Here we go. Here's my overall take on what happens once Jim Shooter buys out Marvel Comics. It has good, bad and overall different effects on Marvel itself, comic books, entertainment, and the world, that would be felt to this very day. For this, I'm going with the most likely events, and with some speculation as to what happens in the realm of possibility. Don't take any of this as definitive, it's just a thought exercise. I'm presenting one scenario, out of many that could occur. I'm gonna do this in chapters because of the sheer length of it all, so as to make it more digestible.
The Iron Age of Comics
The year is 1988. Jim Shooter successfully puts in the highest bid through his holding company Voyager Communications, and thus he buys Marvel Comics. This puts him at the very top of the company that last year he got kicked out of. He has a greater position of power than before, because he has no one above him to answer to, but he does have people to answer to still in the form of investors and partners of other brands. They're not above him officially, but to maintain the company's success, he always has to keep them in mind.
One thing I should note is that there would indeed be a lot of drama between him and the other members of Marvel, but that alone wouldn't be crippling. See, many of them to this day look back fondly at the Shooter era, and see him as "warts and all". A great leader, just one hard to deal with. The most notable person driven away was John Byrne, but he's always been quite egotistical and opinionated even if undeniably talented. So the years 1988 and 1989, in terms of stories, is largely the same as it was in OTL. It's the
1990s where everything begins to change.
The first big change is that Rob Liefeld is unlikely to make it to Marvel. He first started as an independent creator, and then had a brief career at DC as a freelancer, before his "unique" art style made him sought after by the newly purchased and Perelman-led Marvel Comics. Jim Shooter had a specific art style in mind when he ran Marvel as a whole, and while there were differences between each artist, none were in the way Liefeld did it. Shooter, having total control over Marvel Comics, and seeing DC as their biggest competition, won't be interested in bringing Liefeld over. It's possible that Liefeld's career is fairly successful, but he instead continues over in DC and into creator-owned stuff without a big event. While he may be fairly well-known, he's
far less influential within the comic world, where he's separated from the other Marvel creators, thus can't correlate ideas with them, including the creators who eventually founded Image Comics, nor can he climb a ladder to impact the entire state of comics as a whole.
The Dark Age of Comics was seen as being born from Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, but it wasn't immediate. The late '80s was a continuation of the Copper Age, as it took a while for the influences of those two comics to take full effect. They could
only take effect in a looser environment that allowed it. Notably, DC had one of their best eras creatively in what is seen as the Dark Age for comics as whole, because they had a more professional management. Some "dark age"-esque characters like Azrael and Lobo existed as commentary and not straight examples, and rather than make "dark" stories, what they often made what was considered
mature stories through the newly-founded and prestigious Vertigo imprint. The imprint started in 1993 as a direct result of where they were going post-TDKR/Watchmen.
It was in Marvel where the dark age took off, and Marvel has since the '70s always been the industry leader, they heavily influenced others. Marvel, Image and a variety of lesser companies were what made the Dark Age what it was. In a Shooter-ran Marvel, the Dark Age would
never get a chance to form the way it did. What this era would be known as is the
Iron Age. In OTL, people use the Iron Age as an alternate interpretation of the late '80s to early '00s that doesn't focus heavily on the Dark Age but the era as a whole. That's the
official era in this timeline. That begs the question:
What does the Iron Age even look like?
Well, we can get a good glimpse at what it might've been through the late '80s and some of the '90s. It's similar to the Dark Age in certain areas, in that it would have darker art, more violence, heavier sexuality and mature themes. I get this sense from Mutant Massacre, made under Jim Shooter's supervision, which some considered a precursor to the Dark Age, but was far more well-made than that. Another example is Inferno, which
was made under Perelman's ownership and DeFalco being EiC, but was a natural continuation of the storyline already set in place during Shooter's leadership. As said, 1988 and 1989 in terms of stories are probably identical.
In the '90s, you did see comics that were dark, but not representative of the overall Dark Age. Most prominently, this came from DC's aforementioned Vertigo imprint, as well as the independent creator-owner and licensee company Dark Horse.
So what we get is an era where comics aren't simply dark, they're overall more mature. Taking on darker themes, but also having the writing skill and art style of the last era to go with it. That is most likely the Iron Age in a nutshell. The fact that Liefeld never made it to Marvel in this timeline means that we don't get Cable, Deadpool, Domino, and the entire X-Force born out of the New Mutants. Yeah, that
alone has a major effect on entertainment, especially in the '10s where Deadpool became his own brand... but we'll get to that later.
Instead, the New Mutants title continues the path of when Shooter was in charge, give or take the few months where he's out and and had to buy the company to get back in. This is what the final Shooter era New Mutants title looks like:
Because we never see Liefeld in the picture, it remains focused on horror and fantasy, and develops further in that direction, rather than getting a retool that eventually led to X-Force. In fact, if anything, the New Mutants would be right at home in this mature and experimental Iron Age, and would continue as a hit title in a new era.
As for the field of creator-owned comics, Image Comics never exists without Liefeld. However, the creator-owned comics themselves will likely still see a big push in this era, but in a different direction. DC had Vertigo, but Marvel also had Epic, which was founded by Shooter
himself in 1982, predating Vertigo by over a decade. It just wasn't well-known, and when Shooter was fired, the potential of Epic itself was largely ignored, instead Marvel only looked at work for hire. That's a huge factor in what led to Image.
So in this timeline, we see more use of Epic itself, and it becomes Marvel's official answer to DC's Vertigo. Epic is both a place of completely original ideas, and a place where Marvel characters are reinterpreted in different ways. Spawn, Savage Dragon, Shadowhawk, WildC.A.T.s, Stormwatch, Cyberforce and Witchblade might all still exist in this timeline, but would exist under the banner of Epic.
The third biggest comic book company, and the one that doesn't answer to either side in this case becomes Dark Horse.
Dark Horse succeeded by doing a bit of everything: They do creator-owned, licensed comics, and were one of the earliest manga publishers. They were able to survive in the excessive Dark Age by valuing quality over quantity, but it also meant they never reached the same heights as Image OTL. However, without the existence of Image itself, Dark Horse becomes the go-to publisher for creator-owned material, often stuff that was rejected by the Big Two, and subsequently it's a place where creators on the rise could get noticed. We see a bigger Dark Horse than it was OTL, because it would absolutely
thrive in the Iron Age.
Hellboy would still be the flagship title of the Dark Horse brand, and would probably expand faster than OTL. Other properties like Sin City, The Mask, and their big licenses with Aliens, Predator, and of course, Alien vs. Predator, would bolster the rest on the western end. I can see many different comics also arising here, perhaps one published at Image OTL, such as Liefeld's Youngblood (which he conceptualized in 1987), Black Flag or The Maxx. Manga would potentially heavily benefit in this environment, where more attention is drawn to Dark Horse, and thus it might actually speed up the geek world's interest in Japanese culture.
Manga published by them in OTL includes Ghost in the Shell, AKIRA, Gunsmith Cats, and Ah! My Goddess!. They predate the Tokyopop boom of the late '90s and early '00s, and with Dark Horse being much bigger in this new environment, they might able to focus more on manga distribution, and thus more manga sees western releases and a wider audience is met. This could affect the overall development of manga's western expansion and may even make Tokyopop either not exist, or exist in a smaller form than it did OTL. But that's
way into speculative territory, and it's also leaving the core idea of Jim Shooter buying Marvel, so I'll just leave this where it is.
There's the matter of Valiant Comics. I did say that Valiant wouldn't exist in the OP, but giving it more thought, it's entirely possible that Valiant could still exist in this timeline... but as an imprint of Marvel Comics. Jim Shooter is a big idea guy, and even before he was fired, he still wanted to pursue different stories in the superhero genre. He did this by creating a new imprint called the New Universe.
It was an effort to expand with a more "realistic" universe separate from the main Marvel line. It ran from 1986 to 1989, and limped along in its last years without Jim Shooter. So with this, let's imagine that in the '90s, likely 1995, Jim Shooter tries again by coming up with the Valiant Comics imprint, an attempt to go further into established ideas of the Iron Age, without being held back by continuity.
This actually might be
better for Valiant than in OTL, because now Shooter has Marvel as a main resource constantly generating revenue, and has full access to the Marvel stable to create projects, whereas before he was solely reliant on the Valiant line, and funded it out of pocket, and thus it was harder to survive in the era it was in... and it didn't. The fact that it had a stable foundation means that Valiant can persist much more easily, and become a viable alternative to the Big Two that lasts longer than in OTL. There is no Acclaim era, most likely. That also means no shutdown, and probably no 2012 reboot down the line.
Overall, the comic book market doesn't reach a speculation bubble that bursts, but continues as a natural progression of the Copper Age. 1996 is business as usual, and Marvel continues forward rather than declare bankruptcy. There is no Clone Saga for Spider-Man, no overexposure of the X-Men (but still plenty of it), no Force Works, no Onslaught, no Heroes Reborn, no having to sell the movie rights to other companies just to stave off being shut down, and no comic book crash to speak of. This is a better time for Marvel, for comics as a whole, and this will have massive effects on the entertainment industry in next millennium...
I know everything here sounds pretty rosy, but trust me, the bad parts and the
weird parts, will come later. Stay tuned.