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Taking a look through all the posts, it appears that I am the only one who has suggested that sole-creator comics are superior to multi-creator comics. However, in both my previous posts I have also said that I have enjoyed, and would include in my favourites, multi-creator comics (Stan and Jack's FF is amazing). To say that I want to make all comics by sole-creators, or that there is no place for writers in comics was never my intent, and was not something I said. Knock it off.
You probably haven't noticed, but I think about comics a lot. I also like to talk about comics, to bounce my unformed ideas off of others and see where I'm going wrong. Once or twice a year I make a lame attempt to say some kind of bold and reactionary statement. If I could go back and not be such a stupid ass, I would reword my first post to something like what Sleaze has said a few times now, that there is a difference in sole-creator and multi-creator work. I'm not really here to argue the point, but to take what I've been thinking about for years and try to make some sense of it, even if that means deciding that there is no difference.
Like Byron said, this view of mine may be because I draw comics. For me, dissecting how comics work doesn't just end at interpreting other people's comics, but also how I make my own (shit as they may be). Again, at this point in my life I'm far more interested in how something is done then in what it says. While I own and enjoy many collaborative works, they fade much faster in my memory than the ones made by one person, and this may be due to my interest in their mechanics. That, or the "primacy of vision" (hehe) of a single creator makes a more forceful point.
LLBG, if you think the discussion is without merit, then please feel free to take no part in it, something I have done myself with many seemingly useless threads. However, I hope you stick around, because when you aren't just crossing your arms and repeatedly saying "You're wrong" you add a lot to these discussions.
I don't believe that "cartooning" is writing and drawing. It's a completely different discipline (though not a different medium). When you sit down and make a cartoon all by yourself you work in a completely different way from if you were to collaborate. I have written scripts for people to draw, drawn from people's scripts and done all the work myself. All three ways of working are, from my experience, very different, with pleasures and anxieties all their own.
The part of Millar's essay that I disagree with most is that people who "write and draw" are "superhuman", or, as some might say, "geniuses". I think they are people who have absorbed this different way of processing information and laying it down on paper. They've learned a different language, one in which the words and images are the same thing, symbols used or ignored to get a point across.
Separate writer and artist vs. sole creator is two different languages. LLBG, in most cases I can tell that difference between the two without looking at the credits. In the instances where I wouldn't be able to (and, again, I have stated right from the start that this is sometimes the case), it is because the writer/artist combo is working so closely together as to almost be the equivalent of one creator. This is the goal most writer/artists want to achieve, and the ones who nearly succeed are the creators who don't try to steal the spotlight from one another and have good communication and shared ideals.
I just can't understand the Alan Moore thing. The Grant Morrison thing, yes, but Alan Moore?
Hey, Runce. I actually like Morrison better than Moore. And for the record, I do like some of Moore's work, too, as well as many other writers (though I can do without Gaiman). I just like other people's work better. Who can account for taste?
I think another reason I prefer sole-creator comics is because I never have to worry about fill-ins. |
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