THOUGHTS ON JIM SHOOTER

Jim Shooter passed on the last day of June this year. I won't be writing a general overview of his work, given that I only knew his Marvel and DC accomplishments, and almost nothing about his efforts for companies like Valiant. Defiant and Broadway. But I'll cover a few career highlights (and lowlights) here.

 

I'm sure almost every Shooter-obit will mention that he sold his first scripts to DC Comics, via mail, at the age of 14. Shooter became well known for improving the often staid adventures of DC's team of futuristic super-teens, the Legion of Super-Heroes, by crafting more engaging melodramatics and a greater use of action. By the middle 1960s, some long-time DC artists had started using greater dynamism in their stories, such as Gil Kane in GREEN LANTERN and Mike Sekowsky in JUSTICE LEAGUE, probably as a response to the increased popularity of Marvel's action-heavy product. But Shooter brought the sensibilities of a fan-reader to these early scripts: he wrote the sort of things that he, as a teen, liked reading. That included a greater emphasis on battle-scenarios, and even the often stodgy SUPERMAN books under editor Mort Weisinger were improved on that score. I'm sure many obits will mention that Shooter created a new recurring foe for the Man of Steel: the Parasite, who could drain off Superman's powers and then use those powers to beat the snot out of the hero. But I have a nostalgic preference for his script for SUPERMAN #191. In it, the Kryptonian must fight against DEMON, an evil cabal with fantastic weaponry, to keep the agents from obtaining a forbidden artifact. This issue might be the only time long-time Super-artist Al Plastino even came close to rendering the sort of hyperkinetic action one expects from American comic books. 

  Shooter left DC for a few years, and then came back and wrote a few more stories. But he would prove more important as an editor at Marvel, particularly when he rose to the position of the company's chief editor in 1978. All reminiscences of the period seem to agree that Shooter came into Marvel when there was something of a power vacuum, and that the company was losing a lot of money on ventures with dubious commercial potential-- some fan-favorites like the McGregor KILLRAVEN, some unlikely "throw-stuff-against-the-wall" creations like THE GOLEM and GABRIEL DEVIL HUNTER. Shooter imposed a greater editorial authority over Marvel raconteurs for the next nine years, and although he made the trains run on time, many long-time employees, among them Doug Moench, complained of micro-management that limited creativity. Back in the day, I protested the regimentation of the Shooter regime by writing a negative JOURNAL review of the 1984-85 SECRET WARS. Not that my review, or anyone else's. made any difference to the success of that maxi-series. The sweet deal that Shooter or his reps negotiated with Mattel Toys got the comic book promoted on TV alongside Mattel's SECRET WARS toy line-- and so WARS was a big hit for Shooter. (I never knew why afterward Marvel kept adapting toy lines that DIDN'T promote the comics on TV. With the exception of G.I. JOE and maybe TRANSFORMERS, most of the toy-adaptations went down the tubes.)

  Now, in those days, Shooter represented the apogee of mediocre commercial comics to the JOURNAL and its readers. I can't claim I didn't channel some of this virulent anti-Shooterism at the time, but I think I was at least aware that some creators, such as Frank Miller and Walt Simonson, produced good-to-great works under Shooter's editorial aegis. Gary Groth's take was more adversarial-- if a company wasn't producing what he deemed "great art," it was worthless. (Note how, on the JOURNAL cover above. Shooter is getting dubious looks from many characters from "alternative comics:" Rorschach, Mister X, Mister Monster, Zippy the Pinhead, and Ed the Happy Clown, for five.) By the early 1990s, the JOURNAL's devaluing of all commercial comics was so complete I for one quit submitting to the editors, since I believed that a critic had to be able to appreciate excellence in any form.       

    I don't remember finding any excellence in any of the stories Shooter wrote during his nine years at Marvel: not even the excellence of good formula comics, like LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES . However, as an editor he helped deliver the balls-to-the-wall, super-melodramatic conclusion of the "Dark Phoenix Saga " in X-MEN 137. As many fans know today, originally the X-MEN creators Claremont and Byrne had meant to deliver a fairly low-impact, cop-out (IMO) conclusion to the story. Shooter insisted that Dark Phoenix had to pay a price for succumbing to her cosmic killing-rage, and whatever one might think of imposing moral judgments on ficitonal characters, in this case Shooter's instincts were better, for that particular story, than those of Byrne and Claremont. It didn't matter to me then, and doesn't matter to me now, that Phoenix and Jean Grey would be revived many more times, in many more permutations. All that matters now was that the original story delivered a good finish to its dramatic action. Without Shooter, X-MEN fans might not have had that.

And for that accomplishment, I can even forgive SECRET WARS.