Success Quote by Len Wein

Creative failure is rarely a clean verdict; it is often just the feeling of leaving the room before the audience arrives. Len Wein, a working cartoonist who helped define modern superhero storytelling, is talking about the weird time lag between making a thing and learning what it actually is in public. In comics, where deadlines bite and collaboration blurs authorship, your internal barometer is especially unreliable. You finish an issue exhausted, aware of every compromise, every panel that didn’t land the way it did in your head. “Complete catastrophes” can simply mean “I can see the seams.”

The intent here is half confession, half practical advice: don’t trust the voice in your skull as the final critic. Wein’s subtext is more pointed: readers aren’t evaluating your process, they’re experiencing the product. What you perceive as failure may be invisible to them, or even become the very texture they respond to - urgency, messiness, emotion. Comics fandom also thrives on idiosyncrasy; a risky swing or an off-kilter moment can lodge in someone’s imagination precisely because it doesn’t feel polished.

There’s an understated humility in “not even sure,” which pushes back against the romantic myth of the artist as flawless judge of their own work. Wein implies a more democratic ecosystem: meaning is co-authored by reception. The line is comforting, but it’s also bracing: if your disasters can become hits, your “sure things” can quietly fail. The only rational move is to keep making work and let the audience surprise you.