Go, Read: Agitation On Behalf Of Wally Wood Receiving A Top Of Show Credit On Daredevil TV Show

I'm not sure what to do with an openly naked PR attempt to manufacture a mini-controversy like an open letter generated by J. David Spurlock of the Wally Wood Estate asking for a credit on the recent Daredevil TV show, covered here and some other places. I love Wally Wood, down to every last scrap of work he did. I love the idea of Wally Wood: drunk ghost-daddy of beautiful, broken mainstream comic books and their beautiful, broken creators. I think there should be Wally Wood ice cream. The work he did on reviving Daredevil from its initial conceptual work by Stan Lee and Bill Everett was indeed crucial to that character's survival and eventual transmutation into the forms seen on the show.

On the other hand, I'm super-dubious of efforts calling attention to an apparent controversy that seem instead to be there to generate one. The use of Mark Waid's general quote about Wally Wood as a specific endorsement of the call to credit is awful, flat-out. The idea of a pre-show credit is a very specific request for which very broad, general reasoning has been given, reasoning that may make you look like a corporation-loving chumpstick if you opt out. It's hard for me to figure out what's optimally just. I see Wood's contribution as pretty unique in the history of comics and in the history of Daredevil, but I bet others don't. I can imagine a lot of rational adults feeling Gene Colan and Roy Thomas are just as deserving as developers, and then it starts to look like you're about to head down a hole.

My hunch is that there's no perfect solution here, but that a rational conversation can be had about creator vs. developer credit, credit in front of a property or on the back-end, and then the entire sticky business of who might get paid.
 
posted 11:55 pm PST | Permalink
 

---

 
Daily Blog Archives
November 2019
October 2019
September 2019
August 2019
July 2019
 
Full Archives