COMIC LEGEND: Marvel assigned John Byrne The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones as a way to make up for displeasing Lucasfilms with their Raiders of the Lost Ark adaptation.
STATUS: False, but Based in a Lot of Truth
A couple of years back, Elliott Ruben Serrano (who you can read over at Comics Waiting Room here) wrote in to ask essentially that exact question:
Way back in the day, I'd heard that George Lucas was quite displeased with John Buscema's work on Marvel's Raiders of the Lost Ark adaptation so Marvel made up for it by getting John Byrne to produce their Further Adventures of Indiana Jones series. True or False?
The John Buscema part is very much true.
John Buscema (on breakdowns) and Klaus Janson (on finishes) did the art on the Raiders of the Lost Ark comic book adaptation, with a script by Walt Simonson.
As was often the case, the adapters were working from an old version of the script for the film, so the Marvel take differed from the actual film, but basically it was a fine, normal adaptation.
Lucasfilm, though, hated it.
Well, the person in charge of the comic book license hated it, at least. I don't know if George Lucas was really even that involved in stuff like comic adaptations at this point.
In any event, they did, indeed, as Elliot alluded to, give Marvel a hard time over the work.
And Byrne WAS involved in assuaging their feelings, but not in the way that Elliot heard the story.
You see, Marvel wanted to do an Indiana Jones licensed comic, which made sense, as the property was a popular one.
But after their displeasure with the movie adaptation, Lucasfilm was hesitant. However, Marvel was able to convince them to approve the concept by explaining that John Byrne, one of Marvel's very top creators, wanted to do the comic, and he would write and pencil it (with Terry Austin inking it). So Marvel's pitch was "The book will be done by our top guy, so you know it will be good."
So Lucasfilm agreed, and Byrne did the first two issues of The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones...
And they were quite good.
And Lucasfilm? Not exactly fans.
Byrne has told the story a few times about how infuriating it was working with the licensing personal at Lucasfilm. Perhaps the funniest story involves the executive from Lucasfilm asking for the plot (which they had approved) to be edited when they were shown the final pages. Yes, when the comic was finished, they wanted to know if you could just change the plot of the already drawn pages to something else. Likely, they were so used to working with advertising, where such demands were not so out of whack, but still, it showed a pretty dramatic lack of understanding for how comic books worked.
In any event, Byrne naturally did not want to work on the book anymore, so a new creative team was found.
The book still continued to be a good book, really - Archie Goodwin and David Michelinie did a good job writing the book and Kerry Gammill and Steve Ditko were fine choices for the regular artists.
But an extended run by Byrne and Austin sure would have been a sight to see!
Elliot asked another question that I don't know the answer to, but I imagine it is a simple answer like "Lucasfilm wanted it changed," but when the series was promoted, it was done so with ads calling the book Raiders of (fill in the blank)...
Anyone know exactly why they changed it?
Thanks again to Elliot for the question and thanks to John Byrne for telling the story about his adventures on the Indiana Jones comic in more than a few places!