Michael May

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There are times when I wish some of these guys – because I think some of them know better – I wish they would take a moment and stop and think. […]You might want to stop for a minute and think with this diverse group of talent involved with the project, maybe there is more to the story than they know. Maybe there are reasons people are willing to work on this. Maybe its not as clear cut as a lot of people think. I’m speaking about this from a distance. I was never in the room, while anything went on, but maybe there’s just more to the story than people think.

— Darwyn Cooke, talking to Rolling Stone Magazine about Watchmen 2.  We should all think better of these people because they MAYBE have a single legitimate reason for creating work that’s morally and aesthetically repulsive.  Maybe there’s reasons, unknown unknowable reasons, hiding somewhere, in a reptilian place far from where human sight or human logic can find them.  He doesn’t know what they are because he’s “at a distance”. But maybe they exists, just maybe, conceivably, it’s within the realm of possibility.  And let’s all think about that!  Let’s think really, really hard.  Because after millenia of evolution, that’s what the human brain should be used to think about.  Let’s use all of the synapses, all of them.   (via twiststreet)

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Sometimes I think if these companies would just commit to a half-dozen comics featuring iconic, kids-friendly versions of the characters it would be easier for fans to process plot points like this as something specific to an interpretation as opposed to a new “reality” that has the weight of being the official version.

— Tom Spurgeon

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The audience doesn’t know what it wants. If it knew what it wanted, it wouldn’t be an audience. It just knows that it wants to be entertained somehow, and that’s a perfectly reasonable expectation. I wish we were better at it. The 50,000 hardcore fans of periodical print comics that we have left, the ones we haven’t and can’t drive away, seem to indicate with their buying patterns that they’re interested only in nostalgia, which is terrifying. And I understand why publishers cater to that; they’re kinda forced to, given that the print distribution system is targeted SOLELY TO THOSE 50,000. I can’t wait to hear what the non-hardcore audience wants; digital will tell us that. I don’t care nearly as much what “comics fans” want as I do what “potential readers” want.

— Mark Waid

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I really don’t think Marvel and DC are helping things by having gritty, R-rated versions of their superheroes in their main comics – what they sell as the “real” versions – while simultaneously selling those exact same characters in kids’ comics and plastering them all over lunchboxes and animated cartoons… Casual readership by kids, or by parents for their kids, is effectively impossible the way things are currently structured. And I think the waters are muddied too far now to claw that ground back. I think it’s insane that DC have spent 70 years making Superman as big as Mickey Mouse, and branding him to be understood by parents as being pretty much as kid-friendly as Mickey Mouse, only to piss that brand away in a decade. Nothing wrong with doing mature content in comics – in fact, it should be encouraged as often as possible – but doing it with characters who are on your kids’ lunchboxes is kind of moronic. Take a lesson from Watchmen and come up with new characters for that stuff. And then go back to Superman and Batman and put the same kind of love and effort and craft and intelligence you’ve been putting into all those rape scenes and body mutilations into something kids can read, and adults can also be proud to read because of all the love and effort and craft and intelligence you’ve put into it, and make those the “real” versions.

— Roger Langridge

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Don’t get me wrong, I love Kirby, but this is brain-coasting even for him. He clearly wasn’t in any particular mood to dicker around with clever villain names during the ten or fifteen minutes he spent whipping this annual up. “Okay, we got Captain America, we got mutants, and we got Magneto, which is Doctor Doom for mutants. And who I gotta use, because the office told me to. Okay, whatever. But to hell with Magneto’s old gang, they can keep that. I’m not looking that shit up, and I don’t wanna do that same old stuff again, anyway. I’ll make some new guys. Yeah, new guys, I can do that like breathing. I can piss new guys out like a race horse with Charlton rates. Whatever the hell that means. So, yeah. Need some new guys. Need some new guy names. Names…names…where’s my cigar? How about…Lifter? Yeah, sure, Lifter, a strong guy that lifts. Burner…a fire guy that burns. I swear that cigar was here not two minutes ago. Slither. Snake guy that slithers. And Peeper, with the eyes, and boom-boom-boom, here I go and look at this, I got three pages penciled here, an I didn’t even know I was holding the goddamned pencil!”.

— Evan Dorkin

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DC makes clear its intentions on a book that serves as a tribute to the industry’s loss of writer and animation producer Dwayne McDuffie without directly benefiting his family or something similar, which has caused some creators to balk. This kind of awkward weirdness may be, sadly, a more appropriate tribute to McDuffie’s career than something that had gone over more smoothly.

— Tom Spurgeon

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I believe that for a series to have a fighting chance at sustaining a long-term run, it needs to have a distinct “core concept”, some patch of ground that it occupies within the Marvel Universe that it stands on that makes it unique and different and special — and the tough part is that it needs to be both simple to understand and it needs to be commercial. And that’s extremely difficult to do.

This has always been one of the difficulties with Alpha Flight, for example. Traditionally, Alpha Flight has been defined by two interlocking concepts: they’re “The Avengers of Canada.” Now, to me, for a sustaining series, that’s not a strong enough core concept. For one thing, the Avengers are the Avengers of Canada, since they’re the Avengers of everywhere. So that part doesn’t really hold water. And thereafter, the book’s identity comes down to geography, and that’s not a universal-enough thing for the majority of readers to care about. I suspect the same kind of thing is true of Captain Britain and MI:13. Doesn’t mean that these characters or the stories they’ve appeared in aren’t cool and haven’t been done well – but it does mean that over the long haul, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep a series like this relevant to the audience.

— Tom Brevoort

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I feel like we’re watching the death of an industry in terms of evolution, like we’re switching from being one way to a new way, you know? When you do that, you have to burn the bird and get the phoenix out of it. So I feel like we’re transitioning from the Industrial Age to the Space Age. It’s like everybody is lamenting the loss of the railroad, but hey man, now we have airplanes.

— Terry Moore