Earlier today on Facebook, my friend Scott Shaw! posted a quote from me that is semi-famous among comic book professionals. He gave it as "Never fall in love with characters you don't own." I remember it as "Never get possessive about characters you don't own," which I think gets fractionally closer to the core of what I was advising.
What prompted it was that I had friends who'd, for example, get the job of writing Superman…and being passionate writers, they'd pour their hearts and guts into the work and they'd be very proud of the results. All well and good…but they'd be largely unprepared for the emotional wrench that would occur one day when they discovered they weren't parents. They were just baby-sitting.
One day, someone else would be writing Superman, either concurrently or instead of them…and the new guy would be having the Man of Steel do different things, having Lois Lane act in a different way, having Jimmy Olsen say different things. It was often jarring. In one way, it reminded me of an incident I often relate from my days hanging around the Comedy Store, feeding jokes to up-'n'-coming standups. There was a comic there — not a very good one — whose act largely consisted of material right off of Woody Allen's third album. Mr. Allen did three comedy albums. The first two were brilliant and widely-circulated. The third was a tad less brilliant but still very funny…and the record had received so little circulation that you could steal jokes right off it and not get caught. Which is what this kid did. Each night, he'd take the stage and wow the audience with Woody's lines.
So one evening, he arrives at the club and a buddy rushes up to him outside and tells him, "There's a new kid who's on right now…and he's doing your act!" He checks and sure enough, the new kid is up there doing material from The Third Woody Allen Album (that's what it was called)…and probably doing it better. The new kid comes off stage to huge applause and wanders outside, where he is immediately slammed into a wall and threatened by the first guy. The first guy yells, "Don't let me ever catch you doing my Woody Allen material again!"
That attitude reminds me of the way some writers I know acted when they discovered that someone else was writing Spider-Man or Batman or Star Trek after them. They were almost shocked to discover it wasn't theirs. One time I was at a big Christmas party that DC Comics held for its local freelancers at the Beverly Hills Hotel. A very nice party it was and everyone who might have showed up for it showed up for it. Even Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were present and so was Jack Kirby. At one point in the evening, a fellow who'd written a few Superman stories (not very many, as I recall) engaged Mr. Siegel in a loud conversation in which he tried to compare what he'd done with the character with what Jerry and Joe, its creators, had done. He kept saying things like, "My Superman can leap over the moon, whereas your Superman could only leap over tall buildings" or "My Superman has deeper motivations than your Superman." The sheer arrogance of it annoyed those of us who had to overhear it but we said nothing. It took Jack Kirby, who had often found himself in the same position as Jerry, to speak up. He leaned over to the young Superman scribe and said, "You don't have a Superman." Then he pointed to Jerry and said, "He has a Superman!"
I think it was shortly after the party that I wrote in some article what Scott was trying to quote. It was not intended as advice on how not to make a fool of yourself before your peers and betters. It was because when I was writing Bugs Bunny and Scooby Doo, I kept having to remind myself that I didn't own Bugs Bunny and Scooby Doo. They were not my characters. I could take great pride in what I did with them. I could expend as much fervor and creativity as I can put into something wholly original and copyrighted in my name. But what I couldn't do was to "own" the series in any true sense and it was better for my equilibrium to not forget that.
A friend of mine did forget it. He was a die-hard fan of an ongoing property — one not much less famous than the biggies mentioned above. For years, he dreamed of getting the chance to write the comic book…and one day, he did. An editor, knowing of his mania, made his wish come true. My friend really put his heart into the task and he wrote issues that were highly-praised and popular. Part of that may have been because like a lot of us, he put a little of himself into his work. He identified in a way with the lead character and infused it with some of his personality — not enough to jarringly change that established character but it gave him a new depth and dimension. (I kinda did the same thing when I was writing Daffy Duck. All of a sudden, Daffy Duck hated cole slaw.)
At the time, my friend was smitten with a lady named Karen. This was in his real life…but his real life was serving as subtext for the comic book so he introduced a new character into the comic, a lady with whom the lead character could be similarly smitten. The parallels were subtle and perhaps evident only to him but when he wrote about the established comic book character and the new female, he was kinda/sorta writing about himself and Karen. In his head, the new character certainly talked like Karen…and he was amused that when the artist designed that new character, she even looked a little like Karen. The artist had never seen Karen, nor did he know my friend had based the new character on Karen. But there she was on the pages.
All went well until, as inevitably happens with characters you don't own, someone else takes them over. My friend was off the comic and someone else was on. At a convention, he ran into his successor and through gritted teeth, wished him well. The new writer thanked him and began describing some of the things he had in store for the book. All of them sounded horribly, horribly wrong to my friend and he had the cold sensation that his era was being quickly expunged and that none of it would linger. He asked about the character based on Karen and the replacement guy said, "Oh, I have big plans for her. She's going to break off with him because she's never loved him. You see, I've decided she's always been a Lesbian and then she's going to get into this cult thing and get brutally murdered and the hero's going to have to go out and avenge her death and…"
My friend just stood there, feeling like Michael Dukakis being asked on national TV how he'd feel about his wife being raped and murdered.
He went on to write other comic books of characters he didn't own and they were pretty good comics. But he was a little more careful thereafter about injecting portions of his own life and emotions into them.