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shadowkatPosting during lunch break again, should take a walk - it's lovely outside. But damn, no time.
This conversation with Bill Willingham of all people underlines why I hated the Twangel story, and why I stopped reading Marvel, DC and those comics after a while. There's seriously nothing more cliche than the good character getting possessed by some external force and turning evil, then completely all okay after the external force goes by-by, because you know the character isn't supposed to be evil - the external force was. It's been done to death.
Nrama: We talked last time about the super team that's showing up in Fables, yet you just left a super team last year when you surprisingly stopped writing Justice Society of America. I was under the impression you were planning a long run on that title. Why did you leave?
Willingham: I loved doing it. But as people might begin to guess, it takes me a while to get a series into shape, so all the pieces are in place for me to do what I really wanted to do. And what I need to learn is that with things like Fables, I can do a lot of long-range planning and know that I will have to the time to do it because there’s not going to be seven other writers writing seven other Fables books that are going to come up with other storylines that conflict with what my plans are. And there’s not going to be this DC hierarchy that comes along and says, no, no, no, no, we’re doing this with this group, so you can’t do what you were planning to do.
So I need to learn that when I do things in the DCU that one should not plan too far in advance because you’re going to get your heart broken because plans change on the fly, a lot.
But I told you all that to tell you this: With JSA, by the end of the first 12 issues, which turns out to be the number of ones I had done, I finally got all the characters into the right position to really start doing what my long-range plans were. But one of those plans was that this was not going to be a grim and gritty group of anti-heroes. I’m tired of the "fill-in-the-blank turns evil and everyone’s got to fight the evil version of this character." It even fit within some of the issues I did., that "we’re not that type of person anymore."
And then comes along this crossover in which the whole plot revolves around just about every member of the JSA turning evil for a couple of issues.
I couldn’t bring myself to do that because, you know, one time something takes control of you and you accidentally turn evil but it’s not your fault? That can be understood. Maybe the second time something takes possession of you and you turn evil, maybe that can be forgiven as well. But by about the third or fourth time that something takes over this person and he becomes evil, you have to ask yourself, like, well, maybe there’s just something wrong with this fellow from the beginning. Maybe he is just evil. Maybe that’s what evil is, is people that are just accessible to being taken over by whatever cosmic hobo happens to be passing through today.
And I’m just tired to death of those storylines, and I never wanted to do another one of them. Dark Phoenix, dark this, Dark Green Lantern who destroys an entire town on a tantrum one day, and now he’s a good guy again, and Dark Obsidian, which I guess is a redundancy. It's just too many dark, dark versions and evil versions of these characters.
Go here for the rest of the interview, which is just about things he's working on :http://www.newsarama.com/comics/bill-willingham-justice-society-exit-110216.html
Thanks to ub40soft for the link.
As much as I don't like Willingham, he has articulated quite well my issues with superhero comics and that specific trope.
This conversation with Bill Willingham of all people underlines why I hated the Twangel story, and why I stopped reading Marvel, DC and those comics after a while. There's seriously nothing more cliche than the good character getting possessed by some external force and turning evil, then completely all okay after the external force goes by-by, because you know the character isn't supposed to be evil - the external force was. It's been done to death.
Nrama: We talked last time about the super team that's showing up in Fables, yet you just left a super team last year when you surprisingly stopped writing Justice Society of America. I was under the impression you were planning a long run on that title. Why did you leave?
Willingham: I loved doing it. But as people might begin to guess, it takes me a while to get a series into shape, so all the pieces are in place for me to do what I really wanted to do. And what I need to learn is that with things like Fables, I can do a lot of long-range planning and know that I will have to the time to do it because there’s not going to be seven other writers writing seven other Fables books that are going to come up with other storylines that conflict with what my plans are. And there’s not going to be this DC hierarchy that comes along and says, no, no, no, no, we’re doing this with this group, so you can’t do what you were planning to do.
So I need to learn that when I do things in the DCU that one should not plan too far in advance because you’re going to get your heart broken because plans change on the fly, a lot.
But I told you all that to tell you this: With JSA, by the end of the first 12 issues, which turns out to be the number of ones I had done, I finally got all the characters into the right position to really start doing what my long-range plans were. But one of those plans was that this was not going to be a grim and gritty group of anti-heroes. I’m tired of the "fill-in-the-blank turns evil and everyone’s got to fight the evil version of this character." It even fit within some of the issues I did., that "we’re not that type of person anymore."
And then comes along this crossover in which the whole plot revolves around just about every member of the JSA turning evil for a couple of issues.
I couldn’t bring myself to do that because, you know, one time something takes control of you and you accidentally turn evil but it’s not your fault? That can be understood. Maybe the second time something takes possession of you and you turn evil, maybe that can be forgiven as well. But by about the third or fourth time that something takes over this person and he becomes evil, you have to ask yourself, like, well, maybe there’s just something wrong with this fellow from the beginning. Maybe he is just evil. Maybe that’s what evil is, is people that are just accessible to being taken over by whatever cosmic hobo happens to be passing through today.
And I’m just tired to death of those storylines, and I never wanted to do another one of them. Dark Phoenix, dark this, Dark Green Lantern who destroys an entire town on a tantrum one day, and now he’s a good guy again, and Dark Obsidian, which I guess is a redundancy. It's just too many dark, dark versions and evil versions of these characters.
Go here for the rest of the interview, which is just about things he's working on :http://www.newsarama.com/comics/bill-willingham-justice-society-exit-110216.html
Thanks to ub40soft for the link.
As much as I don't like Willingham, he has articulated quite well my issues with superhero comics and that specific trope.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 09:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 11:19 pm (UTC)