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.