Axel Alonso

He was a great editor at Vertigo and at Jemas nuMarvel...what happened to him? He seems like he cannot longer grab talented/pretigious people to work for Marvel. What do you think happened?

maybe marvel fucks you up and takes away any talent you have

Well, you have snake eyes dubs...I respect that. on a related note, Marvel seems to have lost all his good editors too, Where are Wacker, Cebulski, Moore, Idelson et al?

>Marvel fucks you, lets you empty
>Marvel fucks you, takes your talent, lets you BROKEN

Honestly. I've been wondering the same thing. I revered this guy from Vertigo to his time with Marvel in early 2000's. I look at Marvel now and cannot believe this is the same guy but as the E-i-C.

he has a bunch of people above him breathing down his unprofitable neck

1. Peter principle. Good editors get promoted to editor-in-chief which requires different skills than editing individual books.
2. He's a Vertigo guy and I think at some level he'd just prefer to be working on grown-up comics instead of superheroes.

I don't mind him, he probably doesn't have a whole lot of power the way EiCs used to, but his weekly column at Comic Book Resources is fucking terrible. He gives these robotic press-release answers that suggest he hasn't read all the comics (which, being EiC, he probably hasn't). Any time Brevoort takes over the column it's much better.

>1. Peter principle. Good editors get promoted to editor-in-chief which requires different skills than editing individual books.

See also: Bob Harras was promoted to Marvel EiC because of his success at keeping the X-Men line incredibly popular (even after Marvel lost its top X-artists to Image). But he wasn't as successful as EiC, and the X-Men line fell apart because he wasn't able to concentrate on editing it.

Marvel and DC are dead ends. You can't make good comics there anymore. At best, you use them to add prestige to your resume after already having notable work.

Who do you think would be a good EIC?

Harras was always a shit editor. The X-books maintained their level of success after losing Claremont and the Image guys by riding the crest of a wave.

First issue after Lee was Art Thibert trying to imitate his style IIRC, it was sad.

meant to reply to

Even after the speculator crash, they still remained the top selling books.

Yeah, but the X-books course corrected and they also sensed when the Jim Lee style was going out of fashion. The switch to Joe Madueira and a manga influence, plus the success of Age of Apocalypse. It wasn't until the Onslaught crossover that they started to look like they were falling apart, and that was after Harras became EiC.

But back on topic, what were Alonso's good books at Marvel? I know he was editor of JMS's Spider-Man and deserves credit for reviving 616 Spidey after it was a complete dumpster fire in the late '90s. But I don't know much else he did before becoming EiC.

>Who do you think would be a good EIC?

Maybe someone who hasn't been at Marvel before and doesn't have friends there and doesn't care about making enemies.

The two most successful Marvel EiCs after Lee were probably Shooter and Quesada (I said successful, I don't mean everyone likes what they did). And neither one was promoted from within the Marvel editorial culture. Shooter just got there a couple of years earlier, and Quesada was promoted over the heads of all the Marvel staff editors. Which creates a "I'm not here to make friends" culture.

I vaguely recall he edited Hudlin's Black Panther and edited the X-books before becoming EIC.

Part of the problem is what exactly an EIC is supposed to do. EICs can only be talent-bringers when they have lots of power and/or lots of good people underneath. Otherwise, the most basic thing an EIC can do is to touch base with the editors and make sure they aren't mouthbreathing idiots.

Bad EICs, pound for pound, let bad editors roam freely. Happened and still happens with Bob Harras -- the only reason he hasn't been fired is because Johns+Didio+Lee got rid of the crap editors themselves and, at least at the beginning of Rebirth, oversaw editorial.

Glancing at the lineup, it just seems like Marvel editorial is all over the place. They have no idea what they're doing, and that almost always stems from an EIC not keeping the editors in line.

Axel doesn't give a shit about anything except blowing his Disney overlords and putting out hip-hop variants. Like you said, it starts at the top and when his editorial team comes off as practically non-existant or concerned solely with shock value and diversity shit it makes him come off as an incompetent idiot who doesn't have the balls or ability to keep his guys in line and run a tight ship. He's not running a place where writers want to come and work on some of the greatest characters to tell great stories and fulfill dreams but a place assholes use as a pit stop to build up their brand so they can be seen as having influence or being important (people like Leth) or leverage their name value in the hope of becoming Mark Millar or Robert Kirkman. When editorial does seem to step in it's to mandate complete garbage that nobody wants to see and has seemingly driven off at least one writer.

as long as slott collects a paycheck from marvel i will rank axe at the bottom of EiCs

his reign of terror has gone on long enough

Writers want that Walking Dead money and freedom from big summer events. So, Image.

As shit as he is in so many ways, Wacker was the guy grabbing and schmoozing all the talent.

>unprofitable
You are fucking crazy, the margins are insane. The only thing missing is growth.

JUST