I just wanted to say I love you, LeCharles.

@plok: Thanks! The links are worth a peek, though after rereading my own post last night, I realized I was kind of all over the place, using them more as a springboard for some loosely related thoughts that had been percolating for a while than commenting directly on the issue at hand. That’s what happens when you try to rattle off a quick post at work and it snowballs into an essay, I guess!

@Thom: Genre preference is fine as a determining factor; I was referring to guys (and girls) who refuse to watch Grey’s purely because it’s considered “chick TV”. That’s just lazy and reductive.

Yeah…for me, I just did not get into it when I tried watching it. Mainly because I just am not interested in medical dramas (I didn’t care for ER either).

One, in the early years Marvel arguably owed its success to just such a “head writer/visionary” system as you describe: that was Stan, of course. And as Marvel grew, Stan continued to hang onto “head writer” status for a very long time, even though he moved into full-time editing, and then more distant full-time EIC-ing. Remember Iron Man’s “nose”? That was a result of Marvel’s new size trying to cope with Marvel’s old organization around Stan’s cult of personality. Thing was, that organization still worked better under Stan than it does today under the Quimbies, even when it didn’t work quite so well. Roy had a similar thing going after a while, too. It was all almost nepotistic, even almost Shakespearean, a couple of little interlocking fiefdoms run by EIC/editor/writers. Len Wein brought a distinct tone to Marvel, too, as did Archie, and Shooter, of course. I didn’t care for Shooter’s (although I liked it better than the current set-up, and that’s saying something), but you can’t say he wasn’t hands-on, nor that he didn’t effectively put his stamp on things.

Oh no, what am I trying to say here, again?

Oh yeah, that Marvel’s a writer/editor’s company at heart, and it seems to work best when the bigwigs are also working down on the line, producing tone. Kind of like the difference between a good bar-atmosphere, and a bad one: in the good one, the owner’s there five nights a week, instructing by example. But I won’t run too far with that whole thing right now, I just thought I’d mention it in passing…

To my second point, two, which is that there’s lately been quite a lot of crossover between SF and romance, and even Marvel itself built much of its success on the folding-in of romance comics into monsters and superheroes, so before I even go look at Johanna’s articles I’m going to call a little bullshit on the “romance is for girls” bit. I can’t even think of a TV comedy or drama off the top of my head that isn’t leavened with romance, and that doesn’t spend an automatic amount of time hitting the notes of emotional dramatic relevance. No, I don’t think The A-Team and Dukes Of Hazzard would do well at all on TV these days…plenty of action, but not enough sizzle, and let’s face it: it’s the sizzle that sells the soap.

Or, y’know…something like that.

I guess I’m saying…I agree! And also if I was in charge of a big romance-novel line, I’d be looking around thinking “what can we do here to hook more of the male market? There must be something we can do…” Hey, that’s the very reason Wonder Woman and Supergirl exist, come to think of it!

Good points.

You know that bit where I said I have a tendency to skew towards irrelevance? That totally applies here; I’ve never seen more than a couple of minutes’ worth of any of those shows and that was mostly from ads. So I don’t have any real basis to know how well that worked or didn’t. :\

@Katherine: Off-putting and disappointing, as I generally respect Johanna’s opinions on things, even if I don’t always agree with her. Interestingly, I seem to have recently been removed from her blogroll, again, so I must have posted something similarly disappointing recently!

If you look at the big networks, they generally carry a broad range of shows appealling to a wide audience. There’s some news, some game shows, some comedies, some dramas… That’s where the “broad” in broadcasting comes from — they’re trying to hit any number of demographic markets. The networks then narrowcast somewhat with individual blocks of shows to appeal to a certain segment for that time period.

The heavy hitters in the comic world target one demographic pretty exclusively, and with one genre pretty exclusively. Comics shouldn’t be a “micro-niche” but they are because that’s how the publishers market themselves. And that’s why so many individual comic titles don’t last — even from the big houses — because the publishers are narrowcasting to a micro-niche that’s unsustainable.

TV has a audience pool in the millions to draw from, but comics are drawing from a pool of, what? 200-300,000? You can’t really afford to narrowcast in that market unless you’re specifically a low-overhead operation.

Corporate comics could benefit from television’s use of a staff of writers… but it would result in better stories with longer shelf lives and less audience churn.

I’m going to have to disagree with you on this point. The primary reason I dislike movies and TV on the whole is precisely because there are too many cooks in any given story. They’re quick to lose focus because you’ve got a batch of writers all bringing their own interpretations to the table, collated by at least a couple of editors, then interpretted by a host of actors, seen through the eyes of a director and yet another editor. However great the original idea was, it’s been filtered and diluted too much (for my tastes, at least) by the time it reaches the audience.

One of the reasons I love comics is that there are considerably fewer filters. Generally, you have a total of maybe six guys working on the book overall, and generally only two of them can provide substantial impact.

It’s not impossible for TV and/or movies to keep the original vision more or less intact, but those are decidedly the exceptions and not the rule. You need a primary source who has a very strong, recurring presence throughout the entire process, from inception to editting the final cut, and there just aren’t that many Fritz Langs, Orsen Wells or Joss Whedons out there.

Of course, that’s just me. And I do have a tendency to be “skewed towards irrelevance.” :)