Unqualified Offerings

Remember how burned you felt by the Planetary/JLA story a few months ago? Six bucks and an hour of your life down the drain. How the only good thing about it was that picture of Clark Kent in a trench coat hovering over Bruce Wayne’s balcony. How it wasn’t really Planetary in the story at all, but just some people who looked like them? Remember how you couldn’t figure out what the hell was happening at the end of the story - like, for instance, how Diana Prince ever beat Jakita Wagner? How - horrors! - it wasn’t John Cassiday drawing it? I feel your pain because it was my own. However.

Do not not not not NOT let that experience stop you from picking up the new Planetary/Batman crossover, “Night on Earth,” which rocks every conceivable way there is to rock. None of the baleful qualities of Planetary/JLA attach to this story. John Cassiday draws it. It’s a real Planetary story. Heck, if DC hadn’t bought Wildstorm they’d probably have done it anyway with the usual serial-number effacing on the Batman homage. It’s a real Batman story - in fact, it’s a lot them . . . Most of all, it’s a real good story. Heck, Mrs. Offering ripped right through it, with pleasure, despite never having read Planetary before nor having thought much about Batman since that awful third movie.

UPDATE: Also, Marvel has released teaser art and actual information about Neil Gaiman’s upcoming miniseries, 1602, at a joint Gaiman/Marvel press conference. (Thanks to Jesse Walker for the head’s up.)

Also, Dirk Deppey has part two of his response to my response, including his response to my response to his response of yesterday. He talks a lot about the Francine Pascal model, distinguishing “original creator farms out work-for-hire to contractors/employees” from “corporation farms out work-for-hire to contractors/employees,” his theory being that

I would assume that she has provided a “writer’s bible” explaining the core concepts of the series and oversees the writing process, offering quality control to ensure that the end result stays harmoniously in line with what has come before. In short, as the ultimate owner of the work in question, I would hazard to guess that she has an obvious stake in maintaining the intergity of the line, and exercises it out of a desire to maintain the momentum generated by prior works. While there may be other fingers hired to write some (or many) of her stories for her, in the end, the buck surely stops with Francine Pascal.

I, uh, never expected to encounter the words “Sweet Valley High” and “integrity” in such close proximity, so this colloquy has already proved its merit.

The fact remains, however, that even in the case of Francine Pascal, there is an original mind behind the project, one motivated by the self-interest of a creator who wishes to see her creation continue to bear fruit, and who understands that what her readers want is a continuation and fruition of the core concept. I would argue that this is not only a powerful motivation, but also a better mechanism for success than the pure work-for-hire system as demonstrated by Marvel. A company like Marvel, with its rotating editors and many-thumbs-in-the-pudding creative model, is simply less adept at maintaining such a creative engine than a single driving mind.

And he may be right. It seems pretty easy to me to imagine all the things that could go wrong with the “Francine model” - including creator loses all but fiduciary interest in her work; creator feels the call of other projects and leaves her baby in the care of “rotating editors and many-thumbs-in-the-pudding creative model.” This may have happened with Sweet Valley High, if you believe this former ghost writer’s account in the Baltimore City Paper:

Without getting into the loftier question of how much freedom any writer has–unless I’m being annoying–I always answer that everything save the actual writing of the book is done by committee. The plot is decided by meeting; the title gets brainstormed at meetings (I liked Surface Tension, which justly lost to Say It to My Face); and new and old characters spring to life over jelly beans around the office. What the writer gets is a skeletal plot line–anything from a Zen-koan-like list of actions to a Jamesian exegeses detailing each chapter–which he or she (mostly she, as far as I know) then returns, suitably fleshed out, pruned, or padded, to the packager for approval.

The author of the article, Lizzie Skurnick, describes a ” creator, Francine Pascal (please don’t sue me), who lives it up in Paris off the skin of all of our typing fingers.” (Speaking of pitfalls in the “creator-owned/production-farmed” model, at one point in his item, Dirk refers to Howard Chaykin’s creation, American Flagg. But we all remember how the quality of Flagg fell off when Chaykin turned his series over to Steven Grant and Joe Staton.)

Also, concentrating completely on the actual existence of Francine Pascal, however peripheral she may now be to SVH and its spinoffs, leaves Dirk Deppey little room to discuss purer instances of the “house name/packager” phenomenon. For instance, this discussion thread has a reprint of a Writer’s Digest article on packaging that notes that, while Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys were long the property of the Stratemeyer Syndicate and under the direction of Edward Stratemeyer, who came up with the series ideas, for at least some of that time, “Packager Mega-Books was responsible for the new Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books from 1986-1997.” All those Franklin W. Dixons and Carolyn Keenes had plenty of rotating editors and clueless corporate masters to report to also. Bill Sherman also noted the prevalence of work-for-hire in men’s series adventure books. We can add textbooks and many popular lifestyle and reference works to the list. (Sunset, Time-Life, Ortho etc.)

And there’s Roswell High. Author Melinda Metz notes

That probably sounds confusing, and the way I ended up writing the Roswell High books is a little unusual. First of all, the initial concept for the series came from the publisher–Pocket Books. They asked a book packager–17th Street Productions–to develop the idea further. Probably now you’re wondering what a book packager is. It’s a company that supplies edited manuscripts and sometimes covers to a book publisher. Packagers are mainly used for book series. 17th Street Productions, for example, also handles the Sweet Valley High series, the Thoroughbreds series, the Countdown series, and the Fearless series, among others.

So anyway, once the people at 17th Street Productions came up with the character descriptions and basic plot arcs for the series, they started looking for a writer. All of us hoping to be considered wrote a sample. I was actually the second choice. The first choice writer dropped out to pursue another project.

That’s the pure form of the corporate ownership model. I suspect that the creator-run apprentice shop may actually be a surer road to quality, but it’s not the only publishing model out there and it has its own pitfalls. I believe my original claim, “publishing is rife with work-for-hire,” still stands.

Finally, apologies to Dirk for misinterpreting his point about the growth of the manga business.