When Jim Shooter raped Ms. Marvel (and other crimes against the Marvel Universe)

Cafe Society
1

I happened to come across this article about the infamous Rape of Ms. Marvel storyline in Avengers #200. I think I had read this article (or something along the same lines) a long time ago. In fact, I had read that very issue of “Avengers” when it came out.

I was 10 at the time, and only vaguely aware of sex in general (grew up in Catholic home, sex was discussed in only the most extremely vague ways), and was not too knowledgeable about the concept of rape. But I do remember there was something very “off” about the supposed seduction that had taken place. Of course, the whole storyline was bizarre to the extreme (and nowadays, I have to wonder how much cocaine the MC writing staff were consuming to come up with such a twisted Freudian mess), but it was that line – admittedly, with a subtle boost from Immortus’s machines – that really bugged me. The villain just brazenly confessed to using a mind-control device on Ms. Marvel, and nobody (not even the heroine herself) seemed to care! In general, I do agree with most of the points that the article makes about women in comic books in general.

Anyway, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The article writer Carol Stickland lays much of the blame for this fiasco on then-editor of the title Jim Shooter. And that’s what I’m really wondering about – the lasting reputation of Jim Shooter as a misogynist, homophobic, right-wing bigot.

During my comic-book reading adolescence, I did not read ‘Comics Journal’ or insider mags, or very much care too much about the behind-the-scenes creators of comic books (apart from perhaps artists - I would read any book George Perez drew because I liked his art style for instance.) I was only vaguely aware that Jim Shooter was this guy who seemed to have taken over Stan Lee’s job - communicating with the general readers via blurbs on the letters page, etc. It was only years later that I began hearing other comic book geeks make references to Jim Shooter being a controlling a**hole.

A few of the random ACCUSATIONS (not cited) I’ve heard leveled against Shooter –

  1. He adamantly insisted that that no LGBT people EVEN EXISTED in the Marvel Universe. Well, apart from two gay hustlers who attempted to rape Bruce Banner. Also, he demanded that John Byrne redraw / rewrite early issues of “Alpha Flight” that just subtly hinted that superhero Northstar was gay.

  2. He routinely killed any title that starred a female character (Ms. Marvel among them, but also She-Hulk and Spider-Woman) on the slightest drop in sales, while allowing tepid-selling, male-anchored books to chug along.

  3. He forced out popular writers who didn’t share his right-wing P.O.V. (as Steve Englehart claimed) and frequently dictated to writers plots with heavy-handed, conservative-leaning morals. (Such as when the archetypal Carter-era gov’t bureaucrat Henry Gyrich bullied the Avengers into pushing out fan-favorite Hawkeye to make way for the Falcon because of E.O.P. laws. That storyline in hindsight reads like it was written by a Tea-Party member.)

This is another article taking Shooter to task for the execrable Secret Wars II mini-series. The series has many, many flaws, but not least among them was that it seemed to only exist as a soapbox for Shooter to take potshots at liberal targets.

Anyway, I’m curious to hear what the teeming millions have to say on this topic. Granted that comic books had traditionally been slanted toward a white adolescent male audience and Shooter was hardly the only writer/editor to concoct questionable story lines. But whenever I read any article about him, typically accusations of bigotry and sexism come up. Or conversely, whenever I read an article about sexism or homophobia in comic books, there is invariably a mention about Shooter.

What are your thoughts?

2

I haven’t heard the “right wing” claims at all, but even though Steve Englehart was the best writer of the '70s, bar-none, he’s also a crazed loon. I would instantly discount everything he says regarding politics. (He once insisted highway signs in the UK pointed to “Facist Britain”). The fact that Englehart’s a screwball in real-life (apparently) still doesn’t change the fact that he was the best writer of Avengers, Dr. Strange, Justice League and Batman ever (IMO)

In addition, Shooter’s also responsible for making Hank Pym a spousal abuser.

I don’t buy the Gyrich/Hawkeye bit—the story worked too well and IIRC it was setting Hawkeye up for a solo mini-series. However the anti-gay stuff is certainly true–Shooter claimed that the Bruce Banner/rape thing was from Shooter’s own personal experiences (in Banner’s place).

The “rape” of Ms Marvel simply doesn’t work. At the time it came out, no-one thought of it as rape. It clearly was, but keep in mind, it was circa 1983 and people weren’t as open to the idea of date-rape, ect. If it wasn’t violent, it wasn’t really rape. It wasn’t until Chris Claremont revisited the story about 5 years later in Avengers Annual 10 that people said “Oh shit…yeah, it WAS rape.”

3

Shooter insisted on strict editorial control and getting work done by the deadline. Consequently, he ticked off a lot of people and lost a number of Marvel’s better artists and writers, who haven’t been inclined to say nice things about him. Regarding his attitudes towards sexism/homophobia though, I couldn’t say.

4

Shooter’s worst crime was cancelling Master of Kung Fu, my favorite comic of all time.

5

In 1983, quite a lot of people would have recognized that storyline as being about rape. Granted, those people probably weren’t reading comics, at least in part because comics like that one were getting published without anyone batting an eye.

6

I know very little about the details, but I do recall it being mentioned in passing that Shooter was putting together a group to buy Marvel Comics in the early 90s, and the employees so detested the concept that they asked Ron Perelman to be their white knight. They won, but Perelman was a disaster for the company and the person writing up the report said that even given that, Marvel was better off with Perelman.

7

Shooter didn’t bring right wing views to the Marvel universe - they were already there. Back in the sixties, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were strong conservatives.

Look at the references to the commies in these early stories here and here and here.

8

Sorry Miller, I disagree about the zeitgeist as a whole. Remember the whole “date rape” concept (as well as the concept of sexual harassment being a problem) hadn’t really taken off yet.

If you gave that comic (Avengers 200) to say, 100 random people, they would have gotten hung up on the “Immortus’s skeevy son Marcus just became his own daddy with Ms Marvel” thing and the fact that she had a…what? 10 day pregnancy. Remember, the only thing that makes it rape is that one throwaway line about “with a little help from my machines”…one panel, part of one word balloon. Today? We’re aware of roofies, aware that getting girls drunk to have sex with them is totally wrong (and we’re better for it) but back in the early '80s? Getting a girl drunk to take advantage of her was still a funny sit-com plot, not a serious crime.

There’s really no way to prove it, except that look at the resistance that the concept of “date rape” had in the latter part of the '80s and that harassment as a real problem had in the '90s.

9

The idea that disliking Communism in the 1960s makes you a “strong conservative” is laughably revisionist and ahistorical.

Lee and Kirby wrote nonstop in support of the civil rights movement at a time when doing so could get you banned in Southern magazine racks. Lee was still the publisher when Captain America renounced the United States in horror at Watergate. I’m sure there are things each of them believed that are not in line with Democratic Party values circa 2013, and there is no end of portrayals of minorities in old comics that make a modern reader wince, but at the time they were sticking their necks out for obviously liberal causes even when it put their business at risk to do so. Lee has also been hosting fundraisers for both Clintons for twenty years. Above criticism, of course not, but “strong conservative?” Ridiculous.

10

Ah, beat me to it Condescending Robot.

Show me a Marvel comic that argues for something like racial segretion and I’ll cop to them being more conservative.
I think they were left-leaning at the time, but in hindsight they come off as misogynistic and ridiculous.

11

Marvel (circa '74) published the first interracial kiss in comics (Iron Fist and Misty Knight) and took a huge circulation hit in the South.

IIRC, Luke Cage in '71 was the first black superhero to get his own mag. Black Panther was the first major black super-hero ever.

Lee and Romita did the 3-part drug issue that preceded the crappy Green Lantern story by Neal Adams/Denny O’Neill by several years…and they did it without the Comics Code–and forced the CCA to change as a result.

And, per the “Jim Shooter, Racist” thing? It’s fairly well-known in Legion circles that Ferro Lad was going to be black and Mort Weisinger shot it down because Unca Mort really WAS a douchebag racist. If it’d happened, I think Ferro Lad would have beaten Black Panther to the stands by about a year.

I dislike a crapton of what Shooter did at Marvel, and there’s no doubt that he was a homophobe (even by the standards of 1983, he was considered a troglodyte–people were really mad about the “gays rape Bruce at the Y” thing) but he was hardly the monster most people make him out to be.

Also? Spider-Woman was unreadable (Ann Nocenti was writing them, so whaddaya expect), Ms Marvel crashed and burned in the late '70s about the same time as the DC implosion (as did She Hulk). So I’m not sure there’s a case to be made there either. I’d have to see the actual numbers and the trending.

12

Lee went a bit further than just “disliking Communism” - he was writing stories about how the commies were planting secret agents in America and trying to overthrow the country by subversion and sabotage. His beliefs about Communism were in John Birch and Joe McCarthy territory - not the mainstream.

I will concede his views on social issues was not conservative. He advocated liberal views on racial issues.

Lee’s politics in the nineties were very different from his politics in the sixties. So his support for the Clintons really isn’t germane. It appears that sometime in the early seventies - probably as a response to things like Vietnam and Watergate and other events - his political beliefs moved away from the right.

13

So he was, uh, writing comic book stories?

14

It’s pretty well known that one reason for Steve Ditko’s break with Marvel in 1966 was due to conflicts between his conservative outlook (Ditko is a fervent exponent of Ayn Rand’s philosphy) and Lee’s left-wing liberalism.

On the other hand, it’s been reported that Jack Kirby considered Stan to be too conservative for his tastes.

Read http://www.examiner.com/article/steve-ditko-spider-man-s-forgotten-father and http://nobodylaughsatmisterfish.blogspot.com/2006/05/stan-lees-politics-dodgy-or-what.html

15

Yeah, if comic-book writers had to confine themselves to what was mainstream, we’d have titles like Accountant-Man and the Auditors of Doom.

Or G.I. Bill, about a veteran filling out benefits paperwork.

16

Rabid marvel fan since 1973 checking in.

Circa 1977, all my favorite Marvel writers ans artists were being squeezed out by Jim Shooter, including Steve Englehart and Steve Gerber. This did not endear me to Shooter one bit. But looking back at Englehart and Gerber’s 70s writing with a fresh eye decades later reveals that they were, in fact, not very good writers at that point; they were far out and underground-y, but their stuff simply did not make a whole lot of sense and it was poorly structured. Shooter was ultimately correct about them. Gerber grew in his craft aspect later, but Englehart kind of coasted on his cult status and wrote entertaining dialogue and crappy, self-indulgent plotlines for his next three shots at Avengers books (West Coast Avengers, Vision and Scarlet Witch, and that limited series featuring Mantis’s son) and an extended run on Fantastic Four.

Shooter shoved Gene Colan out the door. At his peak, Colan may have been the best artist Marvel had, but at the end of his 70s Marvel tenure he turned in loose, sketchy work with one or two panels per page. Mean Jim Shooter fired everybody’s favorite grandfather, but it was actually the right call.

And who did Shooter bring in to replace these guys? Claremont, Byrne, Austin and Miller did their first top-tier work for Shooter in the late 70s. They’d all done fill-in work here and there for earlier editors, but it was on Shooter’s watch that they became major stars.

I think Shooter killed a lot of the things that originally made me like Marvel Comics, but ultimately he made it stronger and more businesslike in an environment where other comics companies were taking major hits and falls. He deserves more credit than he gets.

17

Don’t forget Gabe Jones in Sgt. Fury in 1963, before “token” characters were even trendy.

And Shooter did everything to keep The Dazzler going, so, as usual, the immediate jump to bigotry has a perfectly acceptable explanation that the accusers’ blind spot is obscuring.

18

But even in comic book stories, you still pick who your villains are. That’s the whole point of fiction vs history. In history you can make the argument that the reason something is there is because that’s the way it happened. You don’t have that in fiction - the only reason something is in a story is because somebody made a decision to put it there.

So if America was being attacked by commie agents on a regular basis in Marvel comic books it was because the writers chose to put them there. And if communists were phased out as villains a decade later (which happened) it was also a conscious decision.

19

Shooter created Dazzler and had a personal stake in that character’s success. Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, and Spider-Woman were not his creations.

20

How the hell do you rape Bruce Banner?! I almost have to agree with the reading of the story that Bruce was aroused or something, I mean the guy literally turns into a monster when stressed.