Daredevil Message Board

[james castle]

...or In Defence of Creativity.

In an effort to put a positive spin on the discussion as well as to avoid getting lost in the now devolved prior threads I thought I'd start a new happy thread to say this: I think it's important that anyone writing Daredevil now or in the future know that there are fans out that that welcome new ideas.

The weird thing about comics is that they started as a medium in which there were no limits. Anything you could think of could happen. Wild, way out there creativity was/is the name of the game. But it seems like almost immediately a certain portion of the comic reading public started to demand limits. Spider-man would never do that! Punisher could never say this! The events of #341 don't jive with the events in #57! This, that and the other are CENTRAL to the book and must therefore never be changed.

I think that kind of dogmatic attitude is terrible, stifles creativity and has no place in a book like Daredevil which has a fantastic history of wildly creative runs.

The idea that Daredevil has a "core" that must be respected is seductive at first but breaks down immediately if you consider the history of the character. What's his core? Blind lawyer who protects Hell's Kitchen? Well that knocks out Born Again because that took the lawyer thing away. Also knocks out virtually all of Nocenti's run (where he's both not a lawyer and not in New York). Knocks out the Daredevil and Black Widow days too among many, many more stories.

If the dogmatic "you can stray but only so far" cry of the uncreative was followed Daredevil never would have gone to hell. He never would have wandered in upstate New York. He wouldn't have flipped burgers in Born Again. He wouldn't have got his sight back. The book wouldn't have featured one of the first non-married cohabitating couples. Waid's run wouldn't have happened. Shadowland wouldn't have happened. Flying Blind wouldn't have happened. Fall From Grace wouldn't have happened. And yeah, half those stories are complete garbage but the other half are great.

The fact that a world where things are allowed to change and to change dramatically is illustrated over and over again by Miller. In his first run he was obviously like "you know what? this needs more ninjas" and then there was ninjas! And Elektra and Stick and the Chaste and it was great. But then he does Born Again and promptly forgets about all that junk. Elektra isn't mentioned once in Born Again. I don't think Stick is either and there sure aren't any ninjas but it was great anyway. And then he writes Man Without Fear and the ninjas are back but now Elektra is some crazy psychopath and it's all great too.

The point is that comics are supposed to be a medium where anything goes and I think once you start putting limits on it you're missing the point and doing the medium a disservice. You know what? I want Matt to go to space. How do his senses work in the vacuum or space? Do they work at all? I want him to spend a year in Japan. Wouldn't that be cool? I want him to give up being Daredevil and just be a lawyer for a run. Maybe we'd get some actually good lawyer stories that way.

So while you might not like everything that's just the price you pay for every once and while getting something truly great.
_________________
JC

So why can't you see the funny side?
Why aren't you laughing?

[Darkdevil]

[Dragonbat]

Amen. I firmly believe that there are no ideas/plots that are utterly without merit. Plots that are harder to execute believably? Yes, 100%. Plots that in general are difficult to accept for a particular book or character and would need to be carefully handled by an exceptional writer? Absolutely.

Some of the best and most memorable stories come about from shaking up the status quo in a big way. (Not only talking DD here.) Yes, sometimes as stated in the OP, the shakeup yields garbage... but it's often far more interesting garbage than usual. And sometimes, there are a few diamonds in that trash heap that make you sit up and take notice. The stories may be good and they may be bad... but they are rarely forgettable.

[McFly]

[Dimetre]

I agree with everything stated on this thread so far.

If writers and artists don't take any risks, then they might as well not be writing or drawing at all. It's only through taking risks that the characters grow as well.

[Darkdevil]

Congratulations to Mark Waid and Chris Samnee on their nominations for this year's Harvey Awards!

Waid is nominated for Best Writer, Samnee earned two nominations for Best Artist and Best Cover Artist and Daredevil received a nomination for Best Continuing or Limited Series.

[Francesco]

I don't oppose creativity or new ideas.
I oppose poor writing hiding behind creativity and/or new ideas.

[james castle]

[qtmxd]

[train]

[jriddle]

[qtmxd]

Trying to guess how business works when even business people often guess wrong is a shot in the dark, but the audience for comics is so much smaller than for media, that the comics might as well be resigned to it by now, and work with it. The media consistently uses older, foundational stories , and I think even using something as recent as Winter Soldier is an exception. They'd rather re-tell an origin for the umpteenth time than jump into the middle of recent continuity. As such, while we might think the media and comics should coincide, there's really no imperative for that. (Spider-Man comics brought back Peter in time for the movie, but it's not like Peter's world was ever gone in the comics.) There's no Avengers movie in theaters now, but they're in constant dvd circulation, and Marvel is obviously not trying to make the comics line-up coincide. When a new movie comes out, there's no inherent reason why the male Thor has to be back. It's not like anyone would forget him. I assumed that tv viewers seeing a serious, noir DD on television would be disappointed if they checked out the book for the first time and found what looks to me like a Hanna Barbera cartoon, but they might even be intrigued by the contrast, who knows. Having contrasting visions in media and comics might even turn out to be good business, twice the bang of for the buck.
And then there's the possibilities of different strategies when Marvel owns both film and comics (DD and Avengers), and when they don't own the films (FF, X-Men, and Spider-Man).