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Post by berkley on Oct 5, 2018 1:24:45 GMT -5
Without knowing any of the people involved my feelings are based on the results I saw on the page, and in general terms I just don't rate Marvel's output under Shooter as highly as what came before. I also don't care for his own writing too much. Was he an efficient administrator? Let's say he was - as a reader I don't really care about that, I'm only interested in the creative side of things and as I say, that was never Shooter's strong side, in my eyes.
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Post by chadwilliam on Oct 5, 2018 14:35:43 GMT -5
With regards to Shooter's writing ability, I just want to jump in and note that I've read a number of Shooter penned Superman tales from the 60's and his stuff is fantastic. He created The Parasite at the age of 14/15, wrote the first Superman/Flash race as well as a later Superman issue in which the two heroes switched bodies, and while I've never been interested in The Legion of Superheroes, I picked up a reprint of one of Shooter's stories about a month ago and his skill on this single issue has me wondering if I should be kicking myself for ignoring this title for so long. Of course, he isn't credited on all of these tales, but every so often I'll come across a comment somewhere indicating that, yes, this story was written by Jim Shooter and sure enough it'll be one of those adventures that has stuck in my mind as being very high quality. Of course, I also think Secret Wars is great and for some reason, that one gets a lot of flak (I'm talking about the first one).
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Post by rberman on Oct 5, 2018 15:10:02 GMT -5
With regards to Shooter's writing ability, I just want to jump in and note that I've read a number of Shooter penned Superman tales from the 60's and his stuff is fantastic. He created The Parasite at the age of 14/15, wrote the first Superman/Flash race as well as a later Superman issue in which the two heroes switched bodies, and while I've never been interested in The Legion of Superheroes, I picked up a reprint of one of Shooter's stories about a month ago and his skill on this single issue has me wondering if I should be kicking myself for ignoring this title for so long. Of course, he isn't credited on all of these tales, but every so often I'll come across a comment somewhere indicating that, yes, this story was written by Jim Shooter and sure enough it'll be one of those adventures that has stuck in my mind as being very high quality. Of course, I also think Secret Wars is great and for some reason, that one gets a lot of flak (I'm talking about the first one). Jim Shooter began writing LSH in July 1966 with Adventure Comics #346: "One of Us Is a Traitor!" which added Karate Kid, Projectra, Ferro Lad, and Nemesis Kid. Adventure plots predominated over teen relational drama. He introduced the Fatal Five in #352 and killed Ferro Lad in #353. He later confessed that his own reading sympathies lay with Marvel Comics, and he was alarmed when Marvel published a roster of its fan club members, revealing the author of DC's Legion of Super-Heroes on the list!   |
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Oct 5, 2018 20:03:46 GMT -5
The first LSH story I read was the one that introduced Nemesis Kid, Princess Projectra, Ferro Lad and Karate Kid. At the time I thought it was somewhat unsophisticated (like most DC stories) but a lot of fun! I had no idea whatsoever that the writer might have been 13 years old.
Shooter was one precocious lad.
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Post by berkley on Oct 5, 2018 20:59:13 GMT -5
As I've said in the past, I think Shooter.s whole sensibility was more suited to DC than to the Marvel of the 70s. Maybe he was a good writer on the 60s or 70s Legion and so on - that's a style of superhero comic writing that's pretty much lost on me and that I certainly didn't want to see applied to the Avengers.
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Post by badwolf on Oct 5, 2018 21:55:39 GMT -5
As I've said in the past, I think Shooter.s whole sensibility was more suited to DC than to the Marvel of the 70s. Maybe he was a good writer on the 60s or 70s Legion and so on - that's a style of superhero comic writing that's pretty much lost on me and that I certainly didn't want to see applied to the Avengers. I've never read his DC stuff but I think I would agree. His writing seems to be suited more for younger readers, which DC seemed to be at the time as well. Marvel's stuff struck me as skewing a bit older.
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Post by berkley on Oct 5, 2018 23:11:18 GMT -5
As I've said in the past, I think Shooter.s whole sensibility was more suited to DC than to the Marvel of the 70s. Maybe he was a good writer on the 60s or 70s Legion and so on - that's a style of superhero comic writing that's pretty much lost on me and that I certainly didn't want to see applied to the Avengers. I've never read his DC stuff but I think I would agree. His writing seems to be suited more for younger readers, which DC seemed to be at the time as well. Marvel's stuff struck me as skewing a bit older.
All I can say is that even* as a young reader I was never drawn to the DC stuff as I was to Marvel's.
And obviously I don't mean to say that Shooter hadn't evolved as a writer by the time he came to marvel in the mid to late 70s or that he wrote the Avengers in exactly the same way that he wrote Legion when he was still just a kid. But I do see him as a Gerry Conway kind of writer: obviously well-schooled in his craft, but just not inspired in any way that appealed to me personally as a reader.
*edit: perhaps it would be more accurate to leave out that "even" and just say that for the most part I wasn't attracted to DC's stuff when I was a kid in the 60s. There were always exceptions and those exceptions became more numerous as time went on. By the 80s there really wasn't a huge difference between DC and Marvel - in fact, I'd say DC was probably putting out better stuff by that time, on the whole. Of course, that was partly due to some of the Marvel writers moving over to DC and, I would argue, a generally deteriorating level of quality at Marvel.
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Post by kirby101 on Oct 6, 2018 5:08:38 GMT -5
I've never read his DC stuff but I think I would agree. His writing seems to be suited more for younger readers, which DC seemed to be at the time as well. Marvel's stuff struck me as skewing a bit older. All I can say is that even* as a young reader I was never drawn to the DC stuff as I was to Marvel's.
And obviously I don't mean to say that Shooter hadn't evolved as a writer by the time he came to marvel in the mid to late 70s or that he wrote the Avengers in exactly the same way that he wrote Legion when he was still just a kid. But I do see him as a Gerry Conway kind of writer: obviously well-schooled in his craft, but just not inspired in any way that appealed to me personally as a reader. *edit: perhaps it would be more accurate to leave out that "even" and just say that for the most part I wasn't attracted to DC's stuff when I was a kid in the 60s. There were always exceptions and those exceptions became more numerous as time went on. By the 80s there really wasn't a huge difference between DC and Marvel - in fact, I'd say DC was probably putting out better stuff by that time, on the whole. Of course, that was partly due to some of the Marvel writers moving over to DC and, I would argue, a generally deteriorating level of quality at Marvel.
That was my experierence as well. during the 70s you had Conan, the X-Men and the Starlin books, but at DC there was Swampthing, the Fourth Word and the O'Neil-Adams Batman, to name a few. By the 80s, what made Marvel special was being duplicated at DC and Marvel was starting to become bloated (a trend that continued to this day) |
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