Jim Shooter, the comics industry titan who went from teenage writing prodigy to seminal but divisive editor-in-chief for Marvel Comics in the 1980s, has died after a battle with esophageal cancer. He was 73.
His death was announced Monday on Facebook by writer-editor Mark Waid and confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter by his son, Benjamin Shooter.
Shooter came of age in an industry that was both staid and stuck in traditions yet unusually open in a way that a phone call from an editor to a kid could make dreams come true.
He wrote stories that he sent into National Comics — as DC was known at the time — in the mid-1960s when he was in his early teens, prompting an out of the blue phone call from legendary editor Mort Weisinger, who would buy the stories and put Shooter on the payroll. It was a boon for the youngster, who could now help out his struggling blue collar family whose patriarch was a steelworker in Pennsylvania.
Shooter aped Marvel Comics’ writing style, bringing a measure of 1960s cool to the more uptight comics that National put out. He created new members of the Legion of Super-Heroes, the group of costumed teens created in the Eisenhower 1950s, adding Karate Kid and Ferro Lad to the line while also birthing the villainous Fatal Five. He also created the Superman bad guy known as Parasite.
Although he became a local celebrity, he left comics for several years before returning, again at DC in early 1970s and again penning Superman and Legion stories. Then Marvel editor Marv Wolfman plucked him to be an editorial assistant and writer starting in 1976. Two years later, thanks to a tumult in the comics industry, Shooter became editor-in-chief. He was only 26.
Thus began a remarkable run that has little parallel in modern comics publishing. Shooter professionalized what had been a loose company in an even looser industry, making sure books were published on time, artists were paid on time and even given royalties and health insurance.
He also had a flair for developing talent, and under his aegis Marvel put out now-classic stories from writer Chris Claremont and artist John Byrne on Uncanny X-Men, Frank Miller on Daredevil and Walt Simonson on Thor, among others. While the artists became among the biggest names in the industry, X-Men became not only the most dominant and influential comic of the decade and beyond, but one of the first true franchises of the industry.
With 1984’s Secret Wars, a 12-issue miniseries that Shooter, Mike Zeck and John Beatty drew, he instituted the concept of publishing crossover events, a companywide initiative that saw one main story play out and influence many of the other titles coming out for months on end. Secret Wars was a massive publishing success and a toy bonanza. It’s a concept that is still being used by Marvel and DC to this day, in varying degrees.
He took fans seriously, and just like Weisinger, called and wrote readers out of the blue. Carter Beats the Devil author Glen David Gold wrote in his 2018 memoir, I Will Be Complete, of how in the summer before he entered high school in the late 1970s, Shooter phoned after reading a SHIELD story he had sent in. Perhaps seeing something of himself in a teen writing superhero stories, Shooter was encouraging, telling the auspicious writer to read as much as he could in high school and to study science.
But despite the successes, and Marvel’s growing corporatization and assured dominance in comics, Shooter’s hard-driving and micro-managerial style began to alienate talent and editors. He drove Miller to DC — twice — where the creator left an artistic mark on literature and pop culture with his masterpiece, The Dark Knight Returns. He pushed Byrne to DC, where the writer-artist’s Superman relaunch became such a media event it made it to the cover of Time magazine.
Still, while many call Shooter a “complicated man,” Larry Hama, who was writing G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero for Marvel as well as editing titles, said that he believed Shooter was always trying to do the right thing. Hama recalled on Facebook how Shooter put a writer-artist on the company’s insurance plan the day after he died in order to help out his widow. (The talent had qualified for the health and insurance plan and wanted to sign up, but Marvel policy only allowed for sign-ups on Wednesdays. The man had died on the Tuesday.)
Hama wrote, “Without hesitation, Jim took the paperwork from me and went upstairs to push it through. He said, ‘They owe it to him, we just won’t mention that he already passed.’ I witnessed him doing stuff like that several times. None of it was made public for obvious reasons. It could have cost him his job, but he did the right thing.”
Shooter was indeed fired by Marvel in 1987 — a failed publishing initiative and the rough relations with editors and talent finally taking their toll. But he remained a player in the industry and a few years later launched Valiant Comics, a company that in the 1990s rebooted such comic characters as Magnus, Robot Fighter and Solar, Man of the Atom while created new heroes in an attempt to compete with Marvel and DC. He even brought along Marvel veterans Bob Layton, Barry Windsor-Smith and Don Perlin, among others, for the venture.
Shooter moved on to another launch another comics company, the short-lived Broadway Comics, which was an offshoot of Broadway Video, the production banner run by Lorne Michaels. Stints at other and lesser independent companies followed as he drifted from the power center of an industry he had helped shape. He remained active, returning briefly to write Legion of Super-Heroes for DC in 2007 and writing comics for Dark Horse in the early 2010.
“Jim was an excellent superhero writer, a character creator, an editor with an eagle eye and a man who gave his all to what he did,” Paul Levitz, the former president of DC Comics who worked as a comics author and editor in the 1970s and ’80s, wrote on Facebook.
Levitz, who was Shooter’s contemporary as well as a poker-playing buddy, offered a clear-eyed assessment in his remembrance: “From my perspective, he was far weaker as an enterprise leader, and unfortunately that was what he most wanted to be. His sense of history was not, in my view, as good as his sense of fiction. But what he did well, he did gloriously … and my inner child will always be grateful for his inspiration.”