New Brevoort Formspring

It’s a tough thing to say, but I think that Mark was an incredibly effective XO, but wouldn’t have been as strong an EIC. The EIC’s job, by necessity, requires the person in the chair to make a lot of cold, hard, fiscally-motivated decisions, and to deal with delivering a lot of bad news. These were always areas that gave Mark a bit of agita–he’d do what he needed to do, but he was more likely, to his credit, to put the well-being of friends and colleagues ahead of the needs of the organization. The EIC cannot do that and be effective. During that one year when he was one of the five EICs of Marvel, he consistently made choices that sustained certain creators for a longer period of time, but at the expense of the titles they were working on. That’s not a sustainable approach for an EIC.