Jim Shooter: Long as well as tall
With the announcement that Jim Shooter is returning to a regular writing gig on Legion of Super-Heroes, he takes over a different title as well: he’s the man with the longest writing career currently writing a comic series.
Jim’s first comic, as we all know, was Adventure Comics #346, cover dated July 1966. Taking over Legion means that his career as a comics writer now spans over 41 years. But did you know that Jim laid out those early Legion stories as well as writing them?
As I recall, Mike Baron works that way, too.
Mike used to do thumbnails, but they were suggestions to the artist – a means for the artist to see how Mike visualized it. He's not working that way on Black Ice.
Hadda give it up because it hurt my back too much. You have to learn how to sit and hold a pencil in order to draw without messing up your back. I find I prefer full script.
I think at the very least Roy Thomas would have him beat by a few months. Denny O'Neil would beat Shooter by a month or more if/when he writes a series again. And of course Stan Lee still writes on occasion and has all those young punks beat by a quarter century.
My take was that Jim's writing an ongoing series. Roy and Stan are writing mini-series. But yes, all of your examples started writing before Jim did.Jim better hope we don't bring Denny out of retirement…
At the spotlight interview with him, he said that Gil Kane liked him because he did the layouts. Jim realized that this relieved Gil Kane of half the work and he could just ink over those. He first met Gil Kane at a convention when Gil mentioned this and then someone pointed out that he was in the audience.Neil