This seems like one of the potentially longer answers, Mortimer. So let’s get right into it. Let me first begin by saying that pretty much nobody gets to the position of being Editor in Chief without a whole bunch of established skills and experience in the field. So every EIC that I’ve worked under has been strong in this area to varying degrees.
Tom DeFalco was the EIC I came into the business under, and consequently, he was perhaps more intimidating to me in that role than he may have been to others. I got to know Tom better once he was outside of that job, when we worked on series such as GREEN GOBLIN and SPIDER-GIRL together, and he’s always been a source of good advice and general support. At the time he came in as EIC, he was seen as a stabilizing force—the editorial staff was still reeling from the chaotic and terrifying final days of Jim Shooter’s era. Tom, though, was a familiar face, somebody who’d come up through the ranks alongside most of the key editors of that period, and so he was a known quantity. He tended to have a preference for the early, formative Marvel books, and even though he would never express it this way, those where the kinds of comics that he tried to emulate. His own work makes that abundantly clear. While he was EIC, Tom espoused a variety of different ideas about what the best way to put together comics might be, including some that I scoffed at, as did a number of the other young editors at that time. I felt like he was out of touch, not tuned in to the changes that the field had been going through since the mid-1980s and the advent of the British talent invasion and the overall move towards more adult material in the marketplace. But now having lived through more and gained more life experience, I find that I agree with him on many of those things, and I struggle to hand down their value to the newer crop of Marvel editors.
I had a unique relationship with Bob Budiansky, who was the EIC of the Spider-Man division of Marvel during that strange year when editorial was divided up into five separate fiefdoms. Bob was the person who hired me after my internship, and who taught me an awful lot of the block-and-tackle of making Marvel comics. Bob was also the only one of the five EICs of that era to accomplish the fiscal goals that had been set out for each EIC—and then he was unjustly laid off despite that, because leadership had changed. And it must be said that he got to his goal by strip-mining absolutely everything story-wise in regards to Spider-Man in a way that probably was not healthy for the line had it continued to go on that way. But the point is that he was given a mission, and he carried out that mission, no matter what he had to do to get there.
Bob Harras was a really terrific line editor when he was running just the X-MEN titles. He had a great eye for talent, and he knew exactly what he wanted those books to be like, what he felt worked and made the characters connect with the audience. He also became EIC during the most tumultuous time in the company’s history, a period in which we would literally have a new Marvel president seemingly every week, with new goals and directives to be carried out, complete whiplash reversals of direction to be dealt with. All during that period, he kept Marvel profitable and strong, which is something that I don’t think he gets enough credit for. Bob was also conflict-averse, which wasn’t a great trait in an EIC, and that would occasionally cause him to act unilaterally when a particular editor happened to be out of the office. I learned that it was always dangerous to take time off, because in my absence, Bob may have decided to change my books all around, knowing that he could make it all fait accompli by the time I returned. But for all of that, I largely got along with Bob fine.
When it comes to Joe Quesada, there are really almost two different Joes, two separate periods during his long tenure. The first Joe was the rebel, the outsider, the rock and roll bad boy given the keys to the kingdom who had no real idea of what would and would not work, and who wouldn’t have been swayed if people told him anyway. This Joe was the early, fearless Quesada of the beginning of his tenure, where he’d try all sorts of crazy things, bring all sorts of assorted talents on board to to Marvel projects. He also had about as good a set of innate instincts as to what a mainstream Marvel reader was going to respond to as anybody that I’ve ever seen. Over time, Joe settled into his role a little bit more, learned the lessons of projects that didn’t work and refined his approach. The more mature Joe was still incredibly market-savvy, but he was a hair more cautious in his decision-making. He’d become more of an adult, wiser. I used to joke that if you introduced the Joe of his first day as EIC to the Joe of his last day, the two would hate one another and fight incessantly. That’s an exaggeration, but only a slight one.
Like Bob Harras, Axel Alonso’s real great skill was in putting together stories and comics. He was a terrific line editor with a strong sense of what he was looking for, an almost grindhouse theater sensibility. As EIC, he had to follow in Joe’s large shadow, and while he wasn’t quite as plugged into mainstream sensibilities as Joe had been, he made up for that by expanding the diversity of what Marvel was publishing, both in terms of the titles and the people behind them. Rather than blockbusters, Axel tended to produce a lot of artistic boutique books that did better than anybody expected. As much as anything, the Matt Fraction/David Aja HAWKEYE series was emblematic of his tenure, a book that was slightly off the beaten track that took people by surprise. Axel’s big difficulty as EIC was that the EIC doesn’t get to edit any books, and so sometimes he could take too strong a hand on a project ostensibly being edited by some other editor. During his time, one of the duties given to me was to watch over Axel and keep him from editing books, and to ring the bell if I thought he was going too far in this regard. Which didn’t happen all that often, but Axel was a thoroughbred trained to run, and so he’d occasionally strain against the limitations of the position. I expect that his current duties at AWA are a better fit for him.
Current EIC C.B. Cebulski doesn’t have that particular problem, he’s very much not looking to edit anybody else’s comics. Coming from a talent relations background, C.B. has a strong eye for talent and for casting—putting the right creator on the right assignment. He’s also the only EIC in my time with the company who regularly, weekly, still goes to the comic shop to buy new books and to chat with the staff there. C.B. is also more international in his thinking than any prior EIC, a result no doubt of all of the travel he’s done in his lifetime. But it’s a real strength at a time when Marvel has exploded on the global stage thanks to the long reach of the films, and so C.B. tends to both recruit talent from all around the globe and to be at the forefront of the company’s publishing moves into new markets and new formats.