Slumming It With Comics

Are comics an accepted medium for authors? When an established author comes in to write a comic are they taking a step down to write these books?

Comics have always been a different take on the written word, they started out as an evolution of the Sunday comics strips and for a majority of their existence have been thought of as lesser literary work. There has never been as much fanfare for the new Geoff Johns comic as there is for a new Stephen King or J. K. Rowling novel. Comic creators tend to come from within the industry, life long fans and readers who have always wanted to write in the medium. Fans end up supporting these creators because they feel the same way, these creators are living the dream.

Fans tend to get a little anxious when a big time novel writer comes to town and writes a few issues of a title.

Charlie Huston was selected by Marvel to relaunch Moon Knight with David Finch and they were able to bring that book up to a level it’s still trying to recapture. Using his skills as a novelist, Huston was able to craft a brutal tale of a man seeking redemption for his past sins and fighting his inner demons. That could read like a best-selling novel but Huston choose to pen the story as a comic, using the medium to tell his story. Fans responded and the book was a solid selling title.

Duane Swierczynski is currently writing Birds of Pray for DC and is playing it like one of his mystery novels. This makes his take on the book different from what has come before, and is helping the book stick out in a sea of superheroes, much like he did with Cable.

Victor Gischler has used his experience with crime and horror novels to craft a vampire universe at Marvel that keeps bubbling as other events occur. Touching the X-Men, Hulk, and Blade and more as the story has started to unfold. He worked on Punisher MAX , a few Deadpool mini-series and relaunched X-Men with a new #1, something that is kind of a big deal. Some would argue that he was not up for the challenge and that we don’t need vampires in X-Men and blah blah blah, but the facts are; he has talent and has brought back a lost part of the Marvel universe not seen since Tomb of Dracula.

Greg Rucka freely goes back and forth between novels and comics, his Queen & Country series exists in both mediums.  Rucka’s novels tend to be widely accepted by critics and fans and any new comics work is also met with considerable praise and support. By balancing the line in a way few other authors do, does he become the exception to the rule?

Brad Meltzer has flirted with comics a few times, once on Green Arrow, bringing the character back to a new level of readers, the DC event Identity Crisis and a stint that relaunched JLA after Infinite Crisis. All of these projects were met with questionable looks; why is this guy writing Green Arrow? Why is the guy who wrote Green Arrow writing a major DC event? Why is the guy who made the DCU a dark place writing it’s biggest team? The fans and readers were unsure of Meltzer despite his literary career.

Identity Crisis was a huge hit for DC, it set the tone, for better or worse, for the DCU for years. It started the final Crisis trilogy and brought a lot of lapsed readers back. This proved that it didn’t require a life long reader or writer of comics to tell a great story. Meltzer arguably opened the door to a lot of novelists to come in and write comics. Scott Snyder walked through that door.

Snyder is a perfect example of why we need to allow new authors into the comics medium. Between his creator owned American Vampire, his run on Detective Comics and relaunch of Batman and Swamp Thing he has been able to make a huge name for himself in the industry. Arguably one of the fastest rising stars, we may never have gotten him if fans were closed-minded.

There have been a few duds to come to comics from other mediums, but the good have far outweighed the bad.

When we think of new blood attached to a book we should go in with an open mind, if an author has a story they want to tell, give them a chance. Joe Hill has been telling the horrifying tale of keys for five series, which could easily have been novels but he chose comics. Hill’s father Stephen King has even been dabbling in the medium, with Snyder and Hill himself, for an upcoming book.

No matter where the author comes from, we need to remember that a good story is a good story, and the more writers we have the better quality books we are going to end up with.