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Changing Comics History (a fun exercise)
steve_bryant
Posts: 96
I posted this on another forum, but it's one of my favorite daydreams...
I remember reading a John Byrne post on his forum, where he said (paraphrased), "I like to daydream about a parallel universe where Wally Wood inked the first 100 issues of Fantastic Four."
I always loved that thought, for a few reasons:
1) Wally Wood inking the FF (after his terrific collaboration with Kirby on Sky Masters of the Space Force and Challengers of the Unknown) would have looked amazing!
2) It's fun to think that someone like Byrne, for as long as he's been a pro, has such fun little "what if" thoughts about comics.
3) I frequently wonder how comics might have been different. I posted a few of these in a thread for the Marvel What if comic, but thought it might be fun to talk at length on how the comics might be altered if different choices were made.
Here are some of them that I posted elsewhere:
What if Marvel had treated Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko the way they treated Stan Lee?
Jack and Steve both had issues with Marvel, and Stan in particular, over credit and/or pensions/financial security. How different would the comics landscape look if these titans hadn't left Marvel in the 1960s?
If Jack hadn't gone to DC, the Fourth World would have been a part of the Marvel universe and OMAC would have been a future version of Captain America.
If Steve hadn't moved on to Charleton and DC, the Marvel universe would include the Creeper, Captain Atom, Hawk & Dove, the Question, and the Blue Beetle (possibly not in name, but the concept could transfer over).
What if DC had accepted Frank Miller and Steve Gerber's reboot idea in the late 1970s/early 80s?
Actually, “Batman: Year One” has its origins in Miller’s concept for the original Dark Knight series some years ago. It was then that Miller and Steve Gerber proposed to DC their idea for the “Metropolis” line of comics, which would revamp DC’s three principal characters and start their continuity over again from the beginning. The new Wonder Woman series would have been titled Amazon, the new Superman series The Man of Steel (which, of course, would not have been the same as John Byrne’s series of the same name), and the new Batman series would have been called Dark Knight. “I plotted the first four issues of the Batman title,” Miller says, but the Metropolis line was never launched, and he later used some of the ideas he had worked up for the Batman in his recent graphic novel series. — Peter Sanderson, “A Talk with Frank Miller” in Amazing Heroes #102 (1986 Sept 15)
Remember, this was Miller at the top of his game, coming off Daredevil and ready to do Dark Knight and Year One.
What if Miller, Byrne, Simonson and Perez "pulled an Image" back in 1984?
What if the four hottest artists in comics left to form their own company...in 1984? Frank Miller was doing Ronin, to be followed by the Dark Knight. Ronin was already creator-owned and it doesn't take much to imagine Dark Knight being done like Watchmen, using a Batman-esque character.
John Byrne was knee deep in in his brilliant Fantastic Four run, but can you imagine him launching his own FF, Danger Unlimited, back then? It probably would have been far more successful than when it was actually released a decade and a half later.
Walter Simonson already had his creator-owned series at the time, Star Slammers. It would have been cool to see him go full tilt on that.
Would George Perez have explored the themes of mythology and female empowerment that he did a couple of years later in Wonder Woman?
It's a lot like the Legend line, but also pretty different. And how would the comics landscape had changed if these guys had the wherewithal to attempt something like this?
A number of creators were exploring creator-owned options at the time. Would Mike Grell have been involved with Starslayer or Sable? Would Jim Starlin have been a part of the venture with Dreadstar? What if Jack Kirby's Captain Victory landed at this company instead of Pacific Comics?
I remember reading a John Byrne post on his forum, where he said (paraphrased), "I like to daydream about a parallel universe where Wally Wood inked the first 100 issues of Fantastic Four."
I always loved that thought, for a few reasons:
1) Wally Wood inking the FF (after his terrific collaboration with Kirby on Sky Masters of the Space Force and Challengers of the Unknown) would have looked amazing!
2) It's fun to think that someone like Byrne, for as long as he's been a pro, has such fun little "what if" thoughts about comics.
3) I frequently wonder how comics might have been different. I posted a few of these in a thread for the Marvel What if comic, but thought it might be fun to talk at length on how the comics might be altered if different choices were made.
Here are some of them that I posted elsewhere:
What if Marvel had treated Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko the way they treated Stan Lee?
Jack and Steve both had issues with Marvel, and Stan in particular, over credit and/or pensions/financial security. How different would the comics landscape look if these titans hadn't left Marvel in the 1960s?
If Jack hadn't gone to DC, the Fourth World would have been a part of the Marvel universe and OMAC would have been a future version of Captain America.
If Steve hadn't moved on to Charleton and DC, the Marvel universe would include the Creeper, Captain Atom, Hawk & Dove, the Question, and the Blue Beetle (possibly not in name, but the concept could transfer over).
What if DC had accepted Frank Miller and Steve Gerber's reboot idea in the late 1970s/early 80s?
Actually, “Batman: Year One” has its origins in Miller’s concept for the original Dark Knight series some years ago. It was then that Miller and Steve Gerber proposed to DC their idea for the “Metropolis” line of comics, which would revamp DC’s three principal characters and start their continuity over again from the beginning. The new Wonder Woman series would have been titled Amazon, the new Superman series The Man of Steel (which, of course, would not have been the same as John Byrne’s series of the same name), and the new Batman series would have been called Dark Knight. “I plotted the first four issues of the Batman title,” Miller says, but the Metropolis line was never launched, and he later used some of the ideas he had worked up for the Batman in his recent graphic novel series. — Peter Sanderson, “A Talk with Frank Miller” in Amazing Heroes #102 (1986 Sept 15)
Remember, this was Miller at the top of his game, coming off Daredevil and ready to do Dark Knight and Year One.
What if Miller, Byrne, Simonson and Perez "pulled an Image" back in 1984?
What if the four hottest artists in comics left to form their own company...in 1984? Frank Miller was doing Ronin, to be followed by the Dark Knight. Ronin was already creator-owned and it doesn't take much to imagine Dark Knight being done like Watchmen, using a Batman-esque character.
John Byrne was knee deep in in his brilliant Fantastic Four run, but can you imagine him launching his own FF, Danger Unlimited, back then? It probably would have been far more successful than when it was actually released a decade and a half later.
Walter Simonson already had his creator-owned series at the time, Star Slammers. It would have been cool to see him go full tilt on that.
Would George Perez have explored the themes of mythology and female empowerment that he did a couple of years later in Wonder Woman?
It's a lot like the Legend line, but also pretty different. And how would the comics landscape had changed if these guys had the wherewithal to attempt something like this?
A number of creators were exploring creator-owned options at the time. Would Mike Grell have been involved with Starslayer or Sable? Would Jim Starlin have been a part of the venture with Dreadstar? What if Jack Kirby's Captain Victory landed at this company instead of Pacific Comics?
Comments
I love the way that the comics landscape changed with the launch of Image (even though their original offering of books wasn't to my tastes). It's a pretty important point in creator-owned comics, so it's one that I frequently revisit, plugging in different creators for the Image founders.
What if Jack and Steve (unhappy with Marvel) and Wally (unhappy with the industry) had lunch with longtime copyright enthusiast Neal Adams, and Kubert and Eisner (both of whom owned their own IPs) were there...and they decided to strike out on their own?
Can you imagine a line launching with the New Gods, Forever People, Mister Miracle, Hawk & Dove, the Creeper, Tor, the Spirit, the Wizard King, and Ms. Mystic (I know Ms. Mystic was launched by Adams years later, but this is a daydream)?
What if DC had successfully lured away Stan Lee?
I remember reading accounts from Stan about DC trying to get him to come over and run their books—no idea if there's any truth to them, but it's another fun daydream.
I imagine it would have been pretty different from the Stan Lee: Just Imagine series from a decade ago. Stan surely would have brought the Marvel Method of plotting/drawing/scripting with him. Would he have brought any of his collaborators?
I can see Stan and John Buscema tackling the Superman books (again, not like the Just Imagine series; them adding that 60s Marvel flair to the Man of Steel). How about Stan and John Romita on Batman? Hard to imagine, but that's part of the fun!
With Stan gone, would Roy Thomas have succeeded him, as he later did? Or perhaps Roy leaves for DC, as well...leaving Martin Goodman to secure the other half of his creative team, making Jack Kirby the Editor in Chief of Marvel...
Like I said, these are just daydreams. What would happen in these scenarios? What other scenarios can you imagine?
Presumably, Moore wouldn't have exited DC. Perhaps he would have gone on to write Twilight of the Superheroes. Unencumbered by his hatred of DC Comics, perhaps he would have stayed on at the company, never pursuing his creator-owned titles and instead became the architect of DC's super-hero line in the 90s and beyond, like a latter day Dick Giordano, Denny O'Neil, or Paul Levitz.
Or would he and Gibbons have kept the title in their hip pocket and relaunched it as a part of the fledgling Image Comics? If the title had been out of print from 1988 to 1992, it would have been remembered as a "really good comic series," and not "the greatest graphic novel of all time." Would the Minutemen have been a part of that initial Image launch? Would Moore and Gibbons have been a part of the original Image founders?
Would Moore and Gibbons have taken the book to Marvel to produce a collection? Would that have established a fundamental shift in power regarding trade paperbacks and collected editions? Would Moore and Gibbons have taken it to Random House (and would Random House have bitten on it), igniting the trend of traditional publishers producing graphic novels two decades earlier?
Would Moore and Gibbons have taken the book to any number of now-defunct publishers, or self-published it, resulting in Watchmen disappearing for 20 years and now being regarded in the same manner of many of its contemporaries, like Nexus, American Flagg, and Scout?
How different would comics (and the Marvel movies) look, if Wildstorm never published The Authority?
After a lackluster career, journeyman artist Bryan Hitch saw The Authority as his last hurrah before leaving comics. What if Wildstorm never published the book? Without The Authority, Hitch (with writer Warren Ellis) never popularizes "widescreen" comics, influencing comics storytelling for the better part of a decade.
Without The Authority, Hitch doesn't get the gig on The Ultimates. Heck, it was Mark Millar's run following Ellis on The Authority that led to his Marvel work, including Ultimate X-Men and The Ultimates.
What would the Marvel movies have been like if DC/Wildstorm had passed on The Authority?
Many people have said that Kirby WAS offered a job as Art Director and turned it down. He was never really good with that sort of thing (he had Joe Simon to take care of contracts and such at the beginning of his career and Roz took care of it once he got to Marvel). The more I read, the more I am convinced that he left Marvel because Martin Goodman promised him royalties and reneged on the deal. Stan getting all of the accolades in the press just was fuel for an already burning fire.
But, let's say he DID stay at Marvel. He moved to the West Coast before leaving Marvel, and as such, he would have pushed to write and draw his own work (much like he did on the short-lived Inhumans strip), and would have been alienated from the rest of the bullpen. As Stan pulled back from running Day-to-Day, Kirby would have probably gotten into animation sooner than he did, as he didn't get along well with Roy Thomas, and he would have kept Evanier as his assistant as Evanier got more work in animation, probably pulling Kirby there with more money and better treatment than in comics.
Ditko would have left anyway. He would NEVER have taken an office job, and didn't leave because of Marvel's business practices, but because his philosophy was shifting. At Warren he got to stretch artistically, and at Charlton he was free to do whatever he wanted. He only went to DC when Charlton shut down the department he was working for, and his main editor moved to DC...he went back to Charlton as soon as he could, doing their horror comics for years.
The one I'd like to think about for a few days:
What if DC licensed their characters to Marvel in the 80's, as Shooters says they began negotiations to do?
Heh...Atlas/Seaboard tells us what would have happened.
Marvel and DC flooded the market to deny the new companies shelf space, and as they had long term deals (and sales records in place), the distributors would have stuck with what they knew. DC owned its distributor and wouldn't have carried them, and Marvel would have squeezed shelf space. The books would have lasted 3 - 5 issues, would have been fun, and would have the characters being used by upstart companies every so often in the direct market, only to meet with sales failure.
I need to get back to the thinking board.
I think they would have sold slightly more books than First Comics, Comico, and Eclipse, but wouldn't have made the insane rockstar money the Image guys did. The crazed speculation bucks hadn't really started flowing yet.
[snip]
Would Moore and Gibbons have taken the book to any number of now-defunct publishers, or self-published it, resulting in Watchmen disappearing for 20 years and now being regarded in the same manner of many of its contemporaries, like Nexus, American Flagg, and Scout?
This one.
And I bow to you for remembering Scout!
Bu the current one fits.
I loooove me a good "What If?"
i know most everybody agrees that Jack got the short end of the stick, but maybe it's really in Stan's personality to make things click and get people on board with him. imagine if he brought THAT to DC. then maybe we would be eagerly anticipating a Justice League movie instead of Avengers... (a stretch, yeah, but...)
What if the working relationship between Stan Lee and Steve Ditko had not soured and we'd gotten 110 issues of that collaboration instead of 38?
I'm a huge fan of the Ditko Spider-Man, and I fully admit that I've spent a lot of time wondering at what could have been.
No knock on Romita, because he is amazing and all, but with his joining the book, things changed. Romita even admits that he ended up drawing a more handsome Peter Parker because he could not draw him the way Ditko did.
And I, for one, think that a more handsome Peter Parker led the character into a completely different direction.
The geeky science nerd aspect was toned down, romance was geared up, and Spidey became a more classically "heroic" character. (By more heroic, I'm talking about the fact that with Ditko's Spider-Man, there was always a slight... creepiness to it... the poses and movement more spider/insect-like.)
Had Ditko remained through the first 110 issues (the original Stan Lee run, for the most part), what sort of Spider-Man would we have today? That's nearly three times as many issues to provide foundation for Marvel's flagship character.
I think there would have been MUCH more tension between the two with Ditko's objectivism, so much like on Dr. Strange, Stan would have assigned either Roy Thomas or Denny O'Neil as scripter and backed off soon after Spider-Man 40. This would have toned down the wise cracking (since Roy was never good at writing that, and Denny did a horrible job of it when he wrote Spidey in the early 80's). Combine that with how Ditko would have not been as friendly to the youth movement of the time...
I'm taking a lot of my supposition from Ditko's runs on The Creeper and other books:
Gwen would have continued to be bitchy, and Parker would never have had a serious girlfriend, leaving out a lot of the soap opera elements that drove the character's sales up. He also would have continued to create new villains, but they would be more gadget based, fewer innate super-powers. He also may have created a few more "masterminds" like Doc Oc and Green Goblin, since Ditko liked having a major villain behind the scenes in his stories. Because it would have been truer to his vision, the sympathetic super-villain would have been completely erased from Spidey, and he would have shed his doubts, knowing he was doing the right thing only to be misunderstood by Jameson.
Sales, however, would be mired in the low to mid-range of Marvel as Ditko's work become more idiosyncratic (think The Fountainhead instead of All My Children), and toward the end of the 60's, Spidey would have been quietly cancelled, much like Doctor Strange or Ditko's DC work.
As for crazed speculation bucks, let's remember the black and white boom and bust in 1985 - 1987...there were a LOT of speculator looking for that TMNT money. They left for a while, but were back in comics by 1989, buying up everything Batman related.
However, I do think it would have been a lot like First, as Chaykin and Grell were hot artists at the time First started, and Miller may have been hot in 1982, but Ronin tanked HARD for DC when it came out. So much so that the first issue of Dark Knight was underordered. Miller was no longer hot, Batman's sales were terrible and it was a $3 comic when most comics were 75 cents...
Byrne has a track record of doing well on company owned characters, but his creator owner work just doesn't do well at all. Next Men was cancelled DURING the 90's boom and didn't even make it to the bust of 1995-6. Perez's creator owned work is much the same, with his series with Peter David flopping and his "Crimson Plague" series doing so poorly he abandoned it pretty quickly.
I think they would have had a go of it, but in the distribution collapse of 1986-7, they would have had to go back to DC and Marvel as their company simply didn't make much money.
YMMV
I'm not sure the trade reprint market would have exploded when it did without the double-whammy of Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns.
And I'm not sure that quality of color reprint could have been affordable to a smaller publisher.
Who but DC could have afforded the huge print run to make the (if I recall correctly) unprecedented full-color 12-issue reprint volume at an affordable price?
Or am I the only one who remembers this?
Something like Marvel would have shown up, but if they started with a team book like FF, there would be no human torch, insted most likely a water powered character like hydro-man. The maturity of comics that marvel brought would take longer because it wouldn;t have the connections that timely had left over. If a FF-look alike does arise then DC would reciprocate w/ the JLA. We would have Human Torch, Captain America and Namor replacing the lesser characters like Martian Manhunter, Aquaman, and possibly green lantern.
The big question is would stan, kirby, etc... go to dc or attempt to start their own company?
Maybe they would go to charlton, only to have them be bought out by DC?
hmmmm.... infinite mysteries, infinite possibilities
What if National had lost its lawsuit against Quality?
Would Quality/Captain Marvel been able to survive the superhero slump of the 1950s?
Would we have a Big Three?
Would the Big Red Cheese be a major cultural icon and known by his proper name instead of the ridiculous "Shazam"?
No movie, for one thing. Moore's been adamant that the book exists as just that - a book - and is meant to explore the comics medium.
Over time I'm willing to bet we'd see supplemental materials out of Moore, possibly with Gibbons on board but more likely with other artists, from the Watchmen universe, but only after he's done creating his Grimoire! :)
thatguywiththeglasses.com/videolinks/teamt/phelous/32316-smallville-finale-10-years-of-my-life
What if Ditko never read any Ayn Rand?