I dunno, Tuck, Paul Dini strikes me as somebody who's pretty in to comics. And given his TV background, there's no reason the "showrunner" idea should have worked better with anyone else.
Sorry, I didn't mean Dini, I meant the team that was assembled to put the actual book together--and again, for Dini to be on the same level as what I'm calling showrunner, he'd need to have been more involved in the production aspect--assembling the various teams for each book, guiding the concept. The artists, the whole thing. The thing that's indictative of a good showrunner--like what Shawn Ryan was for the Shield--is when you watch an episode of the Shield that's directed by David Mamet (a director whose film and theater work is incredibly specific to him) and it's not glaringly noticeable that the director controlled the show. If you took out the Mamet actors involved in that episode--Rebecca Pigeon and Clark Gregg--you'd have something that has nothing specific to Mamet about it. That's what showrunners do, they exert authority and control over the artists hired on to do work, so that the episode doesn't stand out as stunt piece, a "Directed by Hollywood Person" chapter. in comics, it's obviously not going to be that easily controllable, because a guy like Dini can't be standing and watching the drawing. But that doesn't mean it's not a concept that doesn't have the potential to have an affect on comics--in a lot of ways, that's what the Batman family of books were sort of like under Denny O'Neill. Again, it's not always a ground route to "great art', but the thing about major companies like Marvel & DC is that they aren't in the business of great art. That's not what they do well on a regular basis.
Also, how involved was Dini in all the extraneous mini-series? There were at least 8 of them, and I don't think he had a strong hand in those. They were all branded as "Countdown," but there certainly wasn't someone who took them and gave them any sort of cohesion, beyond all of them being various forms of bad.
