The One Thing You Can Never Rewrite Into Mainstream Comics Continuity Is A Sense Of Proportion
There was a semi-fascinating sprawl of arguments around the comics Internet over the last week or so, generated by the video snippet at right featuring Darwyn Cooke. I believe it was pushed along mostly by this essay and subsequent conversation at 4thletter!, at which point it was whisked off to dozens of places dark and mysterious to be mulled over and clucked at. There was a lot of dork court legal action going on here -- by which I mean taking what someone said/wrote, setting it in stone as if it were a brief filed somewhere of that person's absolute belief, presuming that ever sub-argument and digression informs that belief, and then picking at the whole thing with 10,000 tiny hammers. No one comes across well when that happens.
Honestly, though, I think if you step back and take a look at what Cooke's saying, it's almost 100 percent of a piece with one of his long-standing talking points: that a way to honor the original creators of corporate superhero product -- these unfortunately and maybe against-their-will absentee fathers and mothers -- is to hew as closely as possible to the intent and feel of their creations as initially established. Two points, then. First, my strong suspicion is that Cooke's not coming at that idea as a nostalgic fanboy with an emotional connection to the characters as he first encountered them as much as he sees himself as a fellow creator in an invisible fraternity attached to an industry in a way that makes him deeply sympathetic to past creators and thus sees working with their characters in a do-unto-others fashion. Second, I further suspect that as much as the content of what breaks with the conception of those original characters may be important to you or me, the how they're different, it's not the nature of the break with the original character but its severity and degree of difference that concerns Cooke.
Maybe the most fascinating thing about the mainstream comic book portion of the comics industry as a leviathan of creative enterprise is its relationship to formula and innovation. Fans of that material desire something that's new and specifically relevant to their conception of art and reality, and yet they also want to mine every last bit of pleasure out of something that works, all the way out to the last, faintest echo of how the original element hit with them. Let me suggest that this kind of phenomenon may be deeply compelling only if your face is right up against the glass and staring at this stuff with those folks, fully invested and unlikely to stop being so any time soon. If you take a step back, if you allow yourself several steps back -- away from the glass, over by the stair, maybe even the other end of the hall -- you start to wonder if it isn't just easier, less problematic and in the end much more fulfilling to move on to something all the way new, noting as you make up your mind that there are dozens if not hundreds of opportunities for doing so.
