That's it in a nutshell, bub.  Stan Lee has always been a salesman, always will be.  It's his job to sell comics.  Not necessarily good ones, by some of our opinions, but the man's name still stands for comics.

Plus he's getting a pretty penny for it, besides.  Sure beats working for a living...

Stan Lee is awesome. I'd be a smiling bundle of joy too if I cashed in as much as I heard he does every year just for being there. There's no way I can type this without sounding sarcastic but I'm not in the slightest.

Oh hell yeah, Martin. For the scratch Stan makes, I would endorse whatever work Liefeld does.

Well......maybe not, but you get what I'm saying.

"How well they're doing" is relative. Most of their books would still have been canceled when I started in the Bizniz. A decade or two of diminished expectations have caused people now to rejoice over sales that would have been deemed dismal failures not so very long ago.
*****

Numbers and profits are two different things.  I may be selling two hundred thousand issues and taking home one penny a piece, or I could be selling fifty thousand issues and taking home five cents a piece.  Which would you rather have?

I have tried and tried to find operating margin information from the 1980s and have been unable to find anything.  If anyone can find this, I would love to see it.