ThMick wrote:
At the time, Jim Shooter was Editor in chief of Marvel Comics, and the name was an in joke. Somebody actually won a no-prize for it. He is REALLY hated by a lot of people, as he is blamed for the onset of six-title, fifteen issue crossovers that required you to buy usually unrelated titles to get the entire story.
The odd thing is that he also didn't want multi-part stories WITHIN any given title unless they were tied into one of these epic crossovers. He's the reason John Byrne left the Captain America title after such a short run. Byrne had a story in mind that would've brought back the Red Skull, but it would've been like a three or four part story, and Shooter decided out of the blue that he didn't want to see anything more than two-parters. So Byrne told Shooter where he could stuff Cap's shield, so to speak.
As for the G.I.Joe character Shooter, I also wonder if her design was a bit of a nod to the concept artwork for the black female character that was proposed as a figure at one point. That artwork has turned up at a number of Conventions. Shooter wasn't an exact likeness for the character (the artwork for which always struck me as looking like a black Lady Jaye), but I do wonder about it...