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I found out the other day that Chris Claremont was in talks at Image around the time it was founded to do a creator-owned series called The Huntsman with Whilce Portacio illustrating, but it fell apart when Portacio decided to do Wetworks instead. The Huntsman character only showed up in a few Claremont-scripted issues of WildCATs before becoming a footnote. This was around 1994, so it's before any of the really freaky poo poo you got when Claremont went back to Marvel in the oughts. Realistically, you'd probably get a few years' run on a Claremont book at Image before it descended into constant relaunch hell like most of the other launch titles did, but it's interesting to consider what happens if the book succeeded. You might end up with a very different look to superhero comics in the subsequent decades.
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Jul 24, 2020 17:53
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Yvonmukluk posted:I think part of the reason for the focus on the Image exodus era, aside from the potential you mentioned, is that it's so well-documented. At the same time, the industry arguably reached its creative nadir, so naturally the desire to imagine alternatives is very tempting. If Shooter buys Marvel, Gruenwald's not put through the anguish of firing so many coworkers and friends, so perhaps he doesn't die from a heart attack, DeFalco doesn't get booted out at around the same time, and the proposed collaboration with Milestone they were pushing for gets off the ground. I would wonder if a Shooter-owned Marvel would run into a different set of problems, though. Unless he mellowed out some, he was unusually restrictive on content even for the period while he was the EIC; no mention of swearing, his heroes couldn't kill without consequences, no mention of LGBT affairs whatsoever. The Arnie Roth arc in Captain America is a decent example of the latter. I suspect you'd end up with Marvel seeming weirdly puritan by the standards of the '90s, although that'd also mean it wouldn't have a "Dark Age" to speak of. You'd likely also have a regular talent drain, though.
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Jul 25, 2020 00:39
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A minor one with big potential effects: Flo Steinberg quit Marvel in 1968 after not getting a raise, and wouldn't go back for 30 years. It's quite possible it'd be a very different company now if Steinberg had stayed at Marvel through the '70s, just in terms of the effect she'd have had on early fan culture.Alhazred posted:I think that "what if horror comics wasn't killed by the comics code". Would superhero comics be as popular or even be a thing if that hadn't happened? You'd probably still have superhero comics, but I have to figure there are a lot of creators who weren't necessarily a great fit for the genre who'd have done most of their work in horror comics if they could've. Alan Moore in particular always seemed like a horror writer who'd been forced into superheroes by the market, and maybe Marv Wolfman stays doing Dracula comics and never moves over to Teen Titans. That doesn't mean you don't get good superhero books, but I'd imagine a lot of the seminal works in the genre wouldn't exist or would be considerably different.
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Jul 30, 2020 23:39
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sticksy posted:I'm sure it's been discussed at length forever and I'm just not aware of it but the one that always hit me was What If... I'm not sure you'd have the New Gods in their current form at all. Funky Flashman in particular suggests that a big ingredient in their creation was Kirby's frustration with Marvel and Lee.
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Jul 31, 2020 18:31
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OldMemes posted:What if the Dazzler movie had gotten made? Would it have been a hit, or bombed at the box office and become a cult classic years later? The movie was designed as a Bo Derek vehicle, and Bo Derek doesn't make good movies. It'd probably have ended up as an informal failure trilogy with Howard the Duck and that Captain America movie with J.D. Salinger's kid where he just can not stop stealing cars.
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Aug 12, 2020 02:08
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You'd probably need to do something like an editorial/corporate personnel shakeup at some point before the early '90s, so when the artists come to Marvel and object to the terms of the licensing, there's someone at Marvel who both has the empathy to see their position and the stroke to make a different decision go through. Maybe the 1986 sale to New World doesn't go through and Marvel is somewhat less corporate at the time, or Ron Perelman keeps it in his pants and spends less time loving around with junk bonds. What I'd wonder at that point is if you wouldn't see a bunch of the bigger names on that list getting a McFarlane-style deal to do boutique books for Marvel, or if a few of the Image starter titles end up as Epic books with Marvel editors riding shotgun.
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Aug 16, 2020 09:34
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FilthyImp posted:I'd hazard we see a Vertigo style imprint pop up that says 80/20 artist revenue split with creator-control. That would actually make a lot of sense. The Sandman was in publication at the time, so while Marvel wasn't in a position to be precisely envious of its success coming off the Claremont/Lee X-Men #1, I'd be surprised if nobody at Marvel at the time had asked why they didn't have a Vertigo-style imprint. Come to think of it, there's a lot of mostly-forgotten Marvel work in the '80s that's just about the same kind of weird as early Vertigo, like some of the Marvel Graphic Novels or Strikeforce: Morituri, but it seems like that all dried up almost immediately once Shooter was out. Maybe some procession of shenanigans go down that puts Ann Nocenti in as editor-in-chief in 1987 instead of Tom DeFalco.
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Aug 17, 2020 02:57
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Edit: Never mind, I didn't read the last post closely enough.
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Mar 20, 2021 04:45
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Here's one that's more from the comic strip side of things: The original artist on Modesty Blaise, Jim Holdaway, died of a heart attack at age 42 in 1970, in the middle of the "Warlords of Phoenix" storyline. He was later replaced by the Spanish artist Enrique Romero, who did the lion's share of the work on Modesty until it ended in 2002. Thinking about it today, the two artists have distinctly different strengths. While they're both talented, Romero is the one who arguably gave Modesty most of its reputation for what a modern audience might call "fanservice"; there are a lot of strips in Romero's run where he'll find a flimsy excuse to show a woman in dishabille. (Romero even had a side gig in the early '80s, a strip called AXA, which was entirely based around post-apocalyptic sci-fi nudity excuses. It's kind of a hoot.) Holdaway was never shy about that sort of thing either, but Romero made it much more gratuitous, and Holdaway's fight choreography in his strips is often a significant highlight. Modesty Blaise still has its fans today, primarily in the UK, but I'm wondering what its impact might've been, both on comics in general and newspaper comics in particular, if Holdaway had lived longer. Both Romero and Holdaway are geniuses at being able to tell a whole story in three short panels, but Holdaway's style was a big part of what got Modesty popular to begin with.
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Apr 18, 2021 03:13
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FilthyImp posted:Holdaway gets a little more creative with larger layouts and action sequences, a kind of Sterankoization, which grabs the attention of Playboy after some censorship rows. Heffner jumps at the chance to get a sexy, mature ongoing serial to take up 2 pages every issue. It's popular and a steady gig, and the removal of any care for censorship really helps. There's eventually a contest to find a lookalike to get the cover/centerfold as a cute PR stunt. I've also been rereading some of the old Ms. Tree comics from Eclipse lately, and this makes me sad that Mike Tree never teamed up with Modesty.
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Apr 18, 2021 23:01
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