Jim Shooter Should Hire John Byrne For The Gold Key Revival

Yesterday’s post about Valiant Comics got me thinking about the recent announcement that Jim Shooter will be overseeing Dark Horse Comics' revival of the Gold Key characters that include Magnus, Solar and Turok.

I think it’s a smart move on Dark Horse’s part. The superhero genre is a gap in the market for the publisher, Shooter is a talented editor, these characters have been successful in the past and pairing Shooter with them again was a splashy announcement.

Shooter has said that he hopes to write much of the material in these revivals himself. Leaving aside the question of whether this is a good idea (his recent return to Legion of Super-Heroes would seem to suggest it is not) it seems clear that Shooter’s biggest job will be to act as the editorial director of the revival and to assign talent.

I think this is also where his strengths currently lie as a creator. Shooter has had enormous success in the past with “world-building” via tight editorial direction. This is a controversial way to produce comics and not all talent responds well to it, but when it works it can work out very well, as Shooter’s past successes at Marvel and Valiant can attest.

So who could Shooter recruit to work with him this time out? At his last two attempts at this sort of thing – Defiant and Broadway, Shooter relied on finding new talent like David Lapham to produce his books and he may go that way again. Certainly Dark Horse already has access to a stable of talented new creators who work on their various other titles.

But I think one of the major reasons that Valiant was a success (and perhaps that Defiant and Broadway met with less immediate popularity) was that he had a big name creator working with him. Barry Windsor-Smith had only rarely produced regular comics work before he began to contribute to Valiant, and the cache of having him on board brought the publisher extra attention and sales.

Windsor-Smith seems unlikely to be interested in returning once again to the monthly grind, so is there any other big name talent out there who might be both suitable and available? To me one name comes to mind immediately - John Byrne.

(The above John Byrne art is a recent private commisission for Christos Seros that I first saw here)

Byrne is a massively under-utilised talent at the moment. He is probably one of the most popular and successful super-hero comics creators of the last 30 years but at present he is stuck producing comics based on various science fictionand fantasy television series for IDW comics. His has had mixed fortunes with his work recently, but the image above shows that he still has the chops to produce quality super-hero work.

I have no idea how realistic this idea is. It is very possible, given the two people involved, that Byrne and Shooter hate each other’s guts and would never voluntarily work together again. But I am convinced that the pairing would make a lot of sense – Shooter needs the solid talent and the publicity boost that Byrne would provide while Byrne gets access to the type of established superhero properties he has done his most popular work with in the past.

It may seem counter-intuitive – Byrne is one of the most difficult personalities in comics and Shooter is reputed to be one of the most controlling editors – but I think these qualities may actually complement each other. Remember that Byrne’s biggest successes (on Uncanny X-Men and Fantastic Four) came at Marvel in the 1980s when Shooter ran the show.

Obviously I like this idea, but I know it’s only a remote possibility. If he has considered the idea at all, I imagine Shooter dismissed it out of hand as not worth the risk or effort involved. It will be interesting to see what he comes up with nonetheless.

Update: John Byrne has responded to this notion in his forum:

"Jim Shooter + Me = Hell Freezing Over"

Pretty succinct I think.

Marvel acquires Marvelman: Has anything like this ever worked out well before? Part 2

Go here for Part 1.

So if they never really work out for the characters how do I explain the fact that these acquisitions continue to happen?

In a few of these cases there have been obvious reasons for these sales that have little to do with getting access to the intellectual property involved. It's well known that the main motivation for Marvel's acquisition of Malibu and, to a lesser extent, DC's of Wildstorm was to the acquire the sophisticated coloring departments both companies possessed.

Wildstorm also had exclusive contracts with arguably the two biggest creators in the business - Jim Lee and Alan Moore - and DC hoped to make use of those relationships. The other big benefit for Marvel and DC in buying Malibu and Wildstorm was that it immediately increased their market share by taking a potential competitor out of the marketplace.

It is this second, somewhat controversial motivation that I think explains why so many other properties have been bought up by the big two. Buying these characters removes the possibility that another competitor will figure out a way to utilise and disrupt the marketplace.

Valiant is an example of just that happening. Jim Shooter set-up this company in the early 1990s using a bunch of nearly-forgotten characters from 1960s Western/Gold Key Comics to launch his new line of comics. With solid production values and the full resources of a talented editorial and promotional team behind them, the company took off and quickly became one of the biggest comics publishers in the country.

Their success was brief, and in part based on peculiar market conditions of the time, but the example is as stark reminder of the potential disruptive power of new comic company using old concepts in a focused and well promoted manner. If Valiant had only been an imprint of a larger company I don't think it would have been anywhere near as successful, just remember Shooter's earlier attempt to a launch a new superhero line - his failed "New Universe" project at Marvel.

It is for this "spoiler" reason of wanting to block potential competition that I think DC may be kicking itself now that it didn't actively pursue Marvelman. The character probably wouldn't add a huge amount to DC, but he has the potential to help Marvel enormously in areas that DC traditionally dominates.

In part 3 I'll go into the opportunity costs inherent in buying and promoting these new acquisitions and explore the most obvious benefit these companies see in buying the rights to old properties - the idea that these new characters will add value to their pre-existing catalogues -and explain why I think that, except in rare cases (like Marvelman), this is usually a mistake.