Funny how you twisted that. I asked you what you would define success as if not my financial gain, you didn't offer any alternatives.
I by no means said anyone should be PRAISED. but a movie that makes $500 million dollars at the box office is considered successful no matter how much every review and movie goer might despise it as low brow. No one's praising it, but it's unquestionably successful financially.
When people want to make a successful movie, they make a big action packed special effects blockbuster that brings in hundreds of millions of dollars. When people want a film to win awards and prise, they usually make a film with a much lower budget with a mcuh more thoughtful script that won't make a fraction of the gross of a box office smash (with occasional exceptions, of course, for films like Titanic, Shakespeare in Love, Thunderbirds, A Sound of Thunder, etc.)
Likewise, Marvel makes the big splash books that sell hundreds of thousands of copies but at the end of the day are about men in tights, whereas the truly thought provoking books that don't have people wearing yellow spandex are usually produced by Top Shelf, Dark Horse, DC's Vertigo division, etc. (again, notable exceptions for the work of Alan Moore, MAUS, etc.)
Success by no means equals praise, or vice versa. It's nice when they go hand in hand, but this is rare.
Do you have a source for this 500% thing anyway?
I didn't twist anything. I was clarifying for the sake of debate. Now, you mention that when a movie grosses $500,000,000 it's considered a success. That's true, and I'm not arguing that. The same goes for comic books. When a book sells 100,000 copies these days, it's considered a success.
Civil War, New Avengers, Astonishing X-Men, Amazing Spider-Man, World War Hulk, Mighty Avengers...they are all wild successes. They are considered successes because they sell copies and make money. Okay.
Now take what you said about Jim Shooter and apply it. You're saying that Jim Shooter was "incredibly successful" and that more books were produced in his tenure then "any other time in the company's history". Based on that, you're completely wrong. I'm not talking about the guy's personality or the quality of books that were produced in that era. I'm talking about what you're talking about: sales. And you're incorrect.
It is a fact that the number one selling comic book of all time remains to be
X-Men #1, at over 8,000,000 printed and sold. This was under Defalco's tenure, not Shooter's, by the way. It is a fact that Marvel's output of titles increased by 500%* (even know, this is not a typo) when Defalco took office. That means Defalco's tenure was a more lucritave one than Shooter's. Meaning he was more successful.
But let's take a look at the EiC who came before Shooter, Archie Goodwin. Aside from creating the Epic imprint, the Marvel Graphic Novel and being the first to publish the English translation of
Akira as well as one of the first in bringing Moebius to North America (all well and good, but we're talking cold hard sales figures, right?) Goodwin also single handedly saved Marvel from going under by getting the rights to publish Star Wars comics. Remember those? HUGE success. So big in fact, that Jim Shooter, himself, credited Goodwin for bringing Marvel Comics back from the brink of death. And we all know by now that quality doesn't do that. Sales figures do.
So was Jim Shooter the success that you'd like to think (for some reason) that he is? No, he's not. Like I mentioned before, he had a lot of good comics and a lot of good runs under his tenure but you have to look at the greater picture if you're going to make the kinds of claims you're trying to make. He didn't have the highest sales and he didn't have the largest number of titles. Therefore, by the terms of success, when stacked against his peers, he does not measure up.
*
Comic Wars: Marvel's Battle for Survival by Dan Raviv
