This review first ran at The Comics Journal.
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Steve Ditko
Strange Suspense: The Steve Ditko Archives volume 1
Fantagraphics
This is a collection of comics great Steve Ditko’s first published stories, mostly pulp horror from the early 1950s. I found it literally unreadable.
Usually when I write a review, I try to put in an honest effort to actually read every word. I gave it a go here and…well, this is what I found myself trudging through in the second story in the volume, “Paper Romance.”
It was too late for me to back down now! So I wrote the letter as soon as I got home. A letter that had been in my mind for years…telling everything about myself and hinting at what I was looking for in a man…the rest was to come if and when somebody answered my letter! The next few days dragged by with leaden feet and after a while I forgot completely about my letter…well not completely! But then…
Did you read that whole thing? If you did and you enjoyed it, you’re a hardier soul than I. “I got my letter and then I thought about my letter and then I thought about my letter some more and then I used a metaphor: ‘leaden feet’!” That’s just dreadful. And, yes, that’s the one romance story in the book, but the horror and adventure comics are not appreciably better; there’s still the numbing repetition, the tin ear, and the infuriating refusal to finesse said tin ear by leaving the damn pictures alone to tell their own story.
Whether this is Ditko’s fault entirely is unclear. Fantagraphics doesn’t give writer’s credits for the volume, which may mean that Ditko wrote the stories himself or, alternately, that the scripters are anonymous. Even if I don’t know who to blame, though, I sure as hell am blaming somebody for the fact that when the goblins surround Avery, we have text telling us “They decided it was time to surround Avery” so that Ditko has to squeeze the actual picture of the goblins surrounding Avery into an even smaller space. And even when the text boxes fall silent, we have the endless nattering of the dialogue balloons. If the haunted sailor says he hears a wild laugh once, he’s got to say it five times. It’s like having your tale of suspense shouted at you by your elderly deaf uncle . Who is stupid.
Even putting aside the writing, in terms of visual flow and storytelling, Ditko, at least at this point in his career, varies between mediocre and downright bad. He’s got some entertainingly loopy ideas, but he’s constantly burying his punchlines — in his riff on Cinderella, for example, the final panel is supposed to show you the good prince changing into a vampire and the three sisters with their legs ripped off so they fit the slippers. But it’s done so small I had to stare at it for a good 15 seconds before I could make head or tail of it, and then all I could think was — why do you need to pull a leg off to fit into a shoe? Wouldn’t you want to cut the foot instead?
But the solution to all of these problems is easy. Just sell your soul to the devil for the power to create an invulnerable super-worm with poison lipstick who will tear out your uncle’s eyes and replace them with wax. Or something like that. I’m not really sure of the exact plot ins and outs, because I just skimmed the whole damn thing, thank you very much, which was a much, much more pleasurable experience than reading those first couple of stories. Because, whatever Ditko’s limitations, even at this early stage in his career, he’s a fascinating artist with a bizarre and entirely idiosyncratic visual imagination. Eerily writhing smoke, expressive hands twisted into unlikely or even impossible positions, angled shots from up in the skylight — none of this will surprise anyone familiar with Ditko’s work, but it’s all as tasty as ever. In this volume I noticed especially his faces. Everyone in Ditko has these strong lined physiognomies that hover on the verge of caricature. The result in these horror titles is that humans and monsters aren’t so much opposed as they are on a continuum of potential deformity. Even Ditko’s hot dames have features which are too heavy, too malleable — they look like female impersonators, or like they’re wearing masks.
My favorite image in the book wasn’t typical Ditko at all, though. Instead it was this.
Usually Ditko’s drawings are crowded, even cluttered. This panel, though, uses negative space like a Japanese print. It’s an intriguing reminder that, along with the inevitable stumbles, apprentice work can also result in the occasional uncharacteristic, and surprisingly graceful, experiment.
You certainly can’t assume that Ditko wrote the stories himself.
Although he did write the Spiderman that elsewhere on this site is being claimed as the greatest accomplishment of western civilization. But no, most of these old comics are written by hacks so degraded that they didn’t want their names attached to the product. It wasn’t really until Stan Lee came along that degraded hacks began attaching their names to work they didn’t even write.
Yeah; when I posted this on tcj the consensus in comments was that it was probably anonymous hackwork.
I did a post about Ditko’s earlier work a while back, taking images from the Craig Yoe-edited book The Art of Ditko: http://warren-peace.blogspot.com/2010/07/six-ditkovian-motifs-other-than-obvious.html
I think I came to a similar conclusion, that the writing was pretty terrible (I’ve heard that the stuff in the Yoe book was post-Comics Code, and the earlier stuff was better, but you seem to disprove that), but the art is full of marvels. He was pretty awesome, that Ditko guy.
I’ve read loads of these comics, I’d say most of the old american comics I like most have this terrible writing; the horrors I’ve endured!
These are some of my favorite comics, I actually think in many ways they are better than the EC horrors because the weirdness seems to permeate everything, like the strange protagonists and the nightmarish fairy tale worlds; the stories were more varied and different to what text horror fiction was offering (EC horror was often just weaker versions of pulp horror tales). I think some of these more wacky 50s horror comics have brilliant scenarios and situations you dont really find much in books and, games films. I’ve heard there is a 50s horror comic in which dinosaurs kill humans so they can use the heads for bowling.
I thought I had read everything about 50s horror comics but The Horror! The Horror! had some new insights for me, the one I liked best was that while a lot of horror shows the indifference of the universe towards humans, in 50s horror comics the universe shows an active hostility towards humans and loves to torture them.
James wrote: “Although he did write the Spiderman that elsewhere on this site is being claimed as the greatest accomplishment of western civilization.”
Seriously? And here I thought the toilet was the greatest accomplishment of Western civilization!
Noah: “Usually when I write a review, I try to put in an honest effort to actually read every word.”
Newsflash!
by vol. 3 of this series, the art is fabulous, enough to justify “reading” the dreadful stories. it’s odd that you’d characterize Ditko’s art as cluttered; IIRC that’s the case in this first volume, but it’s not at all true of Ditko in general.
But, yeah, Ditko didn’t write these stories, although the credits in the book obscure that fact. Who wrote the stories? No one, if we go by the credits. I guess you don’t need a writer when A = A…
seriously, though, it’s outrageous that you can publish a book like this without giving any credit to the writers — even if just to note that the authors, uncredited as they were in the original comics, are today unknown. None of the three Ditko books make any attempt to identify the authors, nor did an Al Williamson anthology I read from Dark Horse, and I think some other anthologies I’ve read recently.
That’s some Chip-Kidd-Bat-Manga level of douchebaggery. How is it morally acceptable to publish an artist-centred anthology without trying to credit everyone involved? Imagine Marvel published a Stan Lee anthology that didn’t, even in passing, credit the artists…the minimally acceptable standard should be what Fanta/Disney are doing in the Gottfredson Mickey collections, which is to credit everyone, including the lowly assistants. (So Fanta knows better in the Ditko book, too, but everyone already knew that).
this is totally a hobby horse for me. It drives me nuts that all kinds of comics scenes have accepted that you don’t credit the people who do the work. Who assisted Tezuka on Phoenix? Who assisted Gould on Dick Tracy? Who assists Urasawa? No one knows! (By contrast, imagine that it came out that Tolstoy or Brecht hadn’t actually written most of the work attributed to them, but had outsourced it to lowly, nameless assistants — it would be a massive scandal)
Now Jones, please keep imagining: someone saying something like: that Tolstoy story sure has beautiful fonts, but it’s completely unreadable. Wouldn’t that be a scandal also?
He he, I imagine a graphic designer coming here to scold me for despising the fonts… oh well!…
Your analogy seems to be —
Tolstoy novel x : the font in which it is printed
::
these Ditko comics : the art in which they are drawn
Now, it seems to me that fonts are clearly irrelevant to our appreciation of a novel (under normal circumstances! things might be different for an illuminated manuscript, say). If the novel were printed in a different font, it would still be the same novel, just as it’s the same novel if it’s stored in digital form, or recited as a “book on tape”, or inscribed on the eye of a needle. The differences are differences in the means of representation, not the representation itself.
But that doesn’t at all seem to be the case in comics. If the comics in these volumes had been drawn by someone else, they would be different comics (on the plausible assumption that the counterfactual someone else didn’t happen to draw them in exactly the same way as the actual Ditko). The visual content — the “drawing” or “art” — is not an interchangeable font through which to represent the comic; the “drawing” is the comic.
Or, to speak less loosely, the visual content is an integral part of the comic, in a way that the font is not (normally!) an integral part of a novel. Similarly, cinematography and editing are integral parts of movies, or individual performances part of a play. It seems no crazier to say “like the art, but don’t like the story” than to say “like the cinematography, but don’t care much for the script”. I personally enjoy the art direction in a number of Tim Burton’s films, for instance, but the rest should go without saying; without having seen it, I predict I would enjoy the cinematography but not the script in the van Sant/Savides film Restless. The performances from Heath Ledger and Gary Oldman are better than the script, blocking and editing (to say the least) in The Dark Knight. And so on.
…but all of this is so obvious, indeed banal, that you’d have to be completely dunder-headed to deny it. So I must have got the wrong end of the stick, somehow, about what you mean to say here.
Well, I read Nelson Goodman too, you know?
That wasn’t the analogy at all because that wasn’t what you and Noah were saying. Let’s see:
Noah: “This is a collection of comics great Steve Ditko’s first published stories, mostly pulp horror from the early 1950s. I found it literally unreadable.” (How come he’s that great then?)
Jones: “by vol. 3 of this series, the art is fabulous, enough to justify “reading” the dreadful stories.”
What I really meant was: imagine that the Tolstoy story *really* was bad. Maybe the pretty font was by someone else (it usually is), but then we have a couple of creators, at least, who did a bad job. All of them… If the story is still shit after the GREAT fonts, the great fonts aren’t worth a damn.
As Jason Lutes told me ages ago (thanks Jason!), comics aren’t a Frankenstein medium. If the story is unreadable the drawings aren’t any good, period. Because, as you hinted, the drawings are the story too. The drawings can’t be there just to beautify anything.
Oops; I just did a “refresh” and saw that while I was writing, Mr. J. had beat me to posting a rejoinder. Not to let the two-finger pecking go to waste:
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Domingos Isabelinho says:
Now Jones, please keep imagining: someone saying something like: that Tolstoy story sure has beautiful fonts, but it’s completely unreadable. Wouldn’t that be a scandal also?
He he, I imagine a graphic designer coming here to scold me for despising the fonts… oh well!…
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If you’re going to make a joke, why not make one that at least bears some internal logic? (Stephen Wright-style surrealism is clearly not the goal here.)
This graphic designer is perfectly aware — as is standard attitude among pros in the field — that for a lengthy written piece the type font to be deployed should be tasteful, but unobtrusive; say, Times Roman or Helvetica. Making an exceedingly minimal aesthetic contribution.
Where the more gimmicky “Decorative” fonts are reserved for titles, headings.
Thus, it would be absurd for a crappy story set in Univers to be “saved” by the artistic contribution of the font. These “body copy” fonts are workhorses, not showhorses!
While — hokey though their work may often be — the uncredited writers of those stories provided the raison d’être for Ditko’s artwork, the narrative and emotional framework.
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James says:
…[Ditko] did write the Spiderman that elsewhere on this site is being claimed as the greatest accomplishment of western civilization.
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Ah, the ol’ familiar rhetorical tactic; say that your opponent made some absurdly outrageous claim which they in fact never did, then ridicule them for making an absurdly outrageous claim!
Let’s look at the most “praiseful” parts of Russ’ critique:
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R. Maheras says:
…exactly what is it that makes Ditko’s “Destiny” so great from both a literary and artistic standpoint?
How does one go about measuring greatness? After all, there are no established standards for greatness in comics, or, for that matter, the two creative disciplines that are merged to create them: art and literature.
Some argue that great art or literature is timeless, and that it appeals to our emotions in a compelling and riveting way. Others argue that it is something that breaks new ground.
Ditko’s three-issue story arc easily accomplishes all three, and a lot more.
…For the last three pages of issue #32 and the first five pages of issue #33, Ditko creates the most masterful bit of sequential art of the Silver Age, and possibly ANY age. It is an artistic tour de force that needs no words to convey the story.
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Russ is not only not claiming the Spider-Man story in question is “the greatest accomplishment of western civilization,” he’s not even claiming it’s “the best comic book ever!”
In comparison to that achieved in comics, he only says that a total of eight pages of the story arc are ” the most masterful bit of sequential art of the Silver Age, and possibly ANY age [of comics].” (Emphasis added)
As for its being “great”….
Come to think of it, that’s more properly posted in the “Spider-Man: Wordless Destiny” thread.
“…To Be Continued!”
Now that I thought about it, a beautiful drawing in a bad story is like perfume on a turd. I prefer my shit au naturel, thanks.
You know, Mike: I’m part of a generation who wanted to think that there are no great and minor art forms, but maybe literature is great art and graphic design isn’t. Ooops, A Humument, you mean? Hummm…
Domingos; but if the drawings are the story too, and the drawings are interesting/worthwhile, then the comics have worth as comics if the drawings do, it seems like.
I don’t even think we disagree all that much, though. I mean, these are not some of my favorite comics or anything. I enjoy the art, but the writing interferes with my truly embracing, or even reading, them.
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Domingos Isabelinho says:
…As Jason Lutes told me ages ago (thanks Jason!), comics aren’t a Frankenstein medium. If the story is unreadable the drawings aren’t any good, period. Because, as you hinted, the drawings are the story too. The drawings can’t be there just to beautify anything.
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That’s hogwash. And, I’d be curious to hear what he actually said (I’d bet it wasn’t so simplistic). People’s attitudes and ideologies have a way of warping what their senses take in, the better to fit their worldview.
A more accurate proposition would be, “If the comics script isn’t any good, then the comics story can’t be particularly good.”
The “drawings” — whether a single original-art page or an isolated panel — taken in isolation, severed from the narrative, can be exceedingly fine in their own right; when appreciated as drawings.
However, when the art is locked together as a “story” to a mediocre script…
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Ay1GI6EZvTk/TcX1ShPH1pI/AAAAAAAACXk/hsaBWKnSpk0/s1600/thing-with-two-heads-pic.jpg
…even an Alex Toth — who could have soared so high, with worthy narrative material — is brought down. Not to the point of utter worthlessness, but to make one think, “what a waste of talent.”
Well, Noah, what do you mean by “interesting/worthwhile”? What’s interesting and worthwhile in telling a bad story, if I may ask?
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Domingos Isabelinho says:
You know, Mike: I’m part of a generation who wanted to think that there are no great and minor art forms, but maybe literature is great art and graphic design isn’t…
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What, am I supposed to get all huffy and outraged? Of course it isn’t, it’s hampered by its very functionality from the more encompassing, complex, even contradictory effects that great art can create.
Might as well put down a V-8 engine for not being a very good sculpture, when aesthetically it should be evaluated for its worth as industrial design.
And certainly there are great and minor art forms. The greatest of them all is writing, because though painting, sculpture, music can achieve great heights, create powerful effects, words nonetheless are capable of infinitely greater emotional, philosophical, and intellectual precision, complexity and subtlety.
I don’t disagree exactly and I must confess that I cheated a bit with A Humument which is basically drawing, painting, a graphic novel; whatever… I can imagine a graphic designer doing a détournement of a bad novel though. That would be worth seeing/reading.
Domingos, if the drawing is the story, and the drawing is good, then the story (or at least some aspects of the narrative) aren’t bad, right? Part of any narrative is atmosphere, for example; part can be evocation of space; part can be humor or strangeness. Ditko’s comics are enjoyable for all of those things, I’d argue (though, again, within limits.)
Never really got into a Humument; too default pomo cleverness for me….
If a discussion repeats itself endlessly it’s time to quit, but if you say those good things about the art you can’t say that the story is unreadable.
The problem underlying all of this is the old show and tell fallacy. The words aren’t there just to tell and the drawings aren’t there just to show. Both do both and more.
Both words and art are important. Any work where either is less well done is intrinsically flawed. I greatly admire what Toth did, but almost all of the scripts he worked with are just terrible and his body of work suffers greatly for it. And Mike, sarcasm aside, um, that Spiderman as “the most masterful piece of sequential art…of ANY age”…? Are comics really to be held to such low standards?
“The words aren’t there just to tell and the drawings aren’t there just to show. Both do both and more.”
I agree, this is why Ditko is so great. You like Mat Brinkman a lot and he is not really about story at all (as far as I know), as I mentioned earlier, you turned me onto Pierre Duba and Conte Demoniaque, which are in langages I cant read.
I never would have got into comics if not for the likes of artists who sadly usually only draw boring stories. A lot of people who buy comics only look at the pictures because they assume that is the only good thing going on.
I was once scarily obsessed with Ditko, it was feverish, I couldnt stop thinking about him and his art, it changed my life! I read a sentence in The Avenging World about righting your own wrongs and I went back to a comic shop to confess I had switched a price tag on a comic so I could afford it, I said I would understand if he told me never to come back but he just said he admired my honesty.
Although I’m not really into his views anymore and I really dont agree with a lot of them, his arguments changed me for the better.
Ha, actually I haven’t read Goodman on art; indeed I didn’t know he had a well-known theory about it until people kept citing it here. I’ve only read parts of his epistemology, which are quite influential in philosophy — he came up with a new problem of induction, even more worrying than Hume’s.
This is completely out of topic, and it’s in Spanish, but I seem to have more faith in graphic design than graphic designers themselves:
El Quarteto de Nos.
Nelson Goodman: Languages of Art.
By the way: more graphic design and Goodman.
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James says:
Both words and art are important. Any work where either is less well done is intrinsically flawed.
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Yes, indeed so. I’d certainly accept how a story with either a fine script or artwork would be “intrinsically flawed” if paired with mediocre art or writing.
I wouldn’t go as far as to say it makes the “quality” partner’s work into utterly worthless garbage by association.
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I greatly admire what Toth did, but almost all of the scripts he worked with are just terrible and his body of work suffers greatly for it.
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It’s the old “you can’t soar like an eagle if you have to work with turkeys” (or however it’s put) bit.
Still, I wonder if the assumption that given great stories, Toth would have produced great art, is fatally flawed.
If Toth ever said anything that showed him — aside from his field of expertise — to be a particularly deep, literate, or sophisticated thinker, I’ve missed it. (Or, aging being what it is, forgotten it.)
Instead, we see him in an essay praising the most simplistic ideas of what constitutes “heroism”: square-jawed, stalwart uncomplicated he-men (like http://www.twomorrows.com/comicbookartist/media/11bravo.gif ); decrying the decadence of anti-heroes ; plugging away, year after year, in pleasant trifles like “Zorro” or in “Car-toons”: http://kb-outofthisworld.blogspot.com/2010/07/hot-rods-and-rare-toth.html ; that famous story of his where a dancing simpleton is brought down by nay-sayers and sourpusses…
…does this sound like someone able to do justice to complex, sophisticated stories and emotions? Why, given a Kafka story, he’d likely toss it across the room, disgusted that the protagonist doesn’t start acting “heroically.”
Just ran across this interview with him: http://www.twomorrows.com/comicbookartist/articles/11toth.html . And it sure corroborates Toth as highly focused on his line of work; though he was a voracious reader, it sure doesn’t seem the experience made him “deeper.”
Here’s another online find; a Toth letter to Steve Rude (http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/12/fake.html ; scroll down for the typeset version) with a ton of excellent technical visual-narrative art advice, and nary a hint of “philosophizing” or encouraging anything from Rude beyond clear, effective techniques to properly lead the reader’s eye, facilitate comprehension.
And gee, doesn’t that ALL CAPS! FILLED WITH EXCLAMATION POINTS!! HANDWRITING STYLE (?!) OF TOTH’S! OVERWHELM, EXHAUST, POKE, JAB, BLAST, DEEP-FRY THE EYE? SAY SOMETHING ABOUT THE STYLE OF THINKING (?) INVOLVED HERE?!
I believe when people admire Toth (I have a few collections of his art myself; beautiful work! He is indeed a talent), there is the tendency to assume that because his design-sense is so sophisticated, his compositions so masterfully wrought, even challenging (as argued here: http://thegreatcomicbookheroes.blogspot.com/2011/09/alex-toth-vs-david-mazzucchelli.html ), that he is a deep thinker.
(As a reverse effect, we have R. Crumb — impressed by Gil Kane’s erudition and thoughtfulness in a panel they and Gary Groth participated in — saying that he found Kane a lot more interesting than his comics work. To which Kane cheerily agreed…)
BTW, to those who’ve griped about howcum some comic or comics story they see as utterly unworthy became part of the “canon,” a possible explanation in an interview with the authors of Toth bio “Genius, Isolated”:
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Mullaney: Tellingly, Krigstein himself cited [Toth’s 1950 “Battle Flag of the Foreign Legion”] as a major influence. It seems to me one reason “Master Race” and other EC stories are in the “canon” is simply because EC had an organized fandom that wrote and published articles and perpetuated the fame of its heroes. Is it one of the best comics stories of all time? Sure. But there was no Squa Tront for Alex Toth. His work was passed around not from fan to fan, but in well-read copies from working artist to working artist, just as Noel Sickles’s Scorchy stats were passed around from one professional to another. Was Sickles part of the accepted fan “canon” back in the early 1950s? No, but he certainly was near the top of the canon among professional cartoonists. Whose “canon” are we talking about anyway—the “canon” of fans and critics or the “canon” of working cartoonists?
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http://www.tcj.com/feature-alex-toth-book-title/
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James says:
And Mike, sarcasm aside, um, that Spiderman as “the most masterful piece of sequential art…of ANY age”…? Are comics really to be held to such low standards?
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Uh, you did understand that with those words, Russ was not referring to the “Spider-Man” comic, and not to all of Ditko’s work on that title, nor even to his “Destiny” story arc that he praised as “great from both a literary and artistic standpoint”…
…but to a mere eight pages of the latter?
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R. Maheras says:
…For the last three pages of issue #32 and the first five pages of issue #33, Ditko creates the most masterful bit of sequential art of the Silver Age, and possibly ANY age.
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Because your wording, for any careless/forgetful reader who comes along (which sure seems to include an awful lot of people) makes it sound like he’s absurdly referring to the comic, whose quality has certainly…varied; leaves out his qualifiers “of the Silver Age,” and “possibly ANY age.” (Emphasis added.)
Haven’t had the time today to write that full “…To Be Continued!” bit.
But here’s what I started to write before deciding it belonged on that thread of commentary after Russ’ article instead:
As for [that eight-page sequence] being “great,” well, I’d consider it a towering achievement in the field of superhero comics; in the in the way that “Raiders of the Lost Ark” was the epitome of of the Republic Pictures film serials approach.
(Re the latter, don’t the titles say it all? “Canadian Mounties vs. Atomic Invaders,” “Zombies of the Stratosphere,” “Radar Men from the Moon,” “The Purple Monster Strikes”… [Probably nowhere near as great fun as they sound, alas…])
(More along that vein to follow…)
Totally unrelated again, sorry:
When I started blogging I read some advice on the www saying something like: the question is not “am I going to be plagiarized?” the question is “when?” So, lo and behold, my post about faked comics, whose link I posted above, was plagiarized by some slob at some University somewhere I don’t care to remember. This is just for the record, of course…
Now that I’m at it though: a list of faked proceedings in the wonderful world of comics publishing: details blown up, title logos changed, lettering changed (sometimes replaced by mechanical fonts), page layouts faked, art traced where missing, art added to fill the negative space in a fake layout, half-tones added by some hacks, texts changed, recoloring. Add your own and think about it: would this be tolerated in any other art form?
Autographic art form, of course…
That “Ya no sé qué hacer conmigo” (“I don’t know what to do with myself”) YouTube clip — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9LlnLTH87U&feature=related — was pretty outstanding; thanks for the link, Domingos! (I had to keep the sound off, the Missus is still asleep, which likely heightened focusing on the lively visuals and their wordplay.
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Domingos Isabelinho says:
…When I started blogging I read some advice on the www saying something like: the question is not “am I going to be plagiarized?” the question is “when?” So, lo and behold, my post about faked comics, whose link I posted above, was plagiarized by some slob at some University somewhere I don’t care to remember. This is just for the record, of course…
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Aggravating; can you report the jerk to the school authorities?
Still, consider the essay in question, with its talk of “the distinction between original and forgery” and “duplication”:
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In Languages of Art…Nelson Goodman states: “Let us speak of a work of art as autographic if and only if the distinction between original and forgery of it is significant; or better, if and only if even the most exact duplication of it does not thereby count as genuine.”
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Much more at http://thecribsheet-isabelinho.blogspot.pt/2008/10/whats-comics-fake.html
And then your blog is called “The Crib Sheet”:
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crib sheet
Definition: a piece of paper on which one has answers or notes for a test, used to cheat on or prepare for a test;
See cheat sheet
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http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/crib+sheet
It’s awfully ironic; one could almost think some arty game were being played (“I made a plagiarized copy of the ‘Cheat Sheet’ article about forgery and fakery, thereby raising the level of duplication to the next level!”). Except that a university student is involved here, so I’d expect mere stupidity, laziness, and massive “entitlement” is involved instead.
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Domingos Isabelinho says:
…a list of faked proceedings in the wonderful world of comics publishing: details blown up, title logos changed, lettering changed (sometimes replaced by mechanical fonts), page layouts faked, art traced where missing, art added to fill the negative space in a fake layout, half-tones added by some hacks, texts changed, recoloring. Add your own and think about it: would this be tolerated in any other art form?
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Well, if your point is that comics are a crappy, lowly, contemptible art form; deserving to get spit upon, because its creations can be treated thus…
…how about movies? Where the screenwriters (many routinely involved) can see their contributions mashed, shredded, altered? Diverse hands involved, with someone sometimes (due to peculiarities in the credit-placement rules of the Writers Guild of America [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WGA_screenwriting_credit_system ]) who’s only contributed a small portion being credited, while those of greater importance are not even mentioned.
Neil Gaiman wrote a hilarious story from the POV of a screenwriter who sees his script (as I dimly recall) changed from a hard-boiled gangster movie into a musical. As it turns out, based on personal experience:
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“In February of 1991 it was cold and rainy in Los Angeles, and Sovereign Pictures flew Terry Pratchett and me from England to LA, to talk about turning our book Good Omens into a film.
“It was a very odd time. In the afternoons and evenings Terry and I would write outlines for the movie. In the mornings we would have meetings with a tableful of producers and studio development people, where they would ask us questions that would indicate that they hadn’t read the latest draft of the treatment, and ask for changes in the next draft of the treatment.
“It was not much fun.
“Eventually, Terry and I went home and we wrote a script…We sent it in…’It’s too much like the book,’ said the Sovereign pictures person on the phone, as if this was the worst crime a script was capable of committing….Terry, extremely sensibly, resigned from the project at this point. I probably should have as well, but I didn’t. I was curious. I wanted to see what would happen next.
“They didn’t want Good Omens…They wanted something else. Something heartwarming. Something small. Something relatively straightforward. And for reasons I no longer remember, the producer desperately wanted an abandoned pier with a miniature town in it. Also, they wanted Satan to appear.”
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More at http://trashotron.com/agony/reviews/2004/gaiman-screenplay.htm
A movie can be massively re-edited by studio fiat, a director fired and new one brought in; new scenes can be shot, characters recast or added, new dialogue dubbed in, cheesy FX put in.
Re which, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Demon tells how in this moody, thoughtful horror film (titled “The Haunted” by the original screenwriter, based on an M.R. James story), “The film’s production was turbulent due to clashing ideas between producer Hal E. Chester on one side and Tourneur and writer Charles Bennett on the other. Although the original plan was not to show a literal demon, producer Chester inserted a monster [ http://www.b-masters.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/nightdemon-bm.jpg ] over the objections of the writer, director and star Dana Andrews. To accelerate the pace, the film was trimmed down to 83 minutes…”
(In all fairness, if a movie gets re-named “Night of the Demon,” you can’t have audiences walking away saying, “Where was the frickin’ demon?“)
And being a “name” director is no protection:
“Originally over eight hours long, Greed was ultimately edited against Stroheim’s wishes to about two-and-a-half hours, and the full-length version is a lost film.” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greed_%28film%29 )
“Welles lost control of the editing of The Magnificent Ambersons to RKO, and the final version released to audiences differed significantly from his rough cut of the film. More than an hour of footage was cut by the studio, which also shot and substituted a happier ending. Although Welles’s extensive notes for how he wished the film to be cut have survived, the excised scenes were lost.” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magnificent_Ambersons_%28film%29 )
David Lynch saw his unjustly underappreciated version of “Dune” re-edited, with a huge amount of rejected scenes and out-takes (in one, Patrick Stewart speaks the line, “…a wild ass of the desert,” and cracks up!) patched in to bloat the film to fill a planned Sci-Fi Channel slot. All Lynch could do is have his name removed from the credits, making it an “Alan Smithee Film.”
Even actors can be startled to in the final film find another thespian’s voice issuing from their lips. (Like happened to David “Darth Vader” Prowse.)
And then there’s the whole bit of “dubbing” into foreign languages…
Mike: first of all: you’re welcome! Listen to the music too; it’s worth it for the word play alone.
Re. film and comics: you’re confusing two different things: a reprint is not a version. Everything is possible at the production stage of a work of art. Even in painting a patron may change things (what I said has nothing to do with romantic ideas about art). The problems in comics start afterwards: in autographic art forms every reproduction must come from the original (it doesn’t matter if the original is any good or disrespected a writer prima donna, or whatever… the original is the original and that’s what was done, good or bad, during the production process). Recoloring, for instance, is producing a fake.