First-Person Shooter

This book is not primarily about Jim Shooter, but about the range of comics published during his tenure as editor-in-chief.  Yet it is appropriate that the introduction begin and end with him:  Marvel's successes and failures during the 1980s reflected the strengths, weaknesses, and contradictory imperatives of Shooter's own work as a writer.  HIs mandate to make the protagonists' conflict between desire and duty demanded attention to character at the same time that it rendered these character beats clumsy and schematic.  The necessity of completing most stories in a single issue (a Shooter diktat) did him no favors when he returned to The Avengers, while his bottom-line preference for company wide crossovers undermined everything that made him an otherwise good writer: there was little room for the niceties of fine dialogue or character work. The results were often more marketable than they were memorable. 

It would be tempting to write off the entire decade of Marvel's output with the same words, but it would also be sorely unfair.  Though most of Marvel's best creators of the 1970s fled not long after Shooter took over, a number of teams at Marvel managed to produce excellent work that is still acclaimed to this day.  In some cases, they hit the sweet spot combining the artistic and the commercial; in others, they took advantage of editorial benign neglect of failing titles; and, in a third, they availed themselves of the opportunities provided by Marvel's brief experiments with new publishing imprints that provided much greater latitude.  Overworked and spread too thin, Shooter was poorly equipped to exploit the loopholes in the system he helped create, but a small group of newcomers (and even smaller collection of veterans) found a way to make theirs Marvel.

Next: Chapter One: Surviving the Experience (Chris Claremont and the X-Men)