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That wasn't offered. Just before I left, Shooter had offered me script approval, meaning I would be able to read all the scripts BEFORE the book was lettered and published, but that sounded like a whole lot of hassle -- as I am sure Shooter knew it would.

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I think some other "rebel" character, like the LOSH's WILDFIRE or TIMBER WOLF might've filled this gap.

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Again, a reminder that back then, circa 1975, the "rebels" had not yet started to make their presence felt. Wolverine was a minor character, as witness by the fact Chris and Dave were prepared to dump him. I was the one who "adopted" Wolverine, brought him to center stage, and turned up the heat. Howard Chaykin has been known to say the whole "darkening" of the industry was MY FAULT, because of what I did with Wolverine.

There wasn't a whole lot of demand, when I started on X-MEN, for a "rebel" character. The biggest seller was still Spider-Man, who at that point, with three monthlies including a team-up book, was a long way from the "outsider" he started out as!

oh boy do i agree. batman's job, historically, was fighting crime IN GOTHAM CITY. if he left, it was because he needed to trace the origin or source of something that was causing problems in his city.

then, suddenly, he's got plans to take down every superbeing on the planet, the tools to do so (don't you think wayne enterprises shareholders would wonder where the profits were going?) and the mad-on to care about being "the most dangerous AND PREPARED man alive."

i mean, yeesh.

What happened to demarcation??

This is something all too common in superhero comics, and has been for many a year. When Stan, Jack and Steve were laying the foundations of the Marvel "Universe", the characters they came up with tended to be "specialists". Super-science menace, let the FF take care of it. Street level stuff, that's Spider-Man's territory. And the X-Men were all about mutants.

Of course, extraterrestrials tended to slip in everywhere, from time to time. The Skrulls, the Space Phantom, those aliens the Terrible Tinkerer hung out with (and was revealed to be one of), etc, etc. Aliens in that part of the Silver Age were common coinage. A quick way to get a story started.

When things settled down, tho, we saw less and less of this cross-pollination. Spider-Man didn't see too many aliens. Neither did the X-Men. Nor did either battle much that was outside their established bailiwick. But by the time I started working for Marvel, things were starting to get "sloppy". The very first issue of X-MEN I worked on had them off on an alien planet dealing with a universe-threatening menace. Surely the FF's domain? In fact, one of the things Roger Stern (as editor) and I pushed for was more and more MUTANT storylines. That's why Lilandra and her storyline got shoved onto the furthest back of the back burners. How soon after my arrival was Magneto back in the saddle?

i can see where it would be fun to do a mismatch type of story sometimes, where the x-men fight the circus of crime or spider-man takes on bullseye or something... but each hero or team builds up their particular rogue's gallery for a reason-- exactly as JB illustrates.

batman should be fighting criminals-- WEIRD criminals, sure, but guys who commit crimes to make themselves rich. superman should be fighting big and really dangerous enemies, the kind that nobody BUT superman would be facing.

doing a mismatch is fun, but done over and over, it makes the heroes and villains... well, not quite interchangeable but not well-suited for each other. what would happen if superman fought the joker as often as he fought lex luthor?

i suspect it's that very thing that pushed batman to becoming something very different than when he started.