Hollie Buchanan sent me this question…
I've appreciated your recent pieces about artists and how they were forced (or wrangled, perhaps) into arrangements or projects they didn't want (or worse, to my sensibility, having the art changed after its completion). Could you discuss the degree to which that sort of thing happened to writers? I am aware of occasional distinctions between creator, plotter, and scripter and I know that initial direction sometimes came from editors, but I am not aware of anything like Kirby's Superman being redrawn.
Being a writer in some situations means being rewritten. It's especially common on projects where you don't hold the copyright and where you're working with a property you in no way own. If I'm writing someone else's characters, I generally don't have the final say.
And just as artwork is sometimes altered, so sometimes are scripts. I once worked for an editor who (I thought) was motivated to rewrite something in every script that he bought…often a gratuitous change. From afar, I've witnessed editors do this to try and prove to their superiors that they're earning their money and/or are indispensable. In the case of this particular editor, I think it was just that he was convinced he could improve any script. Sometimes, I thought he did but not always.
That kind of thing happens a lot in live-action television…less in animation and even less in comic books. There are good and bad things about working in each area and one of the things that I love about writing comic books is how infrequently that happens. But it does happen.
I'm thinking now of one veteran comic book writer I shall not identify. I think he may have had a contract that guaranteed him a certain amount of work or it may have been that because of past service, the company felt an obligation to keep giving him steady assignments. He's passed on but I still don't feel it would be right to give his name.
Whatever the reason, he was assigned to several comics that were probably not "right" for him (or vice-versa) and even when he was working in his area of past expertise, a large percentage of what he handed in was judged unusable. So it was heavily rewritten in the office…
…and I know this because Len Wein and I once rewrote one of his scripts together and Len had rewritten a lot of them on his own. I asked him why we were doing that. Why didn't he tell the writer what was wrong with it and let the guy have another crack at it? Len said, "I've tried that and what I get back is always farther off the mark. Believe me, this is easier for everyone." I would say we redid 75% of that script…and no, the credits did not indicate that. Len said the writer had never complained about such rewrites…if he even noticed.
Changes in artwork in a comic are more obvious. There are a lot of online forums in which folks discuss changes we've spotted — like John Romita (Sr.) redrawing characters in a story drawn by someone else at Marvel — as he often did. At times, there has been a lot of that in some company's output. I keep reminding people that just because something was changed, it doesn't mean the original artist screwed up. It just means some editor, wisely or foolishly, wanted something changed.
I have seen editors make changes and later regret them. Joe Kubert once did a lot of redrawing on a war comic that Dan Spiegle drew for DC. A few years later at Comic-Con, I introduced Dan and Joe to each other and Joe immediately apologized to Dan and told him, "I shouldn't have done that. What you drew was better." I think Joe's judgement was skewed a bit by an attitude at the company then that what the freelancers handed in always needed a bit of in-house improving to make it publishable.
Sometimes, work can be improved. Sometimes, there are valid reasons to change something. It just shouldn't be tampered with because someone's trying to prove who's boss.
