You need to read Hechinger's letter to Didio
http://nobody-died.blogspot.com/2012/06/regarding-mr-didios-comments.html
"Exquisite coinmaker"
Brilliant.
"Exquisite coinmaker"
Brilliant.
Comments
More to the point, the objection I have to Didio's comment is that it denigrates and deprecates new ideas. It isn't just that DC and Marvel exploit the creations of Siegel, Schuster, Kane, Finger, Simon, Kirby, Lee, Ditko, Etc, but that Didio thinks that doing so is (or should be) the strength of their business, to the exclusion of fostering new creations by new creators. It's a manifestation of what copyright has mutated into: instead of being a mechanism to promote the creation of new things, thru a short-term grant of exclusivity, it's become a perpetual license to keep profiting from existing works, effectively discouraging the further development of new works that add to our culture.
My broader point was this. Nothing against Josh, and I'm glad he wrote his letter, but mainstream comics publishing can't exist without exploiting those IP the way they do. Longtime readers (the repeat customer) don't want change. They can't even handle when Superman gets a new collar. This is Marvel and DCs bread and butter. It's not particularly nice, but it's how they afford to pay the page rates they do. If you want freedom as a creator, if you want ownership of your characters, if you want a movie cheque - go talk to Image. If you create a character for Marvel or DC, you don't get those things, you get a pay cheque. Which is why there aren't a lot of new characters being created - it's not really editorial mandate, it's on the creators (who wants to give away a potential multi-million dollar idea?) as well. So Didio may be stating that this is how he likes to do business, or even how he thinks the business should be run, but ultimately, it doesn't matter, because the bottom line is, it's how the superhero comics biz IS, and it will never change. So, if you don't like the Watchmen prequels for some moral or ethical reason, then I think you'd be hard pressed to find a mainstream superhero comic that DOESN'T come with similar baggage.
But leaving ethics aside for the moment and referencing the amorality of art; that is, any aware artist knows just how much she borrows, filters, steals, homages and is inspired by the work of others. Art is one long conversation with your predecessors. And even "The Great Fount" Jack Kirby drew Jimmy Olson and his pal Superman for a minute, although he handled it very uniquely.
So for me, (and ignoring the morality of how these came to be corporate properties) doing work for hire is as legitimate artistically as creating your own projects. I'd get a kick out of drawing or writing some of my old favorites, but recognize that as a creator, my path is necessarily another one. I'm just disappointed by Didio's apparent belief that playing with other people's toys is the best we can aspire to.
I know for me, for sure, I work every bit as hard on them as I do my own stuff. Actually, I technically work harder, given the nature of things, but what I mean is that I put the same amount of care and craft into everything I do. So that standpoint, it's all the same to me.
The big benefit of doing creator owned stuff is that you can do anything you want, whereas with creator owned you have to serve the property, and that means you are limited in what you can do. I don't necessarily regard that as a negative, myself - I actually enjoy finding solutions to what editors want in a way that keeps the spirit of the property intact.
Everyone is different, though. I'm not sure if I care about artistic merit, because I'm not sure what it means. I would consider the things I care about - telling an interesting story and having characters that are interesting - to be about craft, and that applies to whatever I do.