I heard about Jim Shooter's death last week, and I've seen obituaries almost every day since from comics professionals who got their start under him in the late 1970s and early 80s. Every obituary talks about what a divisive figure he was, but every obituary also talks about his kindness to them personally. There might be some survivorship bias here, in that the people who really had problems with him are probably keeping their thoughts to themselves, but it's still interesting that so many comics creators have banded together to praise him.
I always knew of him as the guy who got his start, aged 13, writing for the Legion of Superheroes for DC. When I was 13 myself, that was kind of mind-blowing, the thought that someone like me could do something like that. And while I never got to that level, that story is probably buried somewhere in my writing DNA, as one of my influences. Certainly it helped that he was associated with one of my favorite books.
He was also editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics in the 80s, which is where his reputation as a difficult person comes from. On the one hand, Marvel created some of its best comics under his leadership, like the Chris Claremont years of Uncanny X-Men and various sagas in the Spider-Man books. Daredevil got dark and gritty under Frank Miller and the Punisher became one of Marvel's most popular characters (for better or for worse), and big crossovers became a thing, starting with Shooter's own miniseries Secret Wars.
On the other, a lot of that period has been criticized as unadventurous both in terms of plotting and art. I've heard rumors that Shooter insisted on strict 2x3 grids with figures confined to each panel, and while Todd McFarlane has disputed it, it's true that panel layouts grew more adventurous after Tom DeFalco replaced him as editor-in-chief.
Plotwise, Shooter has been blamed for the lack of LGBTQ representation in Marvel until the 90s - to hear Claremont tell it, Shooter was instrumental in vetoing any same-sex relationships between Kitty Pryde and Rachel Summers or Illyana Rasputina, as well as Claremont's (frankly bonkers, but in the best way) idea for Nightcrawler's parentage: that the shapeshifter Mystique, who'd been implied to be his mother, was actually his father, and that Mystique's long-term lover Destiny had been Nightcrawler's birth mother. This plot point has since become canon in the comics, but you have to wonder where the characters could have gone if the creators had been allowed to tell these stories back then.
On the positive side again, a number of tributes to Shooter have also highlighted how he worked to get royalties and fairer contracts for freelancers at Marvel, and how those contracts were then abandoned after he left. Given how many creators were left out in the cold while the characters they created made millions for Marvel, it certainly adds some nuance to the controversy over Shooter.
In the end, being editor-in-chief of Marvel at that time must have been a pretty thankless job: riding herd on a bunch of fractious creatives who wanted to tell more advanced stories than what superhero comics usually featured, while also fighting his bosses in corporate over spending. There may have been some poor decisions on his part, or they may have seemed heavy-handed to creators who didn't get their way. That said, given how Marvel nearly went out of business in the 90s amid the speculator boom and an attempt to buy the main distributor, Diamond, maybe Shooter wasn't that bad?
Whatever the truth of the matter, it's notable that the stories I've read about him this week have highlighted those same points: Shooter gave a lot of people their breaks in the business, and he made sure various people got the credit they deserved for ideas that made it to print. He wasn't perfect, as so many of these tributes point out, but then, who is?
