Heroes of Pulp Fiction

Adventure Comics #372

When I was just a little kid, I read the comics that my oldest brother inherited from our even older cousins. I didn’t choose anything; I just read whatever was available. Mostly these were DC’s Adventure Comics from the late 60s featuring Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes. Superboy, you see, would travel 1000 years into the future to fight evil villains with a great big group of teen heroes who had all been inspired by his own legendary self. They were colourful and campy, filled with teenage drama and science fiction. In other words, perfect!

The concept of artists and authors being responsible for these works never occurred to me. There were just the stories and the characters, and that was good enough for me.

Legion of Super-Heroes #13

In my tween years I started to buy my own comics, no longer relying on hand-me-downs. The Legion of Super-Heroes had grown up, rarely saw Superboy any more, and graduated to their own book. Everything about it was bigger, better and more adult. At the same time, I discovered the competition: Marvel Comics. What set them apart from most of the DC comics was (in my opinion) frailty and pathos. Where Superman was in essence a god of form and intellect having the barest of Achilles heels by which he could be challenged, Spider-Man was a loser who just barely managed to keep his head above water, in or out of costume.

I didn’t notice at the time, but the one DC comic that hewed more closely to the Marvel line was Legion of Super-Heroes. Characters were flawed and relationships had rough edges. The dialogue was more human. There was a reason for this, but I’ll get to that later.

What I did notice at that time was that there were people involved in making these things: writers and artists and more. Artists, in fact, were broken down into “pencillers” and “inkers” and “colorists” and “letterers”. I trust those are all self-explanatory. What I mostly noticed were the pencillers and - to a lesser degree - inkers. I would imagine that’s pretty normal since the visual aspect of the medium has the most immediate impact. There were artists whose work made me want to look away and others whose work made me want to just stare for hours.

Important Info from "Ed"

Least relevant to me as a teenage comic book reader were the editors. As far as I could tell, they just added little notes explaining references. For example, if the characters called each other by their real names, there would be a little narration box at the bottom with a note from “Ed” saying: “Ultra Boy's real name is Jo Nah, while Phantom Girl's is Tinya Wazzo.” Incredibly, these layabout editors often had assistant editors working under them! And seemingly pointlessly presiding over them all was the Editor-In-Chief. In DC’s case, his name was Dick Giordano and he was notable for drawing a mean Batman*. In Marvel’s case, his name was Jim Shooter and he was notable for being much taller than everyone else**.

Pretty Good

Then Jim Shooter changed the world as we knew it. He wrote Marvel Superheroes Secret Wars. Nothing was the same after that. The Thing left the Fantastic Four and went on a cosmic walkabout (or something). Spider-Man got a sexy black costume that tried to eat him, was beaten by a bell then went on to be the worst villain ever. Something likely happened to Thor, but I hate Thor so I have no idea what. Shortly after, DC had their own major series that changed everything for the worse and then Shooter replied with Secret Wars II, which made me not want to read comics any more. Not only was it awful, with an uninteresting omnipotent alien floating around looking like an even whiter Michael Jackson, but to understand it - or even the normal comics I read anyways - I had to also buy Dazzler and Thor. Unacceptable.

Really Bad

It turns out I was right to stop reading comics. That started a trend of annual crapfests that threaded their way through everything. I was done***. So, apparently, was Jim Shooter. No, he wasn’t fired for writing Secret Wars II. I don’t think he should have been (even if I’m tempted to say it jokingly). He presided over what was, to me, the greatest years of Marvel Comics. He also, as I found out later, wrote those old Legion of Super-Heroes stories from the 60s - when he was 14 years old! When he was about 12, he studied the comics put out by Marvel to figure out what made them better than the DC comics then he applied that formula to stories he wrote for what he thought was the worst DC comic and sent those stories to DC, unsolicited. They were accepted and his Legion stories are considered legendary. (But not because he was only 14.)

Anyways, since I stopped reading comics I missed his firing - whatever it was for - and so I also missed the heaps of bile spewed at his exiting ass. In a number of stories I never bothered to read at the time, many of his compatriots expressed a sincere lack of respect for him and a joy at his loss of status. Oh. Well... He must really be a terrible person. Either that or some artists are temperamental and egotistical and don’t like being told what to do. But let’s be honest: how likely is that?

I only know two things for sure. One is that his best work is most of what I remember enjoying (Secret Wars II notwithstanding), whether it be his writing in the 60s or the Spider-Man and X-Men comics from the 80s when he was Editor-in-Chief. The other is that he’s a very entertaining blogger. That’s right, he is now telling his side of the story in blog format, along with an enormous variety of other tales from behind the pages. For a nerd like me, it’s a lot like Legion of Super-Heroes was when I was a kid: perfect.

* He also drew some Legion of Super-Heroes covers!

** 6'7" (and a half)

*** Actually, I started up again later when I found myself wondering how the Legion were doing. They stayed interesting for a while, until they were changed completely by a crapfest. Several times.