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Legendary comic creator and editor Jim Shooter has died at the age of 73 after a long battle with esophageal cancer. Writer Mark Waid broke the news on social media.
Shooter began working in comics at the age of 13 in 1965, having created and submitted a story featuring teen heroes the Legion of Super-Heroes on notebook paper after discovering comics during a hospital stay. DC editor at the time Mort Weisinger was impressed with the story, hiring Shooter without realizing he was just a teen himself, sparking Shooter’s long career in the industry.
Shooter became a breadwinner for his family at age 14, moving with his parents from Pittsburgh to New York City to work in the DC offices when he wasn’t at school, skipping college to take a short-lived job as an editor at Marvel Comics. After a stint in advertising, Shooter returned to writing at DC, taking on Superman for a time before making his way back to Marvel in 1975 for a more successful career as a writer and editor.
Shooter’s rise through Marvel’s ranks was lightning fast, leading to him becoming the editor-in-chief of the venerable publisher after just three years, in 1978. Shooter began pushing Marvel toward a stronger crossover audience with multimedia tie-ins for the publisher’s comic line, including the groundbreaking Secret Wars crossover, which launched as both a comic book and a tie-in toy line simultaneously in 1984.
Shooter himself wrote Secret Wars, pioneering the concept of a company-wide comic book crossover that pulled in all of Marvel’s biggest heroes and villains to do battle on a far-flung planet – a story that will now influence the upcoming films Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars.
While editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics, Shooter developed a double-edged reputation as a stickler for the quality and timeliness of every comic in the line, which led many creators in his employ to occasionally resent his hands-on editorial methods even as their comics became more and more popular with fans.
After leaving Marvel in 1987, Shooter helped co-found Valiant Comics, developing a whole superhero universe including heroes such as X-O Manowar, Bloodshot, and more, who have managed to remain perennial presences in the comic industry through multiple relaunches and changing of hands for Valiant as a publisher.
Throughout the ’90s and ’00s, Shooter remained a key part of the comic industry, eventually returning to the Legion of Super-Heroes, who started his career, for a truncated run in the mid-’00s. He also took a second swing at running Valiant, and developed several other short-lived publishers in the ’90s.
Jim Shooter loomed large over the comic industry (and not just because of his towering, nearly seven-foot-tall frame). While his methods as an editor have remained controversial in the minds of many creators who worked underneath him, the remnants of the world he helped build in the Marvel Comics of the ’80s still resonate today, especially in the MCU, which has been digging deep into the Shooter era – especially the impending film adaptation of Avengers: Secret Wars.