Quote Originally Posted by xpyred View Post
I wonder if anyone said that about Chris Claremont and his 15 years on Uncanny X-Men. I'm sure not all of Claremont's X-Men stories during that period are gold standard.
With Claremont, the X-Men before him was a minor-league title. He elevated the X-Men, more than any other writer before and after him, into Marvel's uber-franchise and the center of the MU, and it's his stuff and ideas, the notion of Mutants as a metaphor for the oppressed that crossed into the movies, the Fox cartoon, Xmen Evolution and after that. Claremont on X-Men is comparable to Miller on Daredevil or Moore on Swamp Thing, Michelinie on Iron Man.

As far as ASM goes, the norm for a long time was shorter runs (Conway, Wein, Wolfman, Stern, Defalco) after Stan Lee. And in Lee's case, Lee-Ditko is the more consistent period than Lee-Romita. Then David Michelinie came along and had this huge extended run on Spider-Man. After him you have the great sadness that is the Clone Saga and Post-Clone Saga, and then JMS had another seven year run. So long runs on Spider-Man is the more recent and consistent trend. Slott is unusual because he wrote Spider-Man bi-monthly whereas Michelinie and JMS worked single-monthly. So in the same amount of time it took JMS to reach 70 issues, Slott got to do 140 issues...obviously higher workload, and hopefully for his sake, more pay, but it also means that Slott had an unfair advantage in logging more books on the pile than earlier writers did.

At the same time ASM is ASM, it's been a generally consistent and defining title for multiple geneations. Until the Clone Saga, Spider-Man never had a bad decade and bad period. Not everything before was good (just like not everything during the clone saga and Pre-JMS period was bad) but overall that was the norm. It's very difficult to argue that Slott transformed ASM the way Claremont did X-Men or Miller did Daredevil.