chief? Like, you had to keep pouring in money into the company, “I gotta think of the next big thing. We need to keep expanding.” Nope. You’re thinking about it like a fan, and I’m going to tell you how I thought about it like a professional. We were in the publishing business, and I wanted to run Marvel Comics like any other publishing house. I just felt that as long as we were making money, that the people upstairs would leave us alone. My goal was to make money for the company and to expand the number of titles we were doing. Here’s the simple economics of publishing: in order to make money as a publisher, you have to publish. In those days I could see that comic book stores depended upon the monthly comic books. The individual stores would basically sell the same amount of each title every month. In order to ensure the health of the comic book stores, we needed to slowly build up our output, because the more titles we produced that sold through every month, the more money the comic book stores would make. The more money the comic book stores made, the more secure the industry was. And I wanted to be in a secure industry. But did you feel you had enough creators to put a line of good books out there? Yeah. I also felt that, as publishers, it was our responsibility to help develop new talent. You can only develop new talent if you’re expanding. So I wanted to be in a growing company. I felt that the more we grew, the more work we would provide to the creative people. I always saw myself as a freelancer who masqueraded as a staff person. The goal was to slowly increase the production over a period of time, and give people a chance to develop. Here’s the secret with creative people: they don’t spring full-blown. They all need time to develop as creative people. That’s why we had books like Marvel Comics Presents. That was essentially our version of New Talent Showcase. It gave a lot of people like Rob Liefeld and many others an opportunity to develop their craft. A chance to spread their wings. Yeah, and learn how to tell a comic book story; there’s a real craft to this business. A lot of people think that you just sit down and it just flows, that it’s just the work of genius. No, you really have to know what you’re doing. Did you feel you had a huge momentum going on around ’89, ’90? It seemed like you had someone really good working on all the books, and you had stories that readers were into. Well, yeah. I think we kept getting good momentum going. I also think the golden age of comics is whenever you started reading them. So that might have been around the time when you were really getting into them. This was a key era, too; I remember it was very strong editorially. DC had nothing on you guys at that point. And that was something I wanted to get into, the superstar artists. Were you aware these guys were becoming big names for themselves, Todd and Jim Lee at that point? It happened pretty quickly. I think as soon as
Interesting X-Men piece by Jim Lee (along with Cyclops character shot). Top panel was used to promote 1991’s X-Men #1 release; lower panel was an unfinished thought by the artist. X-Men ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.
Jim Lee did a couple of issues of Uncanny, right away with people, he struck a chord. Yeah, but don’t forget, Jim Lee had been around a long time before he did Uncanny X-Men. But he was in the minors on Alpha Flight. His star started coming up when he was doing the Punisher War Journal. Here’s the secret of comics: the characters make the stars, and the stars make the characters. If you’re a talented guy and they put you on a major character, then you’ll become a superstar. But you were aware, when people talk like, “I like that Jim Lee run of books,” or “I like Tom DeFalco’s run on Spider-Man.” People talk like that, and in fan circles they do talk like that. But the fans always talked like that. The guy I like is terrific. The guy you like is a bum. Y’know? Did you ever start feeling like they were getting out of hand after a while? Because I remember
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