Date    : January, 1992

                            MYLAR IS FOR WIMPS!
Brought to you by Vinnie Bartilucci, teller of tales (he also juggles.)

This is part two of our interview with Valiant publisher and editor-in-
chief Jim Shooter. We return just as Jim is talking about Magnus, Robot Fighter.

JS:  I think that Magnus, as created by Russ Manning, is one of those few
     comics in comics history that is what I consider primal. Batman is
     primal. It's based on those childhood fears that everybody has. Every
     little kid's greatest fear is that Mommy and Daddy will be taken away.
     Some kid in a supermarket gets lost for thirty seconds and he's
     wailing. Imagine if they're bleeding to death on the sidewalk in front
     of them. Superman is primal; he's the last of his kind. Well, if he
     were done right he'd be the last of his kind. He's the ultimate
     outsider. The Hulk is primal. Because within each of us dwells a
     mighty raging fury. Spider-Man is primal. They [Marvel] don't know
     why, I can tell you. Peter Parker is everyone who isn't Flash
     Thompson. Flash Thompson is the guy to whom everything comes easy.
     He drives to high school in a sports car. He's the captain of the
     football team. He dates cheerleaders. He has girls do his homework for
     him. I mean, he lives the life of Riley, he has a grand old time. And
     everyone who's not Flash Thompson is Peter Parker. He's not a nerd.
     He isn't a jerk or a failure. He's not a guy that doesn't want to go
     to parties or go on a date. Look at him; he's a good looking guy! He's
     smart, he's talented, and underneath...he's super! I mean, this guy
     is incredible...but he's not Flash Thompson. Each of us has something
     that prevents us from being Flash Thompson. One guy isn't Flash
     Thompson because his nose is too big. One guy isn't because he hasn't
     got any money. But Peter Parker's reason is the most generic of all-
     it's responsibility. Things keep coming up that prevent him from going
     to parties. It's not that he doesn't wanna go, it's not that he isn't
     popular when he gets there. It's that he can't go because Dr. Octopus
     is looting the city. And because he has a sense of responsibility. He
     can't go out because Aunt May is sick, and who's gonna take care of
     her? Stan used to say that Peter Parker is driven by Guilt. That's
     bullshit. Guilt is when you fail, and you feel bad about it. Well,
     that happened once to him. Responsibility is when you stay up all
     night and get it done. So Peter Parker has that responsibility. He's
     the success...and he pays the price. And everybody who wasn't Flash
     Thompson is Peter Parker. Because we all have problems in our lives
     that keep us from having the life we want to have. THAT'S primal.

VB:  Can I take this to mean that you're not as happy with Spider-Man now
     that he's a little happier in his life?

JS:  No no, it's not that you can't have fun. It's that each character has
     an essence. If you make Peter Parker into Flash Thompson, you have
     abandoned the essence. You may be going to something else for a while,
     or you may be doing that for a while to set something, I don't know,
     and I don't care.

     I feel that his character concept, whether we're doing it or not, is
     a primal concept. I mean, for years, Batman was done as a detective
     that wore funny clothes. And he wasn't particularly driven, or
     anything. But when people like Denny O'Neill and Frank Miller started
     getting back to the essence of the character, he became powerful
     again, and they're making movies about him and stuff. So is it wrong
     to do it some other way? No...for my money I think that's missing the
     point a little, but...hey, it's their party.

     That's what we do here - we look at every character and ask, "Who is
     this guy? What is it about him that makes him interesting? And would
     he still be interesting if we took it away?" So we try to look at
     every character that way. For example, X-O is a barbarian. Totally
     different frame of reference. No matter what he learns about this world
     his view of it is always barbarian. We have a story where X-O meets
     Harada, the guy from Harbinger who has used his powers to build a
     massive empire. Both for personal gain, and for what he thinks is a
     higher purpose. Other characters, like Solar have met Harada, and his
     take is that he's not a good guy. Arik encounters Harada and figures,
     "This guy's a king!" Seems okay to him. He's got power, uses it,
     that's cool. Has no problems with the man. Another example - his friend
     Ken gets kidnapped, Arik's take is, "Ah, he's a man, men are warriors.
     Warriors die: noble is his sprit." Doesn't affect him in the least.
     He thinks "Hostage? Well, maybe if I were a king I'd ransom him..."
     This guy is from before chivalry, he doesn't know from this stuff.

     As for Magnus's essence, I think Magnus is very close to Tarzan. I
     think it was deliberate on Russ Manning's part. But Magnus is a much
     more complex society to deal with. You wonder, what if you had a guy
     with that kind of purity and you put him against a backdrop like this.
     Where he has to make a decision between this beautiful utopian,
     fascist place, or this gritty, ugly, nasty place...I mean is Goph land
     better? Where you can't walk on the street? Where it's every man for
     himself and kill or be killed? Well...that's a choice, isn't it?

VB:  Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the world, you have Rai, who is in
     many ways, Magnus's opposite number. He's been raised from birth to
     protect this one giant robot.

JS:  Rai and Magnus start with the same point of origin. We asked before,
     why does 1-A raise Magnus to kill other robots like him? Why would
     Grandmother kill any intruders into Japan? 1-A is North-Am's
     Grandmother. Each one of them takes care of their people. Which
     includes dealing with anybody, even someone like them, who shows up.
     They have no loyalty to other robots. They have a loyalty to their
     people. And because they're similar, they have this friendship, or
     love, towards each other. So Magnus and Rai really have the same
     starting point - raised from birth to be their country's human free-
     agent protector. One might assume that Rai was the inspiration for
     Magnus. You have Rai, who's been there for a thousand years, and 1-A
     says, "You know, I'm gonna try that!" But from that point on, they are
     very different characters. Magnus is Tarzan; he's solitary. It's
     Magnus's interaction with the world. With Rai it's far more internal.
     It's nuclear family. It's Rai's strife with himself - he didn't want to
     be a Rai. It's a very personal and human story, as opposed to Magnus,
     which is more on an epic scale. In any conflict, Magnus is an element
     on a level of an Achilles, or Hercules. Rai is an element on that
     level physically, but his conflicts are all personal. Magnus is an
     extrovert, Rai is an introvert. Rai gives you the human touch-
     stones...all the elements that Magnus lacks. Magnus is looking for
     what Rai has. Rai is envious of Magnus.

VB:  It's because he's having all these second thoughts that makes Magnus
     so interesting now. If he were the same old selfless character, he
     would just be another cardboard cutout...

JS:  Yeah, and that's why I like Rai so much. And David Michelinie is the
     guy to do it, too. He's doing some very good things with Rai, Kazuyo,
     and their relationship. And his whole relationship with Grandmother.
     Rai is primal, too...Rai has lost his parents. His mother was a robot,
     really. And with the loss of Grandmother and his loss of clear
     direction in his life...while Magnus's world grows outward, Rai's
     closes inward. Literally and figuratively. I think it's a great
     contrast of styles. I'm also very glad we got David Michelinie to write
     it. David is an incredibly good writer and I don't think he's had the
     chance to do the kind of things he can do with his other work. He's
     been kind of shoehorned into a corner.

VB:  Meanwhile, back in the twentieth century...And that's another thing.
     Marvel has one book that deals with their thirtieth century, and I
     believe DC has one as well, although the name slips my mind for a
     moment...(sarcastic grin) You've got two complete universes going
     here, really.

JS:  Yeah, it is one universe, tho, just two separate times going on in the
     same universe. Basically, when I was doing Legion of Super-Heroes for
     DC, it was the only book that was set in the future. So...I owned the
     future. And DC kept no continuity. In the 60's you could read any
     Superman story or any Batman story, in any order...it didn't matter.
     One from a year ago was just as current as the one you're reading
     today. But I kept my own continuity. I was the only one there who was
     doing continuity, trying to do what Marvel did. And that gave me a lot
     of ability to do things, having my own little corner of the universe
     that was all mine. I could keep it tidy, make sure it all worked.

     Now I'm trying to do it on a grand scale. Trying to do not only in the
     future, with the two books there, but also in the past.

VB:  Are we gonna see more future stuff?

JS:  Oh yeah, we've got lots of room for that.

     In the Spring we're doing our giant crossover book. [UNITY- the one
     just solicited...VB] It may have happened before, but as far as I
     know, Secret Wars was the first super crossover; let's take all the
     books and have a giant crossover. So we did it two ways, we did it
     where all the characters took a break between months and went off and
     had an adventure, and another one where there was one main story that
     branched into the other books month by month. And everybody's still
     doing that, whether it's all one month or over the course of a couple
     of months. That's become such a staple, now, it's the marketing ploy
     of the 1980's and 90's. Having done it once or twice, I figured if
     anyone does this again, they'll find yet another way to do it. But no,
     they keep doing the same thing. And to me, they're often kind of
     meaningless, just kind of circular stories, or they violate everthing
     going on in everybody else's books. So I for one have had crossovers
     about up to here.

     BUT, on the other hand, I remember how much as a kid an idea like that
     would have appealed to me. And I rembered why I did Secret Wars.
     Because when I was at Marvel I would spend a lot of time reading
     letters from kids. And every day you'd get like a dozen letters saying
     "why don't you do one big story with all the characters in it?" A
     dozen a day! And so finally one day the light bulb goes on..."Why
     don't we do one big story with all the characters in it?" After being
     told tens of thousands of times that'd be a good idea, I think about
     it and say "Gee, that'd be a good idea!" And so we did it.

     What I'm building to here is that it's still a good idea. That's the
     kind of thing people like. The fact that it's been done...very badly,
     again and again, by both major companies in recent times doesn't
     diminish the fact that it could still be fun for the reader, exciting
     for me, everybody. So I figured, okay, but let's learn from the lesson
     of other people; let's not do it wrong, let's do it well. So we've
     come up with what we think is a good crossover. Well, people may say
     when they hear we're doing a universal crossover, "Oh, no not another
     crossover": this one they'll like. Because we're not gonna fall into
     the pitfalls. First of all, the universe is small enough, and
     basically we all work in this room. So we can build it perfectly.
     Secondly, they don't even have to meet each other. All we have to do
     is create an event big enough to affect your world. And then show, in
     each character's title, how that affects them. That's a crossover.
     We're going to do it right. Some characters will meet, some won't.
     Some characters won't know what's going on, some will. It's the way
     to do it, and because these are the real books, by the real writers,
     because it's all just us kids here, none of it is insignificant. There
     isn't anything that happens in this crossover that the writer of the
     regular book is gonna ignore next month. This is all part of the
     continuity, part of the universe we're building. We've even made an
     agreement with Barry Windsor-Smith to design all of these books and
     lay them out. So all the crossover sequences will all be done by the
     same person.

VB:  Anyway, here in the 20th century you've got Solar...

JS:  Once again, I'm just building on what came before. Even when I read
     the early Solar stories, I didn't think they were great stories.
     Mostly it was a failure of execution. Beacuse if you sit down, let's
     just look at the facts, let's take a look at this guy. He's a
     scientist, he's kind of a regular guy. He gets affected in some kind
     of atomic accident, he becomes this kind of god-like being. Now, I
     think the folks at Gold Key were trying to do it realistically, but
     they just didn't have the horses. The writers they had just didn't
     know anything about science. The artist they had drew real people
     well, but they couldn't draw the science-fiction side of it very
     well. And the net of it was the stories were unconvincing. They just
     weren't very well thought out. This guy would do things like fly to
     the sun, come back inflated with power and be dangerous because he was
     giant sized and stuff like that. He would split into six parts so he
     could be in a couple of places at once. He would convert into any kind
     of energy, he would transmute elements...and then he would go back to
     the lab, and putter around with test-tubes. And no-one would bat an
     eye. "Oh, Solar saved us all from the volcano, and now here he is back
     in the lab." They didn't think through what it MEANS to be a god. And
     so what we're trying to do here is take what was begun in the sixties,
     and give it a little more thought. And kind of play it out the way it
     would play out. Keep the huge-scale fantastic power...and address the
     human ramifications. And man we're having fun. I mean man, this is my
     favorite book, I just love this book. It's easier to write than Magnus
     in a way, because Magnus is such epic scope, always dealing with these
     broad issues. And every Magnus has a lot of characters to keep track
     of. Magnus is like a Cecil B. DeMille production. Every Solar is from
     the point of view of a guy that can transmute elements. What does that
     make you look like to him? It's comparable to when I was at Marvel and
     writing Avengers...and Daredevil. Avengers you had to be world-scale.
     The thing that's interesting about Daredevil is his point of view, or
     the lack of one. He has an absolutely unique perspective on every-
     thing...he can't see. So seeing through his eyes, if you will, is the
     thing that's kind of interesting. And of course, Solar's a lot more
     powerful than Daredevil, but that doesn't change the fact that it's
     a very personal book, as opposed to a grand epic.

VB:  So, you also have Harbinger. Now this book seemed to hit the ground
     running. The first issue started in the middle of a fight. So I'm
     assuming that will be filled in in issue #0.

JS:  Yes, that's right.

VB:  Of all the books, this is the one I had the most problem with, because
     I didn't see enough of the characters to have a real clear idea of who
     everybody was, and what was going on.

JS:  Well, maybe I made a mistake. It gave the book a sense of immediacy,
     but when I read fiction, one of the things that appeals to me is the
     sense that things were going on before. If you read Lord of the Rings,
     there's a sense of history; this world has been here a while. Too many
     times, especially in comic books, you get the feeling the characters
     are just hanging around waiting for the story to start. Like they were
     doing absolutely nothing before this story started and they have no
     other reason for being than being bitten by the radioactive water
     buffalo so they can go charging around butting into trucks. So I tried
     to give the sense that stuff had gone on before. I wanted to try to
     get people interested in the characters, and also to take through the
     building of the team. So maybe I didn't do it very well...my motives
     were good.

     And people have asked "well why didn't you do issue #0 as issue #1?"
     Because issue #0 is really intensive to one character, to Sting. And
     I felt that if that were the first issue, it wouldn't be until the
     third issue or so that they'd really be a team. No, let me start
     further down the pike, and come back and fill that in. I mean, isn't
     that how people really are? If you meet someone, you know what's going
     on NOW, and sometime later, in a bar or something you're sitting there
     talking and you find out how they got that way. I mean I've done it
     both ways. I've started with the origin and moved on, and I've started
     in the middle. The goal is to make these characters come alive and be
     as real to everyone as they are to us. There's probably a lot of ways
     to get there.

VB:  Let's talk about Faith (Zephyr/Zepplin). She's pretty much the first
     overweight female heroine in a long time, if ever. She's not comic
     relief, but in many eyes she's being played exceedingly stereo-
     typically. I certainly hope she's not representative of your opinion
     of fans... Why is such a potentially positive character played for an
     object of ridicule?

JS:  Well, who's ridiculing her? I mean, other kids make fun of her. But
     find me a bunch of kids, and let's watch em for a while and see what
     happens...

     If people would go to the trouble to read the story, they would find
     out that she is almost always right, she's clearly one of the
     cleverest of the team. She is often the one who solves the problem.
     Around here, she's one of the favorites. She's the one that everyone
     finds the most charming and interesting. Why? Because she likes Star
     Trek, all the people here do too. Because she likes all the stuff
     they're into. And because she's silly enough to do all the things she
     does, wear a cape and all that. I'll bet that if you looked around,
     9 out of 10 of the people who wore capes this year are comics fans.
     She's a good character. And if truth be told, I am too poor a writer
     to make up a character. You'd have to be some kind of genius to pull
     a credible character out of the air. All of my characters are people
     I know. And Faith is quite specifically one person I know.

     I got one letter from a person that was just outraged, how DARE I use
     such sterotypes. Kris is a jealous bitch, Zephyr is a comics geek,
     Flamingo is a southern bally whore, and how dare I do all these
     stereotypes, and I can't wait for the next issue.

VB:  Let's take a look at Harada. Is he your take on the old question, "was
     Hitler doing the right thing in his own mind?"

JS:  Oh, not at all. I think Harada is a guy who found he had this
     incredible power, to know things he wasn't supposed to know, to
     influence people, and as he got older, to physically affect them. And
     I think Harada is what most people would be. He's definitely not a
     cackling villain type. I have gotten letters from people saying
     "you're really not playing this villain up." Everything he and people
     say sounds pretty reasonable, and they're getting the idea that maybe
     Pete really is this loose cannon who's causing trouble. I mean look,
     he robbed the post office! They've stolen things, they've killed
     people...maybe he's right, this kid's crazy, no one knows what he
     might do! Well, isn't THAT interesting?  And on the other hand, if
     you're in Harada's shoes, and there's someone out there fully capable
     of doing a lot of damage...what do you do? Do you do the comic book
     thing and put on your cape and confront him? No, you'd probably put
     a bullet in the back of his head.

     So I'm trying to play it logically. Harada is no peach. He is danger-
     ous...he is, I suppose in many ways our Dr. Doom. But all we're trying
     to do is be a little more credible. I guess I feel that comics don't
     have to be grotesque caricatures. Bob Layton was saying the other
     day that in comics you never see people walk or run, they always leap
     and JUMP around. I find it very exciting when a character jumps
     around...when it makes sense that he would. But when he says "Oh, boy!
     LUNCH!!" and goes leaping down the hall to the kitchen.

NEXT TIME- more on Harbinger, X-O, and a look at the future of Valiant
Comics