Jun 22, 2008 9:27 PM
TJKC: I hear all the time from people who say that all the super-hero stories have been told, that they're done; that these stories and ideas can only be fresh once.
ALAN: Yeah, so then you have to go to the trouble of actually going and making something else fresh. It is a bit of work and I can understand how a lot of creators these days don't really seem to be prepared to do it. They'd rather wait for somebody else to do the innovation and then jump aboard because that is much easier.
It's much safer in terms of your career. If you wait for somebody else to prove that it works and then jump aboard, you'll probably get more out of it in terms of profits—and so will your characters—than the actual person that did the innovation ever did. You could carry on doing stories about super-heroes forever. There's still new cowboy stories to be written. If anybody disbelieves it, they should pick up the works of Cormac McCarthy and try picking up Blood Meridian and see if that's not a new way to tell a cowboy story. I do get a little tired of hearing people saying that everything is done that can be done.
"All the great innovations were in the past." What kind of culture would we have if everyone always thought like that? Certainly people have been thinking like that for a long time. I'm sure that ever since any form of art or music began there's always been a huge crowd of people thinking, "Well, that's it, really," thinking, "How could we ever top this?"
And then somebody comes along who doesn't believe that and doesn't buy into that—doing something which is completely revolutionary and changes everything around, and then everyone is euphoric for however long it takes for the buzz to wear off, and then they say, "Well, now all the great ideas have been had.
There's no possibility of anything in the future"; which I think is a weak and defeatist attitude. I think that any creator worth their thoughts should not be believing that there is a point further down the highway, but trying to reach it.
Creativity or the advance of any medium is like one of those old Warner Brothers cartoons, where you'll have a railroad train running across the desert with Daffy Duck having to chop up the railroad train itself in order to lay tracks in front of the train. I don't know if you are familiar with the particular cartoon image I've got in m'head: Sort of laying tracks in front of you where there are no tracks, which is a giant leap of faith.
You have to first believe that there is something in front of you, then you have to do your best to actually reach that point rather than say, "We've reached the very edge of creativity because I can't think of anything to do. Therefore, I will decide that the entire humanity has reached the edge of creativity just because I've given up," which is a very cowardly and defeatist attitude. If only more artists could grab the medium by the horns in the way that Jack Kirby did and sort of decide that they are going to make up their minds whether we've reached the end of ideas and whether there might be a few more in there. My basic position is that ideas are infinite, limitless, but it just depends whether we're prepared to do the work to actually bring them in. Whenever you get creators talking about some inherit fall or failure in the medium or in any particular genre, they are mainly talking about their own flaws and failings in their own creativity. You can't blame the medium:
"I guess there weren't that many super-hero ideas. I guess that we've used them all up." It reminds me of the ancient Greeks when they were coming up with all these myths in the first place. The world of ideas is inexhaustible and infinite. You just have to find them, which an awful lot of people are not prepared to do. They'd rather let someone like Jack Kirby do all the hard work and mining and the back-breaking; mining an industry for thirty or forty years and then the nuggets that he happens to throw to the surface always find them and they put a new spin on them.
They don't want to do the hard work themselves. This is not a blanket condemnation of the whole industry. I think it's fair to say there are a number of people in the industry who are much happier sort of working with stuff that's already been placed, rather than to try and build up their creative muscles and do some of that work themselves. But that's just my own particular feeling I'm sure."I hate the movie industry [because] if I make a bad comic, it does not cost a hundred million dollars, which is the budget of an emergent small third world African nation. And this is money that could have gone to alleviating some of the immense suffering in this world but has instead gone to giving bored, apathetic, lazy, indifferent Western teenage boys another way of killing 90 minutes of their interminable and seemingly pointless lives." -Alan Moore (Nevins, 277)
Jeff: if you need someone to blame, throw a rock in the air and you´ll hit someone guilty dice:yo tengo los huevos para hacer en donde sea
Jeff: if you need someone to blame, throw a rock in the air and you´ll hit someone guilty dice:d los cojones!
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