Fanfic Thread Spinoff: Am I Nuts Here?

[PatrickG]

Okay, I realize thread derailment happens. But I'm gonna start a separate thread 'cause what I have to say is a wee bit off from that.

Gail was talking how a fanfic writer accused her of "ripping off" a fanfic where Black Canary kissed Batman. Now, I don't think it would constitute "ripping off" even if Gail read fanfic, which she doesn't, because that's not a story premise; it's a story element. I recall people saying that there were people who felt ripped off at the premise of Nightstar, Dick Grayson and Starfire's daughter from Kingdom Come; personally, I think everybody saw the potential for that anybody could have independently come up with that; it's so obvious that, while perhaps fun, is not a concept anybody could cite as "original".

I have a history of "calling" certain things in a vacuum. I remember ranting like a crazy person in more than one comic shop as a teenager about how the Watcher's appearances with gloves vs. his appearances with no gloves were giant neon sign that he was being impersonated by Aron the Rogue Watcher during Defalco's FF run and I started saying it as soon as he showed up gloveless. I insisted in Zero Hour #4 (the first issue) that Extant was working for Parallax and blabbed constantly about the idea of Superman getting overcharged and becoming an energy being. I sincerely doubt any comics pro would have heard some kid's ramblings at the comic shop and run with any of this.

However, where things do get a bit hazy for me as to whether I was inspiring stories is when I started getting online, when I talked to creators and when I started actually pitching.

Joe Casey always had a habit of pitching stuff a few weeks after me that I'd likely chalk up to shared tastes. This includes The Intimates (announced a couple months after my super-hero school pitch to DC, not HUGELY original), an issue of Superman he did where Superman fights a comic book Superman brought to life (I pitched a variation on that to his editor a couple of months prior to the solicit, slightly different emotional hook) and even had a werewolves-on-the-moon steampunk thing floating around. This is surely just shared tastes.

At my first con, I remember everyone at the DC booth staring at me when I said that Hal Jordan should come back as the Spectre. They seemed to lose interest when I added that I found that was a bad fit and suggested that what I thought would fit better would be Hal Jordan: Firestorm (his body WAS in the sun) or even just plain Hal Jordan, a powerless man in deep space written as a space western about redemption, casting Jordan as a guilty hearted, two-fisted badass who has to deal with a lawless universe devoid of a Green Lantern Corps and the anarchy he'd created.

I remember having conversations with John Ostrander about how weird it was for the Crimson Avenger to be the DCU's official "first super-hero" and the void that having no 1938 Superman created and he wrote the short story where it established the Crimson Avenger had prophetic visions of Superman dying and was "avenging" Superman all along. Not quite what I would have done but, hey! I like to think our conversations inspired it.

Likewise, I was pitching Club of Heroes stuff to then Batman editor Matt Idelsen and discussed the pitch in front of Grant Morrison and proceeded to discuss it WITH Morrison, even mentioning that I'd lump in Chief Man of Bats and that I thought financier John Mayhew had sinister potential. This was... 2004? 2005?

I flat out suggested that I found aging Johnny Thunder to be depressing and that I thought he should become the new Thunderbolt, suggested that it could be established as a rule about having a genie in the DCU that you take their place when you die. I remember everyone seemed skeptical but it happened in print.

These are the minor cases, I'll be back with the bigger cases later. Anybody encountered this? I found people were more willing to listen to me because I even said I had no intention of suing if they listened. I said then and continue to believe that having one idea or ten ideas or a hundred ideas doesn't make you a writer or an artist or a creator but the true test is the ability to come up with more ideas on command. So, for me, no one idea would constitute something I would pick a fight over... But sometimes I do start to wonder if I've been too loose lipped or maybe even been used as an idea farm. Like I say, more later...

In the meantime, anybody else have this experience?

[PatrickG]

On the coincidence sidebar:

My Hal Jordan series idea (Mystery in Space) revolved around Rann's zeta beam technology reconstructing Hal's dead body into a living one, atom-by-atom. He wakes up alive on a deserted planet Rann with no idea how he's alive or where Adam Strange is and the heart of the series was supposed to be him looking for his friend and questioning how he's alive. The book would have used the classic title "Mystery in Space".

Now, where I find the whole thing very interesting is how I addressed his redemption:

- In my concept, Parallax was a space parasite that had attached itself to Hal Jordan. Hal wasn't aware of this but the resurrection process (reassembling him atom-by-atom) would have purged him of the Parallax entity and so the plan was for him to confront Parallax when he got back to earth, as Parallax was still in earth's sun. Big difference: My Hal would have still felt responsible for Parallax's actions after discovering the truth even when everyone, Batman included, would have told him he isn't to blame.

- The touchstone moment I had in mind for Hal's redemption was interesting from a coincidence standpoint. Having tracked Adam Strange to Apokalips, he discovers there is a Green Lantern still active there, an undercover GL on Apokalips with a special ring that's still charged (hello, Raker). The Apokalips GL dies. Adam Strange gives Hal the ring in the midst of a fight as hundreds of parademons descend on them, Hal puts it on and we're treated to him in his old costume for a full page splash (yeah, I'm aware splashes are traditionally just the opening page). He then looks at the ring, has a flashback to being Parallax, TAKES THE RING OFF, throws it up in the air and SHOOTS IT WITH HIS GUN, destroying it because he doesn't want the power or the temptation. Naturally, Adam is all "You just threw away the one advantage we had!" And Hal is like, "Trust me, that ring, that temptation... It would have held me back. I still have two bigger advantages than any ring in this fight." "And those are?" "My fists." "Maybe you are insane after all, Hal."

I was seventeen or eighteen and I must have spilled that to anyone who would listen but I think the Raker concept would have come up anyway. And I don't think anyone I shared that with was in a position to share that at DC although a few people I related that to (who didn't seem to like it) did work at DC. Still, I smiled when Raker turned up a couple of years later.

[blueheed]

I have my own idea about when things like this happen. I'm not saying what you said isn't true or possible, especially because you were interacting with people that made things happen. This is more of a vague to everyone type of comment.

Some people throw out ideas and theories like they were popcorn, just loads and loads of it. Every once in a while one of those hundred might be coincidental with someone else and a story with that element comes out. Then suddenly their story was used, never mentioning all the 99 that never would happen. It's a selective memory thing. Someone has a lucky number and they remember all the times something happened with that number, but forgetting every time something didn't happen because it wasn't memorable.

It's also important to note that you can come up with a good idea, and someone else coincidentally came up with the same idea, but they're more skilled and are able to get it published when the other wasn't. It's sometimes easy to come up with a cool idea, but to plot and scheme around it to the point that it's entertaining enough that others enjoy it as much as you do... not going to happen quite as often.

Just a few things to think about. And in that second case, if you realize you're not really skilledenough to pull off a story like that, I think it would be great to see someone do it with skill, whether they got the idea from you or not.

[PatrickG]

Oh, hell yeah. Though there were a few cases where I was like, "Dude. You missed the point of the idea I was telling you."

I'm gonna skimp on the meatier stuff because I've rambled on about it for years.

I used to consult a LOT with Jeph Loeb for what I'd guess was the better part of five or six years, from 1999 until his son died. Probably about 10 doublespaced pages worth of back and forth A DAY, in addition to public forum banter. He was a big booster of mine; I got the vibe that he was ramming me down his editors' throats and that they took pitches from me to appease him.

SUPERMAN v. 2 #178? Got my name in the credits of that one. Well, the specific nature of the credit changed from what Jeph had intended. I've never asked but my impression is that he waited until it was in the art phase before he told them my full level of involvement and said, "You have to publish this and you have to credit him."

I remember I was pushing for an anniversary sequel to Crisis to be written by Geoff Johns and use Superboy-Prime as the villain, which was the culmination of my years of nagging DC to bring Kal-L back. I gather from reading that the original plan (oddly enough) didn't involve Kal-L or Prime and Jeph Loeb was the one who pushed for bringing those two in.

We also used to talk about how cool the idea of having an older Superman as counterpoint to Kon-El would be. I had a Brainiac pitch that was considered "too depressing" Post-9/11 with time travel and an older, World War II vet Superman. I suspected that had some influence on Jeph's older Superman who appeared in a couple of SUPERMAN/BATMAN arcs.

Also... I was pitching to the SMALLVILLE comic and the aborted planned backup feature in Chuck Austen's ACTION COMICS. The latter was interesting because every character I pitched around was either killed or part of the core 52 ensemble.

The former, well... I actually had a Buffy pitch that Loeb asked me to hold on because it was too close to something they were doing for BUFFY: ANIMATED. Script by Steven DeKnight, I believe. Idea being, Buffy had to slay her first car, which accounted for her being such a lousy driver and always borrowing her mom's car later in the series. My version had lots of Christine and Herbie gags (and a Transformers nod as well as a Night Rider shoutout) that I couldn't get out of my head and Jeph helped me rework it into a Smallville idea for the comic, with a Kryptonite-fueled smart car and a Fast and the Furious subplot involving a chop shop getting ahold of these cars and selling them. The central visual "gag" was actually having Clark smash a green roadster into a rock, ala ACTION #1, but with the twist being that he's doing it to kill the car. Painfully coy but my idea was to make it fun and maybe excuse the excesses by framing the story with an unreliable narrator.

My understanding was that I had a good shot and that Sam was also going to have a story with Kryptonite-mutated cows as the centerpiece but the series got cancelled. I would have liked to see another Sam Loeb scripted story too, which is a shame.

I mentioned my piece to a close friend who was a huge Smallville fan and he thought it was the worst idea he'd ever heard. I stopped watching the show regularly and, from what I gather, evil Kryptonite-fueled cars did show up in a Fast and the Furious pastiche. He forever regarded that episode as when Smallville jumped the shark and blames me for it to this day. ;-)

[Free-Man]

I think part of it is fanboyism. There were a lot of fabfiction-ish elements in Kingdome Come, and that seems more like Alex Ross' inner fanboy than any real attempt at intellectual plagarism.