Javins = Shooter ?

I've been running behind on a number of things lately and just had a chance to read Rob Salkowitz's piece talking with Joshua Williamson at New York Comic Con from a week and change ago. It's a good read overall, but let me quote a portion I want to focus on...

DC has, at times, been prone to playing too heavily into that, manufacturing crises and continuity events that landed with diminishing returns, exhausting existing fans without bringing in new ones.

These days it is doing the opposite of that. The lineup is bristling with new takes on old characters that offer onramps for fans with varied tastes and sensibilities...

Williamson credits a lot of that to the culture created by editor-in-chief Marie Javins. "Everyone likes her total leadership," said Williamson. "She has a lot of trust in us. I think that's because she was also a creator, a colorist. She has this experience and understands it from that perspective, not just a business perspective."

Williamson says that under Javins, creators have a lot of freedom to take books in their own direction, almost as if they were creator-owned.

That, to me, sounds remarkably like, Jim Shooter's early days at Marvel. Jim Shooter had been a writer for (primarily) DC starting back in 1966. He got to be editor-in-chief at Marvel in 1978, and soon helped to usher in the legendary runs of Chris Claremont and John Byrne's Uncanny X-Men, Frank Miller's Daredevil, Walt Simonson's Thor, John Byrne's Fantastic Four, and Doug Moench and Bill Sienkiewicz's Moon Knight among others. And if you read/hear interviews with any of those creators talking about that era, they all say that they had a lot of latitude to do what they wanted. They took the characters in then-new directions based on the creators' visions, almost as if they owned them outright.

Shooter has since gotten a bad rap for his later levels of editorial interference, and sliding his focus more to the business end of the company to the detriment of the creative end. (I recall Byrne citing that he had been working on Fantastic Four about 3 months ahead of his deadlines, but then Shooter changed the deadlines and he became six months behind overnight.) I knew a retailer who made a very clear distinction between "Early Shooter" era Marvel and "Late Shooter" era Marvel with the split being 1984 with the Shooter-scripted Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars. Because Late Shooter era Marvel seems to have less creative (as generally perceived) output, more complaints from creators, and even several creators (notably Byrne, Moench, Steve Gerber, Marv Wolfman, and Gene Colan) having left to work for DC, Shooter's reputation with Marvel isn't great. But his first years there were qualitatively and quantitatively excellent.

For pretty much the exact reasons Williamsons attributes to Javins.

I suspect that if you look any of the collectively great periods of a comic publisher's content, you'll find not only some incredibly talented creators (which seems obvious) but also an editor-in-chief who trusted that talent in the same way. Bill Gaines' "new trend" EC comics. Early '60s Marvel under Stan Lee. Like Shooter, their work isn't devoid of controversy but there was some amazing creative output that came out of those periods. Creative output that directly led to higher sales.

Funny that has to be learned over and over and over again.

Related Items business DC