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As the story goes, Mort Weisinger, when he was editor of the Superman titles in the Fifties and Sixties, used to ask neighborhood children what they wanted to see Superman doing. He would then tailor the stories accordingly.

That's one rare example, if true, of when it is good to give the audience what they think they want. Children, at least then, had a simple innocence, and that was reflected in Superman's stories. But as more and more fans have turned pro, the target audience has shifted. By the time I was hired to "reboot" Superman, DC was not even considering children, once by far the largest part of the audience. Indeed, the editorial focus of the company had turned more and more toward that part of the audience once considered the fringes -- the older, long-time, anal-retentive fans. The very ones who, when I came in in the Seventies, were mocked around the offices and seen as decidedly unhealthy.

In a very short span of time, tho, I saw office jokes about, for instance, the sex lives of the characters turning up as parts of the stories. These were considered "mature" stories, tho as one artist put it, they tended more to be sophomoric.

With each "reboot" and "reinvention" DC and Marvel have turned further and further away from the kinds of stories that were most successful in the Past. As I have mentioned before, when I started at Marvel it seemed as if people were saying "Remember how great those stories were by Stan and Jack and Steve? Let's not do that!" Is it mere coincidence, tho, that I tried very hard to do those kinds of stories when I was working on FANTASTIC FOUR, and my run on that title has been widely declared second only to Stan and Jack?