Something I have been thinking about for a while. Who would you consider Marvel's most versatile writers? We can talk about so-and-so being a great Daredevil writer and a great Spider-Man writer but often you have issues where they don't do that well in X-Men and so on. So that made me think of examples of writers who wrote excellent and great stories for multiple titles and teams.
Obviously, Stan Lee, the first EIC of Marvel's continuity is a natural starting point. On account of Marvel Method issues with Ditko/Kirby/Romita/Everett, there are a lot of stuff we can qualify but at the very least he wrote the scripts, i.e. in-page dialogue and captions (based maybe on notes and stuff left by Kirby/Ditko according to one '60s interview where Lee admitted as such). He did do that, and it can't be denied that the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, X-Men, Dr. Strange, The Mighty Thor, The Avengers, Iron Man all speak with his voice. So he definitely qualifies and of course Lee has that unique quality where even though his writing style is inimitable different characters sound different to each other. Peter Parker's balloons read with a diferent voice than Ben Grimm or Reed's, Jameson reads different from Dr. Doom, and that applies to everyone. Writers after him tended to be more active in plotting and scripting and deciding the story. Roy Thomas was I think the first one, Gerry Conway was another. If we consider Kirby and Ditko as writers, then Kirby is probably the most versatile there is -- FF, Mighty Thor, Captain America, X-Men. And unlike Ditko, and even Lee, Kirby's post-'60s career actually did produce great comics. The DC Stuff yes, but also stuff like Madbomb for Captain America (for which he has writing-artist credit). Yet, you can also say that Kirby's stuff are large canvas epic stuff, mostly the cosmic and divine stuff, with Captain America being the only "Street-Level" stories and even then Cap battles on a big canvas, stuff like secret societies, foreign threats, legacy villains of Nazi war criminals and so on. In the case of Ditko consider that he did Spider-Man, neurotic, grounded science-fiction stuff and at the same time did Doctor Strange, going cosmic and mystical, doing all kinds of trippy and weird stuff. Ditko didn't do as many titles as Kirby but his two big Marvel creations diverge from each other more sharply.
So who would you rank as most versatile after that?
My pick would be Roger Stern. He wrote a great run of Spider-Man, a great run of Captain America, a great run of Avengers, showing he can handle the small-scale street stuff and the big scale cosmic stuff. He wrote the 10-page heartbreaker The Kid Who Collected Spider-Man and stuff like Under Siege and Assault on Olympus. He also wrote arguably the greatest Doctor Doom story of all time -- Triumph and Torment, and he did a lot of work on Doctor Strange (who is also a big part of T&T albeit that story is still Doom's). So he handles different corners of the Marvel Universe with aplomb and can do all kinds of stories. I can't think of someone else with that kind of solid record.
Who else comes close in your view?