LogFAQs > #896914232

NightMareBunny posted...

no editorial control gave us books like saga the walking dead paper girls east of west deadly class lazarus black monday murders and tokyo ghost

It's easier to be good without editorial control if you're a fully creator-owned property that lives or dies on the quality, and when you can tell longform stories without having to worry about what the next writer is going to do. And when your comic is a singular, self-contained story, and you don't have to worry about ever crossing over with other stories that may have different tonal or genre implications than yours, or having to write someone else's characters "correctly".

But that's also meaningless when you're talking about titles like Avengers, X-Men, Batman, etc, where the writer is expected to respect the stories of the past while not shitting all over the property in ways that future writers feel compelled to fix (hello, Grant Morrison!). When you're dealing with company-owned characters or titles, you pretty much NEED strong editorial to keep writer and artist egos in check and to protect the brand for future use.

It's telling that the most memorable and beloved X-Men characters and stories came from a time period when Marvel had the strongest editorial control its ever had and when the title had a single writer for more than a decade who could completely control the direction of the book. Once Jim Shooter got fired and Claremont got forced off the book, though, the franchise pretty much nosedived straight into a septic tank (which it has arguably never recovered from).

Also, the converse is that, while creator-owned titles can be some of the best comics in the business, they can also be some of the most terrible, ideological, poorly-written hipster bullshit you've ever seen. For every gem you'll find a turd if you look (rather than just taking recommendations for the most popular books).



NightMareBunny posted...

i enjoy marvel comics but you gotta admit that if someone wants to show their best stuff it's not gonna be at marvel or dc

I'd agree, but the converse of that is that nearly every quality story Marvel or DC has ever produced came at times when editorial was both strong AND in the hands of enthusiastic and creative editors (as opposed to purely corporate editors), while most of the periods where editorial was at its weakest also tended to produce some of the most forgettable or embarrassing shit that everyone does their best to pretend never happened (ie, a large part of why most comic fans loathe the 1990s as a whole).

It's also telling that most of the artists who complained the most about editorial interference in the 1980s went on to form Image, where they had total creative freedom, and used it to put out a roaring waterfall of liquid feces. Image's reputation improved over time mostly only after they actually started to organize things better, kick out the worst offenders, and then started recruiting better creators to run their own singular creator-owned titles rather than trying to build an entire universe out of thinly-veiled copies of Marvel and DC characters.


---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family