but who would be to blame for all the really bad arcs of late at marvel ? (ie spider-man, WWhulk was way disappointing compared to planet hulk, civil war....and who can forget "the other").

these companies should let their creators create, and not their editors create for them. it's not the editors job to tell the writers what they need to write and how to write it. it restricts the creative freedom and in the end, we the readers remember only one thing...that it sucked. we don't know whose fault it really is (although we blame the artists and the writers because we're ignorant and don't know any better to actually find out who was..) and it's not fair to those who were just there for the ride because someone told them how to drive while they barked orders riding shotgun.

get rid of guys like didio and quesada, and let real creators and real people who care about what they deliver hold the reigns at these companies.....people who know how to write and guide creators when organizing large crossovers by telling the writers what the idea is, and letting them do their own thing and work with each other on these projects...

man i miss jack kirby sometimes...these days, more than ever.....

You're dead-on about why Titans Hunt was a good idea, but it fails for the same reason your initial defense failed: it rambled on too long and focused too much on how the old Titans sucked. Thanks, Captain Obvious, we couldn't notice that.

If it's self-evident the old Titans sucked, then just get it over with quickly, don't screw around hammering an obvious point. Destroy the team in four or so issues, and then immediately make good on the promise to rebuild it as something stronger.

Anything else just comes off as a more exaggerated version of what you're bitching about: the team losing, crying, hugging, etc. Because, we'll, you're pointing the camera at the sucky thing and not the promise of regeneration.

I mean, if JMS had insisted his name be completely removed from 'One More Day', whether the removal happened or not, would he have ever gotten a job from Joe Quesada again?

And, since Didio does the same thing, how long before he was essentially blacklisted from the Big Two because he refused to take a credit he didn't deserve?

Didn't Alan Grant leave Batman 20 years ago because the bat-editors wouldn't let him write what he wanted?

It certainly fell apart, but for awhile there, it made Titans a "hot" book for the first time since Perez's aborted return to the title.

Such a credit already exists: “Plot By:”

Shooter used it.

Of course it would be nice if a writer could insist on having a “Plot By:” credit stuck in there. “Plot By Marv Wolfman and Jonathan Peterson; script by Marv Wolfman”. Problem solved. We’re no dummies. We can figure that one out.

Good! Let's see more of that!

I'll take that.

Plot by Dan Didio and Keith Champagne.

Script by Keith Champagne.

Champagne would get paid the same, and we'd all know that he was working under certain...ahem...restrictions.

Plus, any one who says this: "“I’m going to kill Terry Long if it’s the last thing I do.” is all right in my book.

I was in the campus library one evening, and someone had left a few copies of Comic Shop News lying on one of the tables. One of the issues covered the big Titans Hunt storyline, and just reading the interview and seeing some cover art ignited my interest like wildfire. I think I called my old regular shop and set up a mail order account so I could have my books (especially Titans) sent to me at school.

All because of Titans Hunt. Those first six or seven issues were just fantastic. It went off the rails at the end and never really recovered, but for awhile, it was an excellent comic (again).

~ Jay

"So basically, I think Peterson was right to intervene and get Wolfman to cut back on the crying and losing"

And I'll agree there. But everything else he did as editor on the book was the same hamfisted "blow up the book to show the fanboys how 'edgy' we are" crap that turned the 90s comics boom into the 90s comics bust. There are better ways of making the Titans more active protagonists in their own book than by spending a year having them systematically hunted down and killed off by the Wildebeest Society. Much like there are better ways of taking your mind off a headache than by repeatedly nailing yourself in the crotch with a baseball bat.

Shooter used it.

Of course it would be nice if a writer could insist on having a "Plot By:" credit stuck in there. "Plot By Marv Wolfman and Jonathan Peterson; script by Marv Wolfman". Problem solved. We're no dummies. We can figure that one out.

But despite having one hand tied by editorial, sometimes these series can do quite well and might actually represent some royalties for a writer. They might be slower to give up their credit in that case, even if it doesn't represent their best work.

I've also heard he was involved in the poorly-received Beast Machines iteration of Beast Wars, a show that fans previously praised for unusually good writing.

Showrunners are, to a man, writers who have proven themselves through long years in the trenches and gotten reputations as solid story crafters. Screenwriters, even when they're doctoring, get their jobs on the basis of their past work.

Dan DiDio's writing resume prior to working as an editor at DC are soap opera writing and Reboot. He moved into upper creative echelon work pretty fast after that. Good for him that he did, but he's not equivalent to a showrunner in terms of displayed skill.

It’s worth buying ‘The Titans Companion’, BTW, to read Marv Wolfman’s interview about the same period. He talks about how terrible the ideas were that he was being forced to accept by his editor, how he just had no enthusiasm for the book anymore, and how he went along with it for a while before realizing there was just no point to him being the writer anymore if all he was going to do was transcribe someone else’s story that destroyed everything he loved about the series.

Yeah, but what he loved so much about the comic was people crying and hugging each other and losing every fight they were in and constantly getting bailed out by guest stars, unless they were fighting nameless henchmen, the only foes they could beat decisively. I mean, there really was a lot that was lame about the book. You don't lose that many readers for nothing. I think people bought it back in the day because it looked like a Marvel book, but when people realized it was a bunch of kids whining about their daddy issues, crying a lot and losing every fight they were in, they got labeled as wimpy saps and people dropped it in droves when they realized it really wasn't so much like a Marvel book after all. The only readers who stuck with the book were the ones who emotionally connected with the Titans so much that they almost felt like family...which makes sense because the only people in real life that stick by you through thick and thin and have faith in you no matter how incompetent you prove you are is your family. But the average joe on the street who is not related to you will see you for what you are...a loser. This is why X-men succeeded where Titans failed. They had the emotional connection to keep the hardcore fans who regarded the X-Men as family, but they also had the cool asskicking to satisfy the casual fan and bandwagon jumpers who wanted to see the characters accomplish something and be cool and could care less about emotional identification. Titans on the other hand was written in a way that if you were a casual fan or someone who wanted to see asskicking protaganists, you were disappointed by seeing them constantly whupped, crying and hugging. It could only retain the fans who had emotional attachemetns to the Titans and viewed them virtually as friends and family, the people who didn't care if they were wimps.

So basically, I think Peterson was right to intervene and get Wolfman to cut back on the crying and losing (well, I think they were still losing actually, Marv can't help writing them like that). But honestly, I think he should have just taken him off the book altogether and found a writer like him who also had no strong emotional attachment to Wolfman's precedent.

On the one hand, I agree the insular nature of the comics industry is coming to the point where comics are now de facto written by the editors. But on the other I think top-down writing is the nature of the pop-culture product beast these days. And nothing qualifies more as product than superhero comics.

Plus, he was the man who came up with the "Hawk becomes Monarch" idea, one of the most ill-conceived decisions in DC's history (not necessarily the one with the biggest ramifications, but deciding to change the ending of your mystery and making the villain of a story be one of the only two characters in the entire fictional universe that it _couldn't_ be, just because your ending had leaked, is a level of stupidity most mortals don't approach.)

It's worth buying 'The Titans Companion', BTW, to read Marv Wolfman's interview about the same period. He talks about how terrible the ideas were that he was being forced to accept by his editor, how he just had no enthusiasm for the book anymore, and how he went along with it for a while before realizing there was just no point to him being the writer anymore if all he was going to do was transcribe someone else's story that destroyed everything he loved about the series.