No one will speak up for Jim Shooter? I will, then.
Editors in comics––Editors-in-Chief especially––always have very mixed track records, and Shooter is no exception. Certainly the firing of beloved illustrator Gene Colan sat badly with people, but Shooter turned Marvel's sales around during a slump that really seemed to be due to missed deadlines. And while writer Steve Englehardt was either forced out or departed due to Shooter's attempts to make the trains run on time, Shooter hired him again later on for the West Coast Avengers, home to one of Englehardt's best stories, "Lost in Space-Time." And while Shooter gave important jobs to and helped make a superstar penciller out of John Byrne, he did fire him eventually (to be fair, Byrne thought he could write and draw Fantastic Four for Marvel and Superman for DC at the same time––Byrne allegedly burned Shooter in effigy at a party held to celebrate Shooter's eventual firing from Marvel). Shooter was a writer of mostly aggravating, disappointing comics material himself, and he had an attitude towards story and art many artists at the company found exasperating, but he enabled several Marvel properties to develop lasting sophistication and depth where there had sometimes hardly been any to begin with. The most notable here has to be X-men, where Shooter defended writer Chris Claremont for years from most attempts to usurp his control of the title, recognizing, as he said to editor Louise Simonson, that Chris was, in his words, "writing a modern novel" with the book. Even there, an editor can be enabling and helpful one minute, and screwing the artist up the next, and Shooter did preside over the X-factor comic, the second attempt to franchise the X-men, and an attempt to expand the franchise beyond Claremont's coterie––which ended up nearly disintegrating in his hands, and was rescued by Claremont associates Louise and Walter Simonson. Shooter presided over the move from newsstands to dedicated comic shops, leading to Marvel helping to set up comic shops around the nation. A deal with a retiring employee led to the creation of the direct comics market. Pressures to maximize profits rose as Marvel was bought and sold, and Shooter was fired ultimately for his last and maybe most important action, establishing a royalty system for the artists who worked on Marvel comic books. After that, in keeping with his personal aesthetics, he masterminded one of the most homely, blandest superhero comic lines imaginable, the Valiant Universe (later resurrected by a lot of much less inhibited artists and writers.
As a creator, or ringmaster, Shooter ushered in the era of blockbuster event comics, writing the childish but extremely successful Secret Wars, then bringing much more extravagant literary ambitions to the desperate folly of Secret Wars II. And his bold venture to create the much-promoted flop, the New Universe, was an abject failure which impacted the health of the company as a whole. As a writer, Shooter is famed for an early run on Legion of Superheroes at DC, mostly done when he was a teenager. Later, as EIC of Marvel, Shooter's stories frequently put the pressures of being an editor-in-chief first and foremost in the story. This is a dominant theme of both the notable Avengers mini-epic, The Korvac Saga (Korvac has power over every living thing, the Avengers try to stop him, and one of them discovers––after they ruin his life by making him kill them in front of his girlfriend and then he makes himself disappear for good––that he really intended to do good with his godlike abilities, and the Avengers ruined it for the universe. And Secret Wars replays that same storyline with Dr. Doom in charged of ultimate power. When he wasn't making godlike author-insert characters with ultimate power, but whose good intentions everyone misunderstands, Shooter was writing embarrassingly about what one might suspect was his own sex life in the pages of the awful New Universe title, Starbrand. The most stomach-churning examples of twisted sexual politics in his writing, however, comes from his contribution (along with three other credited writers, but with significant oversight on the project) to his most infamous credit, on Avengers issue 200––a comic which prompted Carol Strickland's quintessential piece of comics criticism of the era, "The Rape of Ms. Marvel." Shooter was gracious enough to let a furious Chris Claremont take over an Avengers Annual to write a rebuke of the issue in fiction, introduce the new character Rogue for good measure, and then take his beloved Ms. Marvel away from the Avengers writers. In later years Shooter has denied writing the book, though he has a plotting credit and takes responsibility for publishing it. But the theme of the story is the same as many of his others, that of the all-powerful man whose good intentions the heroes mistrust, causing them to turn on him, essentially hurt his feelings, and then he uses his power to disappear forever. It's all pretty wild; it's comics history. EICs immediately after Shooter plunged Marvel into the depths of despair over the next few years, leading to bankruptcy, leading to the movies, etc., etc. But Shooter always kept the action hot in the comics themselves, where it always belonged.
So many ups and downs. What is an editor, for good or ill? For X-men fans especially, we got to where we got to be thanks in no small part to Jim Shooter backing his best writer of the era in his grandest ambitions. Shooter himself was an interesting guy; he starts in comics at a ridiculously young age, and is essentially what we might call a prodigy in the medium. As EIC, he was younger than most of his Marvel staff, telling them all what to do, and frequently turning out to be right about it. As he got older, the limited horizons afforded to him with his success in his chosen field made him a writer without a lot of natural subject matter, and seemed to atrophy his somewhat limited sense of what made an interesting comic book. In spite of lots of Shooter's effort, Marvel did not develop an "evergreen" graphic novel during his tenure, to match DC's classics from the time, Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, and Batman: Year One (though perhaps X-men: God Loves, Man Kills or Elektra: Assassin should have been a similar kind of success and simply wasn't). You could make the case that Shooter was out of Marvel at exactly the last point an EIC could have such a vast personal impact on what went out the door at Marvel. Afterwards, corporate raiders saw to it that few such people harbored artistic ambitions for a long time afterwards––though I think some of the more aggressive and ambitious editor-in-chiefs of later eras, like Bill Jemas and Axel Alonso, took a page from Shooter.
For me, he was a fascinating figure in the background of the era where I became hopelessly lost inside comics. Claremont and Louise Simonson's writing on X-men books bewitched me as a kid––reading, I felt like I was for the first time being given privileged access to the world of how adults thought. And Annie Nocenti introduced me to Marshall McLuhan in a New Mutants Summer Special. Shooter backed all these writers, either putting them in that place or keeping them there, so I could read the best things they would do. It's impossible to feel about the Editor-in-Chief the way you do about the principal auteurs of the work––and Shooter's own artistic record is batsh*t crazy, and no measure of success or appeal. But I have a soft spot for him, I guess, as the organizer of the first great show of my life, before the movies––and, these days, my job, sort of. So, thanks Jim Shooter, I think.