More or less, yeah. I think there tends to be a general progression you can follow of a work's quality, with company projects becoming better and more lively the more freedom the artist has, and indie books being more genuine passion projects since, well, it's an artist pitching their story instead of trying to sell a Spider-Man story Marvel wants to buy. There are exceptions of course, but I found Bass' claim ridiculous enough that I had to say something.
The reason you thought my claim was ridiculous is because you misconstrued it.
Okay, so, correct me if I'm wrong, Bass, but I read your argument as this...
A story that's about everything will ultimately be about nothing.
I never brought up anything to do with content. I was talking purely about creativity. Restrictions can provide focus for content, but I was never making any point like that.
Therefore, all stories must have limitations.
Firstly, it's not "therefore" because the point can't follow from a point I never made. Secondly, all stories
have limitations. It's not something one can choose not to do. Stories are temporal art form; immediately the time it takes to tell is a limitation upon the artist. Saying all stories must have limitations infers a possibility of one without limitations, and that's nonsensical.
And since limitation is built into a corporate owned character like Spider-Man, writing comics for the big two must be equivalent to writing indie work, or maybe even a little easier, since the blueprint is already there. I think you're making two crucial mistakes here. You're assuming that all limitations are inherently equivalent, and you're mistaking these limitations as the bedrock from which the story is born. As if someone says "I want to tell a five page story" or "I want to tell a Spider-Man story" and the genesis is formed from within the mold of this core limitation.
I absolutely agree that the argument you posited is crucially flawed... which is why I never made it. I never espoused all limitations are inherently equivalent, I mentioned that the artist is free to choose their limitations, and gave multiple different types of limitations to show the potential variety available, not to homogenize them. Nor did I think that the creative process begins with a restriction. It
can do, and some people do indeed consider them first. Much of the avant garde of an art form is developed precisely from the 'bedrock' as it were, of the limitations of the medium itself. But that isn't always the case, and I never implied that it was.
Before I get into it, let me just say your claim that without some sort of challenge, an author is going to be lazy and take the course of least resistance is ridiculous. Anyone who takes their craft seriously doesn't want to crank out just another story. They want to tell the best story possible. Relying on genre conventions and cliches isn't derived from a lack of challenges. It's a symptom of lazy or inexperienced writing.
It's not ridiculous. It's psychology. You will take the path of least resistance, every time. The author you've imagined who takes their craft seriously, if they do not have restrictions imposed from without, they'll impose them upon themselves. What do you think a writer means when he says, "No. My character wouldn't do that."? He's restricting his choices by imposing upon himself the restriction that is 'that character'. And sometimes, over the course of the work, restrictions will be ignored or imposed. Perhaps that character does change. Perhaps the character is dropped entirely. It's naive to think that you can create without restrictions. Painters don't create by putting every colour on their palette and using them all up. They carefully choose to use certain hues, and the others can't be used. Writers immediately section off entire settings and genres when they begin the process of writing proper.
The misapprehension comes from the confusing terminology we use: when someone is creative, we say that their mind is "free" to explore new ideas, they're "open-minded", the psychological term for someone being creative is "the open mode". And so the concept of restrictions would seem to indicate the opposite; close-minded, trapped, blocked. But this terminology is descriptive of the mental state, not of the results of being in that mental state. You're "free" to be "creative". You need to be in the open mode to be creative, but once in that mode, you need something to work off of in order to focus your mind on the very thing you're trying to be creative about.
But let me answer your hypothesis with a pretentious metaphor. Think of the writer as a sculptor. He wants to tell a story about the relationship between power and responsibility. There are no editorial responsibilities. In front of him is this enormous hunk of marble. Contained in it, is his sketch of a narrative. It contains all the potential elements of the story in his head: the personal experiences, his own biases on the subject at hand, the tones he could take, the genres he could explore, the vague sketches of characters that have flitted around his mind over the past few years and might fit the project. And he starts chipping away. He gives it shape and form until it begins to have structure. Subplots are hammered away as he realizes they don't serve the aesthetic he wants. Characters once considered essential are carved off to give the figure definition. And eventually, he has a piece of art. He started with an enormous hunk of marble, but the end result could be anything from a life sized statue to an intricate little piece that fits in the palm of your hand. The process of writing defined the limitations. The limitations were defined by the shape the story took. What he might have considered a short story turned into a novel. What he might have considered a brief and punchy article turned into a sprawling epic. The limitations serve the purpose of telling the story, not the other way around.
The hunk of marble is a creative restriction: only certain forms are achievable from it. He cannot chip at the marble and create plastic. Nor can he create something larger than the block of marble was to begin with. So to, are the tools he uses to chip at it. The artist could choose to use just his hands. After days, weeks, of pounding his fists at the marble, he's exerted a lot of energy, he's exhausted, and all he has to show for it is a hunk of marble. Alternatively, the artist could choose to use any materials he wants. So his marble structure has paper sellotaped to it, sheets of metal balanced on it, and clingfilm wrapped around it. He's free to do what he wants. So he just grabs whatever is around and uses that.
But, if we're going to talk sculpture: in sculpture, you begin with mud. Clay. You begin learning how to sculpt with a material you can add to. This allows people to make mistakes and learn from them. If you accidentally take too much clay off, no problem, just add more on. As you progress as a sculptor, the materials work towards marble and stone. Materials that if you chip off one inch to much, you've ruined it all. You can't put it back. The master sculptors all worked in such materials, because it was the most difficult, and therefore, the most artistic material. With clay, you could do anything you wanted, because it was cheap and replenishable. But the nature of marble was costly and irrevocable, and those were restrictions that forced the sculptor to only produce their best work. Every use of the chisel had to be precise, considered, and the most effective choice. Modern art no longer uses even clay. The modern art sculpture is a mash-up of random, tangentially linked objects, "installed" as they are. Glass is put in a gallery as glass. They're so "creative", they don't even create anymore. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if in the Tate Modern, right now, a Turner-prize winning sculpture is a random block of marble.
One of the better examples I can think of is Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, one of the funniest novels ever written, and I can't imagine a picee of work defined by more severe limitations. It barely even fits the definition of a novel. Ostensibly "Pale Fire" is a thousand line poem by a (fictional) poet named John Shade, but the bulk of it is contained in the index, commentary, and foreword, all written by an (also fictional) editor named Charles Kinbote. The story itself is more about the men's two relationship, revealed through Kinbote's egotism and self-aggrandizing biography, that spills out into the pages of his commentary. The story itself is practically defined by the limitations, but the limitations work because they directly address the story and themes Nabokov is addressing. The unreliable narrator creates a prism of possible explanations for the story he's telling. Did he kill Shade? Was Shade ever real, or is he just a pseudonym for Kinbote? Is Kinbote a pseudonym for Shade? How muc hof his biography is real and, given this is ostensibly a poem, why should we care about what the commentator has to say? There's no way to properly read the story, insuring that the reader will be flipping back and forth between the poem and the tangled mess of commentary like a goon. In short, it's a mocking, metaphysical critique of the critics and historians who live in the shadows of artists, and the very idea of having a critical commentary of artistic expression. But there's the rub. The story itself is about the relationship between artist and fan, and the severe limitations arose because they served the needs of the story, not because Nabokov needed to impose limits. Narrative came from theme, and limitations/form came from narrative.
Now, imagine you want to tell a story about the relationship between power and responsibliity, and you go to Marvel. So they give you this big hunk of marble that's already been sculpted to have the general form of Spider-Man. "Here you go," they say. "But don't change it too much. He still needs to be distinguishable". You can give him a smirk but you can't give him mandibles. You can put a small scar across his chest but nothing on the face. He still has to look pretty. You're at the mercy of decades of continuity, the core integrity of the character as merchandisable by Disney, the prejudices and predilections of the editor, and the trends of every other book starring Spider-Man and event coming down the pipeline. Story's slow to gather an audience? Well, find a way to cameo Iron Man. His new movie's coming out. There are limitations, sure, and some of them might help to tighten up your story, but they aren't self imposed, and many of them are going to be roadblocks that the narrative has to detour around rather than bridges built to guide the story to its intended resolution.
Again, you're responding to points I never made. I didn't say that "restrictions first, then narrative". Nor did I say that restrictions imposed by merchandising are equivalent to a self-imposed restriction to do with content. But in both examples, not only is the creativity not hampered by the restrictions, but it's precisely embracing the restrictions that will lead to creativity. The problem with the Marvel example isn't that their being given restrictions and as such, can't be creative. It's that the restrictions
are bad ones and the writer (rightfully or wrongfully) chooses not to work off them. In fact, you even agree that those restrictions, if they were to be embraced, would tighten the story up.
You are arguing against a point I never made, which is that "all restrictions are equivalent in their value", by making an equally fallacious statement that "self-imposed restrictions are better than those imposed upon you by others". The origin of the restriction is
utterly irrelevant as to the quality of that restriction in breeding creativity, nor the resultant creative decisions the artist gets from working against them. It doesn't matter where the restriction comes from, or who gave it. What matters is that the restriction encourages creativity and that the artist embraces it to be creative.
It seems to me that the most well regarded works of big two comics are the ones that are transgressive, either stories about characters that are not yet well developed or at the fringe of the universe (and thus more open to diverse interpretation and nimble retconning), or interpretations that take place in an alternate universe or where the artist has enough clout to ignore continuity as it suits them. Look at Swamp Thing or Animal Man. A one-note creature feature who had his entire core changed for the sake of a sprawling gothic epic. "Alec Holand isn't Swamp Thing. Swamp Thing is Alec Holland's corpse". A d-list superhero that had appeared in maybe three stories. "Buddy Baker is just a pawn in a game of metafiction". Look at Azz's Wonder Woman, one of the few DC relaunches getting legitimate acclaim, where he outright stated he hadn't read much and never much cared for the character, where he's completely rewritten her supporting cast and upends fundamental aspects of her characterization and background. Look at Garth Ennis' Punisher MAX, where any associations with the Marvel Universe are cut free and Ennis is left to go to town. It's hard to say these are interpretations of the core characters. Frank Castle could have been any number of 70's and 80's style vigilante pastiches, Wonder Woman could work with little change as an urban fantasy strippde out of the universe proper. ST and AM could be exchanged with any number of original or existing characters with little loss to the original properties. These books aren't the definitive stories of these characters because they're about these characters. They're the definitive stories because they're great stories in and of themselves that are hidden in the skins of existing properties, and they become the new definition for these properties.
And
The Ultimates is much the same. Whether you think it's one of the best works of mainstream superhero narrative or not, it's hard to argue that Mark Millar was given a pretty remarkable degree of creative license most writers aren't given. Writing superhero comics rarely gives you the amount of leverage for interpretation he had, and its success is largely due to the degree to which he reinterpreted. Classic characters are chiseled down until their virtues are stripped away and all that's left are their ugliest, rawest traits. If you ask me, they aren't at all the core interpretations of these characters. Thor in particular seems antithetical to the vision of Kirby and later Simonson's character. But it worked not because it captured these characters, but because it essentially gave Millar license to tell a creator-driven superhero comic with the names of Marvel characters plastered to his characters. And
Wanted was just a rejected DC pitch with the names changed to be marketed as an indie book. Either could interchangably work in canon or out, but they both sink and swim on the creative freedoms given to Millar.
On second thought, that's maybe a little
too far, but I still think it's pretty clear the success of
The Ultimates came from a loosening of limitations on corporate-creative properties. And it's also a textbook example of creator-owned versus corporate owned. Would
The Ultimates have been better had it not been licensed? Yes. And it would have been called
The Authority.
No. It would've been worse. You forget; Mark Millar actually continued THE ULTIMATES after he left Marvel as WAR HEROES which was a total failure.
That isn't to say there can't be great pieces of work that are driven by an author's desire for an owned character. All-Star Superman was clearly a project of passion, and one that would have not had nearly the impact with any other character. Sometimes an artist's intent will serendipitously converge with a particular character. Sometimes a story can be fused to a character with little sacrifice being made. But more often than not, the great passion project for someone isn't going to neatly tailor itself as a Spider-Man story.
I would agree. Which is why I never said anything to the contrary.
That said; I can see how you got the wrong idea. I should've given an additional contrary example to the one I gave. By going "Thor good, WANTED bad", you got the impression I meant, "Franchise good, indie bad". I should've also given an "Indie good, franchise bad" example. Warren Ellis' GLOBAL FREQUENCY versus ULTIMATE IRON MAN: ARMOUR WARS would've worked.
I think that's a good way of putting it. With most skills, you learn by following a blueprint. You mimic artists or musicians or writers you know. You crib their style as you learn the craft, and the more you do it, the more you learn. But eventually you reach a point where the templated available aren't versatile enough to tell the story you want.
Most artists don't even acknowledge a blueprint exists, let alone that they should learn from it. They just presume any acknowledgment of a blueprint will stifle your creativity, as if they're inherently masters of the form. Can't stand it.
