When you work in an industry as insular as comic books, there are bound to be some bruised egos and grudges carried. Occasionally these feelings even make their way out onto the pages of the comic books themselves. Most of the time, you presume that the teasing is meant good-heartedly, but you never know.…
1 Funky Flashman and Houseroy. After leaving Marvel for DC, Jack Kirby decided to use the pages of Mister Miracle #6 to take a shot at his former coworkers—specifically, Stan Lee and Roy Thomas. The Lee riff is understandable, especially from Kirby’s side of things, as he felt that Lee took too much credit for their work together at Marvel and that Lee got more attention because he had a better image. The knock on Roy Thomas (as the excessively demeaning “Houseroy”) is strange, though. Kirby didn’t appear to have had much interaction with Thomas at Marvel, so such a harsh criticism seems a little out of bounds.
2 Thundersword. In the pages of Secret Wars II #1, Jim Shooter gave a little grief to a former notable Marvel writer, Steve Gerber, who was at the time writing for the G.I. Joe cartoon series. In the comic, Gerber is depicted as a bloating hypocrite who feels that he is better than “the masses” while continuing to sell them bloody gore by the bucketful (“Of course I’m against violence, you idiot! That’s the point!”).
3 Sunspot. Soon after Shooter did his Gerber take, so, too, did John Byrne, Len Wein, and John Ostrander on Jim Shooter in the pages of DC’s Legends #5. In the comic, Shooter is depicted as a raving power freak, constantly harping about the “New Universe” (Shooter had just launched a new line at Marvel Comics called the New Universe—his Sunspot persona is also a send-up of the main character of the New Universe, the Starbrand).
4 Johnny Redbeard. Byrne, in turn, was lampooned in an issue of Erik Larsen’s Savage Dragon. Johnny Redbeard was a power-mad fellow who experimented on characters and gave a number of them superpowers and then abandoned them all when he became disinterested in them. The characters all match characters that John Byrne had, at one point or another, worked on—including riffs on She-Hulk, Superman, and Namor the Sub-Mariner. These now-ignored characters call themselves Johnny Redbeard’s Nixed Men, in reference to Byrne’s series for Dark Horse Comics at the time, John Byrne’s Next Men.