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All week long: Revisit the highlights and lowlights of 1987 with Popverse's Made in 87 week.

April 1987 was a big month for Marvel Comics — but not because of any comic book issue that hit the stands. (Sorry, The Punisher #1, which was released April 7 that year.) Instead, the month proved to be important because it saw the departure of editor-in-chief Jim Shooter, ending an 11-year tenure with the company that he had worked to recreate in his image with no small success… and no small amount of frustration and upset on behalf of the writers and artists that worked under him in the process. But what drove him out after more than a decade? The answer might center around how poorly those same writers and artists were being treated.

Contemporaneous reports of Shooter’s departure were simultaneously blunt and vague. “JIM SHOOTER FIRED” yelled the headline in The Comics Journal #116, but the subhead added, “Marvel cites no reason.” The story itself points to an unnamed but “informed” source that claims, “tension between the management and Shooter lay behind the dismissal.” Marvel spokesperson Steve Saffel, by contrast, was quoted as saying, “Jim had been editor-in-chief for ten years. The time just came for a change.”

In his time as editor-in-chief, Shooter’s Marvel had uncovered major talents like Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz, published character-defining runs on titles including Uncanny X-Men, Daredevil, and Thor that inspired comics and movies for decades later, and introduced concepts and titles like Secret Wars, X-Factor, and New Mutants that would become fan favorites. Yet he was also seen as an overbearing presence whose editorial demands once resulted in a creative team rewriting and re-drawing an entire comic book in just a couple of weeks in order to make a deadline. Whatever the tensions were between the hard-headed editor and Marvel might have been, both sides kept their mouths shut and let the speculation — from fans, professionals, and industry watchers alike — mount.

Well, they kept their mouths shut for a few decades, at least.

In 1987, the iconic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon debuted - and all our lives were changed. Watch this reunion of the original voice actors:

In 2011, Shooter made the case on his own website that he’d “driven out by the corrupt bastards who were running and raping the place at the time,” arguing that Marvel management at the time was incompetent and attempting to cash out by selling the company and disappearing with the proceeds. “I was fired from Marvel NOT because, as virtually EVERYONE thinks, because of anything that happened that had anything to do with the comics, the comics department, the staff or the creators, contract or freelance. I WAS FIRED BECAUSE WHEN MARVEL WAS SOLD TO NEW WORLD PICTURES I BLEW THE WHISTLE ON MARVEL’S CORRUPT MANAGEMENT,” Shooter wrote passionately. “A couple of months later, I was fired. That’s the chance you take as a whistle-blower.”

Turns out, that might not have been the complete story. After Shooter’s death in July 2025, his friend and confidant JJ Jackson offered a more nuanced take on what she believed occurred. Shooter, in her words, had been working to discover why the company was failing to pay Marvel creators royalties owed, only to be stonewalled by executives at both Marvel and parent company New World Pictures.

"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,” Jackson wrote — so Shooter seemingly decided it was time for a Hail Mary pass.

“He met with New World management and threatened them with a class-action lawsuit,” Jackson continued. “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.”

So… why was Jim Shooter fired from Marvel in 1987? Perhaps he tried an extremely outrageous solution to the problem of unpaid royalties, as Jackson alleges. Maybe he was fired for whistleblowing on the former owners of the company by the new owners, as unlikely as that might seem. Given that so many of the players in this story are no longer with us, we may never know the full story.

Who knows? Perhaps the time had just come for a change.

Get your wide-shoulder blouses and your Members-Only jackets, and go back in time with Popverse's Made in 87. Highlights include:

• How Bart Simpson was quietly toned down from being "so mean" before The Simpsons' first episode, as revealed by his long-time voice actor Nancy Cartwright
• Marvel Comics killed the X-Men in 1987 to reset the franchise - but it didn’t stick
• Why the Princess Bride’s iconic duel is an even better swordfight than you remember
• How The Golden Girls became a staple at gay bars in the 80s
• Inside Spider-Man’s chaotic 1987 bachelor party that Marvel turned into a real-life spectacle