Steve MacManus is credited as an important editor because he was Tharg during a period of the comic everyone sees as a golden age (1978-1987).
But MacManus is seldom heralded for the equally important, perhaps
more important, rescue job he performed returning to an active editorial role following the precipitous crash in readership of the early nineties (120,000 to 50,000 readers in
5 years)
Following Alan McKenzie's
dismissal, sub-editor John Tomlinson and then
Megazine alumnus David Bishop were nominally in charge of the Galaxy's Greatest comic, but the prog's most successful editor (now Group editor) was involved in the day to day task of putting
2000ad together alongside both Thargs.
"The Pit was Steve MacManus's idea", Wagner recalls. "He felt there was room for a different style of Dredd epic, more of a judicial soap opera. I was sceptical about it until I got down to working it out, then I saw how well it could work".
'The Pit introduced Galen DeMarco, a young judge whose future became inextricably linked with Dredd for years afterwards. "When the story started, I didn't know how it was going to pan out for any of the characters", the writer says, "but when I saw Carlos's interpretation of her, I knew I had to use her again".From David Bishop's Thrillpower Overload, p.182
Bishop's actually underselling the importance of
The Pit. He's right to say that the dynamic between Dredd and DeMarco (and Jura Edgar) drove the direction of all major Dredd stories between 1995 and 2000 - from
The Pit to
Doomsday.
But, more importantly, Wagner never wrote another major Dredd story that didn't involve Dredd working in a managerial capacity with a team of younger judges - much as MacManus had done in his mentoring role with first Tomlinson and then Bishop.
Prior to
The Pit, Wagner's big idea to escape the corner he (and Grant) had painted Dredd into with stories that explored the fascism of Justice Department and portrayed Dredd as a bastard, like
Revolution and
America, had been to redefine Dredd, in stories such as
Mechanismo and
Wilderlands, as a rugged individualist hero who didn't play by the rules.
That approach and those stories proved, at best, qualified successes.
The team dynamic that's central to the second half of John Wagner's
Dredd career - in my opinion, the
really good stuff - all came from
The Pit. It all came from Steve MacManus, the greatest editor
2000ad ever had (twice).
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mighty-One-Inside-Nerve-Centre/dp/1781084750