Jim Shooter
| The name or term "Jim" refers to more than one character or idea. For a list of other meanings, see James (disambiguation). |
Jim Shooter (born September 27, 1951) is a comic book writer and editor. Shooter is perhaps best known for serving as Marvel's editor-in-chief during the mid-1980s.
He worked on a number of story treatments for toy companies and had an acrimonous relationship with sister company Marvel Productions, claiming they thought little of the comics company (to the extent of ignoring Marvel Comics treatments for toy properties) and that the relationship didn't improve until Margaret Loesch took over. One property he worked on including a proposed transforming-robot toyline borrowed from Japan... called Mysterians, which never got made after Knickerbocker Toys was bought out by Hasbro. Hasbro came to Marvel to work on a treatment for their transforming robots and Shooter wrote the initial six-page treatment for The Transformers. He then handed it over to Denny O'Neil to do character treatments for it but considered O'Neil's work to be "cranked out, pithless stuff"[1] and went looking for another writer-editor to do it. Bob Budiansky was given the job after Shooter's first few choices turned it down. [2]
Notes
- Shooter sold his first professional comic story, an issue of Legion of Super-Heroes, when he was 14 years old.
- After being the ongoing writer for some time, he then briefly retired from comics because he graduated high school.
- Shooter also helped develop the concept of the company-wide crossover, beginning with Marvel's Secret Wars.
- Basically, if you're reading Marvel or DC Comics today, you owe the man.
- (nobody mention Warriors of Plasm.)
