"Keep in mind, SECRET WARS began as a toy promotion. At the start nobody expected it to be a hit. It was only when Shooter forced all the other titles to tie in to SW that we saw its sales climb."

--

I hadn't thought if it that way before. There was already CONTEST OF CHAMPIONS which also featured all of the MU characters together - but it was a completely standalone story and was easily ignored, which I suppose most readers did. 

--

"And that was at the expense of the other titles. Fans who were operating on limited budgets flocked to the book that had virtually all the characters in it. The numbers SW accrued were basically subtracted from the other books."

--

I recall handling the original SW well enough, but by the time SWII came around, I tried to buy all of the tie-ins for the first couple of months, but I had to give up because there was no way I could afford them all. And since continuing to read SWII meant having to read an incomplete story, I gave up on it altogether. Then I became more and more annoyed that this Jheri-curled clone of Captain America* kept popping up in the books that I was trying to read.

I know that kids weren't meant to know about how the sausage was made, but it became pretty damn clear to me even then that there was something fishy about the guy with Editor-In-Chief credits (and the voice of the Marvel Bullpen Bulletins) getting the writing gig for these two major series. I also questioned the point of an Editor credit going to someone else - who was going to get away with telling Shooter "No"?

* Roger Stern might have been the only writer to reference this fact!

I’m not a psychologist, so I don’t know.

•••

From time to time Shooter had expressed the opinion that there shouldn’t even be credits. That it should be the characters alone that sold the books.