Shooter gets blamed for a lot, too, because he was the dominant guy at Marvel during the era in which fans and creators started getting bugs up their asses about "Creators Rights". So despite Shooter having NOTHING TO DO with who owned what, or who got credit (he didn't OWN Marvel; he just ran the comics), as the "Boss", he was the figurehead that everyone got to yell at and blame when things started coming down that "oh, if you're a creator, you're screwed".Horsenhero wrote: ↑Fri Jul 14, 2017 11:59 pm Jim Shooter, it seems to me, gets blamed for a lot of crap that probably wasn't his fault. This comes from being the boss I suppose. I mean, it's well documented that he fought for higher paying contracts for all his top tier talent (including Byrne), but they all hate him so much he gets blamed for everything any creator deems bad, even if those claims directly contradict the claims of other creators.
This is why I tend to take all the stories about Shooter with a grain of salt. He started in the business at 14 and worked hard. His fate in comics is almost so tragic as to be shakesperean. After shepherding Marvel through one of their most successful periods, he's shown the door. He starts Valiant and makes that an attractive enough property that Wall St. investors fought over it and when it's finally leveraged for a very handsome price, he's dumped into the rubbish heap. Without him around Valiant begins a slide they almost didn't get out of.
Given the fact Shooter was successful in his early career at DC, maintained Marvel as the dominant comic company and built Valiant from the ground up, I imagine he was probably a hard ass editor. That undoubtedly is how he could build several successful brands yet still be nearly universally hated.
With with the fans now reading Marvel & DC, but thinking that both companies are horrible godless corporations, makes the long-serving figurehead of one of them out to be a bad guy.
Granted, I will believe 100% that Shooter was a micromanager, and that it would be really annoying if he was micromanaging YOUR stuff. But so much of what he says makes sense- for one, I'm GLAD he kiboshed Bill Mantlo's "Spider-Man has a baby out of wedlock" storyline. Hell, if we had Shooter at Marvel now, we might have avoided the "Gwen Banged Norman Osborn" arc, One More Day, and more! Sometimes, creative people SHOULD be told "No".