"Unfortunately, there are writers whose only concern is how good they could make themselves look on a title." -- Len Wein
Len Wein (; born June 12, 1948, in New York City) is an American comic book writer and editor best known for co-creating DC Comics' Swamp Thing and Marvel Comics' Wolverine, and for helping revive the Marvel superhero team the X-Men (including the co-creation of Nightcrawler, Storm, and Colossus). Additionally, he was the editor for writer Alan Moore and illustrator Dave Gibbons' influential DC miniseries Watchmen.
Wein was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2008.
"A true friend is someone who is there for you when he'd rather be anywhere else.""A writer writes. Period. No matter if someone is buying your work or not.""Art is always in the eyes of the beholder. Only posterity has the right to point out our mistakes.""I always wanted to fire rays out of my fingertips.""I became an art major, took every art class my school had to offer. In college, I majored in Advertising Art and Design.""I had never really thought of myself as a writer; any writing I had done was just to give myself something to draw.""I hate the crazy, neurotic characters beyond a certain point.""I realized the only thing I owed my audience was my own judgment and my own best effort.""I think there's something inherently dishonest in trying to go back and mess with the past.""I try not to violate what came before me and to leave lots of wiggle room for those who will follow.""I try to find what makes even the worst, most despicable character sympathetic at his or her core.""I was a very sickly kid. While I was in the hospital at age 7, my Dad brought me a stack of comic books to keep me occupied. I was hooked.""I would like immortality.""I'm a neurotic New York Jew by birth. Creating characters is second nature to me.""I've always thought of myself as an organic writer, rather than a cerebral one. I feel my way along as I go, hoping I'll get to the place I intend to reach.""I've had editors over the years who couldn't find a clue if it was stapled to their butt.""I've never sat down and thought about the difference between plot and theme. To me, that's never been important.""If a story isn't working, I'm simply unable to finish it. That's what usually tells me something is wrong.""In general, shorter is better. If you can encapsulate your idea into a single captivating sentence, you're halfway home.""In these litigious times, if you're a beginner, it's becoming harder and harder to get your work to the people who might actually be able to hire you.""It all depends on which side of the desk you're sitting on.""It's all about who's where on the food chain. When I'm the story editor, I expect my writers to follow my vision. When I'm working for another editor, I'm obliged to follow their vision.""Lord of the Rings, I think, is far and away the most brilliantly done stuff.""People who were more concerned with themselves and looking good to their readers then they were with the characters sacrificed a series for the sake of a story.""Sometimes you're not even sure which of your stories were failures. There are things I've written that I thought were complete catastrophes when I finished with them that have gone on to generate some of my most positive feedback.""The bottom line always remains the same: What is the basic humanity of the character? How do I make them resonate with the reader?""The most unrealistic thing I've ever read in comics is when some group of characters calls themselves the Brotherhood of Evil or the Masters of Evil. I don't believe any character believes their goals to be truly evil.""There is an ancient legend which warns that, should we ever learn our true origin, our universe will instantly be destroyed.""These days, it seems that if you're not already in place, you can't get there from here.""Were there stories I wrote along the way that were terrible clinkers? God, yes. But they were all a product of their time, and I did the best I could.""What makes a story is how well it manages to connect with the reader, the visceral effect it has.""When I got my first glimpse of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, my breath caught. In that single instant, he was Wolverine.""When I'm my own editor, there's very little difference between the first draft and the final. I write what feels right to begin with. I rarely make any major changes.""When someone writes to tell me something I've written made them laugh or cry, I've done my job and done it well. The rest is all semantics.""You can read a dozen different textbooks or how-to manuals that will tell you the basic rules of what makes a story - a beginning, a middle, and an end."
According to Wein: "I was a very sickly kid. While I was in the hospital at age seven, my Dad brought me a stack of comic books to keep me occupied. And I was hooked. When my eighth grade art teacher, Mr. Smedley, told me he thought I had actual art talent, I decided to devote all my efforts in that direction in the hope that I might someday get into the comics biz. I became an art major, took every art class my school had to offer. In college, I majored in Advertising Art and Design."
As a teenager, Wein and his friend Marv Wolfman regularly took the Thursday afternoon tour of the DC Comics offices. Wolfman was active in fanzine culture, and together he and Wein produced sample superhero stories to show to the DC editorial staff. At that point, Wein was more interested in becoming an artist than a writer. In a 2008 interview, Wein said his origins as an artist have helped him "describe art to an artist so that I can see it all in my own head", and claimed he "used to have artists, especially at DC, guys like Irv Novick and a few of the others, who would come into the office waiting for their next assignment and ask [editor] Julie Schwartz, 'Do you have any Len Wein scripts lying around? He's always easy to draw.'"
Eventually, DC editor Joe Orlando hired both Wolfman and Wein as freelance writers. Wein's first professional comics story was "Eye of the Beholder" in DC's Teen Titans #18 (Dec. 1968), for which he created Red Star, the first official Russian superhero in the DC universe. Late the following year, Wein was publishing anthological mystery stories for DC's The House of Secrets and Marvel's Tower of Shadows and Chamber of Darkness. He additionally began writing for DC's romance comic Secret Hearts and the company's toy-line tie-in Hot Wheels; Skywald Publications' horror-comics magazines Nightmare and Psycho and its short-lived Western comic books The Bravados and The Sundance Kid; and Gold Key's Mod Wheels, Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery, the toyline tie-in Microbots, and the TV-series tie-ins Star Trek and The Twilight Zone.
