Creative Custody

Someone — I know not who — has been posting the above graphic around social media. In case your screen is too small, I'll quote it and then explain why I think it's wrong in so many ways…

Dear Comic Book Creators,

What many of you don't seem to get is that there are nearly 80 years of history behind the iconic characters you write, draw and edit about.  You DON'T OWN these characters.  The public does.  But, you are the CARETAKERS of these pop-culture icons.  That's literally your job to take care of them for the public (a.k.a. your customers).  You may have forgotten this.

We're not trying to pick a fight with you.  We're just reminding you to take good care of our beloved characters.

— Your Customers

Okay, here's what's wrong with this letter…and keep in mind, the following is written by a guy who has been reading comics for around sixty (60!) years and has winced at many comics that, I thought, defaced characters I loved…

  1. This message is misaddressed. If anyone needs to be scolded, it isn't the folks who write or draw the characters in question. It often isn't even those who "edit about" them, whatever that means. It's the current management of the company that holds the copyrights and trade marks. They are the ones with the final authority as to whether classic characters are altered, darkened, killed, made insane, forced to undergo a sex change, turned into Lego blocks, etc. They make the decisions as to who writes and draws the comics and how those people should or should not handle them.
  2. The public does not own these characters. I mean, in a sense, the public owns public domain characters but in a more real sense, nobody owns public domain characters. Anyway, this open letter obviously does not refer to public domain characters. It refers to characters that companies own and it is built on the premise that it's clear they don't own them. But they do.
  3. The letter uses "we" a lot but I suspect it's written by one person who thinks a lot of people agree with him or her and that their viewpoint is widely-held. I cannot prove it but I further suspect he or she is wrong about the consensus.  Some of the best-selling comics of the last decade or three have been comics which I'd bet the writer of this screed believes did not take "good care" of those beloved characters.
  4. And our job is not literally to take care of them for the public but to do versions of them on which the current public wishes to spend dinero.  It would not be unreasonable to look over recent sales figures and come to the conclusion that a large chunk of the buying public does not want to buy Your Father's Hulk or Your Mother's Wonder Woman.  They want a version tailored to present-day sensibilities of pacing and/or intensity and/or sex and/or violence.  That means change.
  5. Moreover, you will not find a whole lot of consensus among the folks you call Our Customers as to what is the right way to handle these characters. Take Batman, for instance. There are those who say the proper, faithful way to do Batman — the mode most faithful to the Kane/Finger original — is to make him dark, angry, realistic, obsessed, filled with rage…and in some ways, as crazy as the villains he battles.  Visually, it would be the way Frank Miller and Neal Adams (to name but two of many) drew the character to great fan approval. And there are those who think Batman oughta be drawn in the semi-cartoony Dick Sprang style with more separation of hero and villain, and with less grit and ugliness.
  6. Thus, if you say "take good care of our beloved characters"…well, that's easy to say in the general.  It's a little more difficult to agree on when that's being done and when it's not.  I've been reading comics as long as 95%+ of those who'll read this message and I've seen lots of Batman comics (or Superman or Spider-Man or Iron Man or Doctor Strange, etc.) that were hailed as faithful to the characters but struck me as quite the opposite.
  7. And lastly in this numbering, I've also seen a lot of comics that I thought were quite unfaithful to the source material but pretty good comics, nonetheless.  That counts for something, doesn't it?

As long as characters and franchises are passed around from one creative person to another, there will be variations and you and I will read some issue of Batman and say, "Jeezus!  What was that writer thinking?  That's not my Batman!"  But it may very well be someone else's Batman.  That is never going to change and right now, I don't get that the marketplace particularly wants it to change.  Seems to me a lot of readers enjoy seeing diverse, imaginative variations on classic characters.  Quite a few of 'em sure love to see a new artist come in and draw the players as they've never been drawn before.

There's a bit of advice to comic book creators that I coined years ago which somehow gets attributed to other folks but I'm quite certain I said it first.  It's to "Never get possessive about characters you don't own."  You will wake up someday and someone else will be doing them and what's more, they may start by undoing everything you did.  I have friends who wrote Superman or Batman or some superstar protagonist for some time and started to feel like those were "their" characters.  But they weren't.  Those writers were like baby-sitters who'd forgotten they hadn't given birth to those particular babies and so it was traumatic to have them snatched away.

Maybe I need to extend that advice to readers, as well.  Once the creator of a strip or a comic or a character has exited the scene, no writer has more moral right to that property than any other writer who might be given the assignment.  You as a consumer may vastly prefer one writer's interpretation over another — I certainly have my favorites — but everyone is not only replaceable but certain to eventually be replaced.  And if you don't like a certain ongoing series as done by a certain current writer or artist, it may not be because they've forgotten they don't own those characters, it may be because the folks who hold the copyrights and trade marks want them changed that way.

Or it may be that the current writer or artist isn't very good.  That happens, too.