Former Marvel Comics EIC Jim Shooter Passes At 74, Oversaw Historic Runs On ‘Fantastic Four’, ‘Thor’, ‘Amazing Spider-Man’
The sun sets on yet another comic book industry titan, this time as legendary Marvel Comics Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter has passed away at age 74, leaving behind a medium-wide legacy that touched nearly every modern super hero, from Spider-Man, to the Fantastic Four, to Superman, to even the Legion of Super-Heroes.
Word of the hardline editor’s passing was first publicly confirmed on the afternoon of June 30th by noted Fantastic Four Vol. 3 writer Mark Waid, who announced the heartbreaking news via his personal Facebook account.
“I’ve just received word that Jim Shooter passed away of esophogeal cancer, which he’s been battling for some time,” he wrote. “I realize that for many he’s been a controversial figure in the past (game knows game), mostly with regards to his managereal style, but my experiences with him lay outside that realm and began with my lifelong love for his writing beginning with the first time I ever picked up a copy of Adventure Comics in 1967.”
Following a lengthy eulogy for his fellow Marvel creator, Waid ultimately concluded, “I regret that I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye, but I’m glad he’s finally at peace after years of suffering, Godspeed, Jim.”
Among the many individuals who have left a mark on the medium, Shooter is easily one of the most iconic and most controversial to ever do it.
Born in Pittsburgh in 1951, James Charles Shooter was one of the youngest to ever break into the Western comic book industry, first joining DC at the age of just 14 after his Legion of Super-Heroes fan comic submissions caught the attention of noted Silver Age era editor Mort Weisinger.
As explained by the man himself in a 2010 interview with comic book historian Christopher Irving, “I spent about a year reading, studying comics, trying to figure out what I liked and what I didn’t like – I read both DC and Marvel – and tried to figure out what Stan was doing. When I thought I was ready, in the summer of 1965 and I was thirteen years old, I wrote and drew a comic book story for The Legion of Super-Heroes. I thought that was the one comic I could make the biggest difference with. I made a cover for it, which I also colored, and everything. I didn’t know what a script looked like, so I made it look like a comic book and drew the panels and wrote the word balloons. I sent it in to DC Comics, and got a letter back that said ‘Hey, we think you may be able to draw features for DC Comics!’”
“Sometime in the evening I got a phone call from a guy who said his name was Mort Weisinger and he wanted to buy the stories I’d sent. He commissioned me to write a Supergirl story,” he continued. “People have occasionally said ‘Mort really plotted everything.’ No, my instructions on Supergirl were ‘Supergirl, twelve pages’. Most of them were like that, and I’m not saying we never had story conferences. I sent in the Supergirl, and he liked it and said ‘Send me a Superman, twenty-two pages.’ I sent him ‘The Origin of The Parasite’ and then I was back on Legion again.”
“When he told me he wanted me to do Legion regularly, that was the phone call – I lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and all of this was over the phone – and he said ‘I want you to come up to New York and spend a couple of days in the office.’
I said ‘Okay,’ but I was hesitating. He said ‘How old are you?’ I said ‘Well, sir, I just turned fourteen.’”
Making the trip on his next school break, Shooter ultimately accepted the job offer in order to help lessen his family’s financial struggles, in doing so kicking off a three-year tenure at DC during which he would make a number of notable additions to its canon including the aforementioned villain Parasite, The Legion’s long-running enemy group The Fatal Five, and the first race between Superman and the Flash (as run in Superman Vol. 1 #199).
In 1969, Shooter would successfully apply for an editorial position at rival publisher Marvel Comics, which he opted to pursue in lieu of both his current gig at DC and a potential academic run at New York University – albeit not for long, as he would leave the House of Ideas just under a month after he started there.
“I worked at Marvel about three weeks, and was trying to stick it out,” Shooter told Irving. “The money they were paying me might have been good in Pittsburgh, but not in New York. I was looking at the price of apartments, and not eating (because I couldn’t afford to eat, and went a long time without food), so finally with great regret I quit the job and went back to Pittsburgh.”
Spending the next few years as a freelance advertisement artist, the fledgling comic pro would return to the industry in 1975, penning an extremely short run of Legion stories Superboy Vol.1 for DC before tensions between him and his editors drove him to return to Marvel Comics the next year to accept an editorial offer from then-EIC Marv Wolfman.
Enjoying a meteoric rise through the publisher’s ranks over, it would take just two years for Shooter to be appointed Marvel Comics’ EIC, succeeding Archie Goodwin in 1978 and proceeding to usher in a new era for the company.
Taking a notoriously harsh, no-nonsense, and almost totalitarian approach to the Marvel Bullpen, while he did not find himself the most popular man in the office – “Everybody hated me,” recalled Shooter. “They weren’t sure what to do with me. After years of anarchy, all of a sudden there’s a guy calling up ‘You know, Doug Moench, I’m reading this plot, and there’s one section that doesn’t make any sense. I want to talk about it.’ Some guys go ‘Oh, sure, I’ll fix it.’ Other guys: ‘Sure, if you don’t like it change it.’ Other guys just screamed at me.” – he nonetheless got results.
During the nine-years of his iron reign, readers were treated to such now-historical moments as Frank Miller’s Born Again run on Daredevil Vol. 1, the Hobgoblin debut in Roger Stern’s The Amazing Spider-Man Vol. 1, Walt Simonson’s Thor Vol. 1 fusing of the God of Thunder with his Norse inspiration, Reed Richards’ trial during John Byrne’s time on Fantastic Four, and the start of Chris Claremont’s time in charge of the Marvel’s Merry Band of Mutants. There was also his attempted New Universe, an original, more real-world line which failed to pick up steam with readers
Further, he also sparked the industry’s still-ongoing love-affair with company-wide crossovers, overseeing the first ever such event in 1982’s Marvel Super Hero Contest of Champions Vol. 1 before solidifying the concept’s popularity with his personal penning of 1984’s Marvel Super Heroes: Secret Wars Vol. 1 – which also saw him introduce one of comic books’ most iconic visuals in Spider-Man’s black suit.
(And in bringing things back to his DC roots, he also wrote the second meeting between Superman and Spider-Man, as published in Marvel Treasury Edition #228.)
But far from his management style being the only controversy of his tenure, Shooter’s time as EIC was also marred by a tumultuous and public legal battle with Jack Kirby over the ownership rights to his original artworks, as produced for early issues of Fantastic Four Vol.1, Avengers Vol. 1, and X-Men Vol. 1.
As recapped by Shooter himself in a 2011 blog post:
“I tried at every opportunity to convince Marvel’s brass to return the old artwork. There were many reasons cited by the corporate counsel, financial officer, etc. why this was a problem — i.e., the art could be considered an asset, and couldn’t be disposed of with no benefit to the stockholders of a publicly traded company, tax issues and lots of other nonsense.
“Over time, I successfully overcame those objections, and got approval from the board to return the old artwork. Kirby’s contract had expired at about that time, and he ‘d left. As soon as he left, he sued Marvel for ownership of the characters he’d created. The return of the artwork was one aspect of that case.
So then because he was suing Marvel, the lawyers felt that the artwork couldn’t be returned — it’s complicated, but doing so could tend to support his claims. In fact, they wouldn’t let me return artwork to anyone while the case was pending. Imagine the frustration of guys like Joe Sinnott and the Buscemas.
The legal sparring went on a long time. Starting, as most lawsuits do, with a period of threats and legal maneuvering, in 1978 the Kirby side began an aggressive legal and PR attack on Marvel that ended (or lessened somewhat) in mid-1986 when the matter was settled. Though it was a complex case about who owned the characters the way it was pitched to the public by their side was that Marvel — and in particular, I wouldn’t give Kirby his art back.
Eventually, I convinced the lawyers that it wouldn’t compromise the case if other artists got their art back, and I was allowed to return everyone’s but Jack’s.
“The Kirby case ended when Marvel, in discovery, produced a number of documents, including several signed with Cadence Industries’ predecessor proving that Kirby had specifically agreed more than once in exchange for compensation (beyond the original payment for the work) that Marvel owned the work (art, characters, everything). One specifically listed every story Kirby ever did — part of the proof Martin Goodman was required to provide that he owned what he was selling when he sold Marvel to Cadence, I believe. Kirby’s lawyers were apparently unaware of the existence of these documents, apologized, and dropped the suit.
Marvel’s lawyers would have shown them earlier, but never dreamed that the other side wasn’t aware of them.
The only remaining thing was returning the artwork. Kirby then demanded as a condition of accepting the artwork that he must be given sole credit as creator on all the characters he co-created with Stan, and that Stan must specifically receive no credit. He framed his demands for the return of the artwork in such a way that to do so would be a tacit admission by Marvel that it was “his” art, i.e., he owned the underlying rights, and therefore the characters. Kirby also insisted that he created Spider-Man.
About a dozen times, I requested an audience with the upper management and/or lawyers to argue in favor of generosity toward Kirby. One thing I proposed was offering a settlement which would include Kirby (and all other founding fathers) in the character-creator incentive I’d established for current Marvel creators. This incentive was a profit sharing plan that paid a royalty for ALL uses of a character. It works like partial ownership. I asked for it to be retroactive to the date the plan had been installed. Retroactive payments of any kind beyond that date had been previously, adamantly ruled out by management. As it turned out, my more modest plan was ruled out too.
So Jack, with his lawyer’s help, sent us a letter refusing to accept the artwork back unless he were given credit as sole creator on all the old stuff he and Stan worked on together. He specifically insisted that Stan would get no credit, and that Jack must get credit, or Jack would not accept his artwork back. That just blew my mind. Shortly after that, I met with Jack in San Diego, and I talked with him. I said, “Doesn’t Stan deserve some credit?” Jack said, “Yeah, he does.” And I said, “So you’d be okay if we put ‘Stan and Jack’?” He said yes. I said, “And another thing, Jack, in your letter you insist you created Spider-Man, and I know you developed a version of Spider-Man, but it wasn’t the one that was actually used. The one that was actually used was the one Steve did.” He said, “Yeah, you’re right, that’s his.” Jack was fine with it; he had no problem. So we settled, and he got his artwork back.”
Yet, despite all his successes – not to mention the increased profits brought in thanks to his editorial efforts – Shooter was eventually ousted from his position by Marvel’s board of directors, having drawn their ire thanks to his belligerent success browbeating them into guaranteeing better baseline royalty rights for the creators whose work formed the entire basis of their existence.
Per the former EIC in the second-half of his interview with Irving:
“After that was when Marvel was going on the auction block. When the people upstairs were trying to sell the company, what it means is that someone in my position was the highest-ranking guy other than the owners. So either I would become an accomplice and help them sell everybody down the river, or I become a labor leader. By that, I mean that they started to do incredible things to save money for the bottom line: they cashed out the pension fund, they changed the whole health care to a cheaper thing where people had to pay more, they wanted to cut out all of these benefits, they wanted to retroactively eliminate the royalty program.
“I said ‘No, no, no, there will be a class action suit against you, and I will file it. You can’t have people doing ten months’ worth of work with the understanding that they’re getting royalties and then stiff them…’
“They said ‘We’ve decided, as of today, that we’re not paying any royalties on anything.’ That argument ended on the executive floor, in the intersection of the hallways leading to the offices of the financial officer, the executive vice president, the president, and the house counsel, all in this key section, and with me standing in the crossroads, screaming my head off and threatening a class action suit. I won that battle, but then I lost a lot of other ones.
“But meanwhile, now that I’ve become the enemy, no one I like gets a raise. Anyone who says anything bad about me gets a raise. They bring in this girl, Carol Kalish, because the Vice President told me ‘We have no clue who could replace you. You’re the only one who could tell us.’ So they bring in this girl, Carol Kalish, who seems to be knowledgeable about comics, so they figured they would have her to replace my knowledge of the industry, and could get rid of me. In case it hasn’t been made clear, no one above my rank at Marvel at that time had ever so much as opened a comic book. And they were proud of it!
“So, we went through a couple of bad years there, and they did eventually sell the company. It got uglier and uglier, and they were making me into a pariah. It’s also when the Kirby lawsuit reached its peak. They said ‘Hang him out to dry. Let people believe Jim won’t let Kirby have his artwork back,’ as if I had a vote. I wasn’t the CEO, the lawyer or on the board. Also, I was the public face of Marvel, so if anything went wrong it was my fault. Nobody knew Galton or Chairman Shelly Feinberg. They knew me.
“Basically, I got the shaft in a major way, and by the time they finally got rid of me, nobody cared. If you saw the day of my thirtieth birthday party and then a few years later when they got rid of me. I won the fight about paying royalties, but they had actually stopped paying international royalties, hoping that no one would notice. Walt noticed, and said ‘Somebody sent me this Star Slammers from France. Where’s my royalty check?’ So here’s my thing: I can say to Walt ‘It’s those bastards upstairs, Walt. They’re screwing you,’ so Walt quits, and then Shooter has scared another creator away. Or, I can say ‘Walt, there must be some mistake or problem. I’ll do my best to fix it.’ I go off and rant at the villains upstairs, and it does no good, so then Walt goes ‘I thought you were going to fix this,’ and then he quits anyway.
“I remember that when they finally fired me, I felt I owed Walt an explanation. So, I called up Walt, and said ‘You know, Walt, when I went up stairs and told you about not getting your royalty check, they said they were deliberately not paying anybody, but would pay if you showed up with a lawyer.’ He was real cold to me on the phone, like ‘Go away, I don’t believe you,’ as if I was just trying to drum up sympathy. What can I do?
“They did a good job, and got rid of me. I was blackballed, literally blackballed.”
On the outs with the comic book industry but still in love with the medium itself, Shooter eventually realized that, in his words, “No one would hire me, so I had to hire myself,” and thus chose to take his talents to the indie scene.
Spending the next two decades founding a variety of comic book publishing houses, his endeavors including the short-lived Defiant Comics and Broadway Comics, as well as the still-living Valiant Comics (which he left in 1992 over creative differences), he would eventually returned to the mainstream in the early 2000s, contributing his talents to the sole published issue of Marvel’s failed, Kabbalah-based Seven superteam, a new run on Legion of Super-Heroes Vol. 5, and a modern age reboot of Gold Key Comics’ catalog for Dark Horse Comics.
Finally, Shooter would spend his final years dividing his time between freelance consulting work, as provided through a partnership with comic book publisher Illustrated Media, and the convention circuit – In fact, just a little over a week before his passing, the Marvel Comics all-star was scheduled to appear at the 2025 HeroesCon before a last-minute cancellation ostensibly due to health reasons.
Here, at the end of both this obituary and Shooter’s comic book history-making life, perhaps there is no better way to honor his legacy than sharing one of his most poignant directorates, as given to Marvel Comics’ bullpen during his time as EIC in October 1984: “Effective immediately start doing good comics. I realize that this directive reflects a substantial departure from previous company policy , but please try to comply.”
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