David if you don't like the thread and are tired then go ahead and take a short break. The Luchessies won't ruin your legit operation by throwing kick backs to the archbishop to con you, take a mass hit out on your organizational partners turn your best ground level lieutenant and confidante against you, assassinate the pope, or hire a Sicciallian to kill you that accidently kills your daughter. I promise.

And you won't have to send a guy to sitck the ear-thing of the big bad guy's glasses into his carotid artery.

I was thinking "Northern Exposure".

Personally I'm going for Brokeback Mountain.

Jim, I wasn't thinking of Peanuts when I mentioned Work for hire arrangements. Your points are all valid and yes, when it's something like that where the creator is such a part of the success then they have a massive bargaiing chip. Rarely in superhero comics is one person solely responsible for a series and rarely are they so intrinsic to the success.

I grew up reading comics in England and had never heard of Marvel Man until Moore brought him back,having since seen the original,it was a very poor and obvious rip off Captain Marvel.I liked Moore`s take on the character.Similarly i suspect that DC put the new Brit on Swamp Thing as it was a poor selling title and not many would care if it sank,fortunately he did something different and special with it and he made it a hit.I admit i bought my first Swamp thing after hearing gossip in a comic shop that he was to take it on,and then reading a little prose promo he did in other DC comics to promote it,i liked what i read and my first issue was The Burial,i then tracked down the previous issues.I don`t like everything Moore does but these two are classics IMO.

Jim, I wasn't thinking of Peanuts when I mentioned Work for hire arrangements. Your points are all valid and yes, when it's something like that where the creator is such a part of the success then they have a massive bargaiing chip. Rarely in superhero comics is one person solely responsible for a series and rarely are they so intrinsic to the success

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Got it.

And I'll go with Neil Gaiman's Sandman as an excellent example of "rarely", since DC even agreed to end the series when he was finished with it.

...Rachel Pollack...

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That just became my #1 reason why they agreed so readily with Neil...!

Heh heh heh. However I'm sure their are writers that could have done good and interesting things with the concept too.

"So what I'm saying is some thought should be taken to see if additions and subtractions are clarifying, or just muddying the water with trivia and mundanity, or tacking things on for a short term effect(Kitty Pryde is now a Ninja!) with no thought to the future. Also a change should be evaluated as to whether it will most likely be destructive or constructive in terms of having others write that character. Will it amplify the character or just mute and dampen it."

It's almost like, after so many posts, I start to see why changes ARE made.

Alan Moore didn't cause every comics creator to suddenly turn into douche bags. He was too good, and created too much of an impression, that's all it was. If he is apalled by that, and I bet he is, that's not a fault in the man. It's a fault in American "culture". The need to suckle at the tit of real talent has changed from lionizing someone, say, like Ernest Hemingway or Faulkner, to creating clones of them who do the real muddying, the real cruddying, of the culture. For every Stephen King in the 70s-80s, there was fifty imitators trying to lock-step. That was the real beginning of the boom to create duplicates of lesser quality. You see, if Marvel and DC had kept their ethics intact, they'd have realized you don't dismiss the Roger Sterns of the world to jump on the Moore clone bandwagon. Some good talent was guilty of publically fellating Frank Miller and Moore, and it ruined comics pretty much forever. Again, NOT Miller and Moore's fault. The inane imitators (whether forced by the companies into doing or not), had no idea that even WORSE talent was going to hold their knock-offs in high esteem. This is not new. It happened in publishing, it happened in films. Do we blame Steven Spielberg for the Blockbuster mentality in Hollywood? Or whoever the hell it was that started Remake Fever? (Actually, that guy needs a good de-nutting.)

Hating Alan Moore because he's pretentious or whatever is one thing. But he's not the comics Anti-Christ either.

Starman wasn't really a Revamp though. It was a new character replacing an older one. Unfortunately it did so with death. It also pulled in the other variant Starman characters and some long unused characters(Black Condor, Tigorr, etc.) to set up a bit of an ensemble. Really the character that got a "huge" change from Starman was The Shade. He sort of got the Magneto treatment and a convenient excuse for a lot of his bad behavior.

Gaimon's Sandman was also mostly a new character. The old Sandman had his own sidekick replace him(unfortunately with death again) and strangley he became a guy with rock powers. We didn't have to face the idea of Weseley Dodds mutating into a dream god. We did have to face the idea of Sandy being a powered(powedered) hero though.