Superman Through the Ages! Forum

I just discovered the website for the Legion Amateur Press Association that's been working since the 1970s (which Todd and Mary Biernbaum ran before they became actual writers). Amazing how in all their website they talk about "a community for young fans to get together" but say absolutely nothing about how APAs were pretty much how gay slash fanfiction was sent around before the invention of the internet.

Still, they managed to get Jimmy Shooter, the greatest Legion scribe of them all, to talk Legion with them back in 1976, and his insights into the characters are incredible. Jimmy wrote at a time when plot was more important than characterization, so he never really got into the Legionnaires' inner heads. One need only look at STAR BRAND to see that Jim Shooter was someone with incredible skill for characterization, and here he's making up for it in a big way, telling the APA everything all the tabloid details, stored here:

http://members.aol.com/interlac/legionnaires.html

They also post thoughts by Todd and Mary Biernbaum, I suspect mostly to show a contrast between the sacred and the profane, like those Renaissance artists that draw Hell and the Angel of Death next to Heaven.

Some of the more interesting quotes:

Imra "Ironass" Ardeen. Bwa-hahahahaha! Oh, that's beautiful. I will call her that forever from now on.







Yeah, that always seemed very out of character. As much as I like Levitz, I never could accept Dream Girl as this hypercompetent leader type that was always in control.



I KNEW IT!

Sounds like old Jim has a bit of a thing for troilism, doesn't it? I'm surprised he didn't just call it "Superboy and the Legion of Swingers".

This isnt the old say so about Element Lad being gay - the tip off being he wore pink or such nonsense?

Jimmy Shooter? The guys a giant- Julian - physically well over 6 feet 6" - I dont know if he;d take kindly to being called Jimmy.   :wink:

That's Mr. Shooter :)

Interesting.  Scooter read a lot of things into the characters, things he never got to use at all.

Yeah, Shooter is the guy that OFFICIALLY "outed" Element Lad, though in the 1970s and 1980s after Shooter left, E-Lad was characterized as heterosexual, strangely enough - apparently Paul Levitz and Cary Bates didn't get that particular memo.

Isn't Jim Shooter a member of the Gay and Lesbian Comic Creator Organization or something like that?



He'll always be cute little Jimmy Shooter to me, who wrote Legion of Super-Heroes when he was fourteen.

Jim Shooter's column in the Marvel Soapbox are truly interesting because Jim goes on these utterly bizarre tangents, like that one where he says that he will never, ever sue DC for characters he created when he was a minor, because that's not something Peter Parker would do, or that one he started the New Universe line off with, where he explains that he, Jim Shooter, has a superpower because of his incredible height.

Jim Shooter, along with Jack Kirby, is in the category of "brilliant but crazy."

Last I heard of him, was when Valiant Comics went under.

He launched two more comics lines after Valiant was wrested from him - Defiant Comics and Broadway (with Lorne Michaels).  I interviewed with him when he was at Valiant and I had been so out of touch with comics I had no idea he had headed Marvel.


He asked me what artist I thought was the best storytller.  I thought about it for about ---all of two seconds -- and blurted out "Curt Swan!"

He said "Close but no Jack Kirby."  He then pulled out a reprint of an early Torch- Cap meeting and pointed out panel by panel that you could follow the action without being able to read the words.

Same thing's true of Swan but less dynamic.

A couple of years ago I had heard he was involved with Phobos Entertainment doing something.

People say that, and I've never agreed with that...Curt Swan had moments where he was frankly, incredible at expressing motion. Look at ADVENTURE COMICS #367 - the first Dark Circle story - there was a semi-splash page of Brainiac 5, Karate Kid, and Sun Boy being catapulted into the sky that had incredible motion.

But you are right, Curt Swan was a one of a kind genius: just look a few pages later at 30th Century Japan - Kirby's "location" splash pages, like the ones that introduced Wakanda, was never better.

I still say Curt's a better storyteller. :twisted:

Ah, beautiful. I love Shooter... Everything the man touched from his amazing Legion stuff to Secret Wards is hold in my book.

Thanks for the link, Julian.

A little off topic, whatever happened to Jim Shooter? What is he doing now?

Since August 2000, he is part-owner and creative consultant for the sci-fi firm Phobos Entertainment.

I agree that Swan had a gift for expressing emotion facially, especially when paired with a good inker, that has been rarely surpassed in its subtlety and range.

This is the sort of technique that made him a favorite of artists who came up in the otherwise Neal-Adams-dominated-70s.  I'm thinking of someone like Dave Sim, who has referred to Swan as an influence.

Jimmy Shooter had the Midas Touch, that's for sure.

And SECRET WARS is a terrific miniseries. People come down on it because it was a series absolutely meant to sell toys and steal the thunder of CRISIS. While that's true, it was also an incredibly fun, well-written commercial for toys, and if I was Crisis, I wouldn't take having my thunder stolen quite so personally if it was by something like that.

Everybody behaved the way we know them to behave; it was like STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN for Marvel Comics, it had a great warmth, with the Enchantress trying to seduce Thor, Galactus attempting to eat the battleworld, Molecule Man dropping (my God) an ENTIRE MOUNTAIN RANGE on the good guys, Doctor Doom having a secret hidden agenda, Magneto as a conflicted character trying to fit in on the side of the angels. It was a nice touch to have the X-Men separate, "segregated," if you will, from the other heroes. The reason they gave though, was because of their taking in of the supposedly reformed Magneto, because the hip, cool and progressive Marvel heroes would never be racists.

Who said that SECRET WARS had zero lasting repercussions? The distrust of the X-Men by other heroes was a plot point all through the eighties, culminating in the wonderful Roger Stern X-MEN/AVENGERS battle.

Jim Shooter used the fact that some of these characters had never seen each other before. To the best of my knowledge for instance, I don't think that the Wasp and the Lizard had ever been in the same comic, and look at the story he told there, where the Wasp saved an injured Lizard and nursed him to health; there was the Wasp, all sweet, and the Lizard, talking about his hatred of all humans. In the end of course, the Lizard saves the Wasp in return.

There was an interview with Shooter on Newsarama, that I'll have to remember to post sometime, where he gave a few interesting details:

1) The reason Shooter wrote SECRET WARS was because writer ego-feuds (notably between Claremont and Byrne, which resulted in Byrne establishing that a Doctor Doom that Claremont used had been a robot) had gotten so out of control at that point that as Editor in Chief he was the only one beyond reproach by others.

2) The 1970s STAR WARS comic had been a really, really big deal. It was the best-selling comic for years, and Shooter says it "saved" Marvel nearly singlehandedly from bankruptcy. Strange to think of it today, but STAR WARS apparently was a big deal in the 1970s: both Roy Thomas and Chris Claremont were on that book, with Roy Thomas leaving because the Lucasfilm "guidelines" were unbelieveably stringent.

And last but certainly not least...

3) Jim Shooter has in him one more Legion story. Nobody will allow him to write it, though!