DC Comics just announced that they are shit canning Tom King from Batman, a writer praised for his work on Mister Miracle and largely responsible for a lot of the acclaimed work in comics right now. He had a full arc planned for 100 issues, a storyline that wraps up over that period, and everything he’s set up just gets pulled right out from under him.
Why?
I guess sales. I understand it on the company end, but chasing a few thousand sales over and over is what got comics into this mess to begin with.
On the other duopoly’s front, Marvel is actively lying in their solicitations to customers on what a book is about to try to get people to check out a new character. No one buys new characters because Marvel/DC set it up so that I WILL BUY BATMAN/SPIDER-MAN NO MATTER WHO’S WRITING IT I LOVE THE CHARACTER, by their own devices, and flooded stands for decades with just those characters to cater to that mentality, and so new characters never stick. It must be maddeningly frustrating to have a book and not even have someone be able to read a real solicitation about the character and have to dupe them into reading in hopes they’ll stick (they won’t). What a shitty audience that the companies feel compelled to do this. I
With marketing departments lying, getting yanked before stories get finished in things that have been planned for years, having crazy tight editorial oversight, having to cater to crossovers that pull your characters out of their stories and planned development, it sounds like pure torture as a creative to work at these companies.
People ask me all the time “which character would you want to write?”
The answer’s always the same: my own.
I get to write what I want, pace the stories how I want, release how I want, and it keeps the energy fresh for me every time. I don’t have anyone telling me what II can and can’t do, I have no one pulling my storyline from me. Why would I want to change that to write some fan fiction on some character I don’t have any control over, who the next writer when it inevitably turns over, will just undo everything I did for his run?
It sounds like complete torture.
I’ll stick with what I’m doing. And you should too, because my characters actually develop and have meaningful arcs in Flying Sparks. Volume 2 is still available, I just shipped out all of my last book, The Ember War. This will be going to print in the next month or so so get in before the variants are gone forever!
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