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Spun out of a soon to be deleted topic...
Work for hire corporate superhero comics - great or ghastly - because or inspite of their means of production?
First of all Jack
Dear Mr. Fear,
Speaking of poison - your attitude smacks of it. What comics do you read? Looking at the comics forum, I can see a sizeable portion of it is dedicated to superhero works.
Well, boo hoo. I am far from retarded and.. yet.. I.. like.. the idea of Marvel and DC universes, even if a large amount of them are badly written tripe.
Yer right, though, nostalgia is toxic. And...?
Then Jack Fear said
Don't have a problem with superheroes per se, O Adjectiveless Namesake: only with franchises—"shared universes," episodic works by diverse hands, the way that the commercial demands (There Must Be Product Every Month) overrides basic artistic impulses (Good Stories Have a Beginning, Middle, and End).
For instance, I read PLANETARY (when it comes out), and have no qualms with it being a superhero book. But it's got a singularity and purity of vision that comes from the creation being inextricably, contractually linked to the creators, and it's telling a single story. If PLANETARY were a Marvel property, we'd have seen a dozen Terry Kavanagh/Igor Kordey fill-in issues by now.
Anything a writer does on a franchise book is essentially meaningless, because it can all be undone in a single stroke: character development can be reversed, characters can come back from the dead, life-altering events can be explained away with pocket universes, robot doubles... all manner of cheats. And in fact a lot of this retconning is driven by the demands of the fans.
That's a horrible stricture for a writer to have to work under, and it's not conducive to good writing. And even on those occasions when excellent work is produced under those restraints, that work can still be rendered invalid in a heartbeat.
The system's entire purpose is to produce work of acceptable mediocrity. The occasional exception does not justify the continuance of a fucked system.
To which jack replied
Hey, I don't know. Are you the fellow that hates Igor Kordey? He's an excellent artist in my opinion.
I apologise (slightly) for the tone of my last post, but you did seem bent on shorting everything I had to say in a manner that wasn't open to dialogue. Ellis' 'Excalibur' had a beginning, middle and end. As Morrison's NXM will. 'Dark Phoenix' does - it's in a tpb. Or 'From the Ashes'. What goes on afterward need not devalue these things in and of themselves.
I thought it slightly presumptuous of you to speak for everyone here, stating that 'we don't' like fictional universes. I don't buy franchises, personally, although some teenage kid that wasted a lot of money inside me was thrilled to hear about New X-Men when it was announced. I have not been disappointed.
I'm not saying they're faultless by any stretch of the imagination (DCU, MU.) Bear in mind, Planetary is part of the Wildstorm Universe, too. However, the idea of all these thousands of books accumulating to one whole entity, independent of any single vision is, to me, conceptually exciting.
A lot of the faults you mention are also nowhere to be seen at New Marvel, truth be told.
Anyway, I was defending a site, which on first look, had me thinking in a similar fashion to yourself, but that somehow became compelling to me. And who's residents are nowhere near the caricature you have painted of them. I enjoy going and fighting my corner aganst a consensus there. Viral tec, remember?
(*petulantly*) Hey, man, it's a free world - and you can't stop me.
Then My Misheard Lada of the Flowers interjected with
Based on Jack Fear's logic all of Isaac Asimov's work is worthless purely because the publishers hired some hack to 'rewrite' some of his books and a few new books for things like his Hari Seldon series. It possibly wipes out Philip K. Dick's canon because of the new Blade Runner books, though it could be argued they are sequals to the movie and not the book the movie came from...
Also, despite the fact that his Sandman beared no relation to any previous holder of the title, that invalidates Neil Gaiman's 'Sandman'.
To which Jack Fear replied
Lada: just because it gets done in "proper" books doesn't make the practice any less abhorrent.
And your comparison doesn't quite hold, does it--because you're still thinking of the Foundation series as "Asimov's books," rather than as "Hari Seldon books." The original works are still closely identified with the creator in a way that true franchise books are not. I don't think Grant Morrison's NewXmen be said to be a "continuation" of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's work in the same way.
Similarly, while the Blade Runner novels may embroider and elaborate on the source film, they're not going to invalidate or reboot it in any meaningful way. The closest equivalent to these comics in the prose camp would be Star Trek novels and their ilk.
adjectiveless: First, a point of order: you used the royal "we" before I did. If we all like these wee fictional universes...
Second:
the idea of all these thousands of books accumulating to one whole entity, independent of any single vision is, to me, conceptually exciting.
And to me, not. No need to paint yourself as a martyr over this.
Then Flux = wants Nikki McKibbin to win came in with..
I think that Jack Fear has a good point about the corporate-properties, but I don't think it's nearly as black & white as he makes it out to be - plenty of worthy work can be created in that system, stories that do have an end even if later writers change all of it.
And the notion that simply by owning your creative property alone makes that work more worthwhile is really foolish - plenty of creator-owned work is no better or worse than corporate properties, in terms of quality. Even though most of the comics that I enjoy the most now are creator-owned, I would say that Grant Morrison's New X-Men or Peter Milligan's X-Statix are both infinitely superior to most of the dross put out by Image or Oni Press, and certainly stomps all over Planetary which reads like a fourth-tier Marvel comic. (Think "Thunderbolts" or "Captain Marvel")
The Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen is my god joined in with
Nikki's off the island tonight, Flux.: I agree that singularity of creatorship does not inherently make things better or worse. The dreadful 1990s do not negate the wonderful stories and characters of the 1980s X-Men for me, any more than umpteen production teams have ruined long-running series such as EastEnders or Doctor Who. Milligan's doing better work via franchise right now than he's ever done in creator-owned work.
I think it's backward to call a story a thing with a beginning, middle and end. Sure, some stories can be defined that way. But almost by definition that's not what serials are about. Some of us get off on the serial nature of certain franchises, and this isn't necessarily a bad thing. There are different kinds of storytelling.
Hell, part of the fun for me is waiting to see how they inevitably bring back Magneto and crush Charles' legs again...
now post on... |
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