Keep in mind, too, that the late Sixties and early Seventies, when much of this work was being done, was still very much a part of the period in which the books had several stories, and several creative teams, in each issue. That approach was rapidly dying out -- to the ultimate detriment of the form as a whole -- but the mentality was still there. The talent was less important than the characters, and having Neal on one issue and Irv Novick on the next was, in Julie's mind, not so very different from having a three story issue with Shelly Moldoff, Dick Sprang and Jack Burnley on the art. Some fans were, by then, buying for Neal Adams, but most were buying for Batman.

Six weeks not enough?

QUOTE: I'm paraphrasing a bit, but he proclaimed to the effect that "Readers are happily willing to wait a little longer for a book if the creative team is really doing a really good job" Um, no, they're not. They wait because they have no choice if they want to read the further adventures of their favorite character(s) in the late book in question. And isn't the creative team always supposed to be doing a really good job?

Some fans do, however, have this mentality, unfortunately.

"Altho Julie doubtless hired Neal to do books like GREEN LANTERN and BATMAN because he saw in this "new guy" a spectacular talent to be exploited, Julie was still one of the old-timers, someone who knew it was the song, not the singer that was important. His job was to produce BATMAN, not Neal Adams' BATMAN."

Ok. Point taken. Maybe I'm pushing too hard to make a point.

The thing that depresses me the most about threads like this is that I find myself being held up as some kind of religious zealot for insisting that people should do the job they have been hired to do!!

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You are not being a religious zealot for insisting people do their jobs. As a matter of fact, you're an inspiration to me. The main reason I have returned to art school to finish up my BFA in Graphic Illustration, is late pencilers. I have tried to work as an inker, and I was only charging $25 a page. The problem was not getting enough pages per month, and not getting any work from Marvel or DC. I decided that the only way to solve the problem was to become the penciler myself, and then ink my own work. I figure this way I can make sure that the book comes out on time, and I hope to always have work. There is a song that I feel best describes why books are shipping late.

They would have drawn a page today, but they got high.

Other people could have had work too, but they got high.

Now the book is shipping late, and they know why.

Because they got high, because they got high, because they got high.  

QUOTE: Six weeks = 30 working days. That's less than 3/4ths of a page a day. Do these guys have to break every five minutes so their nannies can massage their aching hands?

Reminds me of something Liefeld was quoted as saying.

Quoteth Rob:

"When you get called up for a meeting with Steven Spielberg or you're hanging out with Tom Cruise four days a week, you don't want to go home and draw; you want to find some friends and tell them about it."

There was another fun quote from Todd McFarlane from his old E.G.O. column in Wizard magazine years ago (yes, there was a time I actually bought the wretched thing).

I wish I could remember the exact phrasing, but in a nutshell, he was complaining about the criticisms of Image lateness by his peers (JB, Peter David, etc.).  claiming that Image does not hurt their livelihood and that the criticism "boils down to jealously".

He likened this to an analogy that if his Mom opened a shoe store, nobody would care.. unless her shoe store was a huge success. 

Anyone happen to have those old Wizard issues? I would be interested to know how accurate my memory is here.