| |
|
I think Sleazenation’s comment on the artistic abilities of Moore and Morrison is a good point; I’ve always felt one of Moore’s strengths as a writer is knowing just how much text a panel can bear (on what one might call the Ellis – Smith spectrum of wordiness). I think it’s this which makes Moore’s stories flow as well as they do (offhand, I can’t think of a Moore story which doesn’t flow well, even if it’s say, one of the more expositional issues of Promethea), and I think the same applies to Morrison’s work, Miller’s as a writer, and the like. Understanding the balance of words and art, I believe, lies at the heart of the medium.
I don’t know if the introduction of known writers into the Image stable could necessarily be seen as the sole reason the sales started to slide, because if memory serves weren’t the sales on the wane anyway ? You could point to the fact that the comics were past the speculator-friendly #1 as a reason – a Comics International headline at the time stated that Youngblood #2 sales were a drop of 50% from #1 – and so I think that Moore, Sim, Gaiman and Miller were brought in on Spawn and Claremont onto W.I.L.D.Cats more as a way of trying to arrest declining sales; more a symptom, one which may or may not have been remedied by this short-term cure (I’m sure many people bought the issues by writers they were interested in and then bailed out, as I did), but which certainly wasn’t the root cause.
Returning to the central idea of whether the medium’s best served by a sole vision or collaborative work, I know it’s a cop-out, but I’d have to say that you can’t make any hard and fast rules; enjoyable/successful/whatever-other-positive-word-you-want-to-use comics and cartoons aren’t made as straightforwardly as putting together certain ingredients. Sometimes, collaboration’s the way to go (Watchmen without either Moore or Gibbons is as unthinkable as Spider-Man without Ditko or Lee; Lennon and McCartney stuff), and other times a single person knows the way (Watterson, Eisner, Kirby, Campbell, Talbot). But equally, there are instances where a creator’s probably got too much free rein (Miller writing, drawing and editing on Ronin springs to mind, most of the Leifeld stuff from the 90s) and where good creators somehow don’t gel, despite the promising nature of a project (Sam Kieth on leaving Sandman : “I feel like Jimi Hendrix in the Beatles”). So I think it’d be dangerous, at best, to say that a sole creator, or collaboration, is the best route to creative success. It’s just as dangerous to say this about music (Lennon-McCartney and The Smiths on one side, Mozart and Bowie on the other) or film (Kaufman and Jonze, Welles and Mankiewicz, or Lynch). Would people generalise in this way about these forms ?
And I’d share Runce’s slight surprise at Moriarty’s comment about not rating Alan Moore that highly, but I’m not having a go there; Moriarty’s posts have consistently shown a solid and informed knowledge of comics and cartooning, so it’s not as if the non-impressedness is born of ignorance or anything like that (unlike a friend of mine who said – and these are his exact words – “I’ve never read any Stephen King books, because they’re all shit”). So if Mori doesn’t like Moore’s stuff, I’d guess it’s one of those ‘each to their own’ things. Not wrong, just different, and gawd knows the world’s big enough – even if the medium seems to be contracting sometimes – to have room for people to like different stuff. |
|
|
