Via Marc.
Michael Chabon's keynote at the Eisners has a four-part manifesto. Here's the meat of part one:
We should tell stories that we would have liked as kids. Twist endings, the unexpected usefulness of unlikely knowledge, nobility and bravery where it�s least expected, and the sudden emergence of a thread of goodness in a wicked nature, those were the kind of stories told by the writers and artists of the comic books that I liked. The first two, very generally speaking, you tended to find more often at DC; the second two at Marvel.
And, y'know, he might not be wrong. But my left-brained structure-focused mind immediately snapped to extending the theme. What if you built a comic company using different combinations of those four features? Say, #1 and #3. You'd get twist endings that were always about the unexpected emergence of noble behavior. Except that wouldn't work, would it? Like the audience of a Shyamalan film, you'd lose sight of the story trying to pick out the character whose emerging nobility would provide the twist ending; the best you could hope for is an inverted House of Mystery. Matching #2 to #4 is little more profitable. So I'm not likely to found the next great comics company by recombining the DNA of DC and Marvel.
But Chabon's speech is worth reading in its entirety.
Posted by Greg at August 5, 2004 10:51 AM