7. Green Lantern Burns Jim Shooter (Literally)
DC ComicsSpeaking of controversial editors, Marvel seemingly had a gift for picking them. Long before Bob Harras arrived on the scene, the bullpen was lorded over by one Jim Shooter, widely regarded as a totally narcissistic jerk-wad with his head shoved where the sun don't shine. And we don't mean an alternate Earth that doesn't have a sun. One former Marvel employee who shared this opinion of the company's editorial overlord was artist John Byrne, who had jumped ship after years working on the X-Men title, drawing classic stories like The Dark Phoenix Saga. In 1987's Legends #5 the best Green Lantern, Guy Gardner, tussles with new villain Sunspot in a story by Len Wein, John Ostrander and Byrne. Sunspot is a tall, rake-thin guy with dark hair whose powers are ill-defined but his intentions to remake the universe in his own image are very clear, since he walks around yelling them whilst talking about how great and all-powerful he is. Seems like kind of a narcissistic jerkwad, if you ask us. Thankfully Guy takes care of him in no time, using his power ring to first explode him with a petrol tanker and, when that doesn't do the job, to start disintegrating his limbs. Pretty hardcore, and it only stops because he gets called up to go help Doctor Fate. So where's the inside joke there? We didn't say it before, but besides having the narcissistic jerk-wad thing in common, Jim Shooter was also a tall, rake-thing guy with dark hair whose intentions to remake the universe in his own image were at the time very clear, since he walks around yelling them whilst talking about how great and all-powerful he is. This multi-page sequence in Legends #5 is John Byrne and friends literally burning Jim Shooter at length for being an awful person. Note that if all that was perhaps a little too subtle for the average comics reader who probably didn't even know who Jim Shooter was, let alone what he looks like, the script makes it all the more obvious: at the time the editor was overseeing his pet project, the New Universe, a separate line to the regular Marvel continuity set in a more "realistic" world. Shooter wrote the flagship character, Star Band, who coincidentally lived in his own home town of Pittsburgh and had similar ill-defined powers to Sunspot. The "ultimate power to create a new universe", no less.