Chad's Challenge part five: events!

Chad asked me: What is your opinion of the event-driven stories at Marvel and DC? (The practise more than the stories.)

And it's really a pretty simple question to answer: it depends on the situation. I judge each event individually. There have been some that have been hamfisted editorial-driven crap and there have been some that have been really intriguing, creator-spawned concepts. There have been some that have been strongly united and there have been some that have been thinly tied together.

I've been a fan of event-driven stories in the past: I loved Invasion and Armageddon 2001 back in the day. I was a big fan of Secret Wars. I still think Identity Crisis is one of the most interesting books to be published by the big two in the past few years, and 52 was very interesting. I've hated other event-driven stories: War of the Gods, Zero Hour, Infinite Crisis. And others I think were interesting ideas but failed in execution, Our Worlds at War being the clearest, most recent example I can think of.

And some recent Marvel ones sounded like they could have been good, and I am interested in checking them out: Civil War and the Hulks.

So, in the end, I've been burned by them before, but I haven't let that prevent me from trying new ones when they come along and when they seem interesting, because in the right hands they can be very interesting. Editorial input can hinder a creative process, but it can also heighten it, and event-driven stories are prime examples of both.

That then leads me to my question for you: What do you think an editor's role should be in the creative process, and what editors would you say have been the most influential, for good or for bad? (I'm not really talking about the EIC's really either, but more the street-level editors.)