Lack of action.

Book-length emotional confessions by superheroes out of costume, having coffee at a luncheonette.

Gratuitous sexual content. Nudity if possible. Frontal if possible.

Bad art. Very bad art.

Stories that "change Captain So-And-So's world forever".

Series that proclaim they are "not your father's Captain So-And-So".

HAVE CHUCK AUSTEN WRITE EVERYTHING. HAVE CHUCK AUSTEN WRITE EVERYTHING. HAVE CHUCK AUSTEN WRITE EVERYTHING.

Female characters must be maimed or murdered, then preferably stuffed into heavy duty appliances, all in the name of providing motivation to "heroes."

If you are a "hero" the only way to win is to splatter your enemies' brains across the scenery. Otherwise they run away, rape your wives/husbands/leather fetish Dominatrix Masters/pets/children still in the crib, kill them graphically and stuff them in the freezer.

Moral codes are stupid, unrealistic, and been there/done that - anyone shown with one is an emasculated wimp who deserves it when they watch frail "innocents" get casually scragged by their superior beings - superior because they are stronger and not burdened by the limiting concepts of conventional morality. They are weak and should be shown to be so.

Three words.


Secret.

Wars.

Four.

(I'd have said Secret Wars Three, but that already happened in an issue of Fantastic Four)

Glory be to the Empire.

Have the artist imitate the "Hot at the moment" artist and use lots of action lines
Execute multiple cover variations to increase sales
Change the comic to match the TV/movie version currently in vogue
Add leather and/or chrome
"Out" a character known to be hetero for shock value
Kill a time-honoured and adored character; who needs the "old school" anyway?

The BEST way to do superhero comics is for them to NEVER be completed!

That Quesadia mini that's five YEARS late blows the pants off anything Lee and Kirby EVER did!

BRILLIANT!

Make all characters into dark, obsessive, lunatic, ninjas, who treat all their allies as enemies by spying on them and figuring out ways to destroy them, just in case. Oh, and generally act like a jerk.

MUTANTS!!!!!!!!!!

Are you talking about the creators or the characters?

MINDREADING: Yes, to both.

You are correct, sir!

And suck out the fun, killing any wish fulfillment aspects to it.

I don't think that the medium of dynamic storytelling through a combination of static text and art will ever disappear. The art of painting (reproducing imagery with pigments on a static surface) goes as far back as 12000 years and shows no sign of disappearing.

What we probably will never see again are creative powerhouses like Kirby and Ditko taking a salary for giving away dozens of concepts worth millions. This example has become a modern cautionary tale to most contemporary comic book who hold on to their best concepts until someone shows them the big money.

Because MarvelDC will NOT give anyone lucrative co-creative rights they are left with rehashing their existing concepts to suit the mood of the time – in effect corrupting the concept until it can no longer be recognized as derived from its original ideals.

MarvelDC is in the same boat as the farmer who couldn’t be arsed to rotate crops or fields: avoiding a long term strategy leads to raising bad produce.

Add to this creative stagnation the fact MarvelDC is owned by larger and more diversified concerns who are aware that managing comic book derived merchandise, TV shows, and movies is a lot less troublesome than managing comic book talent on a day-by-day-basis and what do you get? You get a MarvelDC whose operations are largely aimed at maintaining a copyright whose cost is offset by the sale of the actual comic books.

I think the spiritual custody of THE American Comic Book (sequential art, whatever) is in the hands of creator-owner material published on a novel or serialized schedule. Big business-owned comics like MarvelDC is destined to degenerate into the McDonald’s of sequential art.

And there ARE successes in this area: consider Spawn, Hell Boy, and Sin City.

So ... support creater-owned books!!!!

Ah. And herein we get to the eternal debate in "art", don't we? But to ignore that great philosophical question and deal directly with the mundane...
Kirby and Ditko could hardly be said to have given away their concepts that were worth "millions". In retrospect, yes, the companies that nurtured those characters and concepts have done very well by them. How many zillion other concepts and characters have gone to the eternal trash-heap of the mind because of timing, poor handling, poor whatever?
The existence of comics today is owed to people who came before and trod paths unpaved, no doubt. But precisely because of the handling, the timing, the work ethic of those guys and the commitment to their chosen art, their commitment to their families and their companies, we have such wonderful things.
What if, just to spin this back to your own words, Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko had really "held back the good stuff" until someone showed them piles of cash? No Spidey. No FF. No Captain America. No Speedball.
Granted, Hellboy and Spawn and the Rocketeer and such rightly deserve every entertaining dollar they reap, but its due to such early visionaries that the fields are clear and levelled, and crops able to be harvested. I don't always see the guys who benefitted from such pioneering offering part of their take, despite (some of) them becoming as much "the industry" as the big bad evil conglomerates that pillage and take advantage of every creative urge in comic people out there.

Kirby and Ditko didn’t feel they were giving away their concepts until they realized how much money Martin Goodman was making off their concepts. Until then, Kirby and Ditko were simply having a great time doing what came naturally to them: CONCEPTUALLY CREATIVE dynamic storytelling. In fact, by 1967 or so – about the time he introduced “HIM” in the pages of Fantastic Four – Kirby deliberately curbed his own creativity and started rehashing is own concepts. Essentially, Kirby dropped the “conceptually creative” element from his dynamic storytelling.

His creativity hadn’t been tapped, however, since he was working out the concepts behind the New Gods at the time. Had he received a better deal from Marvel we might have seen Kirby do Galactus vs The New Gods or The Silver Surfer vs Orion of Apokolyps.

Meanwhile, Ditko was creating the Creeper, Hawk & Dove, and Mr. A so he wasn’t tapped out either.

So, the idea of holding back Kirby levels of conceptual creativity in wait for a lucrative opportunity dates back to the late 60’s with Kirby himself.


I don’t feel that Kirby/Ditko should have held back their concepts: only that they should have reaped better rewards. Thing is, contemporary comic book writers and artists can justifiable say “If MarvelDC screwed over Kirby/Ditko they’ll screw me over too if I give them a chance.”

Now, a guy like John Byrne might say that Kirby/Ditko didn’t get screwed over since they got paid for their work. I would answer that they got paid for illustration ONLY. After a quick while, however, they were both plotting and receiving no expressed credit as a condition of work. Wallace Wood refused to work Marvel-method on Daredevil while receiving illustration-only credit so he quit. I would suggest you look up the early post -Wood issues of Daredevil for a taste of what a Stan Lee Marvel-Method superhero was like: memorable villains such as the Owl and the Stiltman, basically.

In fact, Stan Lee had John Buscema emulate Kirby for a number of books, most notably Silver Surfer. Furthermore, Kirby was called upon from time to time, to provide breakdowns for Marvel struggling artists. Bear in mind that Kirby breakdowns, Marvel-style, contained all the crucial storytelling elements of a successful Marvel Age comic book – at a fraction of the usual Kirby pencil rate.

Now, why would Stan Lee or Martin Goodman refuse to grant proper credit? My guess is that Goodman was thinking of selling Marvel for quite some time before 1970 and that he didn’t want prospective buyers getting the notion that they would acquire a company with co-ownership arrangements.

So, today, we have a stand off between the publishers who don’t want a shared-ownership relationship with the talent and the talent who doesn’t want to see the publishers make a fortune on their ideas without a stake in the profits.

When MarvelDC hire out the ‘help’ to play with their toys, they can no longer impose unrewarded visionary conceptual creativity as a condition of work. MarvelDC gets exactly what it pays for: well illustrated, well worded rehashed-REHASH.

Whereas Martin Goodman, in the 1960’s, received a hell of a lot more than he paid for.