Why Jim Shooter was fired from Marvel

About the time I started working at Marvel in 1984 there was a storm gathering. A few of Marvel’s top freelancers had been coming to Jim with copies of comics from other countries in hand that they had not been paid royalties for. Jim tried to look into it and was put off several times. These were some of Marvel’s biggest names on some top-selling books. In 1985 the X-Men team went on a “world tour” and saw copies of foreign reprints first hand. Heck, they were signing books they hadn’t gotten paid royalties on. Researching the problem, Jim found out that things were worse than he thought. Marvel wasn’t paying royalties on toys, either. Finally he cornered the Chief Financial Officer but he was informed that it would cost more to figure the foreign and toy royalties than they were worth so Marvel wasn’t going to bother. Jim pointed out that Marvel was contractually obligated. The CFO didn’t care. 

In the following months Jim went over the CFO’s head to the president of the company. Then he went to the board of Cadence. What he did not know at the time was that Cadence Industries was already trying to sell Marvel and was doing every penny-pinching thing they could to make the bottom line look attractive to buyers. So he got nowhere. At one point Jim threatened to resign and the president of Marvel asked him to stay. Jim said a condition of him staying was that his people be paid. The president promised to do it. Then Cadence sold the company and the delays made sense. But the president refused to honor his promise. 

So Jim took his appeal to the new owners, New World Pictures. He brought up the problem very early on to the new owners and they promised to look into it and fix it. Time dragged by with no results. 

Here was Jim’s dilemma throughout this situation: he knew Marvel was screwing over his people but if he told them what was happening they would walk. As time went on Jim was under increasing pressure to explain why people weren’t being paid and he couldn’t tell them. An executive of a company has a contractual and fiduciary responsibility to protect the company they work for. He was a vice president of Marvel at this time. Telling the freelancers, even some whom he considered long-time friends, would absolutely harm the company. He just couldn’t do it. 

As his friend and coworker, I was in Jim’s confidence at the time and I saw first hand how much the situation tore him up. I often wished I had a solution to offer, but I’m no business person. All I could do was listen and trust him to handle it. I had noticed for a while that a few of the editors and some freelancers were increasingly dissatisfied and vocal about their complaints around the office. It was worrying. A group of them confronted Jim at one point to air their grievances. 

Jim couldn’t take it any more. He met with New World management and threatened them with a class-action lawsuit. We spoke about it the night before that meeting and he said it was going to be the biggest gamble of his life. He hoped his value to the company might win out, but it didn’t. He rolled the dice and lost. They fired him almost immediately. 

Ironically, Marvel was forced to start paying royalties and incentives because they assumed the secret was out. But Jim didn’t retaliate. He still felt a responsibility to the company he helped make successful. He wanted Marvel to prosper, even without him, and he wouldn’t do or say anything to hurt them. He also later attempted to buy Marvel, but that’s a story for another day. 

After Jim was ousted, we heard that a few editors he had disagreements with organized a Ding Dong the Witch is Dead party. Coworkers who thought they could do his job and employees who thought they knew their jobs better than Jim did spread the fiction that THEY got Jim fired because they disagreed with him. It was expedient for Marvel’s management to let them think that. It got the blame off of the real scumbags. Some of Jim’s former coworkers were so aggrieved that when staffers packed up his office they systematically broke the glass on every piece of framed art, before packing it up, and made sure to damage anything fragile just to make sure Jim would know it was intentional. That’s what a nasty few hateful people there were. It wasn’t everyone at Marvel, and it wasn’t even a majority of the staff. But a few bad guys can poison a work environment. 

I’m sure people familiar with corporate business have wondered about the implausible fiction of the “Jim Shooter had disagreements with a few editors and freelancers that led to him being fired” story that was widely circulated. A few disgruntled employees are not a valid reason for a company to fire a top executive with a long history of producing for them. Jim may have been reckless in doing what he did, but he felt he had no choice. 

This post won’t go viral. It was a long time ago. And as Mark Twain is supposed to have said, “A lie will travel around the whole world before the truth gets its boots on.” Jim had long ago learned the painful lesson that you can’t control what other people do; you can only control how you react to it. And he always took what he called “the high road”.  

As to why Jim didn’t write this story himself on the blog, I can only speculate. I suggested it, and he said he didn’t want to. He didn’t explain why. But in 1998 he had a book deal from a major publisher and was writing a book about his history with the business side of the comics industry. I will be posting excerpts from his $uper Villains book proposal starting next week. 

The X-Men Team’s 1985 European Tour blog post