Welcome back, everyone! Just a quick reminder of what our goal for each and every Saturday is: Stirring the pot is the act of causing trouble for the sake of your own amusement. So we here at Comic Booked would like to formally invite you to discuss, debate, and start some shit talkin’ about the characters, the creators, and the storylines given to us from the industry we all know and love, hate, and love to hate. So let’s quit wasting time and start the mud (or web) slinging!
This Saturday’s question: Do creators nowadays respect those who came before them?
So go forth and debate! But be sure to back up your responses. Don’t be scared. And don’t give up. After all, no one likes a quitter. And you’re not a quitter, are you?
It depends on the creators and the companies.
For instance, DC as a company doesn't really respect Alan Moore as a whole, otherwise Before Watchmen would never have been made, but the freelancers who do write for DC may or may not respect his work a lot and draw inspiration from it.
The same goes for Marvel back in the 80s. Marvel as a company never respected their creators, treating people like Todd Mcfarlane and Jim Lee like disposable creators but up and coming comic writers and artists probably appreciated and respected their work and them as people. It's all a matter of faceless corporations
Well, we ought to define what we're calling "respect" here. Do we mean simply referencing their past work in new writing? Paying attention to old characters? We're seeing Jeff Lemire writing Green Arrow and paying his respects to Mike Grell's work on "Longbow Hunters" by bringing Shado back into play. We've also seen her surface as a character in the CW show "Arrow", but I would ask whether these instances, particularly the show, are intentional homage to that past work or simply pulling from those stories for material.
DC's New 52 reboot really pissed a lot of people, and if you're looking for disrespect of creators I think that may be the place to go. The "Before Watchmen" title is a travesty, blatantly disregarding the wishes of Alan Moore and, frankly, degrading what should have been left as a standalone novel. Do you respect a creator like Jerry Siegel when you pull a corporate reboot and retcon his character's origin story into oblivion? And here's a thought: in the New 52, Superman has never died. Now, the death of Superman in 1992 was a giant money-grab for DC, sure, but there were creators who put their heart and soul into that storyline, and fans the world over who were devastated.
I have to lean towards saying No, creators today have lost something in the way they look back at the traditions they've come out of. I would gladly have someone change my mind 🙂
I think there is a certain level of… not disrespect but rather lack of interest in what's come before and it applies to some of the modern creators to an extent but more to the publishers (DC's New 52 and Marvel NOW! both are evidence of this) and newer readers who have basically been told that the older stuff isn't important and should be ignored. This comes from the constant 'updating' of the good stories and, in Marvel's case, retconning their universe to match the movies for no valid reason.
It's done nothing more than make the Marvel Universe almost completely alien to me and I've been following it since 1990.