Every so often, I get emails from people saying “they heard” [x], asking for my opinion. Which is flattering, but honestly – I have practically no contacts within the comics industry. (I have a few in film and TV, but no, I don’t know what’s going to happen with Smallville this season. Honestly, I’m happy to get to watch secondhand preview DVDs from time to time. It saves me money.) Besides, most of the time these are just people repeating some crap some person on a messageboard told them which they believed for whatever reason.
On top of that, I’ll add that I personally don’t believe that this particular rumor is true; it just seems too implausible to me. That having been said, I thought it was interesting for discussion as a hypothetical scenario, so, in six words:
“Dan DiDio out; Jim Shooter in.”
Discuss the possible ramifications of this occurring… now!
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Didio out I can believe — the numbers have been pretty brutal the last year. But Shooter? Given he was all but an exile from comics for *years* and only recently even tentatively welcomed back in, I just can’t see it.
Well, yes, that was the same conclusion I arrived at; my question was more “what happens if they did do this.” Does Shooter have any significant enemies remaining who currently work at DC? I know a lot of his old sparring partners are either retired or marginalized now…
Didio out I can believe — the numbers have been pretty brutal the last year.
Oddly enough, that’s not true. Yes, in terms of market share, they lost ground to Marvel, who had a HUGE year, and they are down from 2006, which had the end of Infinite Crisis, One Year Later, and 52, but 2007 was leaps and bounds better than most years prior to Didio’s employment. Countdown, while a critical failure, is doing very well for a weekly series, Sinestro Corp War was big late year hit, and with Final Crisis and Busiek’s new weekly on the way, I don’t think anyone actually making money off of DC Comics is unhappy with his services.
Does Shooter have any significant enemies remaining who currently work at DC? Yes, he does. Not to name names, but there’s one editor who collects NY Post headlines that say things like “Shooter Kills Three on Turnpike,” just because “he’s always knew Jim would snap one day.”
That said, in the hypothetical world where Shooter IS put in charge of DC, I think it depends on how much he’s mellowed since he ran Marvel 20 years ago. If he’s the same, I think you’d see a year of dramatic change (maybe even improvement) of DC’s output, followed by a mass exodus of editors, writers and artists that would cripple DC for years! Writers and artists just have more power than they did two decades ago, and editors have a lot more options of companies to work for, and I don’t think any of them would put up with his dictatorial style of management.
If he has changed, well then, he’s changed, and that’d be impossible to predict.
Countdown, while a critical failure, is doing very well for a weekly series
I’d argue it really isn’t, simply on the basis that it’s not just a weekly series – it’s intended to be the “spine” of DC’s comics, the brand driving the machine for the year. 52 wasn’t even intended to be that thing, and it sold better than half again what Countdown does; the latter’s failure as a brand is evident by the poor-to-terrible sales of its various spinoffs and crossover issues.
DiDio can point to sales increases in the core Bat and Super-titles over his reign, if you’re looking for successes that aren’t big event comics, but they’re not that big (usually about a fifty percent increase, and ignoring the fact that they’ve come with cancellations to avoid the dilution of those respective brands). Everywhere else, regular titles are either about holding even or dropping.
Well the obvious next domino would be in the Legion writer position: Jim Shooter out, Christopher Bird in.
Didio out. His spiritual father in?
Yeah, I’ve just been passing around the rumor that Christopher Bird is co-scripting Final Crisis with Grant Morrison.
I haven’t been “happy” with DiDio’s tenure, but sales seem to be doing well, and even though Countdown hasn’t been what they promoted it to be. I think Final Crisis will decide DiDio’s future. However, I also think that he as an editor has really been beholden to a small group of well-liked and headstrong writers. I think Shooter or anyone else would have the same trouble.
I’d pretty much never read a DC Comic, ever again.
I should also say, I’m not reading much to begin with, but to put him in charge would be the final nail in the coffin.
ZOMG ZOMG ZOMG I heard Bird was writing the third Hulk movie!
Yes. My bold innovation is to have the Hulk say “fuck” a lot. Originally they were going to have Warren Ellis do it, but the exchange rate is better for them to hire a Canadian than a Brit.
Shooter’s run at Marvel had some strong virtues–excellent attention to basics, excellent training of newbie creators. The uniformity of tone is problematic; good in some ways, stifling in others. His faults are significant–poor people skills and ego.
Bringing him in at DC? Well, Carlin would quit/be fired, and that’s not a bad thing. If he could bring back the attention to basics and the creative development, that’d be awesome. But the line is too big for him to micromanage. DC’s corporate culture for a long, long time (back to the forties) has been about compartmentalized editorial offices; that’s waned under DiDio, but it’s still very different from the Bullpen attitude at Marvel. So he’d have to fight that.
The uniformity of tone, at least across the central universe, would alienate some creators. If they had an Epic-like line to play in, maybe that would help. Is there somebody to play the Archie Goodwin role for Shooter?
It’s unlikely that Shooter would be hired; less likely that he’d be given a long enough leash to do more than move the status quo incrementally.
Wow. I dunno. Doesn’t anyone remember the old stories about what it was like working for Shooter?
Still, he has been capable of some great writing (Legion, first Avengers stint, the Valiant line).
Oh but then there was his second Avengers stint, Secret Wars, Star Brand …. I take it back. And he did kill off Jean Grey.
I loved the Valiant line under Shooter, and it fell to pieces after he left and his influence waned. For example, I’m sure it was going to turn out that Torque was a sleeper/spy put into the Harbinger team to keep tabs on Stanchek, and a lot of little things pointed to that, but just like Captain Atom = Monarch in Armageddon 2001, or the damaged Superman robot = Cyborg Superman during the Reign of the Supermen saga, that particular story got dropped and the clues went nowhere.
So: DC under Shooter would produce much better stories than DC under Danseph DiQuesidio or whatever his name is. But unless his personal skills have improved markedly, it would make the WGA strike look like a Brady Bunch episode within six months.
Definite ramification: I will continue not to care about the DCU.
Damaged Superman robot? It was obvious to me from day one that that was Hank Henshaw. Where has it been said or rumored that he was ever going to be anything else?
And I mourn the loss of Valiant, Defiant, and Broadway Comics. All of them had so much potential…
Broadway Comics? Potential? This is madness speaking.
It could definitely have potential, if either a) he’s managed to acquire some people skills over the years, or b) he gets the rock-solid backing of higher-ups in the company who say, “We don’t care who bitches, we don’t care what talent you lose, we just want to see the books ship on time and the bottom line improve.” Because in a very real sense, if you hire Shooter you’re hiring him to be the bad guy. You’re hiring him to force people to knock off the self-indulgence, to run the place like a business and not a clubhouse for comics fans, and to get sales up and make the books popular. And he’ll do that for you…just don’t expect people to have fond memories of him later on.
Well, I remember reading somewhere that Jim Shooter would not allow homosexuals to be heroes. Northstar, for example, was always intended to be gay (according to Byrne), but Shooter forbade any heroes being homosexual. DC has a lot of gay characters now, it would be hard to imagine him putting them in Limbo, or god forbid “cured”. Judd Winick is i believe is almost incapable of writing a storyline without homosexuals and/or AIDS (he has like, a thousand GLAAD awards to prove it), so it would be veeerrry interesting to see one of their big guns chafe at this editorial edict.
But who knows, maybe Shooter has mellowed on his anti-gay agenda?
And what was cyborg Superman supposed to be other than Hank Henshaw?
Possible ramifications? Loads and loads of really bad pun headlines in fanboy blogs. “DiDio Killed by Shooter!” “Shot Through the Heart, and DiDio’s to Blame!” “DC in the Crosshairs of Shooter!” And so forth.
It’s not an insane idea, though. Interviews with Shooter and his runs as Marvel and Valiant EICs suggest that he loves (or at least used to love) super-tight continuity. Crazy-mad-tight.
For example, in an interview about Valiant, he said he went nuts “fixing” a complication introduced by Steve Englehart in the first or second issue of X-O Manowar. Englehart had the main character walk from Peru to the United States in a single issue. Shooter freaked out, since that would clearly take more than a few days. To keep the Valiant comics operating on a matching schedule, he had all of the other characters in comics that month get stuck someplace for a while. The Harbinger kids were stuck on the moon, Solar went off into space, and so forth. That way, the next month, all of the comics would still be contemporary with one another.
That’s a lunatic attention to detail and maintaining “line unity.” His focus for such things would dovetail nicely with the current DC adoration of the “unified line” business model. Depending on how much the higher-ups want to keep the DCU unified and line tight, Shooter might, maybe, get a look. It’d depend on all those personality issues we don’t know much about.
Stormgod: Regarding Northstar…I used to think that Byrne was simply making himself sound good. “Oh, he was always gay!” But I went back and re-read early Alpha Flights, and hell yeah, it’s very clear that Northstar was gay. The implications were mighty clear.
Man, those Byrne Alpha Flights were awesome, yo. An under-respected run.
” I remember reading somewhere that Jim Shooter would not allow homosexuals to be heroes”
Marvel would not allow it’s intellectual properties to be openly homosexual.
“Shooter forbade any heroes being homosexual”
Marvel forbade any of it’s heroes being openly homosexual.
“maybe Shooter has mellowed on his anti-gay agenda?”
…..and then travelled back into time to 1976 so that his character notes for element lad can read:
‘An introvert who covers with snappy patter! Could be gay, who knows? He is confident, almost arrogant. He has a right to feel very special, and his is an overwhelming power.’