QUOTE: 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.

Yeah!  That's the ticket!

The irony is that Shooter was writing better stories, himself, as a thirteen-year-old, and professionally, on "The Legion of Super-Heroes."

••

The IDEA of SECRET WARS was a comicbook to sell toys. It went awry when Certain People decided it was Something Else.

hmm-hmm.

And yet, i find nothing wrong in making something out of it.

JB on Spider-Man, JRJr on Spider-Man and Thor, Waid and Garney
on Cap, Perez on Avengers... I even enjoyed the return of Alpha Flight
and Heroes for Hire, and Thunderbolts was great. Looking back,
things were fun. I even enjoyed Smith and Qs Daredevil run.

There. I said it.

I may have enjoyed Marvel more before but never that much since...

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I'm pretty sure I have the chronology right that Harras was Marvel EIC for only a few months at most when Heroes Reborn with the early days of comics blogs on the Internet in 1996 (the first comics to credit him as EIC were published in January of that year). Heck, I could swear that the HR announcement came a few months before this, in late '95, but I can't confirm that. Anyway, the first HR issues hit the stores in Sept. '96. So, there were only 8 months between Harras' first issues and HR. One way or the other, he just wasn't EIC long enough to have enough pull to make such a decision, not to mention the time it must have taken from start to finish to pull off this outsourcing trick. It had to come from above. And it looks like he wasn't there long enough to try to fight this plan. I'm pretty sure I read that Lee and Liefeld were told that Harras was being brought in as EIC, and that helped them decide to go for it, given their previous working relationship with him.

Edited by Vinny Valenti on 28 June 2011 at 11:16pm

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YES! Now that I think about it, Harras was like the anti-Shooter. Started off with micromanaging the X-books and forced off long-standing writers in favor of "hot" artists, and did have a role to play in the big boom and bust of the industry, but once Heroes Reborn ended, I felt he really made an effort to turn things around. Another reason why I felt that he wasn't really behind the outsourcing was that he made an effort to emphasize how important the FF and Avengers were to the Marvel Universe with the "World without heroes" arc in many of the remaining Marvel titles that were being published alongside Heroes Reborn. I was afraid that he was going to turn ever Marvel book into an X-book somehow, but what ended up happening was that he took a risk and put some of the X-books' top artistic talent on other regular MU books - Adam Kubert on Hulk, Andy Kubert on Ka-Zar and later Captain America, etc. During this time he appeared to de-emphasize the X-books, too.

Not to mention that JB has said that Harras was generally hands-off on his late-90's Marvel work. Harras had a rocky start, but he was far from the worst EIC around.