Yeah but to be fair, Bob Harris did his fair share of damage during the '90's and clearly a lot of mavel planning seems to now be done by colective group discussion - hence the constant mega crossover (We are currently in the middle of a 7 part mega crossover at marvel and they are already talking about next year's).

Without a doubt, I prefered the comics under Shooter's tenure but was that because of or despite of?

As said by some, with Shooter at its head Marvel was enjoyable.

It is of course due to the creative teams as much if not more than to Shooter himself.

And certainly Shooter didn't stay out of the way, but the point is that he obviously cared about the characters, the stories, the marvel universe and even the creators.

 Unlike what happens in comics today, you felt the books were about story, characters and art, not just about banking on a "franchise".

There's of course a clear exception: Secret Wars II.

But even the first Secret Wars, a series that in all logic could have been extremely commercial, a simple banking on the various characters, even this one was about story. Was Shooter a tyran with his collaborators on this one? I heard so. But the point is that we end with a quality series, maybe not perfect (but what is perfect?) maybe with some scenes that make blink a few readers (Galactus ,anyone?), but overall something well writen and well drawn, a consistant and enjoyable story.

Secret Wars II on the other hand was one of the worst series ever published by Marvel. ... At that point at least. Since then Marvel took the habit to do worse than that every month.

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Which is better, being crushed under a steamroller, or trampled by elephants?

These kinds of either/or questions are an exercise in futility.

How did it develop that Marvel had an EIC and DC didn't? Or am I forgetting something about 1970's and 1980's DC compared to Marvel?

Cheers, Jon

Here's the million dollar question for JB and the board. Who do you guys think was a better EIC, Quesada or Shooter?

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Is death an option?  No? Ah well....

But I will say this:  I was buying Marvel Comics when Shooter was EiC, but I have not been buying them since Quesada has been EiC.  And I have more "disposable income" now than I did then.

Secret Wars...well written

I was thirteen when that piece of turd came out, and bought it all the way up until the last issue. Couldn't have cared less how it turned out.

Sometimes I wonder if a thirteen year old wrote the damn thing.

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It's just differences in nomenclature.

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When Shooter came to power at Marvel, the company was very much a stumbling giant. It needed a steady hand and a clear vision to get it back on the road, back on course. Shooter had both -- tho he was not terribly good at expressing the latter. Mostly, his way of telling us we were doing something right was when he started telling us we were doing something else wrong. To make matters worse, Shooter remained in the job long after his particular skill set was no longer needed. As I said at the time, an "ideal" situation would have been for Shooter and Dick Giordano (then EiC at DC) to swap jobs every five years or so.

Quesada came into the job it was completely subservient to Marketing, virtually a figurehead position. Also, we were deep into the realm of Diminished Expectations, so it was no longer necessary to be truly successful in order to APPEAR to be successful.

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Which pretty much explains why the short term sales boosts due to a constant stream of sales gimmicks often directed mainly at the gullible mainstream news media and speculators among civilians. What's even sadder is that many fans wrongly credit Quesada with either "saving" or "bringing" Marvel out of bankruptcy. Then there are those Marvel editors and creators who go online to tell people that sales of the books are doing "great" by the standards of the current market. And don't get me started on those popular Marvel creators who deny that their low selling comic was canceled due to low sales, but instead was canceled because they either wanted to end the book early or because they didn't want to continue the book without the books original artist.