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.
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!
Dilber MC Theme by HarzeM