It was an accident that the Marvel Silver Age we love was what it was at all.
Joe Maneely was Stan's go to guy in the 50s. He personally liked him and loved his work. Maneely tragically died in a train accident in 1958. With an artist spot open, Stan offered work to Jack Kirby, who had recently saw his company with Joe Simon go bust.
When Martin Goodman got the idea for a team book from a golf game with Jack Liebowitz, and conveyed this to Stan, it was Kirby who he tasked with the art/conception. If Maneely were still alive, Jack would still be at DC and it would have been a different book.
The creative force of Jack Kirby would not have been there for the Big Bang of the Marvel Universe and a very different Marvel would have emerged.
Would it have been as successful without Kirby, I think not, but that is a question we cannot answer.

Re: Valiant and the ousting of Shooter.

Just wanted to clarify some stuff posted earlier in the thread, some time back. I covered the history of Valiant in my Other Guys thread; but, there was a gap of time between the ousting of Shooter and the sale to Acclaim. Shooter was pushed out in 1992 and the sale to Acclaim was in 1994. The ousting was a pretty conniving thing; essentially a hostile takeover, to then start looking for a buyer, while jumping on the bandwagon of the other companies, because they wanted a faster return on investment. Shooter owned a majority of shares; but, the venture capital partners were playing shenanigans and one of their people was having an affair with the other partner in the company, creating a conflict of interests, which Shooter could have pressed in court, if he had had the resources for a long, drawn out legal battle. In the end, they bought out his shares; but, he got diddled on the deal pretty badly. It is the one circumstance in his career where I felt he was in the right.

Well, one of the better sellers and longest lived titles was X-O Manowar, with Bob Layton. It was pretty much an Iron man rip-off, with Conan substituted for Tony Stark. Shooter claims it would have been an even more blatant rip-off, if he hadn't reworked it, with Layton. Shadowman did quite well, and Harbinger did fine, in the post-Shooter era. Rai and Turok were a couple of the bigger money books, between gimmicks and the Bart Sears art (Turok), with both being Shooter concepts.

If you look at it, the shortest -lived titles were the post-Shooter ones; so, even without him, the concepts had legs.

Voyager Communications/Valiant consisted of partners Jim Shooter, Steve Massarsky and Winston Fowlkes, each owning a 20% stake, and Triumph Capital owning the other 40%. Triumph was headed by the partnership of Michael Nugent and Melanie Okum. Nugent was the senior partner, with a name in the venture capital world and Okum was the younger protege who had done good. Shooter had done work for Massarsky, who was a lawyer and artist's rep (mostly musicians) and had written a stage show for him. They hit it off and when New World was looking to sell Marvel, Shooter and Massarsky put together a proposal, with financial backing that Massarsky helped arrange, but lost to the McAndrews group. However, they turned around and got new financial partners (Triumph) and another business partner (Fowlkes) and decided to create their own company, which became Valiant. Shooter was able to make good on a past promise from the owners of the Western/Gold Key properties and got a license to publish them, which was left open-ended. However, he didn't get to do them, at first, because the venture capital people wanted known properties and were able to manipulate the decisions. Melanie Okum and Steve Massarsky were having an affair, which was a conflict of interests for Massarsky, as a corporate officer and partner, since his fiduciary responsibility is to the best interests of his company and not to his financial backers. His relationship with Okum led him to side with Triumph, in regards to doing the Nintendo and WWF comics. However, they also tried to hide the affair from Fowlkes, who knew Nugent and Okum, professionally, and was more old school. He did find out, went to Nugent to get it stopped and ended up forced out of the company. That is why we didn't get a Magnus comic first. Also, the WWF was represented by Leisure Concepts, who packaged properties for licensing and Massarsky was on retainer with them,. Massarsky's middle name should have been "Conflict of Interests."

Once Valiant was going great guns and was Number 3 in the market, Triumph wanted to sell and so did Massarsky. They started interfering with Shooter, who did not want to sell; at least, not yet, as he had plans. They presented him with a poison pill editor-in-chief contract which he refused to sign; so, they fired him, even though he was a partner. Bob Layton sided with them and had been angling for his job, according to Shooter (which is a questionable source, in the best of circumstances). They then threatened to devalue his shares and forced him into arbitration for a buyout and he got a fraction of their worth. He and his assistants were unceremoniously removed from Valiant's offices by security, when they fired him. His secretary quit out of loyalty and Barry Windsor Smith ended up leaving not too far down the road, as did artist David lapham, after promises made to him were proven hollow. Basically, Don Perlin stayed, because he needed to earn a living and he was an old man in a young man's game, and Layton, who got Shooter's job, and proceeded to flood Valiant with titles and gimmicks, aimed at speculators. They then got the buyout offer from Acclaim, who had license Turok for a video game that proved extremely popular and they wanted properties that they owned and could exploit for games. They proceeded to mismanage the company into the ground, which pretty much matched what they did to their own core business, as Acclaim tanked in the game market, too.

Valiant had a definite plan, under Shooter, using some of the concepts developed for the original New Universe proposal, tattooed onto the bodies of the Gold Key characters, with the addition of some new ones. You'll notice that the new characters and books were the core element of the Valiant Universe, while the Gold Key characters, provided framing and context, with things like Magnus being the son of two of the Harbinger kids, time displaced. Solar sets things in motion, creating the major event that spawns things (ala Star Brand) and Harbinger features the core conflict, Rai the future of it, and X-O moving in and out. The others represent other segments of ideas, from the supernatural to the historic.

Amazing how messed up comics get when venture capitalists get involved. Seems like they were better off when they had mob connections and shady individual owners. They seemed to have been more honest crooks than the corporate types.