Comic Book Resources

how do you judge an editor? By the number of typos they let through?

–yo
not being snarky, doesn’t actually know

It’s a tough one, but I guess I’d have to go with editor, just because of his involvement with Alan Moore. I’ll just hedge my bets and say he’s a great industry figure.

It’s kind of hard to judge, cuz wasn’t some of his best work as a writer/editor, doing both jobs at once?

I like him best as an 80’s cartoon writer.

I agree with Rohan. When I was a kid, I loved his writing on Justice League, Hulk and Swamp Thing. Later, I loved the runs he edited on a lot of books, especially Swamp Thing, the Bat-books, Green Lantern and Titans.

But for bringing Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons to American comics (Dave in GL, Alan famously in Swamp Thing), I think his importance as editor is difficult to underestimate.

Tough call. I think he’s a solid guy in both areas. Swamp Thing, The New X-Men, Batman, Green Lantern, the first half of Watchmen (He left after objecting to Moore’s ending being reminicent of an Outer Limits episode)… that’s a pretty damn impressive resume.

I like him best as a sous chef.

Writer, until he went to Marvel. Just wasn’t the same after that.

I just wish he came back to comics on a regular basis. He
is much better than most people writing (or editing)
comics nowadays!

Dan Didio worked with him on cartoon producer Mainframe
for a long time. Wein was one of the main (and best)
writers there. Why didn’t he asks Wein to join him at DC?

Best,
Hunter (Pedro Bouça)

I loved him as a writer on Justice League of America and Batman– both were amazing runs in the 1970s and his Swamp Thing stories are classics.

But I gotta go with editor– The New Teen Titans would not have been the same without him I am sure; he recruited Alan Moore to do Swamp Thing, hell, let Alan Moore *radically change a character he created*. And not only did he edit the DC books I most enjoyed as a from 1980-1984, but most of those books went seriously downhill when he stopped editing them!

Writer, I say. Len Wein wrote an awful lot of words in an awful lot of books for Marvel in the 70’s, and to my mind he was instrumental in creating the general Marvel mood that many other writers then got to (very successfully) partake of and enlarge on. He’s the unrecognized man, over there. He provided a lot of texture we take for granted today.

I liked Wein’s Swamp Thing a pinch more than Moore’s. Both damn great books, an’ it’s mostly cause Moore never had an artist I like as much as Wrightson.

So, based only on that, I’ll say Writer.