Editors

One of the big differences between online comics and print comics is one man (or woman, or trained weevil, or whatever they’re hiring these days): The Editor. According to some, the Editor is an obnoxious jerk-off who spends all his time trying to pervert the creators’ comic into some kind of brightly colored money cannon, and the web comic artist doesn’t deal with him. Hooray! Right? I mean, us artistic types love freedom. The problem is, freedom for the artist doesn’t always translate into quality reading for the fans. It’s all some of them can do to get their story down on paper, and sometimes it’s asking a bit too much to expect them to filter out their subconscious desire to see underage girls bend over in short skirts. Thus the question becomes: is the loss of freedom worth the extra protection the audience gets against the creators’ deranged id (because, let’s be honest: balanced people don’t make good writers). Let’s weigh the pros and cons!

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Actually, screw the pros. Pros are boring. Let’s focus on the cons!

With An Editor

Let’s start big: Spider-Man sells his marriage to the devil. What? Why? Well, put simply, Marvel Big Wig Joe Quesada decides that he doesn’t like Spider-Man as a married adult. Also, he doesn’t want him to go through a divorce. Also he doesn’t want to kill his wife. There’s… there’s not a lot a writer can do with that. Go ahead and try: write me a letter if you can come up with a really, really good reason for Spidey to suddenly become a bachelor despite a happy marriage. And while you’re at it, use that same plot to somehow make everyone forget that he’d totally revealed his identity to the entire world during the most hyped event from Marvel in years. Basically, Quesada was asking Straczynski to spin straw into gold; all to make Spidey’s current story closer to that of the movies (somehow forgetting that they’ve already got the Ultimate Universe for that). Yeah, suddenly “The Devil Did It” seems like as good an excuse as any.

Okay, maybe just a little more back story will help this from seeming quite so insane. I mentioned already that Spider-Man revealed his identity to the entire world which, aside from getting him caught up in a class-action lawsuit for selling pictures of himself to The Bugle for years, meant his family was now a target for villains out to get some petty revenge on Spider-Man. Oh shock and awe! Not much actually came of that, though: when his Aunt May ends up getting shot by an assassin, it turns out the dude was actually aiming for Peter and the fact that she was involved was entirely coincidental. The important part is, she’s been shot and she’s going to die… for REALS! Spidey spends a few issues wandering around to everyone he knows and asking them to make his Aunt not die, which is apparently beyond the ability of everyone from Mr. Fantastic, to Tony Stark, to Dr. Strange, all of whom have found some means to travel through time, so you’d think they could whip something up. The whole thing is basically a rehash of the part from Spider-Man: The Other where Peter caught Plot-AIDS and travelled the world being told essentially the same thing. The one guy he didn’t think to ask back in The Other, though, was The Devil (or “Mephisto” as they call him in Marvel comics). So anyway, even though Aunt May told him that she’s okay with dying, since she’s lived a long, eventful life and she’s looking forward to seeing Uncle Ben again. Peter’s having none of that (I assume the longevity of her life is confusing to him, since she seems to be getting younger the longer the series goes. Seriously, look at her in the 60’s and look at her today: how’d she pull that off?) and asks The Devil to give her a healthy dose of the Not Deads. The Devil agrees, on the condition that Peter Parker and Mary Jane no longer be married, kinda just because he gets off on that sort of thing. Also, this somehow resets continuity to basically the 80’s, with varying degrees of stupid spread throughout.

The #1 Most Efficient Way to Get Your Marriage Annulled

The entire thing was a critical bomb. Sales went pretty wonky for a while: a lot of regular readers dropped the series, whereas a lot of other people picked it up to see if it was really as bad as everyone said it was (I can only assume this is how Liefeld continues to sell comics). The funny part is that the issue was actually pretty well written: not a standout piece in Straczynki’s body of work, but a solid Spidey story nonetheless. It’s simply the fact that the last couple pages pinch a loaf on the last two decades of Spider-Man stories. Yeah, there’s maybe two or three years worth of the 90’s that we’re better off without, but not like this! For their part, the creative team did the best that they could do: adhere to the corporate mandates, put out a decent comic, and just continue like nothing happened. If it wasn’t for Spider-Girl we wouldn’t hear anything about the clone saga anym—oh wait? They’re doing that again? Uh… good luck, I guess.

Spidey’s Stance on The Devil Has Changed Over the Years

But On The Other Hand…

If I would have to pick some sort of antithesis to “The Devil Eats Somebody’s Marriage”, I guess it would have to be “Rape Leads to Happy Relationship”. Wait, what!? Yes, leave it to Mookie and his series Dominic Deegan to take the disturbing plot element of rape and just take it that one step further. DD has a pretty vocal anti-fan community, and the moral peculiarities of the series are a big point of contention, but this one takes the cake. I don’t know if you’ve heard about this “rape” thing that’s going around, but word on the streets is that it’s pretty friggin’ horrifying on multiple levels. Would an editor have stopped him and said, “Hey, this whole rape story arc? Maaaaaybe we should cut it.” Probably. But let’s say he at least gave Mookster the benefit of the doubt and decided that a good story could come out of this. A good editor would have helped the writer ease their audience into something as complex as this, maybe made the focus of the story the inner struggle one character has coming to terms seeing their rapist as a real person with real flaws. Okay, at this point it’d probably be best if I explained a bit more about the story that led to this…

Fact: Orcs Love Rape

Two characters who happen to be orcs or trolls or something are forced into marriage when the male orcamatroll tries to keep his family from slaughtering her during some kind of war. His family agrees, but the girl troll monster doesn’t, and she ends up forced through the whole ceremony, which includes consummating the relationship. They’re given plenty of privacy, and no apparent time limit on the deflowering. Does he use the time they’re given to plan some kind of escape out the back of their hut? Does he concoct an elaborate ruse? Does he even spend more than a few panels trying to explain why he’s going through with this? Not when there’s rape to be had! Afterward the girl-monster escapes anyway, sort of rendering the whole thing a moot point, and they meet up years later and it turns out he’s a nice guy and she falls in love with him. How does she do it? Well, after bickering and arguing with him from the moment they reunite, once she realizes he was just a very dumb kid (with a painfully skewed moral compass) who was trying to do the right thing, she forgives him for his mistakes and moves on with her life, stronger for the act of overcoming the tragedies of her youth. Oh wait, actually, she skips the whole “coming to terms with your attacker” step and skips right to the “falling deeply in love with your attacker” phase. It doesn’t help that this whole thing is essentially background noise, with the real plot following a middle-ages rock concert where wizards use their magic to simulate electric guitars, and sorry, it’s not nearly as awesomely stupid as it sounds.

Yeah… Nothing Like This.

The interesting part about this whole thing is how, after the big reveal that lady-orcula was in love with dude-monster, even the regular fans began to complain that the story was, if nothing else, rushed. In response to the complaints, Mookie had a lot of updates over the next few story arcs address some of the complaints directly and basically try to not make the whole thing feel so forced. Now, why I bring this up is that, in many ways, it is the audience itself that is the editor for many webcomics. As a former webcomicker myself, I can tell you that it’s easy to not notice that a plot element is A) Dumb, B) Confusing, or C) Both. If you’re a bit of a loner (or if the only other people you talk to about plot ideas are as insane as you), that crap is going to sneak into your work and the best you can do is try to clean up the mess later on.

The Messed Up Part is He Couldn’t Do This Unless the Act of Doing So Gave Him a Boner

The truth is some people need an editor. Have you seen what Frank Miller commits to paper when they give him a free pass to write whatever he wants? Yeah, he comes out with the occasional Sin City, but his Batman stuff ranges from the insane (All-Star Batman) to the unreadable (The Dark Knight Strikes Again). And anyone who spends time checking on webcomics knows what Megatokyo turned into once Piro’s de facto editor Largo got canned. On the other side of the fence, I’ve known a lot of creators who honestly can’t produce anything if it has to go through an editor first. It’s just not in them. If R. Crumm had changed his writing and art to match the tastes of the time, no one would know who R. Crumm is.