(no subject)

[telophase]

THought I'd pull out and post one of my responses on a recent lilrivkah post about Wizard World Chicago, and creating works, and being passionate about it. The context is a discussion about fulfilling your creative drive through original works (she asked some Big Corporation artists if they ever drew anything for themselves and received basically a "Bzuh?" in answer) , and I'm suggesting that for some people, the creative drive doesn't have to be fulfilled solely through original work.

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How about thinking of it this way: these characters are their passion. Someone who's grown up with Batman, made a million stories about Batman in his head since he was a kid, drawn a million pictures of Batman all over his books and notes, and now he's grown up and working for DC and paid his dues less-popular titles, and now ... dude! He's drawing Batman!!

I don't think that's mere hero-worship. I see lots of people who are passionate about their fanfic and fanart enough so that if they were offered a chance to write or draw in that world, they'd be in hog heaven.

Similar to that, there are people who want to work with certain other people, and they don't care what on. The chance to draw an Alan Moore work, for example - they wouldn't care if it was Watchmen, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or Top Ten, as long as they got to work with Moore.

There's also the idea that the act of creating is what drives them and fulfils their creative needs, not the subject matter. That's one of my drives, and the one that's taken care of by fanart. I don't really care that the character I'm drawing isn't mine, because that's not the point - just to see the rendering develop under my pencil, or the chance to play with settings in Painter (or, currently, to experiment with my new Copics) is the point, and I really don't want to waste time that I could be using to play with this other stuff in developing something original.

Have you read the book Hanging Out with the Dream King: Interviews with Neil Gaiman and His Collaborators ? There's a lot in there about collaboration - the artists and letterers aren't working on their own things, they're working with Gaiman, and you can see their ideas about how they do or do not like doing it. (One of Gaiman's tricks to working well with his collaborators is to find out what they really like to draw, and incorporate it into the story: Sam Kieth does well with giant crowd scenes with lots of little creatures in them, and another one wanted to draw helicopters.)

Hm, went on longer than I expected. I may repost this to my LJ and find out what my friendlist thinks: they're a creative and opinionated bunch. :)

Comments

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I agree (though the DC people did pretty much sound like pawns). There's a long continuum between "totally original" and "tracing," and most people's work isn't as far on the original end of it as they think. And that's OK. For instance...

Fanfic
Fanfic involving original characters that end up going off and doing their own thing.
Fanfic with the serial numbers filed off, then published as non-fanfic.
Fanfic off of public domain materials. (ie, retellings of fairy-tales, Laurie King's Sherlock Holmes stories, Saiyuki.)
Extremely derivative but not technically fanfic works of fiction. (ie, any high fantasy with quests, orcs, elves, dwarves, a Dark Lord, etc.)
Original works inspired by other published works. (ie, China Mieville's "The Tain," which was inspired by a story idea by Jose Luis Borges.)
Original works which borrow a style but not the plot from other material. (ie, original fairy tales in the style of the Brothers Grimm)
Parody and satire.
Original works in a genre the writer did not create, which make deliberate use of genre tropes and characters. (Any film noir, romance, high fantasy, murder mystery, Top Ten, etc.)

And so forth. Very little is completely original.

Out of curiosity, when I give you a character description and you create the character design, do you think of that as original work (because you created the design) or derivative work (because you didn't create the character's personality and get his or her looks from thin air)?

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

Fanfic with the serial numbers filed off

Hee! Very astute.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Mmm. Hard to say. There's a sense of ownership there, to an extent, because I know how he looks and moves and what clothes he wears (whether or not that agrees with your vision is another matter), and I can see a guy walking down the street here in a t-shirt and those baggy khaki shorts eveyone's wearing and go "Yeah. Mark." but there's still a sense that there's things I don't know about him. I don't even really have any original characters - the webcomic characters are mostly mine, but were still born of collaboration, and the two origial stories I have partially thought out, the one with fairly fleshed-out characters was done after a couple of long noodling sessions with a friend, and the other one is still amorphous.

If you look at Can't Sleep (http://www.cant-sleep.net), you'll notice that Mark is physically defaulting back to my Beecher character - for some reason if I don't watch it, any guy with short hair is going to be either Beecher or Jason. And I didn't even realize Mark was heading towards Beecher until night before last, when looking at it.

Genghis and Jason's general look and vauge personalities (to start with) were ripped off from the manga Voyeur (not the sequel series Voyeurs, Inc., which isn't as good, IMHO), taken in a few different directions, then slapped into the middle of an SF convention. They're different now than their progenitors. Beecher's looks showed up more-or-less out of thin air - the utilikilt was the important bit - but his personality was shaped with lots of input from my cowriters.

Beecher, Genghis, and Jason live in my head to an extent that Mark and Push et al. don't, so I feel more proprietary towards them - I know them, I know their favorite colors, I know what their apartments look and smell like, and so on.

But it's a continuum - I can usually identify exactly where I ripped off personality and physical characteristics, so I never feel that a character's truly original - most of the ones that live in my head and feature in the stories-I-tell-myself-at-night stuff are blatant Mary Sues or characters that are mashups of characters from other manga, books, movies, and so on - those feel extremely derivative to me, moreso than the Can't Sleep guys or the Project Blue Rose/BK characters.

Dunno if that answered your question. :) I'm not sure of the answer myself.