The Pilgrimage to Ozzy Osbourne’s Last Gig

 

 

 

By Alex Marshall

They came by the thousands.

They dressed in black, with T-shirts featuring crucifixes, dragons and demons.

They gathered on Saturday in Birmingham, England, to pay their respects to a figure of almost religious significance in the heavy metal world: Ozzy Osbourne, the Prince of Darkness.

Since Osbourne and his bandmates Tony Iommi, Bill Ward and Geezer Butler formed Black Sabbath in Birmingham in 1968, they have been regarded as the fathers of heavy metal.

On Saturday, Osbourne, 76, was at the center of “Back to the Beginning,” a 10-hour concert at the Villa Park soccer stadium that he had said would culminate in Black Sabbath’s final stage appearance.

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Chris Hopkins from Birmingham showing his Black Sabbath tribute tattoo.Credit...Ellie Smith for The New York Times

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Ozzy Osbourne masks.Credit...Ellie Smith for The New York Times

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Anshul Doshi, center with beard, who lives in England, and an entourage that traveled from India for the concert.Credit...Ellie Smith for The New York Times

This was not his first announcement of a retirement from touring or live performance, but this time, he seems to have meant it. In recent years, the singer has had a string of health issues, including Parkinson’s disease. He told a radio station in February that he could no longer walk. Many fans at the sold-out show on Saturday said they would be happy if he just made it onstage, even if he didn’t sing.

So when, at about 9 p.m., Osbourne appeared rising up from beneath the stage, sitting on a black throne topped with an ornamental bat and accented by a pair shiny skulls, one on each armrest, the crowd roared.

“Are you ready?” Osbourne shouted, then tore into a set of five songs he had released as a solo artist, including his 1980 debut single, “Crazy Train.”

As he performed, Osbourne goaded the crowd, making silly faces and gesturing for the audience to clap to the beat. At one point, he activated a water gun next to his throne, and soaked the first few rows of fans.

The crowd’s response to the music and antics was joyful, and Osbourne seemed overwhelmed after so long out of the spotlight. “I’ve been laid up for six years,” he said: “Thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

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Crowds lining up to enter Villa Park for the heavy metal concert.Credit...Ellie Smith for The New York Times

The solo performance was just an appetizer before a full-scale Black Sabbath reunion, which capped a whole day of tributes from some of the most famous names in hard rock. Guns N’ Roses, Metallica, Slayer and others all paid tribute to Black Sabbath and worked covers of the band’s hits into their sets. From afternoon until night, the crowd threw devil horns, moshing and headbanging.

In the days leading up to the gig, Osbourne’s fans had crisscrossed Birmingham to take photos in front of sights associated with the singer, including his childhood home.

Osbourne, who comes from a working-class family and once labored in a slaughterhouse, grew up in tiny rowhouse just a few minutes’ walk from the stadium.

On Saturday morning, as fans posed for selfies outside the house’s front door, its current occupant, Nazish Mahfooz, 32, arrived home carrying bags of groceries. Mahfooz, a transport worker, said that her family had told her to charge fans for photos, or at least offer them the chance to give her 20 British pounds (about $27) to walk through the building. But she couldn’t be bothered, Mahfooz said.

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Fans taking pictures at Ozzy Osbourne’s childhood home.Credit...Ellie Smith for The New York Times

Instead, she hung an Osbourne T-shirt in a downstairs window to add something to the visitors’ photos. “You have this stereotype of rock fans as not nice,” Mahfooz said, “but, honestly, it’s been really good.”

In interviews around the stadium, fans said they had traveled from Argentina, Canada, Denmark, India, the United Arab Emirates and the United States for the concert — and some had maxed out their credit cards to be there.

Kelly Clark, 56, a photographer from Nova Scotia, Canada, said that Osbourne’s music had been the soundtrack to her life. Though she had seen him many times before, this trip had special significance, she said, because she planned to spread some of the ashes of her Osbourne-loving goddaughter in the stadium. Clark said her goddaughter had died in a car accident in 2023, but she would have wanted to be at the show.

Nearby, Rigmor Nikander, a heavily pregnant wedding planner from Copenhagen, stood with her hands clasped to her belly. A few years ago, her fiancé introduced her to Black Sabbath, she said, and now she is hooked. “If it’s a boy, we’ll call him Ozzy,” Nikander said.

Not all the fans had come from far afield. Tash Patel, 55, a graphic designer, said he had grown up near the stadium and first saw Osbourne in the late 1970s, when the singer walked into his father’s convenience store, “stark bollock naked,” looking to buy some alcohol. “It was a time when Ozzy was off his face a lot on drink and drugs,” Patel said.

Patel said he was trying not to drink too much himself on Saturday so that he would remember the concert. But it was a party, after all. “I’ve already had five pints. I’m trying to pace myself,” he said.

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This was not the first time Osbourne has announced a retirement from live performance. But this time, he seems to mean it.Credit...Ellie Smith for The New York Times

And it was more of a marathon than a sprint. The first band, Mastodon, came on at 1 p.m. Several hours later, there was a drum battle featuring members of Blink 182, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Tool. The acts were interspersed with video messages from a surprising range of celebrities, including Dolly Parton and Elton John.

It was not until about 10 p.m. that huge screens at the front of the stadium began showing clips of Black Sabbath performing in its prime.

Then, from behind a sign onstage reading “Back to the Beginning,” the band’s original members suddenly appeared, together for the first time since 2005, with Osbourne sitting once again on his bat throne. The group launched into “War Pigs,” a doomy antiwar anthem from 1970. “Generals gathered in their masses,” Osbourne wailed: “Just like witches at black masses.” The crowd, 45,000 strong, wailed along.

The band played a short four-song set, ending with a rapid rendition of “Paranoid.” “God bless you all!,” Osbourne shouted. Then, as fireworks exploded overhead, and the stage rotated to take Osbourne out of view, the emotional crowd chanted his name: “Oz-zy! Oz-zy! Oz-zy!”

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Fans posing for a photo near Villa Park before the concert.Credit...Ellie Smith for The New York

 

The Ruthless Ambition of Stephen Miller

 

 

 By Jason Zengerle

Stephen Miller was livid. It was a couple of months after Donald Trump’s inauguration, and Mr. Miller, a senior White House adviser, believed that the federal government was not doing nearly enough to stem the tide of illegal immigration into the United States. In a relentless round of meetings, phone calls and emails, he reached deep into the federal bureaucracy and, according to a former Department of Homeland Security official, berated mid- and low-level bureaucrats inside the department. To keep their jobs, he told the officials, they needed to enforce a new policy that punished the families of undocumented immigrants by forcibly separating parents from their children.

Mr. Miller’s demands, however, went unmet. That’s because he was issuing them back in 2017, and the homeland security secretary, John Kelly, had issued his own edict to D.H.S. officials: If Mr. Miller ordered them to do something, they were to refuse, unless Mr. Kelly, the only one of the two men who’d been confirmed by the U.S. Senate to run the department, agreed to the order.

Flash forward eight years, to this past May, when Mr. Miller, still livid and now the White House deputy chief of staff, paid a visit to the Washington headquarters of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, where he berated officials for not deporting nearly enough immigrants. He told the officials that rather than develop target lists of gang members and violent criminals, they should just go to Home Depots, where day laborers gather to be hired, or to 7-Eleven convenience stores and arrest the undocumented immigrants they find there.

This time, the officials did what Mr. Miller said. ICE greatly stepped up its enforcement operations, raiding restaurants, farms and work sites across the country, with arrests sometimes climbing to more than 2,000 a day. In early June, after an ICE raid in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles triggered protests, Mr. Trump deployed several thousand National Guard troops and Marines to the city, over the objection of Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The crisis, from the immigration raids that sparked the protests to the militarized response that tried to put the protests down, was almost entirely of Mr. Miller’s making. And it served as a testament to the remarkable position he now occupies in Mr. Trump’s Washington. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, who reportedly accompanied Mr. Miller on his visit to ICE headquarters, seems to defer to him. “It’s really Stephen running D.H.S.,” a Trump adviser said. The attorney general, Pam Bondi, is so focused on preparing for and appearing on Fox News that she has essentially ceded control of the Department of Justice to Mr. Miller, making him, according to the conservative legal scholar Edward Whelan, “the de facto attorney general.” And in a White House where the chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is not well versed or terribly interested in policy — “She’s producing a reality TV show every day,” another Trump adviser said, “and it’s pretty amazing, right?” — Mr. Miller is typically the final word.

There is much truth to the conventional wisdom that the biggest difference between the first and second Trump presidencies is that, in the second iteration, Mr. Trump is unrestrained. The same is true of Mr. Miller. He has emerged as Mr. Trump’s most powerful, and empowered, adviser. With the passage of the big policy bill, ICE will have an even bigger budget to execute Mr. Miller’s vision and, in effect, serve as his own private army. Moreover, his influence extends beyond immigration to the battles the Trump administration is fighting on higher education, transgender rights, discrimination law and foreign policy.

Mr. Miller, 39, is both a committed ideologue and a ruthless bureaucratic operator — and he has cast himself as the only person capable of fully carrying out Mr. Trump’s radical policy vision. “Stephen Miller translates Trump’s instinctual politics into a coherent ideological program,” Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist, said, “and he is the man for the moment in the second term.”

Steve Bannon, who served as White House chief strategist in the early days of Mr. Trump’s first presidency, compared Mr. Miller to David Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s budget director who ran roughshod over the cabinet as he sought to slash federal spending. But even the Stockman comparison might not do the 2025 version of Miller justice. “I’m not sure anybody,” Mr. Bannon said of Mr. Miller, “has had this much authority.”

Indeed, at times it can seem as if Mr. Miller is trying to seize the moment as much for himself as for Mr. Trump — promoting a policy vision that is not just more coherent but more radical than the president’s. It’s clear what Mr. Miller’s agenda is. Does Mr. Trump share it?

Mr. Miller’s origin story is, by now, familiar. The son of wealthy Jewish Democrats, he grew up in the early aughts in the liberal enclave of Santa Monica, Calif., where he fashioned himself as a conservative provocateur. Running for student government in high school, he campaigned on the platform that the school’s janitors weren’t doing enough work. (“Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us?” he asked in his campaign speech.)

It was during his formative years that Mr. Miller developed a broader critique of society. He watched the left take over California and, in his view, turn it into a failed state — failures that he believed were directly attributable to immigration. As he explained years later, it was his experience in California that led him to conclude that “mass migration turns politics leftward” and that mass migration was turning the United States into California. “The question from the right, and this is the question that Miller is trying to answer, is whether the country functions as a ratchet that only moves leftward,” said Mr. Rufo, who also grew up in California. “It’s calling into question the basic nature of democracy itself if our democracy only moves leftward.” Mr. Miller didn’t accept that history traveled in such an inevitable arc; rather, history existed on a pendulum, and he made it his mission to swing it back to the right.

After graduating from Duke University, he worked as a Republican aide on Capitol Hill and then, in 2016, joined Mr. Trump’s first presidential campaign as the candidate’s chief (and for a time, only) speechwriter. When Mr. Trump won, Mr. Miller was put in charge of writing the administration’s immigration policy, and he set out to reduce all immigration to the United States, not just illegal border crossings. That proved to be a difficult task.

As with his early thwarted effort to institute a family separation policy, Mr. Miller was frequently stymied. The courts blocked the first version of the Muslim ban — an executive order drafted primarily by him and Mr. Bannon. And while the Supreme Court upheld a subsequent version, Mr. Miller believed it left off numerous countries that should have been included. His efforts to freeze asylum applications, enlist the F.B.I. to conduct immigration raids and turn Guantánamo Bay into a migrant detention facility were all successfully resisted by other government officials who believed they were probably illegal and definitely ill conceived.

While many of his former colleagues cashed in as lobbyists and consultants after Mr. Trump left office, Mr. Miller chose to continue the political fight, starting a group called America First Legal. It was one of several think tanks and policy shops started by former Trump aides, including the Center for Renewing America, founded by the former budget director Russell Vought; the America First Policy Institute, started by the former domestic policy adviser Brooke Rollins; and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which was run by Paul Dans, who worked in the Office of Personnel Management under Mr. Trump.

What set America First Legal apart was its focus on litigation. “He understood that the lawfare was going to be a central thing,” Mr. Bannon said of Mr. Miller. Modeling America First Legal as the conservative analogue to the American Civil Liberties Union, which sued the first Trump administration 413 times, Mr. Miller used it to launch a fusillade of legal challenges to Biden policies that sought to remedy racial discrimination against minority farmers and minority restaurant workers, support L.G.B.T.Q.+ students and expand voting rights; later, America First Legal filed civil rights complaints against corporations, including IBM and American Airlines, over their diversity practices.

The legal strategy, Mr. Miller explained at the time, was intended to combat the “insidious and explicit discrimination against white Americans, Asian Americans, Indian Americans and Jewish Americans based on their skin color and their ancestry.” Although Mr. Miller recently denounced universal court injunctions against Trump policies as “judicial tyranny,” America First Legal regularly sought, and celebrated, them in its lawsuits against the Biden administration. The group typically filed the suits in the Northern District of Texas, where it knew the cases would be heard by judges nominated by Republican presidents, including Mr. Trump.

After Mr. Trump’s second election victory, Mr. Miller brought with him the lessons he learned during the first administration and the interregnum. When a transition official reached out to Mr. Miller for the names of people he wanted to serve in immigration-related positions at D.H.S., ICE and Customs and Border Protection, Mr. Miller provided them. He also sent over names of people he wanted in posts at the State Department, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education. As Mr. Miller explained to the transition official, these were positions that might not appear to be related to immigration, but Mr. Miller had learned the hard way that they were. During Mr. Trump’s first administration, officials in those jobs had resisted Mr. Miller’s actions on immigration; now he wanted to make certain that he had his own people in those posts.

Mr. Miller worked closely with Gene Hamilton, the top lawyer at America First Legal who joined the White House as a senior counsel for its first five months before returning to America First Legal, to draft or directly inspire an extraordinary barrage of executive orders. Many dealt with issues that fell under Mr. Miller’s new, expanded remit — including terminating D.E.I. and environmental justice programs across the federal government; proclaiming that the federal government will recognize only two genders, male and female; and rolling back energy-efficiency regulations for certain household appliances, such as shower heads and gas stoves.

A number of the orders also dealt with Mr. Miller’s old hobbyhorse, immigration, including one that purports to end birthright citizenship. But his most audacious immigration move came in the form of a presidential proclamation, which Mr. Trump used to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 and deport Venezuelan immigrants accused of being members of the Tren de Aragua street gang.

Mr. Miller had discovered the Alien Enemies Act while at America First Legal. Speaking to the podcast hosts Clay Travis and Buck Sexton in 2023, he hailed the statute as something “that’s been on the books since the John Adams administration which allows you to deport any alien age 14 or older without due process if there’s a declared state of incursion, of predatory incursion or invasion from that country.” (Mr. Miller slightly misinterpreted the statute, which specifies that the alien must be both male and above 14 years of age.) Since February, Mr. Miller has used the act to send nearly 140 Venezuelans to a prison in El Salvador without due process. Federal judges have ruled several times that the men were deported illegally, prompting Mr. Miller to argue that the court has “no authority” in the matter.

That strategy reminds me of something a former senior administration official told me in 2019 about Mr. Trump and his aggressive approach to immigration policy. “His constant instinct all the time was: Just do it, and if we get sued, we get sued,” the official said. “To him, it’s all a negotiation. Almost as if the first step is a lawsuit. I guess he thinks that because that’s how business worked for him in the private sector. But federal law is different, and there really isn’t a settling step when you break federal law.” Now in his second term, with Mr. Miller greenlighting this approach and a compliant Supreme Court — which recently curtailed the power of district court judges to issue universal injunctions — seeming to ratify it, Mr. Trump’s contention that federal law isn’t in fact different appears to have been proven correct.

The challenge confronting Mr. Miller, who did not respond to interview requests, is how long he can maintain such power. His longevity in Mr. Trump’s circle is a testament, in many ways, to his ruthlessness and cunning. During Mr. Trump’s first term, Mr. Miller abandoned two old allies — Mr. Bannon, who originally introduced him to Mr. Trump, and Jeff Sessions, his old boss in the Senate — when they fell out of favor with Mr. Trump. Instead, Mr. Miller struck up an alliance with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. He’s notorious for bad-mouthing colleagues to the president. In the leaked Signal chat among Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, then-National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, C.I.A. Director John Ratcliffe, Vice President JD Vance and several other senior administration officials, it was notable that only Mr. Vance questioned Mr. Trump’s decision to carry out strikes against the Houthis in Yemen. A third Trump adviser said that was because, of the group, only Mr. Vance was elected to his position; the rest serve at the pleasure of the president, which means they could lose their jobs if they contradict Mr. Trump in Mr. Miller’s presence.

At the same time, Mr. Miller is a world-class brown noser. In an administration that puts a premium on sycophancy, he stands out for just how much he sucks up to his boss. “You have been watching the greatest economic master strategy from an American president in history,” Mr. Miller wrote on X shortly after Mr. Trump’s tariff flip-flop in April. Last year, when he was asked on a podcast to name his favorite ’80s action movie, he answered Jean-Claude Van Damme’s “Bloodsport,” an unusual choice — until you realize that Mr. Trump once deemed “Bloodsport” “an incredible, fantastic movie” and that he liked to watch it during flights on his private plane. The transition official told me that while it would overstate things to suggest that the president viewed Mr. Miller as indispensable — since no one in Mr. Trump’s circle ever is — Mr. Miller has been so central to Mr. Trump’s political operation for so long that the president would have a difficult time imagining what it would be like not to have Mr. Miller working for him.

And yet, Mr. Miller’s power could ultimately unravel because of something far more profound than office politics.

Translating Trumpism into a coherent ideological doctrine can be a vexing proposition, as MAGA’s isolationist wing recently experienced with the U.S. airstrikes on Iran. Mr. Miller has done this translation work perhaps better than anyone. At times, he has exhibited the necessary flexibility, rolling with Mr. Trump’s contradictions and flip-flops. During the first Trump administration, Mr. Miller jettisoned his own protectionist stance once it became clear that the administration’s free-traders had the president’s ear. When I asked the third Trump adviser about the foreign policy views of Mr. Miller, who’s reportedly angling to become Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, the adviser said that they were consistent with whatever the president was currently thinking.

Mr. Miller is more obdurate when it comes to domestic policy, particularly immigration. For Mr. Trump’s second term, he has led the president to stake out a series of maximalist positions, from the ICE raids to the use of the Alien Enemies Act to raising the possibility of suspending habeas corpus for people suspected of being undocumented immigrants. Mr. Trump seems to enjoy having Mr. Miller play the heavy on immigration. During his first term, he jokingly told people who urged him to take more moderate stances on immigration that Mr. Miller would never go for them. Last year, he reportedly quipped during a campaign meeting that if it was up to Mr. Miller, the population of the United States would be only 100 million people and they’d all resemble Mr. Miller. The humor, however, underscores something serious: On immigration, Millerism is a more consistent ideology than Trumpism.

While Mr. Miller is an ardent restrictionist, seeking to reduce all immigration to the United States, Mr. Trump has at times backed H-1B visas for skilled foreign workers; created a wait-list for a proposed special visa, called a Trump Gold Card, that wealthy immigrants could buy for $5 million apiece; and expressed regret about the impact ICE raids were having on the agriculture and hospitality industries. Indeed, the backlash to the ICE raids was so great that in early June, Mr. Trump reversed himself and declared the agriculture and hospitality sectors off-limits to that sort of strict immigration enforcement — before, after intense lobbying from Mr. Miller, he reversed himself again. Still, the hiccup was enough to hint at a broader potential rupture, especially if Mr. Miller’s immigration policies continue to prove unpopular. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that 57 percent of Americans disapprove of Mr. Trump’s handling of immigration, once his greatest political strength.

For the moment, though, it seems Mr. Miller and Mr. Trump are aligned — and that means Mr. Miller has achieved a level of success, and satisfaction, that he didn’t dream of during Mr. Trump’s first term. Last year, in another podcast interview with Mr. Travis and Mr. Sexton, Mr. Miller told the two hosts what to expect if Mr. Trump returned to the White House. “You will wake up every morning so excited to get out of bed to see what’s happening on the border, to see what’s happening with immigration enforcement, you’ll set your alarm clock two hours earlier every morning just to get two more hours of daylight to watch the deportation flights happen,” he said. “That’s how excited you’ll be. That’s how wonderful this will be.”

the new york times  

 

Jim Shooter, Editor Who ‘Saved the Comics Industry,’ Dies at 73

 

 

 

 

By Clay Risen

Jim Shooter, a hard-driving giant of a comic-book editor who took the helm at Marvel at the tender age of 27, then spent nearly a decade revolutionizing the way superhero stories are written, drawn and sold, died on Monday at his home in Nyack, N.Y. He was 73.

His son, Ben, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause. Mr. Shooter was diagnosed with esophageal cancer last year.

Powerfully built, with a looming 6-foot 7-inch frame, Mr. Shooter dominated the comic-book world for much of the 1980s, reinvigorating an art form that had been in decline by finding new markets and new readers.

Though he was not yet 30 when he took over at Marvel in 1978, he was already an industry veteran. He sold his first comic story, to DC, Marvel’s rival, when he was just 14, and he worked for both companies while still a teenager.

Mr. Shooter at age 14 in 1965, the year he sold his first comic-book story. He went on to write for both Marvel and DC Comics while still a teenager.Credit...via Jim Shooter

As editor in chief at Marvel, he rationalized what had been a chaotic operation, instituting a coherent editing process and driving his staff to meet deadlines. He pushed into the growing comic-store market, targeting dedicated fans over the casual reader.

And he drove the company further into licensing opportunities, signing the sort of deals for toy and film adaptations that went on to make comics a keystone of American popular culture.

“I honestly think he saved the comics industry,” Harry Broertjes, a journalist who once worked with Mr. Shooter, said in an interview.

Mr. Shooter could be imperious, but he could also be generous, and he welcomed new talent to the Marvel fold. Emerging voices like Frank Miller and Walter Simonson flourished under his watch, bringing a new, more sophisticated sensibility to the genre. He increased pay rates for writers and artists and gave them more control over their creative output.

“Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars,” created during Mr. Shooter’s tenure at Marvel, was a 12-issue limited series published from May 1984 to April 1985.Credit...Marvel

Marvel prospered in the 1980s. Not only did its sales and profits soar, but it also experienced a long run of landmark releases, among them Mr. Simonson’s work on Thor; Mr. Miller’s work with Klaus Janson on Daredevil; and Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s on X-Men.

At the same time, Mr. Shooter brought a traditional vision to comic-book writing, insisting on simple, straightforward narratives. Among his many aphorisms was “Every comic book could be a reader’s first comic book,” and he made his writers find a way to introduce their main characters in each issue.

His changes were divisive, especially among those who had enjoyed free rein under previous editors, above all Stan Lee, who put Marvel on the map with a new line of superhero titles in the 1960s. Several Marvel veterans left for DC.

“Some people swear by him, and other people swear at him,” Bill Sienkiewicz, an artist at Marvel during Mr. Shooter’s tenure, said in an interview.

In 1986, New World Entertainment bought Marvel’s parent company, Marvel Entertainment Group, and a year later the new owners fired Mr. Shooter. The feelings about his time at Marvel were so passionate that even years later his critics spoke of him in brutal terms.

“From a creative standpoint, Jim Shooter’s Marvel was, by and large, a wasteland of formulaic self-imitation and blatant profit-seeking,” Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon wrote in their book “Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book” (2003).

But he was equally beloved by many artists and fans, who saw the Jim Shooter era at Marvel as the foundation for the efflorescence of comic-book storytelling in the decades that followed.

“Every bad thing you’ve heard about Jim Shooter has a bit of truth to it,” Danny Fingeroth, another Marvel writer under Mr. Shooter, said. “But so does every good thing you’ve heard.”

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Mr. Shooter in 1993. He started a number of independent comic-book companies in the post-Marvel years, but they all eventually closed shop.Credit...JayJay Jackson

James Charles Shooter was born on Sept. 27, 1951, in Pittsburgh. His father, Ken, was a steelworker, and his mother, Eleanor, managed the home.

Jim’s mother used children’s comics to teach him to read, but he hadn’t perused a comic book in years when, in 1963, he found himself in the hospital for minor surgery with a stack of Marvel and DC books to read.

He loved what he saw in Marvel, but he found DC boring. As a challenge, he pulled out the narrative and artistic elements that he admired in Marvel and applied them to stories he wrote using DC characters.

On a whim, he sent them to DC headquarters in New York. The editors liked them so much that they not only published them (with new art), but also hired him to write the company’s Legion of Super-Heroes series.

It was good timing: Union strikes and job-site injuries had left his father unable to work, and his family needed the money.

While still in high school, Jim wrote for DC’s Superman and Supergirl titles, created several new members of the Legion of Superheroes, and, in 1967 with the artist Curt Swan, created a story pitting Superman and the Flash in a race. It became a hugely popular issue.

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Working with the artist Curt Swan, Mr. Shooter created a hugely popular story in 1967 pitting Superman and the Flash in a race. It was republished in 1976.Credit...DC

After being accepted at New York University and offered a job at Marvel, Mr. Shooter moved to New York in 1969. He passed on school to take the job, but he quit after a few weeks because the pay was so low.

He returned to Pittsburgh, got a job in advertising and completely dropped out of the comic-book world for several years.

About five years later, a group of fans tracked him down and encouraged him to return to New York. Offered jobs at both DC and Marvel, he briefly worked for DC before choosing Marvel in 1976. Two years later, he was in charge.

He married Michele Minor in 1995. They later separated. A complete list of survivors in addition to his son was not immediately available.

After leaving Marvel, Mr. Shooter started a number of independent comic-book companies, including Valiant, Defiant and Broadway. Valiant met with some success, but all the companies eventually closed shop (though Valiant later reopened under new owners). He ended his career as creative editor for Illustrated Media, a company that creates customized comics.

He also became a fixture on the comic convention circuit, where he would give lectures about storytelling. He had a simple message, built around the nursery rhyme “Little Miss Muffet.”

In an economical 27 words and two sentences, he said, you have everything: a character, an action, a climax and a resolution.

“If you can remember ‘Little Miss Muffet,’” he wrote in an essay on his website, “you can remember everything you need to know about the basic unit of entertainment, which is a story.”

 THE NEW YORK TIMES