactly >>149882192 point.

>>149856565 (OP)
He was good until he wasn't. Never did anything good after the mid 80s. Is widely overrated because people here hate artists and gays.

>>149883320
artists are whiny divas

>>149865236
What is that ugly jewish thing in your picture?

probably one of Jim Shooter's most controversial decisions was firing Gene Day because he didn't like his page layouts

>>149881564
>artist always have the nicest stuff to say about him, complaining seem to be only from writers.
Byrne didn't have nice things to say, but he was also co-plotting X-Men with Claremont and was writing FF, She-Hulk etc.

>>149885920
Byrne has just as much shit to say about Claremont

>>149887087
Some of that is understandable. After Shooter forced an ending he didn't want on Dark Phoenix, Claremont was burned out and stopped plotting. Byrne plotted the Wolverine versus the Wendigo, Days of Future Past, and Kitty Pryde in Alien issues all by himself and resented that Claremont was getting the shared writing credit when he was just providing the dialogue.

>>149863722
>Comic books that inevitably went on to ruin the DC comics universe and superhero comics in general because of their influence.

This is fucking delusional.

>>149863722
>>Crisis on Infinite Earths
>ruined DC comics

Also delusional. It made DC's sales go up for the first time in decades.

>>149863722
>>Crisis on Infinite Earths
>A good comic that ruined DC comics. Because it's influence went on to make it so that DC had no consistent '616' continuity like Marvel. Because if DC ever finds itself in a corner where the fans don't like a story decisions, or they write a character into a corner? Rather than sticking to them and making the best of it like Marvel does. They can just reboot and wipe the slate clean.

This is the exact opposite of what happened. Post-Crisis was the ONLY time that DC has EVER had a single continuity/universe. And it wasn't a reboot. (New 52 was the first time that they ever hard-rebooted. And that DID ruin DC. So blame Jim Lee, Bob Harras, and Dan Didio.)

pic fucking related.

>>149863788
>>149863812
This is complete nonsense. See the two posts above.

>>149887546
>he was just providing the dialogue

He pitched a lot of those concepts in the first place.

Also, Byrne has ZERO credibility. I wouldn't take anything he says seriously.

>>149865236
>That shit only start to actually sell after they become "classics" and on their way to their third or fourth hardcover.

Nonsense. They got reprinted because they sold well in the first place.

>>149865262
"MUH CAMPY" doesn't sell, you reddit faggot.

>>149865540
>That's like the story of porn star who was estranged from her family only to return home after her father's death only to find he had all of her movies unopened in a closet

wat

>>149865066
Notice how DC goes from 2 million to 3 million in only a 2 year period following CoIE. In other words, the Crisis caused a (roughly) 50% sales increase in only a couple years. That is likely THE biggest growth that ANY American comic publisher has EVER had outside of their early years. (IF there's any exceptions to this then it might be Archie and/or Malibu.) That utterly destroys any claims that the Crisis was anything other than any overwhelming success.

>>149865066
Notice how DC goes from 2 million to 3 million in only a 2 year period following CoIE. In other words, the Crisis caused a (roughly) 50% sales increase in only a couple years. That is likely THE biggest growth that ANY American comic publisher has EVER had outside of their early years. (IF there's any exceptions to this then it might be Archie and/or Malibu.) That utterly destroys any claims that the Crisis was anything other than an overwhelming success.

>>149863722
That's like saying Dragon Ball ruined manga

>>149888325
>Post-Crisis was the ONLY time that DC has EVER had a single continuity/universe
There's a lot of asterisks here to make this technically true. The golden age was one timeline, then they kinda/sorta eased into a different one in the 50s and decided the golden age stories took place on another Earth and then came up with a bunch of others either as one-offs or to excuse continuity errors. Most books took place on Earth One from that time forward. With Crisis they folded everything into one timeline sure but they still continued to do alternate continuities/universes e.g. the Elseworlds imprint, then Hypertime in the 90s and finally giving up and bringing all the Earths back in the 00s.
>And it wasn't a reboot.
There were books that kinda/sorta kept some or most of their continuity because it was convenient or popular (Teen Titans, Flash, Swamp Thing, Outsiders, Justice League to a certain extent and so on) and others that completely wiped the slate clean, most notably Superman and Wonder Woman. Then you had a book like Batman where they wiped out the golden/silver age, kept a bit of the bronze, and completely redid Jason Todd's origin. They repeated this mess with the New 52, completely throwing out some things and keeping others (Green Lantern and a lot of Batman stuff)

>>149889084
>The golden age was one timeline

DC didn't have a "universe" in the Golden Age, so this isn't even close to being true.

>>149889084
>then Hypertime in the 90s

That was never a thing. Morrison is delusional and /co/ needs to stop acting like him or his delusions are any more important than they really are.

>>149889084
>alternate continuities/universes e.g. the Elseworlds imprint

Elseworlds was not the multiverse. They were just rebranded "imaginary stories" like DC had pre-Crisis. So no.

>>149889084
>others that completely wiped the slate clean
>Batman where they wiped out the golden/silver age

These did not happen.

>>149889219
Remember when people just understood that different takes on comic lines could just be that and not some obsessive retardation about a multiverse

>>149889084
>They repeated this mess with the New 52

New 52 had NOTHING in common with the original Crisis. Incomparable. You're deliberately ignoring the image that was posted and falling back on uninformed online memes about comics history that contradict demonstrable actual history.

>>149889138
All Star Comics with the JSA was first published in 1940. Batman and Superman first interacted with them in issue 7, Wonder Woman would eventually join as well. World's Finest (with the first issue being World's Best Comics), the Batman/Superman team-up book was first published in 1941.
>>149889184
Mark Waid created Hypertime, not Morrison, and he introduced it in The Kingdom, the crappy sequel to Kingdom Come. The entire excuse of the book was to provide an in-universe justification for how all the previous stories could "still exist."

>>149889270
Yeah, in the 90s literally NO ONE asked (or cared about) the idea of a multiverse when it came to Elseworlds. Everyone knew that it was just about "HEY! BATMAN'S A PIRATE NOW! AWESOME!"

Same applies to What If? No one thought that "Marvel is copying the multiverse from DC" when What If? debuted. Everyone understood that it was just "HEY! IT'S LIKE THAT ONE STORY... ONLY DIFFERENT! AWESOME!"

>>149888943
>hat the Crisis was anything other than an overwhelming success.
in the short run in the long run it's consequences left everything fucked

>>149889399
>All Star Comics with the JSA was first published in 1940. Batman and Superman first interacted with them in issue 7, Wonder Woman would eventually join as well. World's Finest (with the first issue being World's Best Comics), the Batman/Superman team-up book was first published in 1941.

Dude, try actually reading those comics. There was objectively NO continuity or any idea of a shared setting, nor was there any intent to be one. They were effectively "crossovers", if anything, like "DC vs. Looney Tunes" or "Marvel vs. Mickey Mouse", i.e. a company taking advantage of unconnected characters that they own.

>>149889399
No one read The Kingdom and DC themselves promptly ignored it.

But that's a moot point, because it has nothing to do with the Crisis and everything to do with Waid being a butthurt faggot.

>>149889219
A lot of Elseworlds books had sequels like the Batman Vampire trilogy, Thrillkiller, Byrne's Generations trilogy, The Nail/Another Nail. At that point it's semantics to say whether it's "an imaginary story" or another Earth. They're all imaginary stories, as Moore said. And DC eventually codified a lot of them as alternate Earths after Infinite Crisis.
>>149889252
Denny O'Neil hated the silver age, those stories flat out didn't happen. And the golden age stories just couldn't happen either. At the end of Year One Joker's poisoning the Gotham reservoir, he isn't going around killing people and taking their valuables, though in the 00s Brubaker tried to reconcile both these aspects into one story. It was Morrison in the 00s who decided every Batman story was canon, before then, that wasn't the case.
>>149889313
I'm actually describing the way things happened, you're not.

>>149889438
>in the long run it's consequences left everything fucked

This objectively never happened.

>>149889493
that's an obtuse way to look at it.

>>149889552
>A lot of Elseworlds books had sequels like the Batman Vampire trilogy, Thrillkiller, Byrne's Generations trilogy, The Nail/Another Nail.
Some of these, you're talking about DECADES later. Not exactly proving your point.
>At that point it's semantics to say whether it's "an imaginary story" or another Earth.
No it isn't.
>They're all imaginary stories, as Moore said.
Stop being a faggot.
>And DC eventually codified a lot of them as alternate Earths after Infinite Crisis.
Again, decades later. You keep arguing against your initial point without even trying to.

>>149889552
>those stories flat out didn't happen

Again, you're ignoring the image that was posted earlier that disproves all of this nonsense.

>>149889552
>I'm actually describing the way things happened

No you aren't. And proof has already been posted.

>>149889571
Wrong. It's an objectively factually correct one.

>>149889726
What image? A guy saying things? I'm going by what Denny O'Neil actually allowed to be published. Bat-mite never existed as a character Batman interacted with in post-crisis history until Morrison made it happen. He was a drug addict's hallucination. Dick Grayson was fired as Robin after the Joker shot him in the arm. Barbara Gordon's brief period as Batgirl had her in over her head, and she was never a phD and never a Congresswoman. Catwoman was always an edgy former prostitute, not some dress-wearing gentlewoman thief, though they eventually retconned the prostitute background both back out and back in.

>>149889902
Oh, forgot a big one with Barbara Gordon, because she was deliberately excluded from Year One, she was never Jim Gordon's daughter, but his brother's whom he adopted after he died.

>>149889407
And then Marvel started porting What If stories to the main comics because the House of Ideas ran out of ideas, and started "mapping" What Ifs and alternate timelines that should have just been corrected... argh

>>149869524
you can have more than one graduating class. scott being a creep is the funniest part

>>149889902
>Bat-mite never existed as a character Batman interacted with in post-crisis history until Morrison made it happen.
Jeph Loeb, actually. Batman/Superman #25, July 2006; admittedly a lil before Infinite Crisis.

>>149890485
Yeah but they never graduate and tend to just get written off

>>149889902
>Bat-mite never existed as a character Batman interacted with in post-crisis history until Morrison made it happen.

This is false. You're just discrediting yourself further.

>>149891061
Oh well, off by a few years >>149890597
Never happened under O'Neil.

if not for him, marvel wouldn't exist today

>>149889726
Which image?

Bat-Mite is based. Fuck O'Neil.

>>149889252
Did you read late 80s/90s Batman
Because under O'Neil they were trying really really hard to scrub out parts of golden/silver or drastically alter things to fit in Modern Urban Legend Batman setting. That didn't mean things didn't slip through (case in point: the photo on Batman's desk that has Ace, Bat-Mite and Kathy Kane/Batwoman, Bette Kane/Batgirl) but they didn't seem to acknowledge those things ever happened anywhere else at the time.

Like >>149889902 said Bat-Mite was retconned to possibly be a drug addict's hallucination in an Legends of the Dark Knight story. The only time during O'Neil era Batman that Batman met Bat-Mite was when Mxyzptlk made him "real" in the Karl Kesel/Dave Taylor World's Finest, and then got rid of him by the end. The ending has Bruce and Clark assuming Mxy just created Bat-Mite out of that drug addict's hallucination, so it was left open about whether or not Bat-Mite actually existed. But other than that O'Neil-era Batman never interacted with him again.

Superman/Batman #25 brought back Bat-Mite but they imply through dialogue that this Bat-Mite is a part of Mxyzptlk (Mxy says that Joker's been holding on to one little bit of Mxy's magic that he wants back), so it's up to you to decide if it counts as actual Bat-Mite or a part of Mxy like in the Kesel/Taylor World's Finest comic

>>149856565 (OP)
Was Jim a really good Shooter?

>>149892459
You knew where you stood with Jim

>>149892517
Yeah, you right.

>>149856565 (OP)
He was good for marvel. He was a tard wrangler, he got all those dirty lazy hippies in line and got them doing good comics

>>149883320
Nah, Early Valiant was cool, and I even think New Universe had potential. It was fucking stupid to think it would have been a replacement, but in some ways it was before it's time.

>>149858921
Money used to have purchasing power

>>149858197
Badass action and tits. There you go.

>>149859216
>little gnomes in white face eating watermelon. Denys Cowan stole one off of this guy's desk and gave it to me as a Christmas present. I keep it on my desk here to remind me some of these people still work there
kek
So easy to be progressive when its the community approved thought

>>149865969
They are completely in their rights to fire you for any dumbshit they can think of in an at-will state so long as its not about being a protected class. The difference is that if the rest of staff wasn't a bunch of teenaged girls who loathed the very man going to bat for them they would be able to jointly bargain against the executives since you can't union bust fuckin artists. But the talent will always choose to cut their nose off to spite the face.

>>149881564
I would assume his problem with stylized art would generally be that he felt like artists focused so hard on pretty/cool pictures that the storytelling suffered. Jim was, first and foremost, a guy who believed in clear storytelling. Your art could be stylized and fancy so long as it still got across what was happening in a way that was easy to follow visually.

I think if you want a good idea of what working with Jim might have been like and what he expects out of a comic, go look up the blog post from his run on the Threeboot Legion with Francis Manapul where he was openly critical of how Manapul (and others involved in production) weren't following his scripts.

any good shooter comic recommendations?

>>149894476
Avengers is goods. Korvac saga. Check it out.

>>149889571
No that's pretty much correct. A big part of Marvel's appeal in the 1960s, aside from the more human and dramatic characters, was the (seemingly) tight interconnectedness of the comics where everything was taking place in one setting. It did a lot to build loyalty and more importantly, get readers to buy other comics.

>>149894476
His first Legion run and both of his Avengers runs.

>>149894918
Which wasn't so much of an issue when comics cost a nickle

>>149893639
>He was a tard wrangler

This is his biggest contribution. Most comics writers back then had the potential to be good, but only a few bothered unless they were pressured. The comics industry is overrun by lazy and highly unprofessional writers and editors.

>>149894721
I support this, that saga is superb.

>>149894476
Does he ever had an original comics of his own?