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By Jason Bourgeois
In recent news, it was finally revealed that one of the creators of Lost, David Lindeloff, was writing a Hulk and Wolverine crossover miniseries. The catch being, he's writing the Ultimate Marvel versions of them. Fortunately, I don't read the Ultimate comics, so I was going to ignore it anyway. Before I get into that bit of the rant, I want to address some comments made by Joe Quesada on the matter. When asked before the news was revealed whether or not David was indeed writing Ultimate Hulk/Ultimate Wolverine, he came right out and said that he had no idea what the person was talking about.
No less than a week after that statement, the news came out, and yes, the rumour was true. So that leaves us with one of two possibilities. Joe Quesada outright lied, or he really did have no idea.
If Joe truly did have no idea, then he is one horrible editor in chief, if you ask me. Such a big project, with big characters, and a big name creator, and he doesn't know anything about it mere days before the news hits? That's a sign that someone is keeping some really big stuff from you, and since he's almost the boss of the publishing arm, with a few exceptions, I would be worried about my career if this scenario was true, because when you start being kept out of the loop on big decisions, the bosses usually like to keep you there, on a more permanent basis.
Alternatively, Joe flat out lied, which is the more likely scenario, in my opinion. I get how people don't want to say things before all the lines are signed. That's just good sense. Also, there is usually some deal with some news sources to have them get the scoop on certain items. That's fine, that's great. The standard response in these situations, is to make a good old-fashioned no comment, or something along those lines. I really don't like being outright lied to, or deceived. It's why I've given Mark Millar a wide berth, among many reasons, and it's really soured me on Joe right now. It's needlessly jerking people around, just so he doesn't have to admit to anything, when he could have said anything else.
A lot of Quesada's regime has been littered with this type of deception, from Millar's comments on various projects that remain just vague enough so they're deceptive, but not outright lies, to the mock bickering with creators to boost sales, and the now-infamous "Dead Means Dead" line, which never really seemed to apply to anyone, especially their most touted case for it, Magneto. They dragged his corpse out every time someone questioned the edict, when in actuality, his resurrection had been in the works since Grant Morrison killed him off.
Moving away from lies and obfuscation for awhile, is Marvel's tendency to very liberally throw around the phrase regular creative team. Iron Man springs immediately to mind, but the phrase has been used on many titles over the last few years. First we had the new regular creative team of Warren Ellis and Adi Granov, who have been anything but regular. It's been a little less than a year since they began their run, and only four issues have come out so far. Of course, on top of all that, their 'regular' run will be a mere six issues long.
Finally announcing who would come on after them, Marvel finally revealed the new writer, Daniel Knauf, starting in 2006 - giving us some idea of how much longer we have to wait for two more issues from Ellis and Granov. To their credit, they're not saying he's the new regular writer, but I'm getting tired of all these writers coming in, doing story arcs, and leaving.
These aborted runs, created by a writer just wanting to tell one story, or they slip into a sort of torpor and they no longer care, or whatever, are terribly frustrating. They come in, make their mark on the book, and get out. Then the next set of guys come in, make their mark, change everything around, and get out. There's no real movement in any of these characters anymore, no long running plots that slowly build into grand epics. And with the trend of decompressed storytelling, they're really telling stories of one or two issues, spread out to six.
The characters either remain the same, because they don't want to mess with the status quo the next over glorified fill-in writer is working with, or everything changes so drastically and suddenly, it's like they're completely different characters, and you have to wonder why the writer bothered in the first place if he didn't really want to write about the characters in a way close to their established base, and work towards where they wanted to go. The topper of it all though, is when the next guy comes in and does exactly the same thing, so there's all these short stories that are either wildly different so you can't care about them from one storyline to the next, or they're all the same and boring.
I really miss the days where creators would stay on a title for years, building characters, pushing them in directions logically and subtly, and building a tapestry. This is more like the fast food of comics these days. Quick, greasy, and bad for you.
Finally, to go back to David Lindeloff's project by way of concluding, he made some comments how the Ultimate Marvel versions aren't weighted down by their histories, and things are more open ended, including Wolverine's romances, and such. That's just crap. If you don't want to reference something with the real characters, you don't have to. It's not like Bill Jemas is sitting behind David as he scripts the comics with a gun to his head, telling him to make sure he mentions Wolverine is a samurai ninja with 100 girlfriends on every page. If it's not in his backstory, it can be added, and if you don't need it for your story, don't mention it. It's just that simple. And Ultimate Marvel has created quite a bit of it's own continuity backlog as well already, and with the two competing continuities, that is arguably worse for the readers, having two different versions to worry about.
Hopefully, Marvel's playing with words and outright lying dies down over the coming time, since I find it distasteful and dishonest, and I still enjoy many of the comics from them I read, and would hate to have to set them aside over something like that.
Jason M. Bourgeois
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