Anonymous asked:
But don't you think there is some cause and effect when you always put your top new talent on your bigger books? The X-Men did well because you had great artists on the book in Cockrum and Byrne. Now a great fresh fan favorite type artist ends up on Wolverine or Spider Man or one of a dozen Avengers books and not on a lower tier title. So how do those lower tier titles and characters get that small extra traction?
Well, first off, most artists really want to work on Wolverine or Spider-Man or one of a dozen Avengers titles—that’s no surprise, our artists are fans as well, and they’ve got the same love for these characters as anybody else. Given a choice, the average artist is probably going to choose a WOLVERINE assignment before, I don’t know, an ANT-MAN assignment—they’re likely going to be more into it, it’s likely to sell well and generate more incentive payments for them, and it’s more likely to be better for their career in terms of more people becoming aware of who they are and what they do. Like it or not, this is not an absolutely level playing field.
But all that said, we try to put great people on everything that we do. You point to Cockrum and Byrne on X-MEN as an example. What you’re kind of overlooking is just how big or popular those artists were when that happened. Neither of them was n especially big name when they came onto X-MEN. Dave had a bit of heat at that point, coming off of LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES, but he wasn’t in tremendous demand. And John was a new guy who’d really only done a few issues of IRON FIST and a bunch of stuff for Charlton. Doing X-MEN was a break-out for both of them (John a bit more than Dave). They made the book, and the book made them—that’s how it works.
