New Brevoort Formspring
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Hello Tom, I've always wondered how writers pitch extended story lines without revealing to editors how the story resolves itself. Steve Gerber did this a number of times on stories/books that ended up being scuttled/cancelled (ex. Omega, Killer Elf with a gun, etc). Sometime a writer quits and the replacement has no idea where the story was going. This seemed to happen more frequently in the 70s and 80s. Why would a story be excepted without knowing if the ending was acceptable. Thank you, JL
Well, in those eras, the infrastructure of Marvel was very different. it was still a holdover from the days in which Stan Lee ran everything single-handedly, so you had a single Editor (what we would think of today as an Editor in Chief) and a couple of Assistant Editors overseeing the whole of the line. And many of the senior writers, those who had been on staff at Marvel, functioned as independent editors themselves. So the creators would often be making up their stories almost on the fly, with nobody looking over their shoulders or that they needed to check in with especially. And there were good sides and bad sides to this, but the bad ultimately outweighed the good. So when Jim Shooter came in as EIC in the late 1970s, he began to change the structure, building up a line of Editors to handle the specifics of the various books in house and putting an end to the writer-editor concept. This caused a lot of bad feelings at the time, but was certainly the right move in terms of righting the Marvel of the period.
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