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When Stan Lee was writing the Fantastic Four in the Sixties he came up with the surreal idea that the superheroes actually dictated their adventures to him to publish in comic form. Readers would often see Mr Fantastic, Invisible Girl, the Human Torch and the Thing stopping by the Marvel office to pick up royalty cheques in between the galactic fights and strange voyages into the unknown. Joe Quesada, the fast-talking editor-in-chief at Marvel, has a similar thing going with Spider-man: “As far as my daughter is concerned, Spider-man comes to visit me and tells me the stories of what’s happened to him over the past couple of weeks for me to write down and draw.”

Being in charge of Marvel’s rich universe of superheroes — the cast of characters includes Captain America, Iron Man, Wolverine, Thor and the Incredible Hulk, plus lesser-knowns such as the oddly named Fing Fang Foom and Zzzax, the Human Dynamo — would be most children's dream job and from the way Quesada talks animatedly about his eight years as editor-in-chief, you’d suspect that it was his dream too: “Essentially everything I got yelled at for doing during grammar school — the doodling, the daydreaming — I get paid to do now. No two days are the same. The variety of stuff that I deal with is phenomenal. After this interview I have to read an animation script and then go to a Spider-man lunch at which I’ll be discussing creative ideas for the Spider-man comics. Tomorrow I’ll be sitting in on the voice recordings for one of our motion comics and Wednesday I have to draw a Spider-man cover.” (To get a sense of the weird and wonderful world Quesada inhabits check out his video podcasts.)

Strangely enough Quesada wasn’t one of those children who dreamt of drawing Spider-man for a living. He was born in 1962 in New York to Cuban parents and grew up in the borough of Queens (by coincidence, Spider-man was created the same year and lived in the same neighbourhood). “I didn’t come into comics as someone who had read them his entire life,” he says. “I read them as a young boy and then dropped them when I was about 12 or 13. That was the age when I discovered two important things: sports and girls, and not necessarily in that order.”

But in between chasing footballs and girls, Quesada was busily drawing. He set his sights on being a professional artist and went to the School of Visual Arts in New York. “I hadn’t wanted anything to do with comics — I wanted to be an illustrator. I was very snobbish about it. I had actually taken two elected classes on comics — one was taught by Harvey Kurtzman [founding editor of Mad comic] and the other was taught by Will Eisner [creator of the Spirit] and I failed them both. It was not easy to fail those classes because all you had to do was hand in your final assignment but I cared so little about comics that I just didn’t bother.”

Turning down a chance to learn from two giants in the field is something he regrets now. “I thought that comics were unsophisticated and way too simple. I didn’t realise that the medium had grown during my absence. So in retrospect it’s like, ‘Aw shucks, that would have been helpful.’ At the age of 25, however, I was reintroduced to comics and it was from those books I picked up — Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns — that my desire to work in comics sprang.”

Quesada went on to make an name for himself as an artist at Valiant Comics, a company set up in 1989 by a former Marvel editor-in-chief, Jim Shooter, but it was not long before he was hankering to do something more personal. “I was working as artist and had wanted to get my own creations out there, so me and my business partner, Jimmy Palmiotti, formed our own company.” Event Comics was launched in 1994 and gave birth to several new and popular characters such as Ash, a firefighter with superpowers, and Painkiller Jane. But scarily for Quesada and Palmiotti, their company came into being just as the comic industry was imploding.

In the late Eighties and early Nineties comics were big business, with sales of books reaching record heights and publishers earning huge amounts of money. Dozens of new companies like Vailant sprang up to take advantage of the boom but the money didn’t last long. “It was an incredibly risky thing to do, to set up a comic company just as the comic industry was imploding but we said, ‘To hell with it, let’s do it anyway.’ We were also getting offers from other companies, other creator-owned companies, that wanted to start our company for us. They were offering us cash upfront but we would have sold a little piece of our souls if we had accepted,” Quesada says.

Event Comics survived but many of the companies set up during the boom didn’t, including Valiant. Marvel also suffered and in 1996 it went bankrupt. “It was a false market, probably very much like the real estate market now,” Quesada says. “There was a bubble and we knew it was going to burst, and when it did, Marvel went bankrupt. The reason for this was that we weren’t catering to readers, we were catering to collectors. From an outsider’s perspective I could see that the quality of the books was diminishing and that the company was focusing on the wrong things.”

Just like many of its superheroes have done, Marvel came back from the dead and in 1998 hired Event to revamp some of its second-tier heroes. Quesada and Palmiotti reached out to fresh talent in the industry, hiring the movie director Kevin Smith, British creators Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, who were enjoying critical success with the comic series Preacher, and Brian Michael Bendis, who was to become an important voice at Marvel. The books they produced were a hit and Marvel’s directors were so impressed with Quesada, they offered him the job of editor-in-chief.

“Coming into Marvel was in a lot ways very scary because the company was in such dire straits financially — it was in the shitter. At the same time it was great because — well, people have compared that time to the Wild West and it was because we would try anything and everything to get fans interested in reading comics again. We thought, if we throw as much stuff against the wall, eventually something is going to stick. But all of it encompassed the idea of we have to tell great stories.”

Marvel has had a renaissance under Quesada: it’s comics dominate the market, the characters and stories are fresh and Marvel superheroes are huge at the box office — the three Spider-man movies made almost two and a half billion dollars worldwide. In fact, apart from Stan Lee, it’s hard to imagine an editor-in-chief who has had more of an impact. “I see myself as a caretaker, that it’s my job to make sure that the direction the characters take is the proper one, to make sure that the characters are attractive and viable for readers long after I’m gone.”

Quesada has been helped by the high pedigree of creators he has attracted, writers such as Brian K Vaughan and Damon Lindelof, who produce the TV series Lost, Jeph Loeb, who worked on Heroes, Joss Whedon of Buffy the Vampire fame, J Michael Straczynski, who received a Bafta nomination for his screenplay for the Clint Eastwood movie The Changeling, and Mark Millar, whose comic Wanted was turned into a movie starring Angelina Jolie.

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