I’ll admit, for all the horror stories and failed ventures, I can never bring myself to fully dislike Jim Shooter. It’s mostly nostalgia; His Secret Wars was the introduction to a lot of Marvel characters for me, and he was the guy in charge of Marvel when Claremont was in his X-Men prime, Byrne was doing Fantastic Four and Walt Simonson was teaching everyone how to do it on a monthly basis with Thor. Surely that gives him some credibility, right? If nothing else, it definitely makes his $1.98 Storytelling Lecture worth reading. A series of three posts transcribing a 1994 version of what Shooter calls “boot camp” for new creators, it’s a weirdly fascinating view into how Shooter sees storytelling:
Little Miss Muffet–introduce the character. Sat on a tuffet eating her curds and whey–establish the status quo. Along came a spider–introduce the disruptive element. Sat down beside her–build suspense. Scared poor Miss Muffet–climax. Away–resolution. Now you know the basic building block of entertainment. Is that all you need? No. Little Miss Muffet is a story, it fits the basic building block, it is however a lousy story. You don’t know anything about this girl, you don’t know anything about the spider. It gets old pretty quick. But we can make it better.
Just bring in Frank Springer to pencil and we’ve got another Dazzler: The Movie on our hands…
April 15th, 2011 at 9:25 pm
Why are you linking to my messageboard with your wasted effort of a blog? I pretty much shut it down since I’ve retired as a collector. My messageboard has no relevance to Jim’s blog and I’m not looking for new members.
For the sake of clarification, Dazzler is better than the s#!t modern publishers are producing today. Marvel should permanently fµ¢king murder Spiderman or just go ahead and have Hulk rape the Thing to appease all the dipshits that crave “shock factor” in their stories. I’m fµ¢king sick of the s#!t they pass off as superheroes these days with artists that should not even be considered for drawing coloring books. Comics are about superlosers these days and comics are far too overpriced for me to consider purchasing them even if they were worth reading.
I WOULD consider reading Jim’s Gold Key character relaunch if the comics were a dollar cheaper and the art was actually inked by someone who could improve the look of the sketches that Dark Horse tries to pass as finished art. I do have confidence in Jim’s ability to write an interesting story. I have no interest in much else being written today.
As condescending as your blog post is, Marvel was highly prosperous under Jim’s helm. Your post comes across as highly ignorant.
Defiant1
April 15th, 2011 at 10:39 pm
“As condescending as your blog post is”
This from the most pretentious, condescending self-absorbed asswipe on comic boards.
April 16th, 2011 at 6:40 am
Mark,
I talk to the people at the level they want to talk. If you want to be a condescending dumb a$$, I’ll talk to you like one and show you how inept you are at it. My self-respect is not based on your opinion or anyone else’s. My a$$ doesn’t have a sign above it reading “Entrance”. People who sit on the fence about a topic annoy me far more than people who have made an educated decision.
The author above is comparing Jim’s career at Marvel to the Dazzler comic. Dazzler was marketed to a female demographic to increase sales for the company. That’s actually an intelligent business decision if it works and it did. I’d venture to say that Dazzler had a larger audience and bigger sales than anything being produced today.
The blog post pretends to be objective while it intentionally insults Jim by showing a comic produced for a female demographic to a male demographic audience.
It’s popular to hate Jim Shooter for stupid manipulative things the critics and ignorant fans have said. Why not just hate me instead? …because I do not care what you think.
Defiant1