Some Big Questions, Sparked by Pop Culture

By Neal 

Here are two recent blog posts on creativity that touch upon issues that may be of interest to publishing folks:

⇒There’s a new nonprofit group called the Organization for Transformative Works, which aims to advocate for “a future in which all fannish works are recognized as legal and transformative and are accepted as a legitimate creative activity.” John Scalzi is not entirely convinced, and offers a detailed explanation for why he believes OTW will face an uphill battle in trying to legalize fanfiction. It’s worth reading in full, including the 150+ comments that have been generated, but here’s the nub: “You can’t put characters in new and funny hats, or hand some character other than the main one the microphone, and then say ‘Yay! Now you’re transformative!’ Corporate lawyers will eat you for lunch and burp out your bones.”

⇒Graphic novelist Paul Pope wonders if comic books will ever produce a really great writer, someone along the lines of Robert Penn Warren or John Steinbeck, “authors who can unfold a filagreed theme across an extended storyline and touch on that ineffable shade we call ‘the human condition.'” He elaborates:

“When it comes to comics, the equivalent of a fine literary writer would have to be someone (or someones) with the implicit vision of a poet, who sees and feels life and knows how to code it into visual storytelling through comics’ special melange of prose/dialogue and persuasive drawing.”

As the commenters point out, though, several people are already working in the medium who could fill that role—maybe not in the monthly grind of superhero comics, perhaps, but in the realm of graphic novels, Alison Bechdel, Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, Eddie Campbell, Dave Sim, or Charles Burns immediately spring to mind, and Pope himself mentions Japanese manga pioneer Osamu Tezuka. And as “traditional” book publishers continue to cherrypick the comics medium for writer/artists with crossover appeal, I think even more candidates will emerge.