ComicBloc wonders where all the superhero comic creators have gone:
We have a plethora of comics WRITERS, all with varying skill sets. But how many are truly CREATORS? I don’t mean “let’s take the same old tired thing and put a new spin on it for the umpteenth time”, but the “let’s do something entirely new” kind of thing.
Even the most popular writers out there now just rehash (Green Lantern, Kingdom Come, Skrull Invasions, Civil War, Crisises, etc.) characters and concepts others have let go while the best we get is new and sometimes interesting takes on existing concepts.
Where are the creators outside of indie books?
The rest of the fans wonder if the problem is really with the writers and artists, or everything else:
“If there are comic creators, would the companies really allow them to create something brand new, and if they did would any of the readers in the market actually buy it?”
“You also need to consider the business realities of creating characters and titles from whole cloth. If you create a brand new character or concept for Marvel or DC, the company owns it 100%. If you did that same character as a creator-owned property at another company, or for an imprint like Icon, the creator ends up owning the lion’s share of the property, and reaping the benefits. In other words, if Robert Kirkman had created Invincible as a Marvel book, he would reap very little benefit from it beyond what he’s paid to write it. Since he created it as an Image title, he gets all the benefit from it. There’s very little incentive to create something new for Marvel and DC (Wildstorm and Vertigo creator-participation options aside) — it’s like giving away your ideas. There are just too many other options (Image, Dark Horse, Top Cow, Oni, etc.) where you can retain all or some ownership. That’s why you rarely seen “new” creations in the Marvel U and DCU.”
“Sean McKeever and Mike Norton created the character Gravity for Marvel and the only things I read online were reactions from fans that compared the new character to versions of existing characters. It was a fun take on a young hero gaining powers, but vast majority of the audience stayed away from that mini-series and jeered it from their keyboards at a safe distance. Paul Jenkins’ Sentry is often called Marvel’s newest version of Superman. The comparisons aren’t easy to escape, even when people are creative or inventive… I think it is far more difficult to find open minded readers than it is talented creators at Marvel and DC. If the bigger companies have to mind the bottom line more often, they have to generate the material that sells the most.”
Is it a chicken and the egg situation? Does the superhero market want new ideas, or more of the same? I know which way the cynic in me leans…
May 19th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
So this is all about the dearth of new Marvel and DC characters?
At the risk of Issac Newtoning this deal, you get what you pay for!
//\Oo/\\
May 19th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
Its only a lil’ different than complaining why Disney doesn’t do the same, the movies are usually re-visionings of older stories or reliance on the brand Mouse Universe characters…don’t argue me on Ratatouie (sp?), Toy Story etc….buying and working Pixar into their game plan is similar to Wildstorm when they had the ABC line, Cliffhanger, original Authority and Planetary…and having Jim Lee come over and work his way into the main DCU.
I like some of the brand (comic) stuff…mostly for the long running serial nature of it (its like smoking, bad for your health etc. lol)…but you don’t have to look too far for “creators” creating outside of the big 2…Casanova, Phonogram, and Young Liars (Vertigo, yeah I know) are three of my favorites right now.
May 19th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
By now creators working for corporate comics companies know they’ll receive next to no reward at all for giving away their best ideas to the work for hire system. There’s no other real reason for this phenomenon.
May 19th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
In the long run, it doesn’t pay to create new characters for Marvel or DC. They control the trademark on any characters in their Universes, and the creator gets nada.
May 19th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
Glad to see we agree, Alan!
May 19th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
There are several problems with Marvel’s current approach to writing, such as:
1) Not knowing characters’ histories. When a character’s been around since the ‘60s or ‘70s, there have been too many stories published for writers who weren’t fans back then to know their histories, unless they make considerable efforts to do research, but without that knowledge, they won’t know what the characters’ themes, relationships, and plot histories are, and won’t have a knowledge base for developing story ideas.
2) The absence of narration. Narration is essential for including plot information, overviews of situations and characters, and smooth transitions between scenes. With narration, the characterization and plotting in an issue can approach the complexity of a prose story; without it, the result is often the equivalent of a plot outline. Dialogue-only scripts might make writing easy for screenwriters and make reading easy, but the loss of story content turns the stories into juvenilia.
3) Contempt for superhero fiction. A reader can see that contempt in Bendis’s “Avengers” material, for example, since he tries so hard, apparently, to avoid tactical fights involving powered individuals, disregards continuity, seems to have next to no interest in pitting heroes directly against villains, and concentrates on writing about his pet characters. Contempt is also evident in Brevoort’s “Blah, blah” blog entries at Marvel.com, since he routinely treats readers as if they were children, regardless of the issue at hand, reacting only to what they see their favorite heroes do, and reacting as children to that. In writing about material, he seems to place much more emphasis on an issue’s artwork, the appeal of an issue’s cover art, and production factors than he does on story content.
If lack of creativity is perceived as a problem now, it’s probably due less to a lack of financial incentives that it is to a lack of strong interest in the material combined with a lack of knowledge about the characters and their universe. If a writer were interested, knowledgeable, and skillful, developing novel characters and plots would come naturally.
SRS
May 19th, 2008 at 3:31 pm
New doesn’t come along all that often. Is there is a single truly new concept in movies this summer? Is there a truly new TV show these days? Everything gets rehashed, reinvented, rebuilt. And we don’t care if it’s good. No one is complaining that Battlestar Galactica is built from the bones of a lousy 1978 SF show. No one complains that Grey’s Anatomy is a soap with doctors. No one is angry that Eli Stone is a cousin to Ally McBeal.
So why should we complain if Goeff Johns reworks Hal Jordan, if BMB reinvents Spidey, or if Morrison makes an epic Batman tale from 70 years of pieces. If it’s good and it tells a great tale, that’s all that matters to me.
May 19th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
Because you can only hit the jackpot once, tiger.
//\Oo/\\
May 19th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
“In the long run, it doesn’t pay to create new characters for Marvel or DC. They control the trademark on any characters in their Universes, and the creator gets nada.”
That’s very true.
Which, IMO, made the whole Image “revolution” in the early 1990’s so pathetic. All these “hot” creators leave the corporate companies and what did they deliver?
Spawn? Wildcats?
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
May 19th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
Steven R. Stahl is seriously funny. First, Narration was often REDUNDANT in most comic books, explaining what the reader could grasp by LOOKING AT THE ART. Rarely did it ever move beyond that. Rarely. It often felt like editors required copious amounts of text per page, and the writers would just churn out descriptions of the panel you were looking at. How is that any better? It’s not. And personally, I would rather see things than be told them.
I bet you love the over-writing of Roy Thomas and Don McGregor.
Bervoort was for years the fan’s favorite editor at Marvel, he was the one who had Busiek on Avengers and Iron Man after the icky Heroes Reborn debacle.
The sad fact is fans are fickle and feel empowered to try to backsteat drive everything these days. I can’t imagine what it’s like having thousands of people tell you how to do your job on a daily basis, often while they prove them have little or no understanding of how to write, draw, or even basic a basic grasp of storytelling, let alone how to spell canon (not cannon) correctly. You have people who can cite some random issue of Power Man and Iron Fist chapter and verse, but can’t spell or type for shit, let alone form a coherent sentence.
Shut up and read, comics are going to be as bad as TV when it comes to turning on a dime to appease fan whims.
May 19th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
I think you also have to factor in the market when it comes to creating characters for the big two companies. The Order was filled with new concepts, heroes, ideas, etc and its sales were so poor. Why launch a new series or even mini-series with a new character that probably won’t sell when we can launch a mini series with a character who already has two books out there that will sell?
May 19th, 2008 at 6:32 pm
Um…Runaways anybody?
May 19th, 2008 at 8:11 pm
ElCoyote partakes of ElPeyote.
Lighten up, D00D.
May 20th, 2008 at 9:58 am
I’d like to see more super hero writers create their own shared universes.
I was really enjoying Godland for a while and I always get a hoot out of Mad Man and Powers for that reason.
May 20th, 2008 at 10:41 pm
People should consider that serial characters are a minority in fiction, not the majority. When a writer creates characters for use in a close-ended story, he shapes them to suit the plot and theme. When the story is over, the writer will (should) have said what there is to say about them. The reader shouldn’t feel that there’s something missing, or left unresolved. Simply creating a character within a serial doesn’t automatically make it a potential treasure, capable of appearing in dozens of stories, especially if the character’s a villain. The first storyline (arc) should explain the character(s) fairly well, especially his basic motivations and abilities. That storyline might say all that there is to say that’s interesting about the new character, or the character could be a flop. Relying on a hidden or mysterious past to sustain interest in the character is formulaic writing. While TV dramas aren’t comics stories, the generation and treatment of new characters are comparable. Multiple appearances for characters aren’t common.
As an example of implicit contempt for fantasy material, I point to Dr. Druid’s “son,” who appears in MIGHTY AVENGERS #13. The character has some vague connection to the “magics,” but that’s not based on learning or natural edibility; rather, the connection is based on his “monster DNA.” Given Druid’s unexceptional origin, his status as a minor mystic, and Bendis’s handling of the Scarlet Witch and Dr. Strange, Bendis seems to be claiming that magical abilities are due to DNA, not learning, training, and skills. That’s a nonsensical attitude to take, but it’s consistent with Bendis’s treatment of magic in “Avengers” material as a bunch of nonsense that’s sometimes useful as a deus ex machina or for people doing crazy things. If Bendis believes magic is a bunch of junk, that’s okay, but he shouldn’t be inflicting that belief on readers, nor should Brevoort be letting him do it.
SRS
May 21st, 2008 at 6:39 pm
Sometimes I wonder if, by the lack of promotion for newer titles, Marvel & DC are playing a mind trick on the audience to get them to pay for the old books they rely on. After all, the heavily-marketed books will be in the forefront of their media (eg. Brand New Day), all the comics “journalism” will be geared towards it, and it may leave the audience thinking that all Marvel & DC do are the old characters.
So, by not heavily marketing new books or new characters - like the Order, Runaways, ClanDestine - they are making us think that new books are not worth it, which is of course total rubbish, because they are. Let’s face it, the books they rely on were characters and stories made in the 1960s. That’s a statement in itself. Marvel & DC are afraid of the new, but instead of doing something about it (not talking about Zuda or Vertigo), they continue on in their stuck thinking. Marvel would rather promote their next forgettable X-title than the recent Jonathan Lethem take on Omega The Unknown, because that’s all they know. They have been conditioned to think old will sell, and end up limiting their existing audience and marginalising newcomers.
The only time I think Marvel were open to newness and chuck-away-continuity was when they’d just come out of bankruptcy and Bill Jemas was around. Does anyone remember Peter Milligan & Mike Allred’s X-Force? James Sturm’s Unstable Molecules?