I'm supposed to be on vacation right now, suitcases packed and all of that, but when I found out that Jim Shooter had passed away yesterday, I couldn't go without saying something about him here.
His death came as a surprise, but not as a shock. I was aware of his illness through Harry Broertjes, who'd been a friend of Jim's since he tracked the then-former, then-future Legion writer down in Pittsburgh in the mid-70s. Harry had been keeping the members of Interlac up-to-date with Jim's health problems, and I guess I'm kind of an honorary member because Harry also sends me his 'zine, The Time Cube. When I found out, I wasn't certain if it was for public consumption since the circulation of Interlac is tiny and it's really more of a private club, so after talking it over with Harry, I reached out to Jim himself. If he gave me the go ahead, I'd mention it, but anything less than that and I'd keep it to myself. Here's part of what I wrote:
"I know that your fans are Legion, and that they're in your corner. I'm assuming that you want to keep this private, otherwise I'd rally the troops. Hopefully, Big Jim Shooter hasn't written his last comic book yet!"
This was his response:
"Dear Glen,
I hope all is fine with thee and thine.
Thanks for the kind words. I'm hanging in, though I'm falling way behind on everything. The stuff they give me makes me sleep a lot. : )
Best to you and the troops.
Jim Shooter"
That was back in February. Since he didn't explicitly say to go ahead, I didn't. I thought that it might be uplifting for him if there was an outpouring of love and support from his fans, but at the same time, I erred on the side of caution. Then there was another update from Harry in April, and then the news today.
Jim's problems started last summer, and from here I'm going to quote from Harry directly. What follows originally appeared in The Time Cube 182, February 2025.
Jim Shooter collapsed in his hotel room and almost bled to death last July during GalaxyCon in Raleigh, North Carolina. The sound of a text from his assistant, which arrived several hours after his fall, roused him enough to respond that there was an emergency. The assistant, Brittany Byram, brought security to break into the locked and bolted room. Jim, then 72, was rushed to the hospital. It was three weeks until he could return home to Nyack, New York.
Cancer of the esophagus triggered his collapse. Jim told me Feb. 2 [2025] that the tumor burst a blood vessel, and he had almost bled out on the bathroom floor. Jim was semi-conscious during the ride to the hospital, and then passed out for three days. He said an intensive-care unit nurse told him later that she had never seen so many units of blood used to keep a patient alive. “We almost lost you several times,” he quoted her as saying. After he was stabilized, he was taken from the Raleigh hospital to Duke University Hospital 10 times for radiation treatments to seal off the bleeding.
Jim told me that signs of trouble appeared earlier in 2024, when he had trouble eating and suffered painful hiccupping. In May, doctors identified a tumor partially blocking the juncture between his esophagus and his stomach, and treatment began. Jim remained well enough to attend cons as a featured guest. “You have to make a living,” he said. Due to the cancer treatments, he experienced hair loss and extreme weight loss. Jim, who’s 6-foot-7, went from 265 pounds to a low of 176 pounds. When we spoke Feb. 2, he said he weighed 204.
Now, Jim is enrolled in a clinical trial at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He said his doctor believes the trial will yield “tremendous results.”
In the meantime, Jim said he has resumed limited convention appearances. And, “I’m sleeping a lot.”
Harry updated Jim's condition in the following Time Cube, April 2025:
Sorry my report on his health last time sounded so dry. While I was working on the zine I talked to his friend Debbie Fix, who broke the news to me. I reserved the first page for the news — Debbie assured me it wasn’t being kept secret — and continued on with the zine, prepared to write something whether Jim could talk to me or not. It turned out he could, but there was so much to pack into that page that it read like a newspaper story. I talked to Jim again on March 16. He said it wasn’t one of his better days, so it wasn’t a long conversation.
He said he had started a new treatment program for his esophageal cancer — the fourth. The one he was undergoing two months ago, which his doctors had high hopes for, turned out to have some unpleasant side effects. When Jim was going through tests prior to starting the new regimen, the doctor sent him to the emergency room because his blood count was dangerously low. He remained in the hospital for eight days. He was still having trouble swallowing, and the doctors used an endoscopic tool to stretch the connection between his throat and stomach. Jim said there are fewer bad effects now, although he’s still easily fatigued and doesn’t have much of an appetite. At one point his weight dropped to 170 pounds, which is basically skin and bones for a 6-foot-7 guy.
Unfortunately, the four-month delay between the scans he underwent in January 2024 to get clearance for knee-replacement surgery, and the time the cancer was identified on those same scans in May, was lost. Let’s hope his current treatment goes smoothly and successfully.
We all know how that worked out now. I was optimistic there would be a better result, but in my experience, cancer gets you sooner, not later. The part about it not being kept secret is why I'm comfortable sharing this now (and why it was okay for Harry to write about it before in Interlac). Once when I asked Jim if I could repeat something he’d said to me in an email, he told me that he stood behind everything he'd ever said. (Not an exact quote, but close enough, okay?) He didn’t say one thing in private and another thing in public, and he didn’t keep secrets — that was just the way he lived his life. He was forward, sometimes to the point of being blunt, which was part of why some people didn’t like him, and other people did.
Kind of sad that he still had to make convention appearances to help pay the bills, especially when he was sick, but comics don't come with a retirement plan.
Me n' Jim
I didn't really have a lot of contact with Jim Shooter over the years, so I wouldn't presume to call myself his friend. The first time we spoke was when I interviewed him for The Legion Companion back on January 25, 2003, and I remember it well. We'd had a snowstorm the night before, and the phone lines were down. It was a Saturday morning, and I repeatedly checked the landline to hear nothing next to my ear. This continued until ten minutes after the interview was supposed to start, when I finally heard a dial tone. I dialed his number, my tape recorder was running, and when he answered the phone, he didn't say anything about my being late. We spoke for a couple of hours, and the whole time I was worried that the phone lines would go out again.
When we were finished, he asked me where the interview was being published. When I told him that it was a book about the Legion from TwoMorrows Publishing, he said, "Oh, no! Not those guys!" and then went on to warn me about them. Some negative things had been said about him in The Jack Kirby Collector, and he thought they were out to get him. (Which is funny, because they weren’t, and after a couple of decades writing for them, I can say if there’s one company you don’t have to warned about, it’s TwoMorrows.) When some negative comments were published about him many years later in another TwoMorrows magazine, he was convinced of it! In between, my own work, and some other articles (including a cover story in Alter Ego), seemed to keep the peace.
The last time I spoke with him professionally was to tell him about my Dave Cockrum biography. It was to warn him, actually, because while he and Dave were friends (and former roommates), there were a couple of instances where they didn't see eye-to-eye, and I didn't leave those moments out. I assured him there was more good than bad in the book and offered to have the publisher send him a copy, but he declined my offer and said he'd buy it himself. It was either because he didn't want TwoMorrows to have his address or he didn't want to accept something from them, on principle. The why, he didn't say; it was more about the who.
My closest encounter with Jim Shooter was when we almost worked together on The Legion of Super-Heroes. He had returned to the series in 2007, and had big plans for a double, double-page spread (that's four pages put together) of a wedding scene which would be populated with oodles of characters as guests. He needed help with populating the wedding list, so he reached out to Harry Broertjes. Harry was busy, so Harry recommended me.
So one day I received an email from Shooter asking me if I would help him on an issue of The Legion of Super-Heroes, and you can imagine how I responded. There was no money involved, but I'd get my name in print! As a longtime fan of both the Legion and Jim Shooter, I was enthusiastic. There was only one problem, and I didn't tell Jim — or anyone — about it until right now: I hadn't read a single issue of the Three-Boot yet. Let me explain:
I had gotten into the habit of doing deep dives of first the Legion, then the Titans, while I was working on The Legion Companion and The Titans Companion 1 & 2. I would sit down with a big, long run, and read anywhere from an issue a day to (on one memorable occasion) fifteen issues (of The New Teen Titans, including one Annual, during the time it had 27 pages per issue, and lots of panels and lots of words on every page). There was one calendar year when I only read comics with the word Titans in the title, or were Titans adjacent. So I wasn't too worried about catching up on LSH; I'd get there, eventually. But now I was almost forty issues behind, and at an issue-a-day clip, that'd take over a month, and I didn't have a month. I read the whole work in two days, and my brain was bleeding Legion by the time I was through.
The funny thing is, it was all for nought because two weeks later, I received the following email:
"Dear Glen,
DC fired me today, so if they go ahead with the wedding at all, someone else will be writing it.
Thanks anyway, for the help.
Be well,
Jim"
It was months before his firing was made public, and the whole time people were oblivious online, thinking that he was still the Legion writer, and reading the issues he'd already written. Only I knew the truth! (Well, me and a few other people.) I went into detail about the whole thing over on my website, and I know people don't usually click the links here, but do yourself a favor and click this one. It goes into more detail about what happened, and in chronological order. It’s worth the read.
Good-bye, Big Jim. DC, Marvel, Valiant, Defiant, Broadway. Five careers in one. (Even a short stint at Dark Horse, reviving the Gold Key characters, and I count the New Universe as part of Marvel.) No one else has even come close to doing as much, or starting from scratch and building something out of nothing so many times. He sold his first story when he was thirteen years old; he was the kid who wrote comics. And if that had been it, that would've been enough. But then he ran Marvel Comics, and if that had been it, that would've been enough. But then Valiant, and Defiant, and Broadway, as the market shrunk and shrunk. He was filled with ideas, and could always come up with more. He could've been a prodigy who fizzled out, but he lived up to his potential, and maybe even exceeded it. He had talent as large as the man himself, and a legacy to match.
Other News
Things have been quiet this summer. The Strawman is still coming out in September, there are links at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and the detailed preview is still online here. Life goes on, as it always does.
'Till next time,
Glen
I forgot to mention that Jim also allowed me to reprint a piece he had originally written for DC's digest line (it actually eventually appeared in The Legion Outpost # 10) as the introduction to The Legion Companion. I wanted to update it grammatically so that it sounded like it was written recently, but he asked me to leave it as it was, so I did. My goal heading into making The Legion Companion was to have an introduction by Jim Shooter and a cover by Dave Cockrum, and I got both!
Great piece, Glen. Thanks for sharing.