Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Visionaries of Tomorrow Shooter: It's Official

LMAO! The most dated things about those stories?


Mike Grell's sense of style...


Exhibit A:

Karate Kid's Superpimp getup in SLOSH #209. When I saw it I thought Superfly must have been the first member of the Legion erased from memory.

So as we keep on talking about Shooter, I'm repeating my question from some pages before:

What Valiant stuff did Shooter do that was especially great, which books should I have a look at? As there is a chance to get some stuff pretty cheap on german Ebay right now, I would appreciate a qhick reply, thanks in advance...

As for the second Shooter run: I'll give it another look this weekend but I still don't think that those "Accidental Legion Starting Five being supporting cast to Superboy" stories will ever be my cup of tea...

Sorry Chemical King, I've never had the opportunity to read any of his Valiant stuff either (actually nothing but DC and Marvel stuff)

Shooter wrote the first 15 issues of Solar, Man of the Atom. The first 2 issues of Eternal Warrior. The first 10 issues of Harbinger. The first 7 issues of Magnus Robot Fighter.

He had a hand in the rest of Valiant as well I'm sure.

Solar, Harbinger, and Magnus Robot Fighter are considered his best stuff at Valiant.

Shooter wrote, plotted or edited just about the entire Valiant Line for as long as he was with the company until, I think 93 or so. Even when he stopped being credited as the writer he was still plotting. He also worked on the color seps and in some cases served as fill-in penciller.


He was Valiant Comics. They had some success immediately after he left but it was mainly because of the foundation he put in place with his emphasis on writing good stories.


Jorge got most of what he wrote right...although I'd disagree with him on how long Shooter was on some of those books, and it seemed like he was on all of the Valiant titles at the beginning.

The other major writing he did was for Unity.

LOL. I didn't mean it in hostile terms...it's kinda impossible to be hostile with someone named Cheryl Lad...not only because it's funny but because hey...Cheryl Ladd

I never heard he dislked him personally either...only that he didn't like working with him really...probably due to the script issues you mentioned.

I've noticed...only a couple of artists seem to have real issues with Shooter, the bulk of his enemies are writers or writer artists.

Yeah, you don't like Superboy so you probably didn't get much out of that era...

Although, it was his title so he kinda has a reason to be in there...some of us do like Superboy.

Plus, he was still the most popular Legionaire then.

You are basically right about the format although I dodn't think he particularly dominated the story lines like you seem to remember...he had a couple of big stories but a lot of the time he had to go on some mission at the beginning and then he'd return near the end of the stories...on occassion he played Damsel in distress.


I don't really think his inclusion hurt characterization as they didn't spend a lot of time on his character...

I will say that Mon-El got shortchanged during that run as he was the Leader for most of it and I don't think he appeared in more than one story.


I don't think that was Shooter that was behind that though, as he used Mon-El more than just about any other Legion writer that came before him during his Adventure and Action runs.

A cool bonus is that Archives 11 gives you an extra page that was originally edited out of issue #212. I just wish they hadn't put Karate Kid #1 into Archives 12. First of all it's not a very good story, it doesn't fit in stylistically, and if they'd left it out they could have included issue #224 and completed the entire Shooter/Grell run in those two volumes. Instead that one last Shooter/Grell issue has yet to be archived.

True, it does seem like he had a better relationship with artists in general. Two of his closest allies at Marvel were Don Perlin and Vinnie "the hack" Colletta. But on the other hand, I've read terrible things about him from Jim Mooney and Gene Colan. I've never understood why Shooter came down so hard on Colan, one of my favorite artists ever. Even Colan at his worst was better than 50% of the artists working at Marvel in the early 80's.

first of all, i'm very happy shooter came back to the legion! i hated all of waid's silly "eat it grandpa" stuff, and i'm sure that from issue 37 on the legionnaires are going to act like likeable persons and not like spoilt childs.

as far as i know, shooter helped gene colan a lot. i read somewhere, don't remember exactly where, that nobody at marvel wanted his scrips drawn by gene colan since colan needed money and used to skip the hardest scenes to draw to rush things and draw more. so, shooter made him draw his avengers and every time he asked colan to redraw a page he paid him both versions. at least, that's what i remember to have read!

cheryl lad, where did you read such terrible things from mooney and colan about shooter? as a jim shooter fan, i'm very interested in the subject
thank you in advance!

I dunno. I'm not familiar with Shooter's post-Marvel stuff but from what I've read about "Harbinger" (the new TP is on my wish list), it took the "renegade teens" idea to the next level.

Not to mention Bob Layton and Barry Windsor-Smith.


Not sure...never heard about this.

According to Shooter...no one wanted to work with Colan(except Wolfman)...for various reasons. Shooter actually gave him the Avengers assignment when he was the writer...he probably pushed Colan to do better work and Colan didn't like it. I like Colan's run on Tomb of Dracula and that's about it...his Specter with Moench was decent and SilverBlade was ok...other than that, never been a real big fan of his.

Seems to be some truth to what he was saying though since...Colan left Marvel and went to work with Wolfman at DC.


Mooney is interesting though...since he spent most of his career under Weisenger who was allegedly 100 times the hardazz Shooter ever was.

Layton and Windsor-Smith both had MAJOR falling-outs with Shooter. Layton gives his side of the story here.

Oh yeah, I know about that. I was talking about when they went into business together in the first place. Cheryl Lad mentioned allies at Marvel, and Layton and Smith were among them. Just getting Barry Windsor-Smith to do a regular anything was an accomplishment.

The Valiant split up was all about greed and finances.

In any case...I am not sold on Layton's side of things as he tries to act like they were successful inspite of Shooter. When in fact...they started off really strong for an Indy, basically using the same concepts Shooter attempted to use when he created the New Universe...and the company took off with Unity, which was Shooter's baby. Shooter has a clear track record of success as an EIC...Layton essentially has nothing, except what he did with Shooter's Universe. They did hit some insane circulation marks under Layton, but those weren't individual readers, those were due to all the gimmick covers during the speculator boom.

Valiant ceased to be innovative and became just another Indy after Shooter was gone and no longer the EIC, IMO.

I'm a Shooter fan too, but mainly of his work as a writer. I'm not so much a fan of him as an editor, mainly because I feel that on the whole Marvel comics were better in the early-to-mid 70's than during Shooter's tenure as editor-in-chief. It didn't help that a lot of people whose work I really enjoyed left Marvel directly because of problems with Shooter: Roy Thomas, Steve Gerber, Marv Wolfman, Gene Colan, John Byrne, Don MacGregor, and Frank Brunner to name a few. Alienating that much talent is not a good thing.

Here's Mooney's comments from The Legion Companion:
Mooney: I think Shooter was a very talented guy- still is- but he was a very difficult man to deal with.
Interviewer: Would you say that he learned a lot of that from Mort?
Mooney: No, I think it was just his natural nature (laughs). I think the power went to his head a little bit, and he got a little too autocratic, a little too dictatorial.

Well, you've summarized Shooter's portrayal of events. Colan tells a bit different story (in an interview in Comic Book Artist #12). According to Colan, Shooter seemed to take a personal dislike to him, and began sending every piece of work he did back for changes. Colan describes getting a 30 page story returned with "corrections" on literally every page, many of them just arbitrary things like "this plane is coming from the wrong angle."

I'm skeptical of Shooter's claim that no writer wanted to work with Colan. I think he's a great artist, and Gerber and Wolfman (his main collaborators in the 70's) have been effusive in their praise of his work. Tomb of Dracula, Howard the Duck, Doctor Strange, Daredevil... he did excellent work on all of these. Whether or not a person likes Colan's style is one thing, but he's always done competent, effective work in my opinion. I can think of many other Marvel artists of the time who were much more deserving of being raked over the coals than Colan.

So in summary...27 year old Shooter told him to make corrections in his work and 50 year old Colan took it personally. Notice Colan had no proof of Shooter's dislike other than Shooter sending pages back for him to correct.


Sounds basically like what I said....

If Shooter had a personal dislike of him, why did Shooter put him on his own title, Avengers...one of the flagship titles of Marvel. Either he didn't have a personal dislike of Colan, or else what he claimed was true, that no one really wanted to work with him...except people no longer at Marvel.


And that was Shooter the writer, not Shooter the editor.

I guess we'll all believe who we choose to believe...I personally don't think it's hard to figure out why people have issues with Shooter...because he's a demanding boss, blunt...this much comes off in interviews. But I also don't think he's the anti-christ as most of his opponents claim...nor do I think he intends to personally attack anyone...he's just blunt and old school...and he was 27 years old in charge of veterans older than he was....

Regarding Shooter and Colan, the debate would lie over whether Shooter was requesting valid and legitimate corrections/improvements, or arbitrary and nitpicky changes that served no purpose, simply because he had the power to do so. Without seeing the pages in question, all we can do is speculate. The sheer volume of changes being requested seems excessive to me though, particulary from a skilled veteran. I also look at the fact that Colan had been drawing Marvel comics for 15 years at that point, and to my knowledge no one previously had expressed any problems with his work. Quite the contrary, his main collaborators from that era (Stan Lee, Steve Englehart, Steve Gerber, Marv Wolfman) all go out of their way to lavish praise on his work with them. It's hard to believe that he somehow suddenly became an lazy hack who had to be micromanaged to get quality work from him. To the best of my knowledge no one at DC had any complaints about his work after this trouble with Shooter either. Certainly Colan's work with Shooter is not better than what he was producing immediately before, so it seems unlikely Shooter's "corrections" were making the work better.

I also think the cliche about "where's there's smoke, there's fire" applies. If Colan was the only person ever to complain about Shooter that would be one thing, but there have been many people who had complaints about him, some of them similar in nature to what Colan reports.

In any disagreement there are two sides to a story, and I'm sure there is truth in both sides. I don't think it's wise to fully accept either side as the unvarnished truth, especially if I don't personally know either of the folks involved. I tend to give Colan's story more credence for the reasons cited above, but who can say for sure... there are probably elements of truth in both versions.

At any rate, I don't want to turn this into a bash Shooter thread. I'm a big fan of Shooter the writer, and very excited he's coming back to the Legion.

But unfortunately, that's no indication that they really thought as they said - because, to be true, the "American way" of not saying anything bad about your colleagues makes it difficult to find out when exactly the praises are true and when the particular writer/artist is just being nice.

Let's face it: When you're reading interviews from comics creators and they are asked about their collaborators, mostly you are hearing noting but high praises, no matter who they are talking about. "Bendis is the best", "Liefeld is such a nice guy to work with", "Byrne is so full of ideas" and so on and so forth. Shooter obviously was a little bit different - but he seems to have changed too, if you're reading his current interview concerning Manapul -> same praise, same enthusiasm, same question mark: Is he for real?

As I said before, sometimes I prefer the "bad guys" like Byrne (or Shooter back in the days) who are considered as being rude - but at least you know they're being honest...

Cheryl I'll be back to address your statements later...

For now I'll just say...Chemical King had a pretty good take on it...


Gene Colan was somewhat of a Grande Old Gentleman of the industry...most people aren't going to say something that would hurt the guys feelings or that he might take personally.


The fact that you can give me dozens of people that will say Shooter is blunt or harsh kind of proves my point,

That he wasn't singling Colan out...he's treated many people that way.

He doesn't have a filter between his brain and his mouth like most of us do...it's nothing personal though.


Shooter is the guy that gets personally attacked...


He hasn't been in the industry for a long time...not because he can't write, but because people don't like him personally.

I've got no problem with Byrne being honest...but Byrne legitimately undermines or attempts to undermine the work of others, in print, using characters that don't belong to him. He takes full advantage of his star status to do this...and he uses creations owned by others to grind his axe against individuals he has issues with...he's done it his entire career.

That's unprofessional IMO...I don't care what his opinions are. I'd respect him more if he could separate his personal issues from his professional work.


Marvel didn't put him on Star Brande just to trash the book...but that's what he did, that's why he took the job.

DC didn't hire Byrne to do Legends so he could take shots at Shooter...but that's what he did.

Jim Shooter wasn't grinding a personal axe against Byrne when he refused to let Byrne use Marvel characters to undermine the work of Claremont...he was being professional. The fact that Byrne can't handle this and knows he can use his army of fanboys that support everything he does to pull this kind of stuff and grind his axe, the fact that he even attempts to do so, is extremely unprofessional of him.


Byrne cares little for the characters, fans and companies he works for...he's pretty much all about Byrne. He knows he can draw good and can sell no matter what he throws out there...and that's exactly what he does. He considers the entire mythologies of DC and Marvel to be his own personal playground and soapbox to be used for his own self indulgent purposes.

Well, in the case of Stan Lee, that certainly is true. I've never heard him say anything bad about anyone he's worked with. But not so with the other three I mentioned, Steve Englehart in particular. I've read interviews where he was pretty harsh on artists he'd worked with. And in the same Wolfman interview where he was praising Colan, he talked about how awful Vince Colletta's work was on the few issues of Tomb of Dracula he inked.

And there's also degree of praise. If you are just being polite, you might say something brief like "Oh yeah, Gene Colan was great to work with, he did a good job." But the guys I mentioned all went into great detail about specific things they loved about his work, and said he was one of (if not the) finest artist they'd ever collaborated with. I'm skeptical someone would be that effusive in their praise simply to be nice. And I think it's more likely people would lie about the work of a present colleague than someone they worked with years ago. Obviously you're not gonna trash someone you are still working with, but in all the cases I mentioned these were new interviews talking about work 25+ years ago.

But Colan was being singled out in the sense of the amount of redraws he was being asked to do. Shooter may have been blunt to almost everyone, but he wasn't asking anyone else to do that much redrawing on every job they did.

On the topic of Byrne: I disliked all the changes made in Byrne's Superman reboot (especially the elimination of Superboy), but I think you're being unfair in your characterization of him and his motives. I'm sure he's not saint and is capable of pettiness, but so too was Shooter based on things I've read. As I said before, I don't think it's a good idea to accept everything anyone says entirely at face value if you don't know them, whether it's Byrne or Shooter. At any rate, I think we must agree to disagree here, which is fine with me. The thing we all agree on is that Shooter's return to writing comics should kick ass.

sorry, accidental double post

I don't think it's the "American way" to be polite about colleagues. From experience on cross-functional/gographical teams in the past, most people tend to favor saying something moderately polite about people whom there have been conflicts with. Here in Asia (which I think holds true anywhere else in the world to some degree), apart from the kind words masking the real status quo there is the added element of words said behind one's back and a really active role in trying to bering someone down...quite unfortunate, actually. :-(

I appreciate the distinction made between "writer-Shooter", "editor-Shooter" and "publisher-Shooter". Humans are rarely (if at all) one-dimensional and I've yet to come across someone who has a consistent attitude across all the roles that we take on in our lives. Besides, people change over time so Shooter from 10-15 years ago may not be the same person from the one working today.

Nonetheless, I think DC to some extent is cognizant of Shooter's checkered past which is why they've given him a relatively isolated part of their universe to play in. It allows him to tell (potentially) good stories while keeping him a safe distance away from other personalities currently working at DC whom he may have had some conflict with.

Bottom line, the good thing about getting "writer-Shooter" is that we can assess his merit solely on his published output.


An aside: It's wonderful to see the level of maturity in this discussion versus the infantile behavior one sees in other message boards. Long Live the Legion and Legion World! :-)

Some thoughts.

Chemical King is somewhat right about the "American Way". We are much more PC than the rest of the world. And the media may be to fault. I've seen interviews in europe were the person is much more frank yet not insulting. People understand what they mean. Here the media will twist everything and make it 100times worse.


Re: Stan Lee. Stan always had a mask on for the media. Always said nice and funny things. I heard behind closed doors he was a bit of a tiger. To the creator's face ofcourse. I've read stories where he calls someone into his office and there was lots of yelling. And there is nothing wrong with that. I respect an editor with b@11$ rather than the ones that let the creative celebrity just do what they want.

At least that's the expression you get about (US) American (comic and film) creators. Watching DVD extra material ("It was so wonderful to do this movie, we were like a family, everybody was just so nice..."), reading comic creator's interviews - it tends to sound all alike. I read the Legion and Titans Companions by Glen Cadigan. He interviewed so many comic creators. Most of them did not say one negative word about anyone - even if they had lots of reason to. Wolfman by example was obviously still p.o.'d about the editor who f*** up his Titans run after Peterson left in the sooner 90s. Did he say anything about it? No, he did not even mention his name - which in it's way is probably his way of coping, but I really am astonished about things like that. Wolfman can talk openly, he does no longer work in the field (or hardly), it's been years now and this editor totally destroyed his life's work (anybody read New Titans after #90 or so? It is ridiculous...). But still, he does not let out his anger.

But I totally digress

As for Shooter: I think he was the only one in the Legion Companion that anybody wrote a bad word about. Mort Weisinger, maybe - but he is dead so noone can say a bad word about him any longer anyway. So IF Shooter has inspired ANY american creators do say ANYTHING, he certainly must have been quite... hard to work with...