Some years ago, online fans coined the phrase, "The Priest Curse," and a lot has been made of the fact that I've written a lot of books that were eventually cancelled. Typically, this is all in good fun, but occasionally a fan or even some editors in the business start taking this nonsense seriously, as though any one person on any given creative team can be the sole reason a book is cancelled.

Books are cancelled for a lot of reasons, many of them having nothing to do with the guy sitting in the writer's chair. And while I'm certainly willing to accept my fair share of the blame, I've posted a lot of defenses of my track record online, and I've finally thought to include some of that here, so I won't have to keep repeating myself.

While it's certainly expedient and fun to attribute cancellations to the writer, or the common name associated with a string of "failures," the reality of the business is most everyone from the least famous to the most famous has had books cancelled out from under them. It's a lot like coaching the Yankees; sooner or later you just take one in the neck.

"The Priest Curse" is an, at best, satirical lament of the online fans. I certainly have had my share of bad luck, but to say I was directly responsible for the demise (or success) of a book is a bit sophomoric. The notion that a writer calls all the shots and makes all the decisions is an uninformed one. I've worked with a great many editors over the years, and we haven't always agreed about what choices to make about the books we've worked on.

Sadly, until very recently, I've been near universally overruled on important decisions that affect the direction and handling of the books I've worked on. And, in virtually every case, when the editor chose to ignore my advice and/or warnings, the books have inevitably been cancelled; almost all of them due to choices made by the company that I strongly disagreed with. Now, sure, that sounds arrogant, and I've been loudly chastised for "blaming my artists for my own failures," and so forth. But this is my subjective experience. And, while, yes we all tend to be heroes of our own stories, I'm trying to be as fair to everyone involved as I can manage, in a great many cases far fairer than they deserve.

I'm happy to be in a much more synergistic relationship with my current work, and now tend to shy away from projects where I know the company is pulling left when my instincts tell me to pull right. Because, when these things tank, fans and trade press write articles about ME, while the people who actually made the decisions that tanked these projects simply go onto other things. If a book fails, I'm the guy taking it in the neck. Not the artist, who may have been wrong for the project or who may have been ignoring my scripts. Not the editor, who typically made the bad creative decisions (and nearly always over my loud objection). Me. And, as a result, there are editors who are reluctant to hire me, fearing "The Priest Curse," which is, to me, absolutely ridiculous and revelatory of the amateur fan status of comics professionals who think that way.

Work should be evaluated on its artistic content and integrity. Not on who's popular, or what someone's numbers are or who is whose buddy. Ideally, some objective choice should be made, based on the body of work from a given creator. Ideally, there should be this even playing field, this fairness and truth we as comics professionals espouse in our super-heroic liturgy. But the truth is, it's all about numbers and or whose buddy you are; in which orbit you exist within the industry. If you have strong numbers, you're likely to be offered choice projects.  If you have weak numbers, you're gonna need a friend or friends and your opportunities are shaped by the politics of the business.

Guys like Dan Jurgens and George Perez are offered the best deals because they have the best numbers. But, wait, they have great numbers because they've been offered the best deals. Dan is the hero of Death of Superman and Zero Hour, but he was also the architect of Booster Gold, which didn't fare as well. But, see, if someone offers you a choice project (or accepts your pitch for one), you're likely to hit one out of the park (I mean, how could Zero Hour lose?). And, if you hit one out of the park, they'll offer you another.  And another.  And another. And you're cemented in the position of Fan Fave and/or Star Talent because of the string of hits.

Guys like me can only stare at that glass ceiling. Guys like me can't even get proposals like Zero Hour read. Attached to any proposal someone in my ranking turns in is an invisible note that says, "Marginal Loser Guy," and the words on the paper are interpreted in that context; editors likely to be much more critical and looking for every fault, as opposed to Star Talent where the assumption is the work is good. Blockbuster good. Steven Spielberg good.

It's a trap. It's one that's near impossible to get out of once you're in, once you're branded. In the current market, making a hit out of a turkey book is not unlike the immaculate conception, and career-wise, all prophecies become ephemerally self-fulfilling. Notable exceptions to this theory are Mark Waid and Kurt Busiek, both of whom have successfully fought their way out of the comics ghetto and established themselves as stars. Either writer will tell you it wasn't easy, and they had to overcome a great deal of resistance and office politics to get where they are today.

But, for the vast majority of us, it's like, you meet a girl and wait too long to make your move and end up in The Friend Zone, never to be taken seriously or evaluated by any reasonably objective standard without the taint of who you are coloring those evaluations. This is who I am. These are the gigs I qualify for, and I'm lucky to even get them. They are books predestined to die at some point, and I am, time and again, brought in to shepherd them to their final rest.

I've never been offered SUPERMAN.  Never been offered BATMAN or THOR. IRON MAN or FLASH. I've never, in twenty-two  years, been offered a berth on a solid ongoing series. It's impossible to know, therefore, whether my contribution to the comics field would have increased a book's sales and popularity or whether I'd have tanked it.  Had I destroyed, say, the X-MEN, then, yeah, The Priest Curse would probably have a little more mojo to it. But, honestly, HAWKMAN was cancelled before I even arrived.

I'm one of those guys who gets tossed whatever is left over after the calls have gone through to Grant or Warren or Dan or Mark or Kurt. I'm the guy a lot of people think of when they have some diseased property they're trying to turn around. A marginal presence in the industry whose main asset is he tends to stay out of harm's way. I do a nice, detailed job and I don't make waves or bother people.

Because I've never been on SUPERMAN, I'm not offered SUPERMAN. They tend to offer the Big Books to people who have done The Big Books.  Twenty-Two years later, I'm still waiting for my shot at The Big Book, a shot I am increasingly unlikely to get because my status in the industry has been fairly well cemented into the role of Marginal Guy.

In the old days, the deal was: you take a dog-faced book, turn it into a hit, and you get your shot at better things. However, today's  sales atmosphere does not allow for that. There is fairly little sampling going on: fans buy what they buy. They buy what they know, what is safe to them.  Comics are expensive, and if this is a property that's sold in the bottom rung and has a writer notorious for killing books, fans tend to calculate that into their buying decisions. It is nearly impossible to take a dog-faced book or a dog-faced character and turn that character into a commercial hit (although people like James Robinson have managed to turn characters like Starman into a critical success, even those books never became commercial hits).

So, no SUPERMAN for me. I get SPUD BOY.  And, usually, I'm brought in around SPUD #17, by which time the sales are so depressed not even a resurrected Ernest Hemmingway could save the book. Now, this sounds awfully defensive and whiny. I should just take it like a man: I suck, and that's the end of it. But, the truth is, most everything I've done has managed some level of critical success, but unlike guys like Robinson, I have yet to manage to translate that into offers of new projects that are less sickly than SPUD BOY.

I should also hasten to add I have very few regrets about my career in this business. I love this business and am grateful to have survived in it for two decades, a claim even some "successful" or "fave" writers can't claim. Truth is, I'm not even sure I'd want SUPERMAN. I'd just have liked to have been asked... even once...  Anyway, some whiny notes about my many crash and burn experiences:

POWER MAN & IRON FIST had been kind of treading water since the very successful run by writer Jo Duffy and artist Kerry Gammill.  MD "Doc" Bright and I worked closely with editor Denny O'Neil to create our own direction on the book, and reenergized the title with the fans. However, somewhere down the hall, it was decided that what we were doing wasn't any good, despite the positive reviews and average sales over 100,000 copies (in those days, 250,000 copies— the CAPTAIN AMERICA standard— was the baseline. We were considered a marginal title). We were cut from monthly status to bi-monthly, which we all agreed was a deliberate attempt to tank the book (bi-monthly publication nearly always depresses sales). Our sales slipped but did not plummet, and we went on to do the best we could under the crippling production schedule, until, finally, we were cancelled as part of a line-wide sweep to make room for the disastrous "New Universe" line of books. Editor O'Neil was so furious at the deliberate destruction of POWER/FIST, he ordered Iron Fists death in the concluding issue, #125.

I continued to write CONAN THE BARBARIAN, a book I wrote concurrent with POWER/FIST. The CONAN saga is detailed here, but the long and short of it is I was fired at the height of the book's post-Roy popularity, during one of the more successful runs on the book to date, and for no apparent reason.

Which left me with CONAN THE KING and WEB OF SPIDER-MAN for Marvel. About 1986 or so, a change in the EIC chair led to a new boss who disliked me intensely. This man made absolutely no secret of the fact he did not want me working at Marvel, and he applied himself diligently to the task of making me feel unwelcome. 

I quit WEB due to an unprecedented level of interference from the new EIC, who insisted my editor show him every plot and every script, and the two of them would surgically remove most anything in those scripts that had any artistic integrity to it, instead publishing vapid, empty stories with my name on them. CONAN THE KING, a marginal Conan title that Alan Zelenetz and Marc Silvestri had brilliantly refocused and I eventually succeeded (after several other writers), became the last thing I was doing for Marvel in the 1980's. The book was eventually cancelled for no apparent reason. It was not a huge seller, but it was making money and was well-received by CONAN fans, many of them fans of my take on Conan and clinging to this last vestige of that approach.

This led to DC Comics in 1987, where I pitched something called AVENGER, which later became THE RAY under my editorial direction, developed and written by Jack C. Harris and Joe Quesada. At DC I was offered GREEN LANTERN: EMERALD DAWN, which I quit with issue #2 due to creative differences with the editor (it took me fifteen  months to get issue #1 accepted by him.  Yup, time to go), and the UNKNOWN SOLDIER maxi-series, where I had about four issues of things to say about this guy, but DC insisted on stretching the series to twelve  issues. DAWN was a huge hit, but it never translated into anything for me.

Resigning from DAWN and having been fired off BATMAN before I was ever offered BATMAN (a long story for another time), and feeling unwelcome at Marvel, I quit comics in 1988, concentrating on screenplays and novels and driving an interstate bus for Suburban Transit.

I was lured back into comics by DC's Director of Development Mike Gold in 1990, accepting, essentially, a quota gig as it was public knowledge Mike had goaded DC into specifically trying to hire a black editor. I was the first black editor at Marvel, and now the first black editor at DC. I developed THE RAY with Jack and Joe, and had other successes and not so successes, as every editor has. To my horror, I discovered DC "frowned" on editors looking for work as writers. Had I known this before I had, I would have never taken the job. An editor's salary, in those days, was barely enough to live on. It was traditional that an editor could supplement his salary with freelance work. Without the freelance, it was impossible to make ends meet, so I had to continue driving the bus part-time while working at DC (and while spending nearly every evening and every weekend developing MILESTONE MEDIA  with Denys Cowan, Dwayne McDuffie and others). Eventually this took a toll on my marriage, and I left DC in 1993 in an effort to save it.

The entire time I worked as an editor at DC, despite the big hit with EMERALD DAWN and, previously, SPIDER-MAN VS. WOLVERINE, I was not offered a single page of writing work. It was as though I'd ceased to exist. The single exception was a fill-in issue of BLACK CANARY (#8), where I again made history by giving Black Canary her menstrual period (albeit heavily edited into an ongoing oblique reference; the intellectual cowardice over such a natural biological function was... puzzling), and giving her a love interest in the 19 year-old RAY. The story was drawn by, per my usual, a first-time artist who, as many first-time artists tend to do, ignored my art direction and befuddled the storytelling. And the art was just plain ugly. Ugly art, by the way, devalues a story in much the same was as exquisite art can elevate a lame story. If the art is ugly, it translates into lame story, lame writer. I was never offered another page of writing until I left DC in 1993.

Leaving DC staff, I was offered THE RAY by Editor Brian Augustyn, perhaps the best story editor in the business right now, and a hugely underrated talent. The new RAY series was never a big hit. We began with Howard Porter, whose drawing chops quickly developed into a fan fave, but his awkward beginning on THE RAY cost us out in the world: once some fans turn away from a book, it's near impossible to get them back. Combined with my seemingly never-ending "Death Masque" appearances and a deadly choice of Jason Armstrong to succeed Howard after he was plucked form the RAY to draw JLA (and over my strong objection and warning; Jason simply was not ready yet), our sales spiraled and we ended the series abruptly with issue #28.

I was offered HAWKMAN, and Editor Paul Kupperberg and I worked with Porter during the interim between RAY and JLA to develop an entirely new direction for the book that cleaned up a lot of the continuity mess built up over the years. Our plan was accepted by DC Editorial, but then the ledger guys from the bean counter end of the hall cancelled the book before I ever got started. I agreed to write the last three issues, #30-32, presumably doing them with Porter (who was taken off after the first issue so he could begin JLA sooner and replaced with, again, pretty bad storytelling and pretty ugly art, which I assume is more a product of the artist's tight deadline than any lack of talent).

At the same time, I was writing JUSTICE LEAGUE TASK FORCE, which wasn't setting the world on fire sales-wise, but wasn't losing money, either. That book was cancelled along with all of the Justice League books to make way for Grant Morrison's re-focusing of the title in his brilliant JLA.

At about the same time,  I was offered STEEL because there was a movie in the works, and DC had some concerns about the book not being as true to the black experience as it could be. Now, whether that is true or not is unknown: this is what I was told. Editor Frank Pittarese and I met in New York and I pitched him an entirely new direction for the book: The Dysfunctional Superman. Details on that creative take can be found here. Frank and I had a lot of fun working on the book, and were very energized about turning the book around, whose sales had plummeted to around 13,000 copies per issue by the time I came aboard.

The problem was, there were only three people working on STEEL. Frank, myself, and inker/finisher Tom Palmer. Artist Denys Cowan's interest in STEEL seemed to go only about as far as his rent money. After a brilliant first couple of issues, Denys slipped into some kind of creative coma, phoning in the weakest excuse for pencils I've ever seen in twenty-two years as a comics professional, placing Editor Pittarese (and, later, Editor McAvennie) in a completely untenable position with their own bosses. This frustrated the hell out of everyone, especially inker Palmer and myself, and, eventually Palmer just gave up, refusing to correct or complete Denys' bare-bones non-art, and the look of the book spiraled downward.

Eventually, Editor McAvennie, seeing the handwriting on the wall, decided a change in direction was in order, and attempted to link STEEL with the more successful SUPERBOY and SUPERGIRL titles in a kind of TEAM SUPERMAN thing, which included the very bad choice (in my opinion) of making  STEEL's 50th anniversary issue part 5 of a 7-part "Millennium Giants" crossover. Mike  wanted more of a Karl Kesel approach on STEEL than the ersatz anti-myth Editor Pittarese and I had developed, and the change in direction was wrenching for both Mike and I. Denys' chronically late and malnourished pencils only exacerbated the problem, and Mike spent many, many late nights at DC cleaning up after us, but refusing to give up on the ship, even when I suggested we cancel the book or replace me as writer. Though I disagreed with Mike's directional change on the title, I certainly respect his hard work and dedication to a book most editors would have given up on long before. STEEL was eventually given an abrupt burial at issue #52.

At the same time, I was working on XERØ for DC, details to which can be read here. The long and short of it: XERO was the Apollo 13 of my career. DC was willing to continue publishing XERO beyond issue #12, but I was unwilling to write it and requested #12 be the final issue.

Writer Mark Waid recommended me to succeed him on KA-ZAR, a book that was struggling in sales despite heavyweights Waid and Andy Kubert and the brilliant work they did there. This broke my solid ten-year blacklisting at Marvel. The former EIC, who had worked so diligently at making it well known he did not want me working there, was gone. The new EIC was perhaps less hostile towards me, but truthfully, I didn't register on his radar in any meaningful way. On KA-ZAR I was paired off with Kenny Martinez, whose sense of storytelling often clashed with the scripts he was supposed to be drawing, which provided mixed results creatively and made writing the book an uphill battle for me. This, in concert with my being over committed to XERO, QUANTUM & WOODY and other things, made me chronically late and got Editor Matt Idelson yelled at.  A lot. Matt took me off of the book after only four issues, replacing both Kenny and I, and the book was cancelled three or so issues later.

QUANTUM & WOODY was cancelled when the company publishing it went out of business. Had nothing to do with me, although it was fun for Doc and I to think ourselves capable of tanking an entire company this time. Q&W was the most popular (creatively if not sales-wise) book Acclaim published. It was resurrected briefly when Acclaim took another run at comics, and lasted 12 issues before it died again, having published only 4 or 5 of the 12 issues Doc and I did in this period. QUANTUM & WOODY has been solicited for February, 2001, after which I imagine it will die again. Updated 1.02: Acclaim never published Q&W in February of '01. At this writing, we have no idea if this book will ever publish again.

Which brings us to BLACK PANTHER, a book I was certain would be cancelled after the disastrous decision, around issue #9 and against my violent opposition, to change the book into a hoo-hah slapstick comedy with Batman Adventures-style art. I'm grateful we have survived that choice, and that we survived issue #12, which I was so certain would be the final issue, I hadn't even thought of what was going to be in issue #13 when Editor Ruben Diaz called to chastise me for being late. PANTHER is either the lowest seller Marvel has or is certainly one of the lowest.

Paradoxically, PANTHER is one of the best-reviewed and most critically acclaimed comics Marvel puts out, but we have yet to find a way to make that translate into sales. Beating the odds, PANTHER survived well into its second year under EIC Bob Harras who had no particular animosity towards me but no particular loyalty, either, but reportedly liked the book (as did the widely villainized Chris Claremont and others on staff at Marvel). New Priest-friendly EIC Quesada has an obvious paternal interest in PANTHER (as the book's co-creator and original editor), but even he cannot guarantee the book will survive past it's third year. Much like the fan-favorite DEADPOOL, BLACK PANTHER is a book always one phone call away from cancellation. Updated 1.02: PANTHER begins its fourth year with a sequel to the ENEMY OF THE STATE storyline (which included the art change discussed here), and enjoys moderate new success in trade paperbacks. However, the book continues to sell at a marginal level, and the threat of cancellation continues to loom over us, with no guarantee of a Year Five.

Speaking (briefly) of DEADPOOL, I'm not sure I was actually fired off DP, so everyone should cut my friend (yes, still) and former Editor Mike Marts some slack. All I can say is, DEADPOOL wasn't working for me. Details of that experience can be found here. I hope Mike is successful in building DP's sales and keeping the book alive and healthy.

And, that about covers the "curse" for the most part.  I'm sure there are other things I've missed here, and I'll be updating this page occasionally as I kill off more books in the future.

Christopher Priest
December 2000
January 2002