Jim Shooter Blasts Marvel: They Forgot What Business They're In!

>“I think they forgot what business they’re in. I think there’s some brilliant talent out there — if you just flip through the books, the pictures are incredible. Sometimes they don’t tell the story as well as they should, sometimes they’re actually designing pages to sell in places like this [a comic convention], and not really thinking about the best way to tell a story. The writing, I cannot account for much of the writing. You have brilliant guys like Mark Waid who will do something and it’s great, but so much of the stuff is what they call decompressed storytelling…”?

Shooter went on to make a compelling argument against decompressed stories.

>“It takes forever to tell a story. What Stan [Lee] would put in six pages–it takes six months. So you look at the sales–Marvel comics are now $4 apiece, and they’re thrilled if the sales are over 30,000. When I was at Marvel, the whole world was different. We didn’t have a single title–we had 75 titles–we didn’t have a single one that sold below 100,000. We had the X-Men approaching three quarters of a million. And that’s not some special No. 1, or somebody dies, or changes costumes, or someone gets married–it was every time.”

Other urls found in this thread:

bleedingcool.com/2017/11/22/jim-shooter-blasts-marvel-business/
adventuresinpoortaste.com/2017/11/19/interview-legendary-marvel-comics-editor-in-chief-jim-shooter-on-the-current-state-of-marvel-creator-incentives-and-more/
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Ultimately, Shooter thinks that Marvel needs to focus on telling good stories that satisfy readers who buy a comic, which seems like a common sense strategy.

>“Now there are lots of variants and lots of gimmicks and they’re really taking their eye off the ball. People say, ‘What do you advise?’ Tell a good story and tell it well. […] We just got great people and the ones that knew what they were doing, I got out of their way and tried to help the younger guys, and make sure it’s on time and preach story, story, story. Before me, everything was like a soap opera and just went on forever and, occasionally, there’d be some resolution, but it’s just never-ending stuff. I said, people buy this unit of entertainment. There better be a story here.”

He continued:

>“Comics have more in common with single malt scotch than they do with other kinds of publishing because it’s a relationship. It’s a relationship marketing business. When I was a kid, I couldn’t wait to see what happened to Spider-Man next month. I didn’t give a damn if the cover was foil-embossed–because it wasn’t. It’s all about them loving Spider-Man, the character of Spider-Man, wanting to know what’s going on with Spider-Man. If they miss an issue and they don’t care, you lost.”

>“When they’re involved,” Shooter explained, “you win. When they’re not, I don’t care how many foil-embossed covers there are.”

bleedingcool.com/2017/11/22/jim-shooter-blasts-marvel-business/

full interview: adventuresinpoortaste.com/2017/11/19/interview-legendary-marvel-comics-editor-in-chief-jim-shooter-on-the-current-state-of-marvel-creator-incentives-and-more/

Totally agree. Shooter had flaws, but he was fucking huge on quality control. He's right about sales, too. Marvel had a long running reputation for producing quality comics, and that was why they sold. Now they've completely replaced that concept with cheap shock value in order to compensate for awful storytelling.

>just read his based 2000s LoSH
>find this
COME BACK SOON JIM

>based 2000s LoSH
Don't lie, bitch.

It's better than Waid's or Bedard's.

The decompression is an enormous turn-off, it's $4 for some dilly dallying, just to get to a cliffhanger, and repeat. The best talents know to craft a self contained story, that you'd like to go back and read again, while furthering the overall arc.

> comics need to have shorter stories, but don't do any oneshot issues because then people will lose interest

this seems like sane industry advice.

>Captain America a Nazi? Are you kidding me? Jack [Kirby] is rolling in his grave. Joe Simon is going to rise up out of his grave and kill those people. That was so wrong because that was not anything like the original intent of the creators.
Based.

>he liked the WW movie
VERY based.

why is there this thread of old writers saying they want to kill Spencer? That doesn't really make them sympathetic.

Hi Nick!

Because Nick Spencer is a shithead.

I think the one thing they've really forgotten is Shooter's maxim of "every comic is someone's first". Sure that could make for some clunky dialogue (i.e. exposition and stuff) but at the same time made it easier to jump in. And it's not like stuff like Claremont's X-Men or Miller's Daredevil suffered for it.

Also yeah, decompressed storytelling is cancer mostly. Lots of nothing happens in a lot of comics and then you get a last page cliffhanger whereas in a lot of older comics something is being advanced most of the time even if it's just some character development.

Trades are great but they ruined the quality of floppies.

I read a couple of Rebirth first trades and even by the end of the volume I felt like not much had been accomplished

I was recently really impressed w/ the first New Super-Man trade. It told a lot of story, skillfully introduced a number of characters and set up interesting dynamics in just a few issues, a rarity these days.

And this is why Shooter needs to come back.

One of the things I love about Stray Bullets is that every single issue is amazing and having read a number of Lapham's interviews, it's because he was trained by Shooter at Valiant.

NSM is great.

Decompression is something that should be applied sparingly so that the absolute most dramatic moments have time to breathe, but they just use it all the time. Every banal interaction has to be an entire page. I hate it.

This is a good point, I wonder if the medium trying to follow film and television storytelling (scenes) has anything to do with it, rather than using it's own rare possibilities to relay information visually. Is it the writer holding too much sway and masturbating on the page? As Shooter said, there are a lot of skillful artists who imo are wasted on most of these scripts.

If the plot of the issue is good, you don't even really need much in the way of exposition.
I always compare it to The Venture Bros. A lot of great episodes of that show intentionally give you the feeling that you're jumping in in the middle and that you've missed a lot and it works because the show is so fun you don't mind how it introduces characters and situations with little or no context.
If a couple are having an argument and it's interesting, I don't need to know who exactly they are and what they were doing yesterday. The argument just needs to be compelling in the moment.

>When I started, there was a story–well-researched, very well considered, and I had a friend who was psychologist run through the whole thing to make sure we got the psychology right. Yellowjacket ends up having a mental breakdown and gets divorced from Jan. And there’s a mistake in that story where the artist drew Yellowjacket hitting her–he was supposed to accidentally hit her with his hand not punch her, so it became the wife-beater story. But the story was all worked out so people could see where it was going, this guy’s heading in a bad direction, and I started getting this hate mail and death threats, all kinds of stuff. So I went to Stan and said, “I’ve never seen mail like this before, Stan.” He looked at it and said, “That’s the kind of mail I used to get in the original days of Spider-Man–why can’t Peter Parker be happy? Why can’t he have a girlfriend?” And I said, “Yeah, but this is pretty intense.” And he said, “Well, how are the sales?” I said we’re going about 10,000 copies a month. He said, “I think you’re doing all right.” So if they’re talking about you, at least you’re doing that right, and if the foundation is good, let them rant. At least they care–give me people who care.

lel, some things never change

Shooter is a hack and it's why he was fired from Marvel and no one hires him anymore.

t.Bryne

Oh absolutely. Look at The Authority. It looks more like storyboards than a comic book.
While a lot of manga is even worse than modern Western comics in this regard, a lot of it also gets the pace thing just right. You want breakneck excitement and development, but it should be punctuated with quiet moments, beat panels, etc.
Manga will go 200mph and then have characters talk and a few panels of just their surroundings or objects in the room as a little breather. Its nice.

>I just saw the Wonder Woman movie–it was good, I liked it. And I heard people say, “Well. it’s not the original Wonder Woman.” Here’s the deal. If you go out and ask 1,000 people to tell you everything they know about Superman, you’ll hear the same things–Daily Planet, Lois Lane, Clark Kent, blah blah. You’ll never hear about Mister Mxyzptlk or even the Fortress of Solitude. Anything the 1,000 people say–keep that, don’t mess with that. Anything that 1,000 don’t say, you get a little flexibility.

Oh the fanboy butthurt that would accumulate if this was applied.

Decompression works for manga because of the general quantity. One Piece can be decompressed because it's getting over 40 chapters a year. A monthly in Japan gets 50 pages or so.

>When I was a kid, I couldn’t wait to see what happened to Spider-Man next month

Also, when you were a kid, you couldn't wait to get your scripts finished so Weisinger would stop harassing you and threatening to fire you.

You know what my biggest problem with decompressed storytelling is?

You don't get Rogues galleries any more.

Back in the day, when you could have ten plus stories a year, you could afford for some guys to come back. Now? You have to wait five frigging years to be anything more than casual acquaintances, let alone arch rivals.

Very good point. Villains used to pop in and out, have concurrent subplots. Now only dedicated mega arcs. A casualty of the tpb business model.

No Rogues Galleries, and because of the way decompressed arcs work, most of the time no supporting cast either, because it's all world shattering events, new status quos, and year long road trips for macguffins.

This. Very few people in comics still understand how to make a good one.

>literally "anger sells more than apathy"
Brevoort did nothing wrong.

>and a few panels of just their surroundings or objects in the room as a little breather. Its nice.

this is super common in anime too, lots of shots of just nature and establishing shots even when dialogue is going on

I think manga+anime was more inspired by hollywood and movie directing a lot more so they took a lot of the same kind of camera angles and directing techniques and storyboarding style, also japanese cinema specifically uses a lot of nature shots like that

To contrast, comics and also western cartoons are very distant from cinematic style, I also think this is why manga etc are sometimes bigger hits and are sometimes "taken more seriously", since it shares a lot of the same language as normal movies and TV that most people are already used to

She deserved it after all the bullshit she put him through.

>Jim Shooter will never walk back into the Marvel offices and slap everyone's shit
Please god why

Notice he's not just going "hurr durr diversity and muh politics" like most people criticizing Marvel do these days.

But still even though the things he's talking about are hurting the quality of the comics, even if he came back and enforced his style sales would never go back to how they were in his day. The market has changed way too much and the way people buy and consume media is completely different.

I think the industry just needs to adapt. It's running on a sales and distribution system that's 20 years old, and still using advertising and selling techniques that are even older.

I don't really have the answers, but there's gotta be something that can be done to bring comics back into public consciousness. It's not like books died when movies were invented, and this medium has some of the most well-known and loved franchises ever created.

So the problem really exists at two levels: the quality control Shooter's talking about, and just that these publishers aren't doing enough to just get comics in peoples' hands. They haven't adapted to modernity and because of that the industry is dying.

Yeah Nick definitely has bad behavior and made some questionable writing decisions, but that really doesn't merit Jim Steranko tweeting about how he wants to shoot him.

>And it's not like stuff like Claremont's X-Men or Miller's Daredevil suffered for it.
Claremont in lectures now says that he bitched about this policy at the time but in retrospect understands it was the right thing to do.

I agree, people won't be satisfied paying a premium for a comic that 80% consists of characters standing around doing nothing with repetitive banter every issue.

I have written him apologies for the things I used to believe about him. I don't fucking do this for anyone.

>he's not just going "hurr durr diversity and muh politics" like most people criticizing Marvel do these days
He published New Mutants and X-Men, which did diversity and politics right for the time (as A trait, not the ONLY trait). That was never the issue then.

To bad he went MAD WITH POWER and had to be fired

that's bob harras dumbass

my mistake! he was drawn a lot like Shooter was

>Before me, everything was like a soap opera and just went on forever and, occasionally, there’d be some resolution, but it’s just never-ending stuff. I said, people buy this unit of entertainment. There better be a story here.”

As Dave Sim would say, the your comic has to pass the beer test. Ex, your hypothetical reader could use their hard earned money for a) beer or b) your comic. Why should they spend it on your pointless funny book when they can get drunk.

The best part is that what Marvel's been doing with the replacement/legacies is something he originally suggested (and then discarded/was talked out of doing) in the '80s for being a bad idea.

I guarantee you the same people crowing about stuff like JaneThor would or have thought that Shooter's idea sounded stupid.

>not seen in picture: 10,000 acne scars

>Why should they spend it on your pointless funny book when they can get drunk.
Show of hands here, who has ever masturbated to a beer

>When I was at Marvel, the whole world was different. We didn’t have a single title–we had 75 titles–we didn’t have a single one that sold below 100,000. We had the X-Men approaching three quarters of a million. And that’s not some special No. 1, or somebody dies, or changes costumes, or someone gets married–it was every time.”

Not knocking Jim Shooter (he's one of the best editors comics ever had) but the world in 2017 is a lot different than it was in 1984 in terms of how people spend their entertainment money. In 1981 a VHS tape cost on average between $79 to $89, that's $214 to $240 in today money.

Amazing Spider-Man #200 (Jan, 1980) cost a whopping 75 cents for a double issue(#199 was 40 cents).

For the price of a new VHS at $79, you could buy 105 copies of ASM #200, or any other comics of the same value.

Now though? DVD's usually range from $2.99 to $12.99 at your local Walmart (depending on the title, Disney Classics movies are still usually higher and Star Wars is never cheap). Or, you could get a Netflix account for $30 for 3 months and get access to a wider selection of films and TV.

Even with inflation, how can comics compete with that? Comics are a "cold" medium, you have to pick it up read it and decipher it. Anybody can watch a movie, it's a "hot" medium.

He was fired because he objected to the late 80s corporate takeover of Marvel and they replaced him with someone more obedient.

>Look at The Authority. It looks more like storyboards than a comic book.

That was the literal point of the comic. Hitch went to Ellis and literally pitched him the idea of doing the comic as a storyboard style and Ellis liked it so much that he wrote the scripts to resemble hollywood movies to fit the art.

Alright, sexy artwork. That's a good reason to get people to buy and come back.

But that means less and less in the growing internet world of free fap material on sites like this one.

Shooter's departure is basically the turning point of modern Marvel from a place where fans could break into the business and even run it like Shooter did to Marvel becoming more corporatized. Harras, Quesada and Alonso are all the bastard children of the post-Shooter Marvel.

Now Marvel would never hire a kid unless he was the son of a celebrity or some Hollywood exec's son like Sam Loeb.

Marvel was at its apex when it could compete with video rental and Shooter got fired right before that price point started tipping the other way.

Let's take a good look at 2 things that changed after he left:

1. Comics stopped printing on pulp or even bleached Baxter paper (yes, that's where the F4 building got its name) and switched to coated stock at the worst possible time, about 2 years before paper prices went through the roof and stayed there. No one requested this, it was a gimmick but eventually all comic books were printed in this fashion.

2. Aggressive courting of film studios. This was profitable but intensely self-destructive in the long run as movies made it less necessary to read the source material and turned it into IP factories.

And then there's the thing Jim himself did that fucked today's Marvel over: the royalty system. He wanted to do right by the creatives but didn't foresee modern writers using it as an incentive to replace their mainstay characters with knockoffs they'd get paid for partial ownership of instead. And because Marvel was about to do it, DC instituted the same program to retain its talent pool.

Mort Weisinger worked for DC, friend.

Shooter didn't come to the House of Ideas until he was a fully grown shaved sasquatch.

SJWs put "diversity and politics" ahead of storytelling and characterization. You can have diversity and you can have politics and you can have them not be the cringiest fucking garbage.

>American citizen with no classical records

That's a quality fucking zinger.

>What Stan [Lee] would put in six pages–it takes six months

So much fucking this. I was stunned last month when I reread the first FF comics. They have so much content I couldnt help to notice that each issue would take at least a 4 issue mini arc for current marvel to tell exactly the same story. The fights were actual fights, not just a big splash of the heroes and in the next page is over leaving you wonder what the fuck happened in between

holy shit this
Mort treated Jim like shit to his face and acted like he was his child prodigy whenever Jim wasn't around.

In all of Jim's blog he'll talk endlessly about how DC lacked any kind of editorial vision before the 80s but you'll notice he doesn't say SHIT about them having money or management problems like Marvel chronically had.

Here's the other takeaway from reading Jim's autobiographical blog: he's a good Catholic momma's boy who's gone on a few dates with women but never really been involved with any and spent quality time at NYC's YMCA when it was becoming the place the Village People sang about.

I can't wait for someone to scream "Marvel would be different if it had a gay EiC."

I really miss that time when a single issue of a comic book told a whole story.

Also good writers can use "banter" to convey plot points and subtly tell us about the characters. Good writers use dialogue to advance the story and characters.

Lazy writers just use it for pointless "realistic" banter.

I read through the Epic Collections for Spider-Man, and in the first one they established like twelve villains. Most of which are some of his most enduring, popular foes. You just don't get that any more.

Do you ever wonder how you became such a bitch?

This for sure.

I'm an oldfag, my first comic was pic related. It was towards the end of a 6 issue arc, packed fucking full of Marvel characters, and yet in one issue I was able to gleam pretty much all I needed to know about who these people were and what was going on. It was super fun and I just fell into comics hard from that point on.

I know that part of me falling out with comics is just getting older, but there was a magic about comics that were able to make you aware of what was going on just in one issue. And when they would name drop previous events and have the little editor box that would tell you what issue it was referencing, it gave you a point of reference for collecting back issues and connecting the dots. I just don't feel like most comics do that anymore. They don't tell satisfying one issue stories, they don't have a sense of discovery attached to them. They're just sort of there.

Shooter is likely very relaxed about Fox given his views on Hasbro.

I think this was definitely the problem I had with that Marvel Legacy special. They put cool things in it, but I didn't feel like I should care. That issue of Spider-Man I actually cared enough about what was going on back when I read it when I was a kid. And it's not limited to old comics; even DC's efforts during Rebirth I cared more about than Legacy. Yet Legacy, which had Wolverine's return and all of that... I just didn't feel like it was something I should care about.

>Dave Sim
>Listening to a pedophile

>supporting cast
SO MUCH THIS. People forget how important the supporting cast is

You don't need exposition for the most part anymore. that's what the first page recap is. explain characters powers and explain what happened to the characters in the last part of the current arc. thats all you need.

shooter's biggest mistake was not coming up with this idea himself. claremont's writing DID suffer for his soap opera and this is how my powers work exposition filled thought balloons.

But it wasn't her fault at all. Or you one of those who takes what she said in Busiek run at face value. Cause she clearly just blaming herself when she did nothing wrong

Well this is all common sense. The problem at Marvel is that they‘ve left common sense behind somewhere along the road.

I think you're underestimating the effect the price of stories that don't take very long to read has. And yes, people can buy and read them online now - at FULL cover price.

Well a sane person would see million dollar movies doing free advertising for your 40,000 sale comics and just embrace it. But again, Marvel went insane and all they can see is their little floppies doing free advertising for the hundred million dollar movies.

>did nothing wrong
>Trick long-time romantic partner into marrying you after he forgets who he is

They use advertising techniques? I thought they just dumped solicits and interviews on CBR etc.

>trick
You didn't read original story, did you?

No, he heard it second hand from people on this board nearly a decade ago

I got my issues with Shooter, but he is 110% correct about decompression. I don't know exactly when it became standard to drag out a single issue story to 6 or more fucking issues, my god, but it needs to stop. The practice has utterly ruined many stories that would've been fantastic if they had been kept succinct.

And as others have pointed out, rogues galleries and supporting casts have been ruined by this, as on top of decompression, the excessive focus on action comes to the detriment of everything else. Characters in comics are only ever standing around talking about fuck all, or fighting. So much fucking fighting.

And you'd think it'd be fairly obvious to publishers that the inability for the average punter to just pick up any issue and enjoy an adventure is a huge barrier to entry, but apparently they're to dumb to realize that even lifetime readers are getting fatigued by every single story lasting a fucking year. Idiots.

>The practice has utterly ruined many stories that would've been fantastic if they had been kept succinct.
Don't worry, sooner or later those stories will be told again, hopefully in a non-decompressed style.

>I don't know exactly when it became standard to drag out a single issue story to 6 or more fucking issues, my god, but it needs to stop

When trades started to become a standard. It's why people started complaining about writing-for-a-trade style, but it's so normalized now that you don't notice it anymore, it's more surprising to see a story that's a two-parter.