| Author |
|
Brian Kirk
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 02 November 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 1244
|
| Posted: 02 August 2011 at 6:08pm | IP Logged | 1
|
|
|
There are comic creators of all shapes, sizes, race, creed, color...why can they not create characters in their image? Well they can but does that pay the bills?
|
| Back to Top |
profile
| search
| www
|
| |
Brad Krawchuk
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 19 June 2006
Location: Canada
Posts: 5819
|
| Posted: 02 August 2011 at 6:14pm | IP Logged | 2
|
|
|
Why not? Especially given the proliferation in recent years of movie studios who pay copious amounts of cash for film rights to copyright holders.
Robert Kirkman seems to be doing alright. So does Mark Millar. Ditto Frank Miller. Why wouldn't a female or minority creator be capable of the same?
|
| Back to Top |
profile
| search
e-mail
|
| |
Brian Kirk
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 02 November 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 1244
|
| Posted: 02 August 2011 at 6:24pm | IP Logged | 3
|
|
|
I agree, there are exceptional creators who have great comics: Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo, Colleen Doran's A Distant Soil are two that come to mind. I'd like to have the whole comics community aware of them...
|
| Back to Top |
profile
| search
| www
|
| |
Andrew W. Farago
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 19 July 2005
Location: United States
Posts: 4079
|
| Posted: 02 August 2011 at 6:34pm | IP Logged | 4
|
|
|
Who's the last Marvel character with any staying power who isn't from one of the X-Men books or one of the Spider-Man books? Ghost Rider, maybe? Howard the Duck? Blade?
Marvel and DC have been diversifying their casts, and I think they're well aware that comic fans are resistant to new ideas. DC's known since the Silver Age that putting a new guy into the costume/identity of an old character works, and that it can generate automatic interest in a "new" character.
Creating a new black character would get some interest in comic shops, or not, but letting a black character be the new Spider-Man? That's going to generate headlines, and it's going to get people to try out the new book. Launching this same character in a different identity might result in a title that lasts a year or two (maybe--how long do completely new characters last these days?), but this is an opportunity for a black character to star in what's likely to be the top-selling Marvel book this summer, which is a pretty cool thing.
|
| Back to Top |
profile
| search
| www
e-mail
|
| |
Brad Krawchuk
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 19 June 2006
Location: Canada
Posts: 5819
|
| Posted: 02 August 2011 at 6:44pm | IP Logged | 5
|
|
|
I've still yet to read any Sakai, but in the past couple years there's a Japanese creator named Yoshihiro Tatsumi that's had some older material (and a more recent autobiographical work) translated into English, and that stuff is simply great!
Linda Medley's Castle Waiting is a title that I'm sorely missing right now, because I have no idea when or if she's going to get around to doing any more of it. I'll have to read A Distant Soil at some point too, I've heard too many good things about Doran for her to be (almost*) entirely absent from my collection.
*I have Orbiter, her work with Warren Ellis, and it's very nice!
|
| Back to Top |
profile
| search
e-mail
|
| |
Jason Larouse
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 10 May 2011
Posts: 515
|
| Posted: 02 August 2011 at 6:54pm | IP Logged | 6
|
|
|
Dog forbid the store owner should be able to point to the Spider-Man comics and say "There they are" without having to "explain" anything. This is probably the single thing that is most damaging to American superhero comics in their present form. It is almost impossible to pick up any random issue and start reading. Everything requires "homework".
*******
Yeah, I wonder how many new or lapsed readers are going to walk into comic book shops in the coming weeks and buy Amazing Spider-Man thinking he's black. I'm betting almost as many as the people who will actually buy the right issue.
|
| Back to Top |
profile
| search
|
| |
Brad Krawchuk
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 19 June 2006
Location: Canada
Posts: 5819
|
| Posted: 02 August 2011 at 7:00pm | IP Logged | 7
|
|
|
That's going to generate headlines, and it's going to get people to try out the new book. Launching this same character in a different identity might result in a title that lasts a year or two (maybe--how long do completely new characters last these days?), but this is an opportunity for a black character to star in what's likely to be the top-selling Marvel book this summer, which is a pretty cool thing.
---
Generate headlines, try out the book, top-selling of this summer... basically it's a short term gain. On the other hand, as you say, launching an entirely new character would only last a year or two anyway.
But that entirely new character? Would BE an entirely new character! Look at the Jaime Reyes Blue Beetle. Aside from his name, and the scarab he got after Ted Kord, he doesn't look anything like Kord, have any of the same powers, or anything. He is, for all intents and purposes, a totally new thing. Except he isn't, because he's called Blue Beetle, and because he picks up on that legacy.
Still, what they did with him was they put him in his own comic series. They got him into the Batman cartoon. They got him on Smallville. They made people outside of comics aware of his existence. If they had done that with Jaime Reyes as a character called the Cobalt Kid, with his power coming from a different alien artifact (not the scarab from Ted Kord) then they could have had BOTH characters, and an entirely new minority character without any of the baggage that was totally unnecessary for them to promote him in other media.
|
| Back to Top |
profile
| search
e-mail
|
| |
Andrew W. Farago
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 19 July 2005
Location: United States
Posts: 4079
|
| Posted: 02 August 2011 at 7:01pm | IP Logged | 8
|
|
|
Yeah, I wonder how many new or lapsed readers are going to walk into comic book shops in the coming weeks and buy Amazing Spider-Man thinking he's black. I'm betting almost as many as the people who will actually buy the right issue.
I don't think you're giving people enough credit here. It's not rocket science. People who are going into shops specifically for this one thing will probably ask an employee where to find it. Or they'll flip through a few books, then ask for the one that they heard about. If you go into a record shop looking for the new Paul McCartney album, you aren't going to wander around aimlessly, pick up Abbey Road and figure that's the exact same thing, are you?
|
| Back to Top |
profile
| search
| www
e-mail
|
| |
Andrew W. Farago
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 19 July 2005
Location: United States
Posts: 4079
|
| Posted: 02 August 2011 at 7:05pm | IP Logged | 9
|
|
|
On Jaime Reyes, the Blue Beetle name was probably the hook that DC needed to get people to even take a look at the character. And a major crossover thing lead-in. I'd love it if it were enough to have a talented creative team telling good stories about a character to sell books, but I don't think that's been the case for a long time. (And you don't have to look any farther than books like Thor: The Mighty Avenger to see that a popular character and a top-notch creative team *still* isn't always enough to sell books.)
|
| Back to Top |
profile
| search
| www
e-mail
|
| |
Ed Love
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 05 October 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 2712
|
| Posted: 02 August 2011 at 7:11pm | IP Logged | 10
|
|
|
I think if you look at the replacement characters in books, they fail at about the same percentage as all new characters or even books launched of classic characters that were less than successful before. All the One Year Later new books failed, the one with the Creeper, the new Blue Beetle, the new Atom, the new Aquaman. The new Firestorm was no more successful than Breach other than generating far more buzz and discussion.
|
| Back to Top |
profile
| search
| www
|
| |
Wallace Sellars
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 01 May 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 17707
|
| Posted: 02 August 2011 at 7:15pm | IP Logged | 11
|
|
|
...I think it's odd that basically people are applauding Marvel and DC for
diversifying their lines by giving table scraps instead of making entire meals
fresh from the oven. Am I therefore not a reasonable person because I feel
slighted at the double-standard?
---
Brad, I'm with you on that and the rest of your post.
|
| Back to Top |
profile
| search
| www
|
| |
Mike Norris
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 16 April 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 4274
|
| Posted: 02 August 2011 at 7:16pm | IP Logged | 12
|
|
|
I really didn't. I know that the younger character (Patriot or w/e) is a fairly new character, but I thought the elder Bradley came out of the 60s when Stan and Gang were conceiving the fill-in Caps between WWII and the discovery of Steve in Avengers. I thought Bradley was a Tuskegee Airman approach to the Super Soldier project rather than simply a "Black Captain America."
Clearly I'll take your word on the issue. It's getting harder to discern actual characters from the Silver Age from characters that they retro'd into the Silver Age. Like the Sentry (that one I knew). I feel rather duped, really. ************************************************************ *************** It was Roy Thomas who first had the idea that there was a second Captain America after Steve Roger's vanished, though it was Steve Englehart who ran with the idea and gave us the crazy Cap of the fifties. Thomas then muddied the waters further by giving us two more Caps between Steve and Crazy Cap. All three the result of Thomas' need for every published story to "count". This was in the 1970s. Thomas did introduce a few non white superheroes in the books he wrote that were set in the 1940s. ( which is the Golden Age not the Silver Age. ) the Asian-American Golden Girl and the African-American Human Top in the Invaders and Amazing Man in the All-Star Squadron. I have to wonder if the government would want to test a formula designed to create Super-Soldier would test it on black men. You'd think the last thing a racist would want is a superpowered black man.
|
| Back to Top |
profile
| search
e-mail
|
| |
Topic Closed)
