Jim Shooter (1951-2025): a memory by GF Willmetts.
One of my team had asked had I heard that American comicbook writer and editor, Jim Shooter had died over the weekend at the age of 73. There are some people you think will never die and I would have put Shooter in that list.
I first came across him when I was reading ‘Adventure Comics’ and the Legion Of Super-Heroes in the mid-1960s when it suddenly had an upswing in stories under its new writer. It only came out much later that he was 14 years old. Quite how he survived working for hardass editor Mort Weisinger beats me. In later interviews, Shooter admits in interviews it wasn’t easy but he came from a poor family in Pittsburgh and needed to make money to support them. Without knowing the format, he drew out the layout of the plot with word balloons which his artists said saved them a lot of time designing the panels and upped the graphics along the way. He wrote the LSH as if it was a Marvel Comic, which DC Comics never cottoned onto.
His full history is on-line so I won’t go into all the details. He dropped out of writing comics for a while and only went back into it applying for work. Eventually, disgusted with his later treatment at DC Comics, he went to work for Marvel. It was here that he joined the rotation of editor-in-chiefs, pleasing Stan Lee because he understood the industry and went off to see the printers and sort out problems there, and stayed with the job.
A lot has been said about how he micromanaged Marvel, but compared to how its run today, was light in comparison. He did a lot more good than bad, especially having reprints when creators were late became a thing of the past. Multi-cross-overs happened annually and he did the major ‘Secret Wars’ series to shake things up, amongst other things introducing Spider-Man’s black costume which later became Venom. It was weird at the time when all the titles leading into the ‘Secret Wars’ stopped there and the next month, a year later before we caught up with the events that happened there. There was also a merchandise tie-in that started it which became the prototype to things we see pretty much today. He also ensured the original art went back to the creators which forced a similar regime at DC Comics who would never have considered it before and a royalty program if sales grew on a title. Quite revolutionary at the time and we take for granted today. Oh and a lot of mini and maxi-series.
Of course, he had some failures as well. The ‘New Universe’ was an attempt to have something separate to the Marvel Universe but it didn’t have a similar appeal. I think if anything, going back to the approach of ‘normal’ people getting super-powers in a ‘normal’ world had been done before by Marvel itself. It didn’t need repeating. Of course, the other new comicbook companies emerging still went that route. A lot of what Shooter did was to find new sales markets, especially in the direct-sales market.
I lost track of Shooter after his tenure at Marvel and into the independent comicbook companies and only got filled in from a later interview. Looking over his career, Shooter probably did a lot more good in the industry than bad and certainly opened up the field. The fact that he stayed as editor-in-chief at Marvel for nine years when his predecessors barely lasted a year each should tell its own story.
GF Willmetts
02 July 2025
