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Fandom and Beyond with Jim Shooter

The lore of comics - and by this I mean stories not just in the books themselves, but also tales about the people who make them appear on the shelves - includes a number of heroes, a number of hacks, and the occasional villain. Among comics professionals viewed in the medium's historical mythology as villainous, Jim Shooter has achieved a particularly ominous place. The epithet "Nixon of Comics" sometimes attaches to him, reflecting the kind of dislike Shooter enjoys among a broad segment of comics fandom.

As with any legendary figure, much embellishment surrounds (or conceals) a kernel of fact that represents the "real" man. Unfortunately, so much controversy surrounds the man that the noise-to-signal ratio in information about him makes fair judgment difficult. A shouting army of his critics, plus a small but vehement cadre of his defenders, all fill the received body of comics history with heartfelt but often unreliable descriptions of the man's history, his work, and his downfall(s) and comeback(s).

If some famous names from comics can elicit snickers and groans by their associations with various dubious moments in comics, few can evoke the kind of venom that attaches to Jim Shooter's name. From beginnings as a comics fan whom talent and luck propelled into writing comics at the age of thirteen, Jim Shooter would climb the ladder of influence until he held the significant reins of power in Marvel Comics, and then, after a tenure of a decade, would crash and burn so profoundly that his only hope to work in comics again centered around his ability to start new comics companies.

Where can we separate the truth from hyperbole, extract invective from self-serving flattery, and get to the roots of the storm of ugliness that centered around the fall of Jim Shooter? His history, as gleaned from mining Web-based information sources can suggest some of the essentials, even if only a few principals enjoy real knowledge of what happened to lead up to the Marvel Comics purge of 1987.

Shooter the Fan

In some ways, Shooter's leap from fandom into the role of a comics writer (regardless of how DC might have defined his status) represents the fulfillment of the fantasies of many comics fans. More fans than the medium could ever absorb entertain notions of getting into the business, a daydream that must tease more cruelly in these days of a shrinking market that accepts little new talent even as it locks out new consumers.

Shooter began writing comics professionally at the age where most Americans attend junior high or middle school. This achievement alone would qualify him for the kind of contempt that jealousy breeds in those who resent the more fortunate; Shooter, in a real sense, got to live out an adolescent fantasy foreclosed to most.

Shooter the Writer

That Shooter should have managed an assignment writing Legion of Super-Heroes stories in the sixties marks him somewhat as an object of envy, though some reflection might bring to mind the tendency of juvenile talent to dead end early. Many prodigies come to bad ends, and move come to absolutely mediocre ends, enjoying most of a lifetime looking back on good old days that might have ended before they achieved majority.

His work on Legion of Super-Heroes stories, back when that feature did not yet warrant its own title (which it would ultimately achieve once it crowded Superboy out of his own book), has become something of a Silver Age archive canon piece. Even a few fans who generally (and, perhaps, reflexively) dislike his work as an adult grudgingly admit to liking his Legion stories.

Such artists as Adams, Kane, Wood, and Infantino, at various times during Shooter's adolescence, rendered pieces he had written. However, when Shooter reached adulthood he stepped away from mainstream superhero comics for a time to work on other pieces before coming, in his twenties, to Marvel, the other Big Two player.

Shooter mentions that he came on as an editor (in the aftermath of the loss of figures like Wolfman and Conway from Marvel in the early-to-mid seventies) with the prospect of writing books, but initially received very few writing assignments, his writing projects having fallen as casualties to a business downturn that had caused Marvel to contract output.

Shooter would do a few Daredevil stories (in the #140s) and later a number of Avengers stories, creating a few hard-hitting tales that bear anthologization well. When provided the opportunity to write, Shooter could produce electrifying tales such as the episode in Avengers when the Grim Reaper chose to decide, via a show trial, the identity and fate of his brother Wonder Man (and Wonder Man's onetime proxy, the Vision).

Shooter, however, played a larger role as an editor. In some ways he sought to reform the editorial side of Marvel Comics, even if received history attributes to him certain practices one might deem decadent by modern comics editorial standards. He devised incentive programs, intended a more rational reallocation of talent designed to improve the entire product line (abandoning the triage approach from before his tenure), and contrived occasional marketing gimmicks such as the now-tiresome megacrossover event.

As an editor, rather than as a writer, Shooter had his greatest impact on the medium, both on an aesthetic level and on a business level. In both particulars Shooter would also eventually become the target of harsh criticism.

Shooter the Editor: The Critical View

Shooter has maintained that Marvel had some decadent editorial practices in the seventies. As he tells it, Marvel would rate books by sales, then writers would divide the books amongst themselves based on a pecking order. "First-tier" writers would get "first-tier" books and "third-tier" writers would get "third-tier" books. Nothing, Shooter notes, about that particular system did anything to improve overall product quality. So, as he tells it, he encouraged a different view in which editors should treat all books as first-tier, allocating talent with the aim to making each title a bestseller. While the Law of Diminishing Marginal Returns must ultimately limit the success of such a strategy, it did much to allow books like Daredevil to break out of the doldrums, and also served to prevent Marvel Comics from suffering the kind of editorial stagnation that many associated with the product of rival DC Comics.

Critics of Shooter's reign as editor note that he came to a Marvel Comics with a minimal and efficient structure of editors and added new editors, then new tiers of editors, until the whole system dragged under editorial bloat and the swarming editors began to supersede the functions of other talent and began pursuing destructive empire-building policies.

This editorial decadence began to strain Marvel Comics' output as editors set up their separate turfs (for instance, impermeable and inviolable X-Men and Spider-Man domains). Then powerful and prominent editors arrogated to themselves the plum writing assignments, based less on talent than on pull. The satrap editors then sought ways to gouge out chunks of rival domains, sometimes through iffy projects like four-part crossover annuals and other events that seemed to serve editors first and readers not at all.

When, in the end, things began to collapse, Shooter became, so we hear, a casualty of the company in which he once played an important role. Too many bad things had begun to happen; too many talents had climbed over the fence to work for DC; too much friction existed, and too many people disliked him. One can glean from interviews that Shooter perhaps comes off humorless and unfriendly, and from this we can extrapolate that his management style differed somewhat from that of Stan Lee (whose infectious enthusiasm may have motivated talent even when Lee's decisions - including vicarious ones he carried out for others - could not have consistently pleased).

Nonetheless, descriptions of him as a pitchfork-wielding demon who might do things like cause John Buscema to vanish in a puff of sulfurous smoke tend to exaggerate and misrepresent his record. The fundamental dislike many fans and some professionals hold for him renders him vulnerable to conspiracy theories and no small portion of outright slander. When the latter begins to fly, we begin to lose the ability to extract the truth from the rant.

Shooter the Editor: The Apologistic View

In interviews, Shooter dismisses the diabolical version of his history without bothering to impugn the motives of his critics. Cynics might discount this as a desire to avoid litigation, but a detached view can speculate that this suggests Shooter does know some things about what the role of a gentleman entails.

He took a rap, he says, mainly because he provided the most recognizable target for organized fandom while Marvel Comics convulsed in the economic and legal turmoil involving the sale of the company in the late eighties. As he tells it, a tendency to speculate and the need to place the blame for the terrible things happening to talent, particularly to comics saint Jack Kirby, combined to focus all ills in a single target and to choose him for this function. One can question the accuracy of such claims while still respecting that Shooter could, for entire interviews, refrain from citing some narcissistic conspiracy in charge of inflicting his woes.

The double-bind scenario Shooter describes when telling of his last days with Marvel does not require a great suspension of disbelief, whether one chooses to believe it or not. His model describes Marvel as divided into talent and owners in those days, and himself straddling the two categories by having a pay scale typical of the low end of owners yet having to produce like talent. In the attempt to sell Marvel, he relates, the owners did everything to get money back from talent, particularly residuals and royalties, to increase the company's value to prospective buyers.

This placed him in an unenviable position. Talent still fights over the issues of royalties. The creators of properties like Superman and Captain America (or proxies for such creators) in the modern era contend for ownership now allowed by laws pertaining to intellectual rights. DC and Marvel and Archie (and, actually, everyone, more or less) find themselves in a web of litigation on such issues. Talent sues over reprint rights on back catalog. Marvel expected some of this even back in the eighties, and sought to foreclose the possibility preemptively by attempting to compel figures like Kirby into Faustian bargains over rights, going so far as demanding that Kirby deny ever having created any properties for Marvel Comics (also known as "The House that Jack Built").

The axe fell, and Shooter found himself with no friends. Many see this as a poetic kind of justice. Hopefully history will eventually dissipate the invective and allow the facts to show through.

Shooter the Pariah

Comics news stories and editorials, when Shooter fell from grace, quickly followed the blood through the water. Soon some clever soul dubbed Jim Shooter "The Nixon of Comics," a title either of considerable fitness or of irony.

The worst versions of Shooter's last days at Marvel (meaning those versions that cast him in the worst possible light) make him out as the willing and eager agent of greedy corporate suits out to cheat and mistreat the talent by whatever means possible. One can recognize the possibility of some truth in this without accepting the entire diabolical version of this onetime "golden boy" of comics.

If, however, Shooter did play the melodramatic role of legend into which tellings of the events of late-eighties Marvel Comics cast him, it seems little to have availed him. He found Marvel's door opened for him to leave and closed against his return whether he opened (or closed) it himself.

In effect, Shooter found himself blacklisted by the industry. This blacklist, however, unlike the historical counterparts in earlier stages in American history, seemed to contain only his name. Mainstream publishers, even if they wanted to use Shooter as talent, dared not; the prospect of working with or for Shooter could cause a preemptive defection of talent, even among professionals who did not enter the industry until over a decade after Marvel dispensed with his services.

Other comics professionals found their way into other lines of work. For instance, Herb Trimpe, in his tragic diaries, details his removal from comics and the difficulties faced by a man pushing sixty to enter a new line of work after four decades in another business.

Shooter, though somewhat younger than Trimpe's generation of talent, sought other options. He chose to stay in comics. For him, though, this meant something other than working for DC or Marvel.

Shooter the Entrepreneur

The machinations of owners who wanted to increase the resale value of the company by squeezing every penny it could out of the people who had worked for it, even by means like retroactive cancellation of royalties, provide the cause Shooter details for his downfall from Marvel. One can only imagine the antipathy a creator might feel at the notion that his royalties would end -- and that corporate lawyers would soon sue him to force him to give back royalties already received.

However, according to his own accounts, even as his position as a persona non grata kept him from the career he had begun over twenty years previously, he had an eye to the possibilities inherent in the long slide Marvel's new owners - New World Pictures - took as they managed to increase Marvel's financial hemorrhaging until a point at which Marvel lost a million dollars a day.

With the onetime leader of the comics market slouching towards the cemetery, Shooter considered the possibility of buying Marvel. He managed, with help, to raise venture capital to post a bid. This bid failed to win, place, or show, and Marvel Comics sold to another interest. Shooter nonetheless realized, even if he had failed in his purchase bid, that he could raise money and he could use this money to start his own comics company.

Hence, Shooter created Valiant Comics, the first of several companies he would found in a successive chain of diminishing success.

Shooter had a definite editorial vision for Valiant Comics, if one can accurately extrapolate from what remains on the printed page. He knew, from working in the business in a time where Stan Lee and Roy Thomas still meant something important in contemporary comics, that a controlling and focused editor could turn a stable of comics into a valid interconnected piece.

Nonetheless, early Valiant output enjoyed considerable vitality, particularly through the efforts of talent like Barry Windsor-Smith, Bob Layton, and Jim Shooter himself. That company's tightly-knit interconnectedness, combined with an apparent respect for consumers (as expressed through things like a relative lack of marketing gimmicks of the annoying Image Comics variety), created body of published work that enjoys considerable fan loyalty even after the demise, sale, and unconvincing rebirth of Valiant's properties under the Acclaim label.

Lee and Kirby (and Ditko) created the Marvel Universe from the roots up. Shooter, with Valiant, did create a number of concepts but also had a number of purchased characters (such as Magnus, Robot Fighter; Turok; and Doctor Solar) that he had to crowbar into a universe containing new creations and unified mostly through time-travel themes. Sometimes this fit seemed forced. For whatever shortcomings Valiant Comics had, though, it enjoyed a number of eminent talents (including the likes of Barry Windsor-Smith) and still, even in its aftermath, retains a considerable loyalty among the die-hard fans it created in its days as one of the "Big Four" comics publishers.

The comics speculation bubble that helped propel comics prices up and a number of flash-in-the-pan talents into a temporary prominence eventually burst, causing an across-the-board collapse in the market. The good, the bad, and the ugly all fell before this implosion, which remains the central condition of the modern market. Valiant suffered as much as anyone did, and eventually electronic game manufacturer Acclaim acquired Valiant's properties, and, for a time, attempted to continue Valiant titles.

Shooter the Wanderer

After Valiant, Shooter tried Defiant Comics. After Defiant, Shooter tried Broadway Comics. After Broadway, Shooter tried Daring Comics. Each subsequent bad end made it more clear that Shooter's experiments with starting new companies - with Shooter owning and controlling the properties - would not succeed. However, Shooter's stubbornness seems more an object of admiration than derision. He knew he had burned his bridges at Marvel Comics; furthermore, he had burned them so severely that DC dared not give him any work for fear of the many employees of that company who had come to view Shooter as diabolical either through experience or reputation. Yet even if his doom seemed to involve a future outside the comics industry, Shooter kept mounting that horse again.

By the time Shooter had begun to try yet again with Daring Comics, he found himself having to provide the outlay funds for printing of books. According to his own statements, his printer (Quebecor) would only print 5,500 copies of a title on the financial terms that Shooter had agreed to; and a knowledge of economies of scale would indicate that Shooter would fine himself very hard-pressed to break even on a run that small.

Shooter in the 2000s?

As this column nears completion (late in May, 2000), Jim Shooter's writing credit appears on the upcoming Unity 2000 book, a follow-up to the Valiant Unity crossover event from the 1990s, although produced by Valiant-line owner Acclaim Comics. Such a piece might suggest that Shooter has put his foot back in the door in an industry that doesn't seem to want him around any more, but one must make any shiny prognoses reservedly.

For instance, Another Universe, an online comics merchant, described the product derisively, asking if this piece might finally patch the holes in Valiant continuity. Can we hope for much when a merchant that sells a book pans it on the page from which buyers select it on-line? Perhaps Shooter's specialized expertise as editor and writer for the old Valiant line made him an inevitable, though unwelcome, choice for this project, a piece merchants may intend to sabotage by hostile sales tactics. If so, we may not see more of Shooter in the future.

In the very short term, however, Acclaim's Valiant properties seem foredoomed to failure. Acclaim, speaking of the Unity 2000 project and of other Acclaim pieces, denies an intent to quit publishing so often in recent public releases that it seems very likely that they intend exactly that. Completed pieces languish, waiting for orders sufficient to justify their publication. Diamond acknowledges its lack of intent to distribute, and Acclaim mentions that it will not attempt to publish anything like a monthly book.

We can probably expect a depressing demise of the Valiant concepts in 2000. However, Shooter's history suggests that he will try again.