Writer's Block: Sheldon and Penny 4ever!
May. 12th, 2010 08:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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Fanfiction: Do you love it or hate it, or are you totally indifferent? Why?
Intellectually, I respect the concept of transformative art.
As a gamer, well, even if you're not playing in a licensed setting, that's all about pillaging pop culture and repurposing it.
As a creative impulse, though ... I just don't get it.
Let me clarify.
I grew up as a comics fan in the late '60s and early '70s, at the dawn of what the fandom calls The Bronze Age. In addition to everything going on at Marvel and DC at the time, it was also a period when a lot of books were coming out about the history of comics.
I didn't just grow up reading about Superman and Batman, Spider-Man and the Hulk -- I grew up reading about Siegel and Schuster, and Bob Kane and Bill Finger, and Stan and Jack and Ditko and Steranko, all these scrappy, struggling guys, exploding with new ideas as they struggled to create a whole new art form.
And I didn't want to write about their creations.
I wanted to create my own characters.
Am I saying that's somehow "better" than fanfic?
Hell, no!
I've got characters by the score. A lot of you know a few of them: I've roleplayed them, online and on the tabletop. Some of you have heard me kick around ideas and concepts for others. There's a passel of them that even I've forgotten about, or recycled into other characters.
What I don't have is stories, and that, arguably, is a lot more important if you actually want to write.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
scarfman has shown that it's not hard to take stories originally written as fanfic for licensed properties and turn it into something new and different by substituting different charaqcters.* If you don't have any stories, though, all you have is a bunch of people standing around, doing nothing, with no way to show how cool and exotic they are.
There's a connection to this line of thinking and the irritation that I feel about DC dragging its old Silver Age characters back into the limelight, but I have a beer in me, so that's going to have to wait.
... possibly until I have more than one beer in me.
*If you don't like that example, remember that Douglas Adams recycled a couple of his mostly-unproduced Doctor Who scripts into one of the Hitchhiker's books and Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.
... and who the heck are Sheldon and Penny?
Fanfiction: Do you love it or hate it, or are you totally indifferent? Why?
Intellectually, I respect the concept of transformative art.
As a gamer, well, even if you're not playing in a licensed setting, that's all about pillaging pop culture and repurposing it.
As a creative impulse, though ... I just don't get it.
Let me clarify.
I grew up as a comics fan in the late '60s and early '70s, at the dawn of what the fandom calls The Bronze Age. In addition to everything going on at Marvel and DC at the time, it was also a period when a lot of books were coming out about the history of comics.
I didn't just grow up reading about Superman and Batman, Spider-Man and the Hulk -- I grew up reading about Siegel and Schuster, and Bob Kane and Bill Finger, and Stan and Jack and Ditko and Steranko, all these scrappy, struggling guys, exploding with new ideas as they struggled to create a whole new art form.
And I didn't want to write about their creations.
I wanted to create my own characters.
Am I saying that's somehow "better" than fanfic?
Hell, no!
I've got characters by the score. A lot of you know a few of them: I've roleplayed them, online and on the tabletop. Some of you have heard me kick around ideas and concepts for others. There's a passel of them that even I've forgotten about, or recycled into other characters.
What I don't have is stories, and that, arguably, is a lot more important if you actually want to write.
scarfman has shown that it's not hard to take stories originally written as fanfic for licensed properties and turn it into something new and different by substituting different charaqcters.* If you don't have any stories, though, all you have is a bunch of people standing around, doing nothing, with no way to show how cool and exotic they are.There's a connection to this line of thinking and the irritation that I feel about DC dragging its old Silver Age characters back into the limelight, but I have a beer in me, so that's going to have to wait.
... possibly until I have more than one beer in me.
*If you don't like that example, remember that Douglas Adams recycled a couple of his mostly-unproduced Doctor Who scripts into one of the Hitchhiker's books and Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.
... and who the heck are Sheldon and Penny?
Re: DING DING DING DING!
Date: 2010-05-13 01:03 pm (UTC)The last couple of years of Justice League, for example, have been a succession of writers undoing the last guy's work so they can showcase their OWN favorite Leaguers -- and the line-ups they choose tend to coincide with specific periods of the JLA comic.
I liked it when Morrison did that ten or twelve years ago, but that's because I'm a Bronze Age fan who bought JLA when I was a kid because (not realizing there were two major superhero comics houses) I thought it was everyone important in the same place. I loved it when Morrison rolled it back to the original seven, but didn't keep up with it past Rock of Ages. Any rollback to a JLA from later than whenever Aquaman disbanded the League, I'm happy to have missed.
Re: DING DING DING DING!
Date: 2010-05-13 03:52 pm (UTC)Sigh. Dwayne MacDuffie writes the best superhero cartoons ever, and handles his own creations with aplomb, but his stint on Justice League of America meandered around aimlessly until he got to do a wholly-gratuitous story arc bringing his Milestone characters into the DCU proper, only not quite.
I'm still not much for storytelling in a traditional prose narrative, but I think I should give some serious thought to web-publishing my