Your false savor Joe casey. YOUR big wash-out was a crackhead writer who was on drugs the ENTIRE time trying to keep up with his fellow drugie morrison? Here's a little info on him.
If there has been ANY writer who has abused upon the good will of devoted fanboys like a villain on a Lifetime TV Movie abuses his wife, it's Joe Casey. Especially given his confessions of his history of massive drug abuse, which makes Joe Casey proof positive that drugs DON'T make you creative. Not to mention how he has managed to piss off the X-Men and Superman fandoms that supported him during his dark days, in terms of Casey openly badmouthing them on numerous occasions because he hates the fact that his fanbase is mainly comic book geeks and not the fairweather hipster scum and webcam girls like Warren Ellis has as his fanbase.
And while Ben 10/Generator Rex may have made him money, I would have to ask how much of it Casey actually HAS. This is the guy that openly admitted spending pretty much ALL of the money he made writing Superman and Uncanny X-Men on drugs, to the point that he openly admits to remembering NOTHING about the times that he worked on the two franchises. Which in turn outright DERAILED DC's plans to turn Superman/Batman into a flashback book to deal with past Crossover aftermath storylines, when the first arc (an Our Worlds At War arc) had ZERO to do with the storyline, due to the fact Casey's drug abuse made him unable to remember anything about his work on Superman and the X-Over, leading to him rushing out a story that did not have anything to do with what editorial wanted, causing them to freak out and killed the entire plan revamp and got him effectively blacklisted from DC for screwing up something as simple as that.
That is the legacy of Joe Casey, a never-was who could have been the next Kurt Busiek or even Chris Claremont but pissed it all away to try and keep up with the a-hole cool kids. The few times that he has shown brilliance have been erased by the banality and contempt he has for his fanbase, because they are not cool enough for him. And while he may get big bucks for Ben 10, no one will care one bit about his role in the show which probably pisses him off to no end......
I couldn't find the link that started it all, but essentially Casey gave an interview after he left Uncanny X-Men/around the time that Wildcats 3.0 launched and basically he apologized to X-Men fans (who were the heart and soul of his fanbase in the early years of his career, having supported him after he was forced off of Cable and who actively called for Marvel to put him on one of the main X-Books during the period of 1999-2000) for the craptastic nature of his X-Men run and the interviews that he gave slagging the very people who's tireless campaigning on his behalf GOT HIM THE JOB writing Uncanny X-Men.
Casey's entire excuse for being a dick and putting out substandard work, was that he spent pretty much all of the money Marvel paid him (as well as the money he made via writing Superman at DC) on drugs in order to try and keep up with Grant Morrison (who's drug usage as part of his creative process is well known). Of course, the irony is that Casey never realized that fans DIDN'T want him to be like Grant Morrison; they wanted him to give them regular X-Men adventures, the kind that Chris Claremont was utterly incapable of providing them as seen by the god-awful second run on the core X-Books in 2000. Casey later went on, in another interview he gave, to admitting he did so many drugs that he can't remember any of the details of his work on Uncanny X-Men, when he was asked about what he originally planned for the Church of Humanity and their interest in Nightcrawler, after "Holy War" and Chuck Austen came along.
Cut to several years later, and the following interview, which had Joe Casey running as far as humanly possible from the fact that he essentially outed himself as a drug addict, with the lamest of all denials (I was talking big and making crap up to make myself look kewl!):
http://www.comicsreporter...sources/interviews/3875/
SPURGEON: One more thing. I asked some writer friends for questions and one of them came back with something like, "Ask Joe about all the drugs he bought from Superman/Aliens. He admitted this in public, so he can talk about it."
CASEY: I never wrote Superman/Aliens. I said in an interview last year -- and it was conducted by a good friend of mine -- that I took all of my Superman and X-Men money and bought a house and went on a nasty drug binge that lasted for months. My editors didn't know about it, and I kept if from my family. And that's where the inspiration for Automatic Kafka came from. I was promoting Kafka's launch at the time, so it made sense to talk smack like that. Which is exactly like that was. I may indulge in the occasional illicit substance, but I've certainly never been on a desperate binge where I'm holed up in my house with my shades drawn for weeks at a time. That's just not me. But it looked good in the interview, and it got people talking, "What the hell is going on with this guy?"
The thing is... an interview is a performance. And I'm the performer, so I'm going to give it to you one way, or another way, according to what I'm trying to accomplish. Luckily in this instance I'm in a truthful mood. [laughs] But in that particular case, I was interested in promoting an image in line with the series I was promoting. I've done it before, and I'll probably do it again on future projects. But that's part of the gig. I don't necessarily think that in most instances that people will read an interview with me or any other comics creator for any reason except to be entertained. It's a form of entertainment. So sometimes I'll talk !@%@ to entertain them. It certainly entertains me.
Of course, several years after THAT, when Casey was forced to explain why he %#%@++ up DC's planned revamp of Superman/Batman, he pretty much confirmed that he was talking !@%@ earlier when he denied being a druggy. And since the interview was done by Comic Book Resources (who are the wussiest wusses when it comes to calling creators out on their lies and bullplop), didn't use the above mentioned bit to call into question whether or not Casey is a liar when he tries to pass the buck on the way he screwed up all of DC's plans for the title
http://www.comicbookresou...age=article&id=24684
Considering this, it’s no surprise that fans don’t need to be intimately familiar with the events of “Our Worlds at War” to enjoy the current story. (“I barely acknowledge it, if at all,” Casey said.) As previously mentioned, Casey worked on the original “Our Worlds at War” event back in 2001, and although part of the reason that DC is running the “aftermath” stories is to answer any lingering questions and tie up possible loose ends, the writer admitted that there were very few of those to address. “The thing is, as far as I'm concerned, there were no loose ends when we first wrote ‘Our Worlds at War,’” he said. “For better or worse, that story was pretty damn tight. It was like an old school Marvel epic, no story beat or character detail left unturned. Despite my rampant drug intake at the time, between editors Eddie Berganza, Tom Palmer Jr. and the writers, we were a goddamned well-oiled machine. So with this story, there was really nothing to follow up on. My poor editor was so swamped with other work, and had been struggling for months to try to make this book into something cool, something that would sell better, I think it was a case of grasping at straws to find a sales hook for a book that's clearly struggling by not being tied in to current events in the DCU. So, even in light of that, I certainly didn't write it to tie into anything... I just wrote a cool 'Superman/Batman' story that'll be able to stand on its own and left it at that.”
Not to mention the following "addition" tossed in by the wussies at CBR.com when Casey saw the article and realized what a lying **+$%%%*% he revealed himself to be
UPDATE 2/6/10 11:30 AM: CBR was contacted by Joe Casey after this article went to press with a correction on the interpretation of his quotes. Mr. Casey did know that the "Superman/Batman" arc was meant to be an "Our Worlds at War" follow-up, but his main goal was to write an excellent "Superman/Batman" story. He was simply surprised by the branding used on the cover after the first issue of his “Superman/Batman” story hit shelves.
The overall thing? Casey is a liar, a poster child for the percentile of creative types for who drugs DON'T make them more creative, and generally an A-hole hipster who can't stand the fact that his core fans are comic book fanboys, many of whom have rejected him because of his **+$%%%*% attitude regarding them. The fact that he's stuck writing crap like Dark Reign Zodiac and generic Avengers flashback books (which ironically ARE GOOD and pretty much show you what could have been if Casey would have rejected the temptation of being hipster scum and play to his core audience of fanboys), shows you how far he's fallen. Especially since even his hipster friends largely ignore his indie output as far as shunning it.