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Speaking of, I know a little about the risible feud between John Byrne and Jim Shooter, with the former detonating the latter's hometown of Pittsburgh in Starbrand when he took it's scripting duties - can you detail some of the more pathetic/amusing pro-battles over the years, preferably avoiding the aforementioned Johnny B?
There have been a lot of them over the years, most of which seemed to have shown up in Marvel comics storylines...for a while, there was almost a weird glee in a writer coming onto a book and undoing everything the previous writer had done. The best being when Peter David undid Byrne's "Lockjaw is a human" story by showing that the Inhumans did it as a joke on Ben Grimm.
Then again, John Ostrander killed off Grant Morrison in an issue of "Suicide Squad" by making him "The Writer" who had the power to change things by writing about them...and when he was attacked by a villian, he got writer's block.
There have been other fueds...but the two that I find most interesting are Kirby vs Lee, and Bill Gaines's family vs Al Feldstein.
Kirby was furious at Stan Lee for YEARS, and took all kinds of pot-shots at him. In Mister Miracle he used the character "Funky Flashman" as a thinly veiled attack on Lee. Then, at the height of the art controversy when Marvel wouldn't give Jack his art back, he did an interview with the Comics Journal where Gary Groth prodded him into unleashing on Lee, claiming that Lee did nothing, blaming Lee for his problems with Marvel and the like.
Stan was personally hurt by it, saying that when he and Jack spoke, Jack never brought any of it up...and that he always thought Jack was a friend until he left for DC in 1970. The two men never really spoke after that, and there was never a reconciliation, which is a shame, since both of them were at the mercy of their bad memories, people with axes to grind and the fact that they both felt they had done the lion's share of the work.
In the case of the Gaines family vs Al Feldstien, Al was the editor of most of the EC stuff, as well as MAD after Kurtzman left and took it from a cult humor mag to one of the best selling magazines of the 60's and early 70's. In 1984, Feldstien and Gaines had a falling out over the content of MAD (Feldstien thought it was time to completely redesign the magazine and update it and Gaines wanted to leave well enough alone). Since Gaines's death, Feldstien has tried to publish an autobiography, and Gaines's wife and daughter will not allow him to use any of his work from EC or MAD unless they have editorial control of the book.
This feud has resulted in Feldstein's being removed from pretty much any official MAD or EC information, and he's usually listed as an "artist", which he was also the main writer and editor for the EC books NOT done by Kurtzman, and the man who edited MAD for almost 30 years, during its peak period. Since Feldstien is on-line, he and Gaines's daughter have had blistering e-mail fights on the EC discussion lists, often drawing fans to choose sides.
It's beneath everyone's dignity, and is depriving us of a book about the early days of EC to MAD at it's peak from the man who was in charge of it all. |
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