Jim Shooter of Marvel Comics has died

He also wrote a darn good run of Legion of Super-Heroes, starting when he was just 13 years old.

Terrible news for the emotionally stunted adults who care about comic books.

No gay heroes? Good riddance.

I wonder if John Byrne's knees allow him to do cartwheels at his age?

He did so many great things and so many horrible things over his career. I'd hate to be the one delivering his eulogy.

He wrote a lot of excellent comic stories that I love, but I'll never forgive him for ruining my favorite Avenger, Hank Pym.

Hope the other side is better for you, Jim.

An absolute jerk to co-workers. He killed the original JLA/Avengers crossover after both DC and Marvel agreed to it and George Perez had started drawing it. He also was not very kind to other artists. Legend? Yeah right.

One artist was drawing a comicbook in the top 5 at Marvel. Shooter made his life so miserable the artist called DC and they offered him a gig immediately.

Shooter would often just come up with decisions and have them implemented overnight. One was that there were no longer to be multi-issue stories, just one-shots. That screwed up a lot of plans, it also didn’t last.

He was a micromanager. But his reign saw some great stories.

Shooter wrote “A Very Personal Hell” where Bruce Banner aka The Hulk, was menaced by two gay guys in a YMCA shower in NYC.

Because of course he did.

In terms of sales and profitability he brought Marvel to it's absolute peak and he played a positive part in establishing creators' rights, as I understand.

Should he ever be forgiven for “Secret Wars II”?

Should he be forgiven for New Universe?

Oh god, no, R12. The original Marvel teams in the early 60s were lightning in a bottle. You couldn’t have duplicated that if you tried.

R1 Hunh? For real? Just 13?

R5 Oh, man. He did a number on Hank Pym. Almost 50 years later that shit has stuck with the character. Well, he's dead now but even his Ultimate counterpart is heading down that road.

Jim Shooter would be a good porn name, but I'd change the spelling of the first name to Gym.

R14, pretty amazing. He was a prodigy.

To be fair, it was the old school Legion of Superheroes. They were not the deepest book when he was writing it. It wasn’t exactly The Great Darkness Saga.

He created Princess Projectra! Worthy of immortality for that alone!

Gym Shoe?

Do you mean Jim Shoo?

I sat in front of him in a class once.

We had a ball making fun of our big ugly teacher man.

He sounds like a bleeding heart compared to nut-job Frank Miller

Was Shooter a "bachelor" like Ditko, Siegal, Shuster, and Ringo? That gay Hulk story doesn't seem made up by a straight guy.

R10 is correct. R6 isn't being fair. Shooter, when all is said and done, is one of a handful of the most consequential people in the history of comic books. Yes, many of the people at Marvel who worked under him in the 80s chafed under his style, his rules, and so on--and this is understandable. If you're John Byrne at the peak of your powers, who the hell is anyone to tell you how do do your book? But the flip side is that Shooter is the one who got Marvel to begin paying royalties to creators (a practice which DC then began to copy in short order), and many are the stories of Shooter going out of his way to make sure freelancers were shoehorned into Marvel's health insurance plan. Shooter also took chances on people that others in the business wouldn't have noticed--he made Jim Owsley the editor of all the Spider-Man titles at a time when there weren't any black editors in comics, much less young black editors. That in turn made possible the career of the late Peter David, whom Owsley hired from Marvel's sales department to write Spectacular Spider-Man. Shooter made Bill Sienkiewicz's career possible. Made Epic Illustrated & Epic Comics possible. And so on.

Marvel in the 1980s had a period of sustained creative greatness unmatched by any other comics publisher in history, excepting only EC Comics' output in the 1950s. Much of that credit has to go to how Shooter assembled talent and managed them. One of the great "What Ifs?" of comic book history is what might have happened had Shooter's investment group been allowed to purchase Marvel from New World in 1989, rather than Wall Street dickhead Ron Perelman, who proceeded to destroy Marvel and much of the industry with it over the next five years. Based on the quality of what Shooter did with Valiant in the early 90s, it's a fair counterfactual to pose.

My own interactions with Shooter happened via email & snail mail nearly 30 years ago. He was generous and kind when no one was looking, and the world of funny books has been much the worse without him over these past few decades. RIP.

Toward the end, he was more of a Dribbler.

R22 Who is Ringo?

From the article above, Shooter claimed that the Hulk vignette was inspired by real, separate incidents that happened to him and a friend. This story was in “Rampaging Hulk” number 23 which was not the comic book but the magazine format Hulk.

Ya know, I never hear stories like that anymore. As a kid, I was always hearing, “A gay guy tried to hit on me…” tales but not anymore.

Wait … R21, what is that story??

He bought the rights to the black Spider-Man suit design from a fan for 200 bucks, that went on to become blockbuster Venom character.

Like everyone, Shooter was human. He did some really good things for Marvel and he made some bad decisions and showed crappy judgement at times with his micromanaging editorial interference. The “no gay heroes” thing was unfortunate but also a product of its time.

Conversely, I’m not always thrilled when a long running character of 50 years suddenly is gay (Iceman!) but do like to see more LGB characters. I liked the way that Byrne’s Northstar went over so many people’s heads (including Shooter’s) but when you read it now, it’s so obvious.

[quote]The “no gay heroes” thing was unfortunate but also a product of its time.

And if he'd left the attitude in the 80s, that would have been one thing. The Hulk story caused a lot of controversy even at the time. He was defending it as recently as 2011.

That recently, R30? Jesus.

And for the record. John Byrne had been gone from “Alpha Flight” for years and years when Northstar screamed, “I am gay!!” in the middle of a fight.

He also wasn’t responsible for a few years earlier when Northstar turned out to be a LITERAL fairy and was dying of a disease that seemed very similar to AIDS.

The whole Bella’s/Illyana story always seemed very “ick” to me. It seemed too close to pedophilia grossness especially before the “Magik” miniseries described her years in Limbo.

But we could have that but nobody gay according to Shooter.

Shit. *Belasco

[quote]That recently, [R30]? Jesus.

Apparently even more recently than that. I just remember reading it on a blog that he kept back then, not only being an ass in the actual post, but going after people in the comments as well, including a gay former Marvel editor.

[quote]And for the record. John Byrne had been gone from “Alpha Flight” for years and years when Northstar screamed, “I am gay!!” in the middle of a fight.

[quote]He also wasn’t responsible for a few years earlier when Northstar turned out to be a LITERAL fairy and was dying of a disease that seemed very similar to AIDS.

For those playing along at home, Scott Lobdell did the former (although it should have by rights been Fabian Nicieza, who was pushed out a few issues prior), and Bill Mantlo did the latter.

The No-Gays-In-Marvel thing was weakened after Shooter was replaced, but they didn't formally end it until Joe Quesada took over as E-i-C in 2000. If you read between the lines, a bunch of writers tried and failed to bring gay themes in. Lobdell hinted very strongly that Iceman was gay 25 years before Bendis actually outed him (Chuck Austen in the 00s and Marjorie Liu in the early 10s did the same thing). And Nicieza tried to do something with Shatterstar and Rictor in X-Force, although he was going for something quite different than what Peter David would give us in X-Factor.

I think it's important to keep in mind that in the 1980s, the Comics Code Authority was still a thing. A huge portion of comic book sales were still coming from spinner racks in 7-11s, grocery stores, book stores, department stores, kids toy stores, and so on. At that point in time, having an openly gay superhero who was in a regular comic would have resulted in Marvel's books being yanked off the shelves in huge swaths of the United States, because it would have been seen as a violation of the CCA. The country and the marketplace were simply not ready for the sort of certain controversy that would have accompanied having an openly gay superhero in 1985. The culture had shifted by the 1990s. Shooter's job was not to advocate for social justice, or to use Marvel Comics to parrot his own beliefs, it was to grow the business and sell comic books. He didn't own the company. Any Editor in Chief who tried to do the Northstar angle in the early-mid 1980s would have derailed the entire company, and killed the goose that laid the golden eggs.

Plus the CCA had that line-item that they had to occasionally have mincing stereotypes attempt to rape our heroes.

…and of course, it always required him to continue defending it for 30+ years even after sensitivities evolved.

Less pithy: You say Shooter’s job wasn’t to advocate for social justice—but that’s exactly what Claremont, Gerber, and Englehart were doing in that same period, within the same constraints, and Shooter let them do it—until it got too gay. He didn’t just avoid openly queer heroes to protect the CCA; he actively shut down characters and storylines that hinted at queerness. Northstar’s queerness wasn’t a secret. Everyone knew. The issue is not ‘he couldn’t have done more’—it’s that he wouldn’t even let others try.

John Byrne started off on his Forum saying his sympathies were with Shooter’s family and friends. And as more and more people shared their happy memories of his reign, Byrne said that a lot of the success. In that era was not necessarily because of Shooter but in spite of him. lol. Byrne has never let it go.

Dead?

Why couldn't it have been Trump?

I guess He’ll needed another editor who catered to little boys

^^^ Hell of course

R39 Which is funny, because my impression is that as time passed, Byrne's assessment of Shooter's tenure has been far more nuanced and measured and mellow compared to what it was in 1987, when he hosted a party where the other Shooter-haters gathered to burn him in effigy...or when he insisted on penciling the issue of "Star Brand" (one of the New Universe titles written by Shooter) where Pittsburgh (Shooter's hometown) is destroyed, lol. Of course, Byrne himself has revealed himself to be something of a hypocrite--I remember when he would loftily and with great sanctimony issue his thoughts, ex cathedra, in the letters pages of "Next Men" in the early 1990s, where he scoffed at Marvel and DC, tut-tutting at everyone who was whoring themselves out to the Big Two in the age of artist empowerment. Fast forward a few years, Byrne's wife leaves him, he has alimony to pay, and whaddya know? He's cranking out shitty Spider-Man reboots, doing Wonder Woman, etc etc. Ironically, Byrne & Shooter both testified against Marv Wolfman when Wolfman was suing Marvel in an attempt to get royalties for the Blade character, going so far as to sit together in the gallery and heckle Wolfman when he was on the stand. Is it a surprise that their egos couldn't coexist?

R38 Welp, that seals it. Shooter didn't do the one thing you wanted him to do, and he wasn't perfect. Ipso facto, he was a terrible piece of shit, etc etc. We get it.

Byrne got mad at me once on his Forum, maybe back in 2003 - but he pretty much gets pissed at everybody eventually, but yeah, a lot of times with good reason.

I asked how come Misty Knight bumps into Jean in X-Men 117 (when Jean thought the X-Men were dead) and then Misty works with the X-Men in Japan in issues 118-119 and never thinks to say, oh I saw Jean on my way out here! Granted, I was bringing up a 25-year-old incident at the time. But wow, a lot of heartbreak could have ended a lot sooner.

Hell, maybe Shooter interfered and told them not to reveal the truth.

Look, nobody’s perfect—fine. But Jim Shooter wasn’t just a flawed person; he actively enforced bigotry from a position of power, dismissed queer representation, and helped delay progress that other creators were quietly pushing for. That’s not just a misstep, that’s legacy-level harm.

We’re not talking about someone who made a mistake and grew. We’re talking about someone who entrenched themselves in harmful views and defended them publicly, for decades, even when it was clear the world had moved on. That’s not ‘everyone has flaws.’ That’s ‘some flaws cause real damage.’”

I can’t take someone seriously who unironically uses the phrase “queer representation.”

Impressive sidestep.

There's tangible, historical harm that Shooter did by holding back queer storytelling and punishing those who tried, and your rebuttal is to sneer at the phrase "queer representation."

That's a deflection, not a counterargument.

The issue isn't terminology. It's that Shooter's policy directly impacted creators and readers alike. Stories that could have helped queer kids feel seen were buried, and careers were stalled. If you find the term "queer representation" too precious to engage with, that says more about your discomfort than it does about the argument. Don't pretend it erases the very real impact of Shooter's editorial policy.

TL;DR: "Homophobia is fine, so long as it's referred to by terminology that I don't like."

Jim Shooter planned to introduce a trans woman Legionnaire in his 2007 return to DC's Legion of Super-Heroes. Invisible Kid, Lyle Norg, was set to transition and adopt the new name Stealth with Brainiac 5's help.

R48 That can’t be true, because we’ve been reliably informed that he wrote a story once decades ago that someone found to be homophobic. QED, in the purity test world that some inhabit. /s