Under New Management

Unlike any previous editor-in-chief at Marvel, Jim Shooter saw his job in terms of the entire publishing line.  This is not to say that his predecessors ignored this or that comic, or that they didn't try to develop new publication patterns or formats. And it certainly does not mean that they did not care about consistency. Marvel was the first comics company to really conceive of its characters as part of a (mostly) coherent universe.   It was under Stan Lee's reign that continuity became, if not king, then at least an occasionally valued ombudsman. Teaders who spotted inconsistencies could earn "no-prizes" (i.e., nothing) for pointing them out. If this spurred a particular type of obsessiveness among fans, well, it also sustained their interest. And it would rarely result in the solipsistic trap that DC would repeatedly fall into after Crisis on Infinite Earths:  an in-universe obsession with the nature and transformation of the comics universe and its continuity.  Marvel was more of an immersive storyworld than it was a coherent product line. 

Shooter took over Marvel at a time when the industry seemed to be in peril: years of expansion were being followed by a significant contraction (more dramatic at DC, but still felt at Marvel).  He instituted changes that homogenized and regularized the company's output with an eye to new readers:  each issue's splash page would feature a narrative box at the top, restating the book's premise.  Long, meandering plotlines and multiple issue arcs were strongly discouraged in favor of single-issue stories (with the X-Men always an exception--the comic was growing too successful to mess with a wining formula).  

Wait, who is giving this page to whom?

Perhaps the most corporate thing Shooter did was to remind his writers and artists, many of whom started as fans and had serious aspirations for their own work, that the characters and books they loved did not belong to them.  Of course they knew this in a logical, practical way (their meagre paychecks and job insecurity would have been early clues), but Shooter was dismissive of their emotional attachments.  As an editor, he helped encourage a trope that would quickly become cliche:  the hero abandons his costumed identity, which is taken up by someone new.  Such changes were almost always temporary, of course, but Shooter could be brutal about his demands for a shake-up when he was unhappy with a book's performance.  Along with his collaborators, Doug Moench had spent a decade developing Shang-Chi and his supporting cast; is it any wonder that he balked at Shooter's order to turn the hero into a villain and kill off everyone else?

Marvel in the 1980s did not eliminate a personal relationship with a given comic so much as it changed the parties involved.  Creators who did not want to follow Shooter's seemingly arbitrary edicts could either relent, walk away, or be summarily dismissed.  The changes he demanded may not have been emotionally rooted in the character development and previous ongoing storylines, but they had to be followed.  Steve Rogers would stop being Captain America (again), Iron Man would fall off the wagon (again) and hand the armor over to his friend Rhodey, Spider-Woman was abruptly (and temporarily) killed off when her book was cancelled, and Ms. Marvel's handling was so egregious that it gets its own section of Chapter 2. Shooter saw himself as the guardian of the company's intellectual property, but his editorship, though corporate, was not cool-headed and disinterested.  The personalized relationship between the creators and their comics was now supplanted by a personalized editorship. 

 Next: Portrait of the Editor as a (Very) Young Man