bartl
08-31-2005, 06:03 AM
The escalating super-hero merry-go-round that Grant described in this week's column was actually one ofhte problems a lot of readers found with the early Marvel (yes, not everybody loved everything about the early Marvel). DC, especially with heroes like Superman, often took a different route (no, not every Superman story used Kryptonite or magic).
As was either mentioned by name or description in the comic writing series, the key to a good story is dramatic conflict. Essentially, the protagonist needs to have vital goals which, due to the events in the story, look like they cannot all be achieved; more importantly, achieving one means giving another.
Now, there are a couple of ways of resolving dramatic conflict. The first, less realistic but more common in American comics, is to find some means of achieving all the goals in spite of the difficulties. In a series, it is permissable for the protagonist to occasionally fail, but the consequences should be dire, and should assert themselves through the series (for example, when John Byrne presented Superman with an apparently unresolvable conflict between protecting the Earth and not killing, Superman chose to kill, but it had a lasting detrimental effect on Superman, even lasting slightly beyond John Byrne's run before it was forgotten). More commonly, Superman's human attachments were taken advantage of.
By the 1960's, for various reasons, DC's heroes (especially those edited by Julius Schwartz) thought their way through problems. Marvel comics were more action oriented. The typical superhero response was, "Keep hitting and hope that something breaks." (and yes, the various spellings of super-hero are on purpose. So there!). The problem was that Marvel had sufficient other things going for it that attracted a new audience, while the action attracted those who preferred to just look at the pictures, and didn't want to read those boring words. In other words, Marvel achieved a balance that DC was lacking. Not to mention that Stan Lee's adman skills came through, and he REALLY knew how to sell a comic, and to keep people buying.
But, as often happens with marketing, the creators confused the surface physical techniques with the underlying principles (this went as far as some companies concluding that the secret of Marvel's success was bad art and writing. Several people here can verify this!). This tendency was alluded to by Grant in today's column when discussing Archie Goodwin, where they may try some of his methods, but without applying the underlying principles (see my post on Systems Analysis), the methods are applying a solution without considering the problem. (I was thinking of inserting a bad Nero Wolfe pun, but compromised on just this parenthetical remark).
In other words, the merry-go-round CAN be stopped. But it requires writers who know their craft, editors who will encourage the writers to use it, and buyers who will pay for it.
As was either mentioned by name or description in the comic writing series, the key to a good story is dramatic conflict. Essentially, the protagonist needs to have vital goals which, due to the events in the story, look like they cannot all be achieved; more importantly, achieving one means giving another.
Now, there are a couple of ways of resolving dramatic conflict. The first, less realistic but more common in American comics, is to find some means of achieving all the goals in spite of the difficulties. In a series, it is permissable for the protagonist to occasionally fail, but the consequences should be dire, and should assert themselves through the series (for example, when John Byrne presented Superman with an apparently unresolvable conflict between protecting the Earth and not killing, Superman chose to kill, but it had a lasting detrimental effect on Superman, even lasting slightly beyond John Byrne's run before it was forgotten). More commonly, Superman's human attachments were taken advantage of.
By the 1960's, for various reasons, DC's heroes (especially those edited by Julius Schwartz) thought their way through problems. Marvel comics were more action oriented. The typical superhero response was, "Keep hitting and hope that something breaks." (and yes, the various spellings of super-hero are on purpose. So there!). The problem was that Marvel had sufficient other things going for it that attracted a new audience, while the action attracted those who preferred to just look at the pictures, and didn't want to read those boring words. In other words, Marvel achieved a balance that DC was lacking. Not to mention that Stan Lee's adman skills came through, and he REALLY knew how to sell a comic, and to keep people buying.
But, as often happens with marketing, the creators confused the surface physical techniques with the underlying principles (this went as far as some companies concluding that the secret of Marvel's success was bad art and writing. Several people here can verify this!). This tendency was alluded to by Grant in today's column when discussing Archie Goodwin, where they may try some of his methods, but without applying the underlying principles (see my post on Systems Analysis), the methods are applying a solution without considering the problem. (I was thinking of inserting a bad Nero Wolfe pun, but compromised on just this parenthetical remark).
In other words, the merry-go-round CAN be stopped. But it requires writers who know their craft, editors who will encourage the writers to use it, and buyers who will pay for it.