I have been reading comic books since I was about 9 or 10 years old. It started by buying GI Joe comics off the rack when my family would go to Thrifty Drug Store for ice cream every now and then in the evening. Though my tastes have matured since then, I still have a lot of fondness for the comics from this era.
Eventually I found Ralph’s Comic Corner, the local comic shop in Ventura, and started buying my GI Joe comics from there. I soon started buying Wolverine, X-Men, and a few other comics, branching out into super heroes.
When I was 12, going on 13, I heard about this big crossover story from a new comic book company called Valiant. They had been putting out comics for just under a year and a half, and I didn’t really know much about them. For two months though, all 8 of their titles would cross over with each other, telling one large story.
For some reason I thought this sounded pretty cool, and I bought them all. I got hooked.
I wasn’t too aware of it at the time, but Valiant Comics was the brain child of Jim Shooter. Jim started working in the comics business when he was 14, by writing a few issues of Legion of Super Heroes. He submitted them to DC, and they hired him, without even knowing how old he was. After working at DC comics, then Marvel comics, he became Editor In Chief at Marvel comics, the position he held through most of the 80s. In the late 80s he formed Valiant Comics, and eventually, in 1991, started the Valiant Comics line.
Though Valiant was a collaboration by a lot of people, it was largely guided by Jim’s vision and ideas. He was the captain of the ship. Unfortunately, Jim Shooter was forced out of his own company by the other owners, in what comes down to a conflict between what was best creatively vs. what was best business-wise. Valiant became a huge success, but wasn’t the same without Shooter at the helm.
With that background, I met Jim Shooter on Saturday at the New York Comic Con.
Awesome.
Jim showed up to the con around 3 or 4pm, and was set up next to JayJay Jackson’s table in artist alley. I had him sign a copy of Harbinger #1 for me, and I asked if he had a few minutes to record a few questions. He agreed, but then my friend Brian did one better, he asked Jim to come over to our table when we recorded our episode of Only The Valiant (my Valiant-related podcast)!
So me and co-host Average Joe sat down to start recording, and over walks Jim Shooter! He sat down, we gave him a microphone, and he talked to us for a while about Valiant. It was great stuff, and will be in the next episode.
Jim was putting on a panel that evening, “How to Create Comics”. It was the information that he learned in his 40 years in the comics biz, working with the old greats like Kirby, Lee, and Ditko. I was hanging around his and JayJay’s booth after we finished recording, and it came time for Jim to head down for his panel. I got to walk over to the panel room with him. It was fantastic to walk around and shoot the breeze with him. I asked him about what he was currently working on, and talked to him a little about working on the Valiant characters again for the recent hardcover books. He is working for a media company, creating comics to be used in advertising, and he spoke kindly about the Valiant Entertainment guys.
The seminar was completely full, they had to turn people away after the room filled. Jim’s seminar was fantastic, I would summarize it as “back to basics, but on stereroids”. It was all about how to tell a story with comics, and what was important about the visual and written parts of the book. I think it could have gone on for hours, but he only had an hour to talk.
After the seminar I got a pic with Mr. Shooter himself:
Me and Jim Shooter
Jim was very friendly, gracious, well-spoken, and very intelligent. He is quite tall, as is commonly known, he makes me, at 6′-1″, feel short. I barely got to scratch the surface of all the things we could have talked about, but it was fantastic.
He is responsible for creating the comics that I have loved since I first read them as a kid, so meeting the man who did so much to create these was a real treat.
The comics that he wrote inspired me to start the