Comic book writers have this power over fans. Fans often want to write the adventures of their favourite heroes, I myself have planned out runs with various storylines for The Fantastic Four, Dr Strange, Superman, Wonder Woman, The X-men, The Justice League and more. Just sat there imagining new obstacles and great moments of triumph for Superheroes. But the only ways into the industry as a writer is knowing another writers and Editors or having writing success elsewhere. The second wave of Marvel writers were the fanboys who hung out in the lobby.
Because of this writers have the ability to exploit fans, this was also prevalent with rock stars in the 60’s and 70’s. But the Rock groupies only wanted a song or a story to tell their friends about Ringo Starr’s penis. The groomed aspiring comic’s writer wants more and has this assumed level of friendship. The writer is making the girl think it’s her ideas and writing skill he’s interested in not her ass. This is a form of deception, even if it does happen to older women who should know better.
Kelly Sue Decconick has offered a solution which is to make Comic book writers more anonymous, like we’re reading Superman not Grant Morrison’s Superman. Now to comic book fans writers are a big deal, they have the power to lift a series to new heights or have it plummet to it’s lowest ever. To the younger or more casual fan Spider-man is Spider-man even if it’s not being written by Stan Lee. But why do we even know who they are, a screen-writer for TV isn’t necessarily known, with some exceptions the head writer of Doctor Who is generally known by the more engaged parts of the fanbase, but not the rest which caused fans to blame Stephen Moffett for the Kill The Moon episode that he didn’t write (Peter Harness wrote it). But there is one big difference between Comics and television, and thats the audience buys it every time. A bad episode of a TV show comes on and your wallet isn’t lighter, you’ve just wasted an hour of your life on Netflix which could’ve been better spent. But a Trade Paperback you buy a new volume of Batman and read it, but how do you know this is the Batman for you? Batman varies wildly, superheroes aren’t that consistent, Captain America’s politics vary from run to run. Do I want Leftist Captain America who punches Nazi’s or do I want one who says “that protesting the Nazi’s is as bad as Nazi’s” (yes that is a real moment).
Comics like Novels are sold by Authors, these Authors become brands, and some Authors don’t actually write their own books like James Patterson (well there is a lot of contradictory evidence of this). But Superhero comic’s weren’t original sold by the writers, the first writer to be a selling point is probably the most famous Stan Lee. Marvel was sold as all being the brain-child of Stan and the universe was all connected so The Fantastic Four could meet the Hulk. This was actually a lie, Marvel’s style of editing was that the artist would come up with an idea and draw it then the writer would put what they thought were the appropriate words in the panels. Stan did some of this, but so did his brother Larry who had the pen name Stan Lee. Larry has since been given retroactive credit for his work on The Mighty Thor but it’s still to us outsider’s if Stan wrote everything and in his own words “[Stan] would steal any credit that wasn’t nailed down”. Because marvel had a standard writer, artists didn’t have to copy each other, at DC Bob Kane made every artist emulate his art style until his departure. Bob would also trace other artists panels when he did do artwork on Batman and with them being in his style nobody could tell (unless they went back into the back issues and checked if that panel was the same). But after artist got the green light to be themselves, writers started getting credit.
And this is the problem, writers deserve credit for what they write. But nobody should laud their power over others or try and use their position to create a quid-pro-quo arrangement with fans with ambitions. So how do you solve it?
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