Embracing his gutter press inclinations, Andrew Wheeler engages in some idle speculation on Bill Jemas's possible editorial inclinations. Plus, why we need to see more old stories in our comics.
17 October 2003

CHANGE FOR A BILL

It's not generally my place to indulge in gossip and innuendo. It's Rich Johnston's place. And, indeed, Rich does a laudable job of it in his rumour column over at Comic Book Resources, and I won't hear a word said against the dear fellow, unless it's about his big silly ginger beard.

But still, one of the chief speculations on the rumour mill in the past couple of months has now come to pass with the inelegant reshuffling of former Marvel president Bill Jemas, Joe's man in Beijing, to the role of Senior Sub-Under-Secretary For Staples & Scotch Tape, or something similarly grandiose.

The suggestion on the floor at this year's San Diego Comic Con - and widely circulated since, so it'll hardly be news to most of you - was that Jemas was taking too much of a controlling interest in the creative direction of Marvel. It was rumoured that he was dictating structure, pacing, and even plot outlines via his editors, and as such, he was to blame for Marvel's apparent creative derailment this past summer.

Whether any of that's true, or whether Jemas was just a scapegoat, we obviously can't say with any certainty, but as Paul O'Brien pointed out in his column on Monday, whatever blame one may wish to lay at Jemas's door, he should surely receive some credit as well for Marvel's extraordinary creative and financial turnaround in the past few years.

Now, a few weeks ago I was fraternising with the aforementioned Rich Johnston (one doesn't chat with the likes of Rich Johnston, one always fraternises), and we were discussing Jemas's then merely rumoured impending change in circumstances. The question on the table was whether Jemas's achievements as a businessman justified his alleged editorial dabbling. It was my view then - and remains my view now - that if the rumours were true, Jemas would have to go.

As I mentioned in this column just recently, it seems to me that everyone thinks they can write comics. It's possible that everyone thinks they can edit them too, but being a good editor can surely be at least as demanding a task as being a good writer or artist, and often a great deal more delicate a task at that. There are those who believe that editors have no place in creative processes in any way; I'm of the opposite view, that there's no one so clever or inspired that their work wouldn't benefit from a strong second opinion, and that the world would crumble into dust without editors to hold it all together. (That I am myself an editor is neither here nor there.)

Bill Jemas may be a very creative man, but if he really has been dictating a creative policy of some sort at Marvel during the past year, the resulting work suggests that he was doing a bad job of it, and he may even have helped drive a lot of talented creators to DC.

Those who do the job of editors are required to be creative thinkers, diplomats, critics and listeners. They shouldn't be looking to ascribe formulas, and they most certainly shouldn't be passing their judgements down from the corner office. Editors are the bridge between the drawing board and the boardroom; executives have no place dabbling in inkpots.

That said, if Rich Johnston is to believed, Marvel executives Ike Perlmutter and Avi Arad will now be the ones dictating policy in Jemas's wake, and if that rumour is true, Marvel may well be utterly doomed regardless.

CHANGE OF SCENERY

There is a saying; 'Every story has been told a thousand times'.

It's one of those tiresome, unadventurous little maxims that really bore me to tears. It only exists to serve as a justification to the inspirationally disadvantaged. What it means is, every new story can be boiled down to a core idea that's been seen a thousand times at the heart of a thousand other stories. But the making of a story is in the telling.

'The story boils down to the same thing, but it's a different story each time.' If I say, "Boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, girl gets terrible disease and dies", in essence, I've told a story, but not a very good one. If you had to read it twice, you'd probably start embellishing on it. "Boy meets girl". Well, where? "Boy falls in love with girl." Why would he do a silly thing like that? "Girl gets terrible disease and dies." Have you thought of casting Ryan O'Neal and Ali McGraw?

The words, the setting, the exchanges, these are what make a story. These things are not merely furnishings and embellishments. The story is in who that boy is, and how that girl charmed him. Diseases are common to science fiction, horror, or episodes of ER, so the story could be any one of these things and many other things besides. If the same audience is newly entertained, then the story must be judged to be fresh.

Let's look at ROMEO & JULIET. We have to, it's mandatory. Shakespeare, as we all know, was a terrible old magpie when it came to ideas. ROMEO & JULIET was not an original plot when he came to it, but he added, "But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!" and a great story was born.

Some time later, Leonard Bernstein tore out "But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?" and threw in "Maria, I just met a girl named Maria, and suddenly that name will never be the same to me". Some time after that, Albert Uderzo renamed the main characters Histronix and Melodrama, relocated their romance to Roman-occupied France, added some indomitable Gauls, and dug a trench between the houses for people to fall in to. More recently, theatre director Joe Calarco brought a new adaptation of the play to the New York and London stages. He kept "But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?" but changed the setting to a Roman Catholic boys school.

They're all the same basic story, but one turns a stage tragedy into a tragic musical (Bernstein's WEST SIDE STORY); another turns romantic misadventure into comic yarn (Uderzo's ASTERIX AND THE GREAT DIVIDE); the third takes the same words and the same medium to tell a very different tale (Calarco's R AND J). In each of these cases, the story boils down to the same thing, but for the audience it's a different story each time.

Similarly, Eric Shanower's series AGE OF BRONZE tells the same story as Marion Zimmer Bradley's novel FIREBRAND. Both are partly grounded in Homer's epic THE ILIAD, which will be adapted again in next year's Wolfgang Petersen movie TROY. Simply by dint of their mediums, each of these tellings will bring something different to a story that was several centuries old when Homer came to it around 2,800 years ago. None of these stories are rendered irrelevant by the existence of the others.

Yet when it comes to comic book adaptations of other works, there aren't a great many examples to point to. The ones that will probably leap to most minds are CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED, a title originally created with the noble intention of promoting children's literacy (or so the publishers claimed). For the most part, these adaptations weren't always particularly artful. As the title suggests, they tended merely to illustrate the text rather than reinterpreting it for a different medium.

Comics' most adept adaptor is surely P Craig Russell, who takes opera as his unlikely source. His adaptations of works such as THE MAGIC FLUTE, PARSIFAL and SALOME, now being collected in both paperbacks and exquisite hardbacks by NBM, are among the most beautiful comics you'll ever see. The basic structure of the story is already in place; Russell's job is to find the best way for comics to tell the story.

I fear that few creators give due consideration to that simple task. They seem more interested in getting the story out there than in discovering the ways in which the art might represent the story. When the story isn't theirs, the creators must stand or fall by their storytelling. For that reason, I think the art of adaptation may be the best hope the industry has of finding out exactly what comics can do.

This article is Ideological Freeware. The author grants permission for its reproduction and redistribution by private individuals on condition that the author and source of the article are clearly shown, no charge is made, and the whole article is reproduced intact, including this notice.




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