We'll set aside basic levels of skill and professionalism for the most part, and focus here on one element in particular. And that element is the oft stated desire of so many artists to "make (their) mark" upon the existing characters to which they are assigned.

Back this up a notch. When I got started in this Business, the shadows of the actual creators of the characters were still, in many cases, long and dark upon them. Altho several other artists had done FANTASTIC FOUR before I got there, for instance, when one said "FF" one thought "Kirby". Same with Ditko on Spider-Man. At DC, tho the creators had mostly faded as far as their artistic influence went, there were still some people who had left their own indelible mark -- Curt Swan was Superman. Neal Adams was Batman. And so on.

(What's interesting in these latter cases, is that while these artists and others undoubtedly left their "mark", most, even all of them started out toeing the company line. Swan came from Shuster's shadow, and his early work was a lot less individualized than it came to be. Even Adams' early Batman work is "on model", drawing the Batman who was in the books at the time, and only over a span of several issues increasingly exerting his own influence.)

Therein lies a key point I am addressing here. Stylistic differences notwithstanding, there was, in bygone days, a much stronger desire, on the parts of the artists, to keep the characters looking like themselves. This was encouraged by the Companies, sometimes with a sledgehammer, as with the redrawing of Kirby's Superman faces in JIMMY OLSEN and elsewhere, sometimes just for fun, as with Wally Wood inking the Daredevil figures in a guest appearance of that character in Kirby's FF. When I joined Marvel, in the mid/late 70s, one of John Romita's jobs, as Art Director, was to redraw faces that seemed off-model.

Today, however, it seems that the rock-star mentality which had infected comics has given us a "generation" of artists whose first instinct is to "make their mark", and, indeed, it is this that is now encouraged by the Companies. The characters have taken a back seat to the "talent", and the artists now approach a new assignment with the stated intent of showing how they would have imagined these characters. The result: if a character -- Superman, Spider-Man, Batman, etc -- appears in more than one title, we will find at least that many different interpretations of that character. (I have commented elsewhere about flipping thru a Superman comic a few years back and finding myself wondering if the lead character had been replaced, as part of some ongoing story, with an Asian teenager.)

The clear and present danger of this, of course, is that selling the talent instead of the character is a sure way to guarantee diminished sales. It mirrors the outraged reaction of Ann Rice fans when Tom Cruise was cast as Lestat. The Producer of the movie dismissed these complaintes, noting that there were many more Cruise fans than there were Rice fans. In this case, we can (hopefully) assume that Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, etc each have more fans than any single artist might have. That there would be more people lining up to buy a Superman book, for the character, than, say, an ALL-STAR book for the artist. That, in fact, given the finicky nature of many fans, having different artists present different versions of the characters is a sure way to guarantee at least a portion of the audience will reject one title in favor of another.

This might be a core reason in explaining why the sales of "best selling" titles these days are individually much lower than the "best sellers" of the pre-DSM/speculator days, but often add up to those sales. So that, for instance, this months SUPERMAN, ACTION, and whatever other Superman titles might be out there, give a total sales count of around what SUPERMAN alone sold in the 1960s (or thereabouts).

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That's most definitely an aspect of this. And it puzzles me. Perhaps it's because so many artists (and writers, and editors) currently in the business would rather be doing just about anything else (as long as it was in Hollywood) the mere fact of doing Spider-Man (to name but one) is not "cool" enough.

Now, for me, getting assigned to MARVEL TEAM-UP was one of the high points of my career. When Shooter offered it to me I actually said "You mean the MARVEL TEAM-UP with Spider-Man in it?" because I could not believe I was being handed anything to do with one of the coolest characters out there. And when I started drawing the book, it was all about trying to find Spider-Man, and not trying to show everybody what I thought Spider-Man should be.

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That's precisely the fanzine mentality I have been referring to lately. The approach to writing these stories, especially superhero stories, has always begun with "Wouldn't it be interesting if…' That's pretty much the whole point, in fact. But what seems to have slipped away in recent years, as the thinking has become more fan-like and less, yes, professional, is the important second part of that question -- the part where somebody says "Yes, it would be interesting -- but where would we go from there?" So you can rip out Spider-Man's eye and put him in spider-armor and have him reveal his identity to the world -------- but where do you go from there?