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Broadway Comics was started by Jim Shooter in 1995, right after his
last company, Defiant, had folded. The company was a division of
Broadway Video Entertainment with Jim Shooter as co-owner of the
characters. In 1996 Broadway Video Entertainment was sold to Golden
Books, which then promptly went bankrupt. The year 1996 being one of
the worst years for the comic book industry, the company was closed
before it had a chance to start, just like a number of other new comic
book companies. [source]
Several months after launching this site, I received a message from
Joe James
stating "At Broadway, the writing team was Jim Shooter, Janet
Jackson, Myself and Pauline Weiss. We literally wrote every frame of
every book together. Jim was of course head writer but we spent a
year and a half 9 hours a day, 6 days a week writing the Broadway
line. That is no exageration. With the exception of the few titles
we adopted individually." He later mentions "I still have a script
for Knights on Broadway #4... I had it plotted up to #7 and the
culmination of the first story arc was supposed to coincide with our
first universe crossover, which was a massive change of all the
books."
Broadway published a total of 33 books before it shut down. Only
23 of those would be regarded as being part of the Broadway Universe.
The other tens books constituted black and white promotional previews,
hard and softcover trade paperbacks and a couple of one-shots titles
that don't necessarily fit into the universe structure. Of the 23
we are considering part of the universe, Shooter had a hand in
writing 19 of them. At the time of Broadway's abrupt closure, there
were 4 ongoing titles. Unfortunately, only one title, Fatale,
completed it's storyarc before Broadway closed it's doors.
Broadway published it's first book, Powers That Be #1, in
November 1995. One year later, Broadway published
their final products, the Fatale Trade Paperbacks.
Aside from being the founder and editor-in-chief, Shooter also wrote
and co-wrote the majority of Broadway's comics including the full
run of Fatale and Powers That Be/Star Seed.
There used to be a very comprehensive Broadway Comics archive
assembled by a user named
Defiant1.
In October of 2005, he decided to retire his archive. I used his site
as a starting point for most of the Broadway information on this site and
felt obligated to mirror his archive once he took it down. At this
time, I have made no changes to any of the pages he produced. I will
over time attempt to verify links and fix any color and layout issues.
You can view Defiant1's Broadway Comics Archive
here.
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