it was assumed I had no way of "fixing" the Vision,

JB:

If you didn't leave the books suddenly, would there have been further developments regarding the Vision? When you left the book he was with the East Coast team without a personality. If so, would the Editor have known about them?

I read both of your titles but not Spotlight. Nine months after your last issue, they gave the Vision the brain patterns of a new character in the final issue of Spotlight. They didn't acknowledge this in the main book for over a year after the Spotlight issue. Considering the Vision's second appearance established that even an android could cry, two years of "toaster" Vision after you left seemed like the new status quo.

JB's West Coast Avengers/Avengers West Coast was my favorite title, hands down back then! I loved the line-up of characters, Iron Man rejoined, the Scarlet Witch was a member (I've  had a crush on here since I was around 5...actually, she was drawn by JB the first time I saw her, so its his fault!), the cliffhanger endings, the subplots...it had it all.

I had already liked the West Coasters and I remember reading that JB was coming back to Marvel and taking over the title as writer/penciler and I was very excited to see what he'd do with it. That was the first time that I had ever gotten pumped up for a specific creator coming onto a series.

Thanks for those great times, JB!

••

You did. That was one story, at least, that I got to finish. That later writers chose to revisit my story and muck it up, in no way should be taken as an indication that I had not told my tale in full.

There is an old saying, to the effect that one should never attribute to malice anything that can be explained by sheer incompetence, but as time went by on AVENGERS WEST COAST I could not shake the feeling there were people above me in the food chain who were trying to deliberately force me off the book.

The worst example was what actually caused me to quit the title, that being the declaration from the EiC that he had "forbidden" the Scarlet Witch storyline when it had first been pitched. That was not even remotely true. What I had planned for Wanda led to a really big storyline (elements of which turned up later, mysteriously, in the "Age of Apocalypse" story), and when a group of writers and editors were called into the EiC's office to pitch ideas for that summer's arbitrary crossover "event", Howard Mackie (the AWC editor) and I suggested our story might work well there. The EiC didn't think so, and Howard and I left the meeting thinking no more of it. We went ahead with our story as planned. Only later did we find out it was the whole STORY that had supposedly been rejected. Funny how we'd missed that.

But the "last straw" element of this came when I was called to task for changing Wanda's costume "without getting permission". Since this was a "change" in the same vein as Susan Richards becoming Malice, or Wanda herself having been possessed by Chthon years earlier, or even what I was doing with the Vision, none of which had required "approval" from on high, it had occurred to neither Howard nor me that this TEMPORARY change was something that needed to be "approved".

I took the hint, and left the book. Which is really too bad, because -- and you will forgive my towering immodesty -- if I had been left alone, I would have delivered a story arc that I'm pretty sure would STILL be being talked about, right up there with Dark Phoenix or my Galactus storyline in FF.

Writers get used to stories going sour on them. It happens. But when a story is FORCED to go sour. . .