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Do you know the conflict between Autheur Theory vs Art as Collaboration?
Basically, Autheur Theory began between French critics and filmmakers, as a way of analyzing the film industry: originally films were clearly a collaboration, and it was common to have more than one director on the same project until the final edit of the film was reached (Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz being famous examples).
But the Autheur Theory presented and popularized the idea that, to have the same prestige as, for example, a classic novel, it is necessary to have a figure defined as "the Author of the film", and the chosen figure was the director.
And this vision became dominant from the 60s onwards, when a wave of directors grew up who exercised strong control over films, and whose names became the brand that attracted people to watch. Before, you went to watch a film expecting to be entertained by the fiction, and to see the actors and characters who were the Stars. You would go by Judy Garland, Gary Cooper, Vivien Leigh, Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, etc. From the 60s onwards, you will see films by director Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Copolla, etc.
And there was the simplified idea that "the director is a visionary genius who is a champion against the oppression of producers and studios who care only about money." But decades passed, and after some box office failures of films made using the Autheur model (Heaven's Gate directed Michael Cimino being the most famous), the cult of Autheur began to be questioned, as it denied the fact the role of all the team collaborating to make a film, often this personality cult of the director encourages abuse practices in the name of the "vision of genius", the fact that just because the director has a style and trademarks common to his films, it does not This means that it is automatically good, just that it repeats themes and subjects, the study of the history of cinema showing that Autheur itself is also a brand to be sold, and that it is not the "great champion against the studios", but in fact, he becomes prominent because when he makes a film that is successful and the studios see that it makes a profit, the studio will support him to do what he wants in the hope of always replicating that success, and the prestige of his name is it works as marketing in the same way that the face of the Actor who is a Star works.
I bring up this discussion because I think a similar conflict applies to the American comics industry: American society is obsessed with the idea of the Great Man, the Visionary Genius. Originally, artists drew the character, and then he became part of the publishing house (Detective Comics, Fox, Timely, etc.).
Those who originally created them continued drawing for a while, then went to work on other titles, and then another artist would take care of drawing the Phantom, Mandrake, Flash Gordon, Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, The Society of Justice of America, the Blue Beetle, Namor the Sub-Mariner, Captain America. Another artist could expand the universe and increase the lore and create a new villain, but he did not compete to erase what the previous artist had built and only establish what their idea was as "the true version".
It was the old collaboration model in which the name of the artist didn't matter, what mattered was telling a good story about those characters. Not everything was rosy, obviously: with the publisher being the owner of the character, the artists were often screwed and left in the cold. poverty. Siegel and Shuster suffered from poverty after creating Superman, and it was the fact that other cartoonists came together to demand decent pay that helped them in their old age.
But narratively, there was a focus on cohesion and collaboration.
But in the 60s, as in the film industry, things changed: the idea of control and authorship grew.
And now you had Marvel (former Timely) selling the image of Stan Lee as the creator of his entire Universe, Steve Ditko defending the view that the Artist should be considered the author of the work, names like Alan Moore, Frank Miller and John Byrne becoming stars, and it all comes back to the idea that the Author should have all the control.
And when a name and work become popular and make money, remember what companies do: they let you do whatever you want:
And readers bought into that idea: His redesign and rewrite of Daredevil and graphic novels The Dark Knight Returns and Year One made people for decades venerate Frank Miller to the point of denying everything that came before as the "version wrong" of the characters and that Miller "fixed" them, no one heard of Swamp Thing and Miracle Man until Alan Moore's name was on the cover, no one remembers that one day Sandman was a masked guy with a sleeping gas gun before being portrayed as the embodiment of the concept of Dreams in the graphic novels of a certain accused of sexual abuse Neil Gaiman.
Now, imagine you are an artist or writer who becomes known as a star in the comic book industry, whose name becomes prestigious and helps sell the magazine, and then you are given the job of drawing an existing character.
Everyone worships you, your word is considered law, you are a genius who can do no wrong, and then you think:
"Why do I have to follow rules, because I have to think about what has already been established as a characteristic of that character, when I can use it to represent what is MY artistic VISION of what a hero SHOULD be?"
And as a result. ..comic crossover events where a bunch of characters die horribly or turn evil for no reason, weddings you've followed developing for decades erased from continuity, characters committing horrible acts without any idea on how to examine the consequences.
We, as the public, created the cult of the genius, the comics industry responded to this by thinking it was a viable economic model in which to profit, and art suffered in the process.
Recognizing the importance of collaboration is the solution to dealing with this problem.
And there are other comic industries outside the US where collaboration, rather than competition between "visions of genius", is encouraged:
In France, more people came to draw Asterix and Obelix after the passing of Gossiny and Uderzo, building the stories based on the work they established.
In Brazil, Maurício de Souza's publishing house produces both Classica Mônica and Friends and Monica's Teen Manga series magazines with several artists and scriptwriters working together as graphics novels in which individual artists reinterpret characters, but without wanting to impose their interpretation as the only correct one.
And the Japanese manga industry has the model of one or two artists working on a story with a beginning, middle and end, which allows other artists, often fans, to develop sequels or spin offs that expand or complement the previous title, without ever trying to erase what was done before.
