Another week, another chance for me to snark at the comic industry. Well, maybe this week anyways. I’d just finished writing up my thoughts here on last weeks question when this weeks came in. I was fired up and in a mood. So my answer was kind short and sour. But I stand by it, and I’ve had a few days to continue thinking about it, and I have an odd thought. If a work isn’t being done by it’s original creator, but instead by some other artist, what do you call it? There’s this thing called fan-fiction, which fount of all knowledge Wikipedia defines as,

Fan fiction (alternately referred to as fanfiction, fanfic, FF, or fic) is a broadly-defined term for fan labor regarding stories about characters (or simply fictional characters) or settings written by fans of the original work, rather than by the original creator.

It does go on to specify that fan fiction isn’t supported or published by the originator, but while I see the distinction being made, the first part is what’s sticking for me. Some comic fan decides they want to get into comics. They practice writing or drawing or both or whatever. They might create fan-fiction type stuff or their own creations. In time, they might get the right persons attention and get hired to create something based upon one of the characters or worlds they are a fan of. Is this not fan fiction, just as a paid and endorsed level?

I could create a batman comic and share it with my friends. It’s ‘just’ fan fiction. But say I come up with this thing, share it around and the idea comes to the attention of a DC editor. Most likely I’ll get a C&D letter, but what if they like it, and decide they want me to run with it and publish it? Did it stop being fan fiction because now I’m getting paid? The work is the same. It’s only legit if you can fool somebody into paying for it? I’m not trying to suggest that fan work is equal to ‘professional’ work, it might be, it might not, it might be superior. I’m saying it’s a strange distinction. And I’m saying if you are not the original creator, then you are always doing fan fiction. Whether a big star or some kid in his notebook. And if you enjoy what’s created, great, if not, that’s fine too. There’s thousands of people lining up to add their ideas. For the responses to the original question about the new direction for DC’s Batman comics, vist CBD. And I am not suggesting you go hunting for fan-fiction, while there’s likely some great stuff out there, it can be a very scary, dark place.

Wow, is that a mouthful! I still don’t have much to say about Straczynski himself. I think a single situation has so many particulars that we’ll never be privy to that it’s pointless to speculate. But on the larger issue of ongoing monthlies vs. graphic novels, while I hold that there will be monthlies, their appeal is disappearing up their own continuity. I Like James Bond. I like Indiana Jones. And while over time there have been different creators involved in telling their stories, they still stay pretty close to the core of who the character is. And their stories are finite. You have an adventure with a beginning, middle and end. There might be parts of the mythos that carry between stories, Nazi’s and supporting characters like Brody or Sala for Indy and Smersh/Spectre/Quantum or say Jaws for Bond. But they don’t have long-soap opera level complex continuity that spins out over years. And while different people have played Bond or written Bond films or books, we know who the character is. Connery, Dalton and Craig portryed a harder Bond closer to Fleming’s original and Moore and Brosnan were a little more suave. But it was still a killer spy who drove expensive cars and looked great in a tux. You know when you go into a Bond, or Indy story what you are going to get. Believe me, we know what goes into a Indy story and we’re trying to hit as many of the elements as we can. Now go pick up a superhero comic. HUH? Who is the person and where’s the Superman/Spider-Man/Wonder Woman I expect? And what is this story, I don’t get it? The President/Mayor is the villan? WHAT? Wait, when did the character die and get re-born? And WHAT is he wearing? It’s all too much. I used to read, and thanks to my local library still try to read superhero comics to keep tabs on what’s going on in a general sense. But it’s hard. Worse than trying to pick up a Soap Opera. So the companies try and clean house and bring everything back to a clearer, simpler, cohesive set of stories. I remember buying the original Crisis on Infinite Earths and really loving the idea of bringing it all togehter and establishing what was what and who was who. Then Byrne re-booted Superman. And Miller did Batman, and Perez and Wolfman did Wonder Woman. Marvel introduced the Ultimate line and started fresh, made it easy for a new reader to start reading Spider-Man. And then went and did it all again.And every time the creative team changes, and it will sooner than you expect, they feel they have to assert their own take on the character and the world. The same thing that happens when you take the character from the page to the screen. The character, the cast, the look, everything is filtered by the army of creators who are currently messing with it. Superhero comics need to lose continuity and start treating these characters in one of two ways. Either like Bond and Indy, core characters you can tell contained stories about that do not change the fundamentals of who and what they are. OR, these characters are like legendary fairy tale characters up for interpretation and re-imaginging. One works better as graphic novels, “Have you read the new Spider-Man graphic Novel?” whereas the other might work better for the monthly anthology type approach. Batman Legend of the Bat seemed to be trying to do that. Or the Star Wars anthology that ran for a while. Personally, I gave up on superheroes a long time ago. I’m much more interested in a story told by one person or persons, that tells a complete story. As to whether I’ll be buying it as floppy monthly magazines or waiting to buy a single book. Wellll… I’d like to just buy a book, I hate buying the same thing twice, and the book is the superior reading format, but if Kill Shakespeare or Echo need to serialize first, then so be it, I’ll be paying twice. See why I like doing DFS as a webcomic? We’re getting the best of both options. Go see what everybody else had to say over at comic book daily.

This topic should be pretty much right up my alley, but I don’t pretend to have all, or really any answers. We’re still very new to the webcomics game, and even if we seemed to do pretty well, we never professed to be experts at small press comics back in the day. But I will stress the advantages that digital has had for us so far. We’re able to instantly share each new page with anyone, anywhere that has internet access. We can get feedback and respond within minutes some times. We’re in colour, which would be so cost prohibitive in print for us as to be impossible. Digitally, it’s the same price. We can also do added things, like sharing thoughts and ideas, or sketches and design material. The process of creation is largely the same, with the exception of the scanning and colouring. What’s really different is the pace. We used to work one 20 page issue at a time, coming out every couple months. Now it’s an ongoing steady process, as detailed by Jeff in his piece a few weeks ago. And luckily for us, we don’t have to worry about things like digital locks and piracy. We freely share each page every week. Now, it’s not that we don’t want to monetize Dressed For Success. We’re really glad when somebody buys a book or gets a convention sketch. And once we finish the Mississauga Jay story we’ll be publishing it in a book and selling it. Nothing radical there, it’s sort’ve the webcomics business model. We’ve been asked about putting the early stories online as well, and we haven’t partially because we’d like people to purchase them, but it’s also simply because I don’t think we could face scanning and posting 5-600 pages of comics. And hopefully, you’ll feel like I do, and once you’ve discovered something you enjoy online, you’ll actually purchase the material in physical form. I’m pleased to say I’ve been introduced to a lot of material that I’ve then gone on to buy. We haven’t looked into apps or ebooks yet, but I have had a look at the site on the iPad and was really quite pleased. The only thing we have considered is trying to leverage HTML5 to create a separate section of the site for people who want to catch up quickly and easily. But that’s us, what I’d really like to hear is what you have to say about the whole idea of digital comics. Do you read a lot? When? Where? How? Which ones? Would you buy a special device or program to read comics? Have you paid for digital comics? Bought something you can read for free? Or are you still a Wednesday store run kinda guy? Let us know.

This time things took a cosmic slant. And it quickly turned in to a game of my God is bigger than your God. I played the game as best I could, and I still think the DC’s Endless are pretty high up on the power cosmic totem pole. But maybe the others are right.

Except it suddenly occurred to me that some of their answers were pushing the limits and definitions, and as such, it would be okay if I did the same and I suddenly knew who were the real ultimate comic book beings; fourth wall breaking creators!

Who’s got the power do do whatever to whoever? why, the person responsible for deciding what happens in the story. The two that came to mind were Grant Morrison during his run on Animal man, and, no surprise, Dave Sim, who openly displayed his power to do whatever he wanted to Cerebus and the world he had created. And as they were shown in the comic book itself, they are ‘in comic books’ and ta-da! I win. It’s nice having my own forum to get the last word in…

Not much more to say about this question than I did over at CBD. I’ve never been a big fan of the Horror genre, (or romance and only a couple mystery just FWIW) so I didn’t have a lot to contribute. Except a really scarily bad book from years ago that a certain Lad introduced me to. It really is evil. Maybe not Corinthian evil, but close. Halloween is over, but you can still get your scare on if you like.

Man, I keep getting buschucked by these things. I’ve never been the kind of nerd who sits around and does fantasy casting or team-ups. I know such a thing is done, I may have even witnessed it. But I just never got into wishing a writer and an artists would create the ultimate comic project. I also never got into the musical supergroup. If I could have a dream project, it would be to have some of the great teams and projects back, like Perez and Wolfman’s Teen Titans or Art Adams doing Longshot. But what I really want is for them to be lengthy. Not six issues, but years. Bottom line, I like independent comics because the creators have a story to tell, not a comic to churn out for a contracted period of time. It drives me crazy to decide I enjoy what someone is doing on a story and then you get a whole new team and direction. But my first answer does stand.

I am having the worst luck with these things. Wrote my piece up, sent it, then realised I’d sent it to one of the other respondents instead of to the whole group. Then discovered my SENT box had gotten turned off at some point. SO I had to re-write it, and things are never the same or as good when you have to start over. But I got to have my say. As usual, my response wasn’t fixed on the big guys, Marvel and DC. The question was sorta poised to be a duke ’em out between them, but I wasn’t the only one to choose an alternate. I focused on the exact question, so the terms quality and books stuck out for me. Oh sure, a single issue of a comic is a book, or referring to the Amazing Spider-man book, but I decided to take it as larger volumes. And quality to me meant both the work on the page, and the actual books themselves, paper, printing etc. And I’m sorry, but both Marvel and DC are flooding the shelves with a lot of sub-par or worse stuff on a monthly basis. (You’re welcome Greg) So from there it’s on to the smaller companies. And frankly, I don’t know enough or read enough from them to really judge. I had to go by what I gleaned from going through Previews for a few months now. Dark Horse? IDW? ONI? Image? So many of these middle tier publishers are half about licensed books. Oh sure Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly are the high end literary publishers, but I’ll admit that I really haven’t read much from them recently. So I cheated, kinda. I went outside Previews. I went to comic material I do know, that I have been reading and a company that is not only publishing great comics in great books, but is also doing something important for comics as an art form and for the future health of comics. Okay, enough pompous windbag, go read everyone’s piece.