Jim Shooter

Born in 1951 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Jim Shooter defined himself as comicsÕ original teenaged wunderkind by selling Legion of Super-Heroes stories to editor Mort Weisinger at the tender age of fourteen. Having no idea how comics scripts were actually produced, Shooter submitted his tales as full pencil roughs with complete dialogue ballooned in; in fact, his first published Legion story used such roughs as pencil layouts, inked by veteran Sheldon Moldoff. Under ShooterÕs deft hand, the individual Legionnaires for the first time began to evidence distinct personalities and snappy, contemporary dialogue. Given permission to focus on smaller groupings of heroes rather than the entire Legion en masse, Shooter put the team through some of its most epic and most fondly remembered adventures before leaving the comics field entirely in the late 1960s. He revisited the Legion briefly in the mid-1970s before embarking on a second-phase career that eventually led to a nine-year tenure as editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics. Shooter went on to found three new comic book publishing companies - Valiant, Defiant and Broadway - in the early 1990s before returning to freelance writing in the 2000s. In 2007 he penned a 12-issue run on DCÕs fifth LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES series, and he is currently scripting the adventures of his former Valiant features - Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom, Magnus, Robot Fighter, Turok, Son of Stone and Mighty Samson - for Dark Horse Comics.