Shooter's back

I know that there are a lot of fanboys who are all giddy over the return of Jim Shooter to writing comics, especially his return to the first book he ever wrote (starting at age 13!!) The Legion of Super Heroes.

I am not one of these fanboys.

I see Shooter as not just a step backward, but a homophobe who writes women as empty-headed, makeup obsessed, hangers on who only care about getting their next Man. His past writing is littered with blatant anti-gay stories, and female characters who previous writers have given personalities turned into airheads, and it was painfully out of date in the mid 80’s because he was still thinking he was writing comics in the 60’s.

He also single-handedly drove away every creator at Marvel who was doing non-mediocre work aimed at someone other than 13 year old fanboys.

One of the things I have written and commented about is how comics have finally started to show some real maturity in their writing, and are starting to get attention from outside the comics market. Even the super-hero stuff is getting notice (like Civil War, Ultimate Spidey and the like) because the writing has made a HUGE quantum leap in the last 20 years. It used to be that you could get mature writing from Alan Moore, Steve Gerber and a handful of others, but now, writers who write as if they are patiently explaining something to a slightly slow Junior High student have had to move on to running “Law and Order” or network TV animation.

Comics also came through the 90’s unreadablity and are now made for general audiences who are used to manga. They have artists who understand page layout, flow and motion instead of the 90’s style pin-up pages that look good on a wall but do nothing for a story.

Ah, but according to Jim Shooter, that’s a bad thing. In an interview on Wizard’s website, he says:

The art in comics is generally better than ever, the writing is often clever and glib, but in spite of that, far too many comics are utterly unreadable. Even hardcore fans find many comics daunting to follow! The craft of comics storytelling is all but lost. A who’s who of industry big shots have privately agreed with me when we’ve discussed exactly this subject, but it’s a tough problem to fix, given the often huge egos of the creators, general creative anarchy and lack of trained editorial people. I’m happy to say that where I work now, DC, appears to be taking the lead in bringing back the craft. My editor, Mike Marts, is really good. He knows what he’s doing and makes you make it right. A lot of good stuff is happening at DC. I’m back where I started 42 years ago...and very happy to be there.

So, according to Mr. Shooter, comics writing is terrible and everyone knows it, but they are too scared to do anything about it.

I defy ANYONE to pick up a random issue of some of Shooter’s writing and proclaim it is better than the average current Marvel book. In fact, I think I’d rather eat glass than read books Shooter has written like:

-Team America
-Dazzler: The Movie
-His run on the Avengers, which included a rape sequence he denied was a rape because it was done with “mind control devices”
-His “Rampaging Hulk” depicting an attempted rape of Bruce Banner in the shower of a YMCA by “average gay men”
-Secret Wars II
-Star Brand
-His issues of Ghost Rider

And so on.

This is the man who believes that Brian Bendis, Mark Millar, Grant Morrison, and so on, are inferior to himself, Tom DeFalco and Bill Mantlo. This is a man who fired Gene Colon saying that his art wasn’t any good but kept Vince Coletta as Marvel’s main inker.

In other words, I’m of the opinion that if Shooter says it sucks, it’s probably brilliant.

Fighting Revisionist History

* The killing fields were real. The genocide against their own people was committed by the Khmer Rouge.

* The Vietnamese — the Communist Vietnamese — were the people who went in and put a stop to it.

* The United States then supported the Khmer Rouge.

Please remember this as right wingers keep floating the myth that the US leaving Vietnam caused a Holocaust and the media continues not to correct them.