There is a small stable of TV and film writers who have decided to write comics.
J. Michael Straczinsky (best known for Babylon 5), Kevin Smith (Clerks), and Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) all started with comics that were tied in to their respective properties, but segued over to mainstream comics and their own original stories.
JMS had Rising Stars (the comic that he will probably never complete because of a bad relationship with Top Cow comics), Midnight Nation (12 issues, all of them great), and most recently Amazing Spider-man and Supreme Power, both for Marvel.
Smith started with Clerks, and then Bluntman and Chronic and Jay and Silent Bob, but he also had a wonderful 13 issues on Green Arrow, and has been doing Daredevil for some time now.
Whedon started doing Buffy comics a few years ago, branched out into Buffy-related stuff, and now he's writing Astonishing X-Men, and it's really good!
Of course, most comics writers also do screenplays and television shows. Neil Gaiman did an episode of Babylon 5 (one of their best, frankly), and about once a year, Grant Morrison threatens to stop writing comics at all and concentrate on his screenplays.
But the question is, why? Why go from being a writer/director superstar to doing dinky little funny books? I think part of the explanation is that we're living in an age were creator/writers are stars. I know this has been the case here and there, at different times, but in film and TV, generally writers get no respect.
The same was true of comics until quite recently, in fact. Jerry Siegal and Joe Shuster didn't have a "created by..." credit on Superman until the late 70s (a massive legal guilt trip followed the release of the films when certain people found out the Siegal and Shuster were living on pensions from crap jobs they took after their falling out with DC... but I digress).
Film writers, like M. Knight Shyamalan (and I'm counting the seconds until he does comics), and comics writers are both turning into the stars of their respective industries. In comics, now that readers are older, they tend to follow writers more than characters. "Mark Waid's writing Fantastic Four you say? I'm there! He's stopped? I'm gone!"
The answer to "Why are writers who are famous for making movies and TV shows moving over to comics?" is "Because they can." All of them loved comics as kids, and the dream of every fan-boy is to write them themselves. Not only make their own are, which is the desire of any creative mind, but to be able to, as Waid puts it, "play with their toys," write the characters they knew and loved from childhood.
That's why JMS is on Spider-man, Smith is on Daredevil, and Joss writes X-Men. There's no shortage of original stuff in their heads, but they're choosing to write characters who've been around for forty years, sometimes longer.
Nostalgia for comics culture, the mindset of the fan-boy, is a powerful thing. We aren't a community, exactly, but we are a fan-based sub-culture. There's a little glint in the eye of every little kid (most of the time, every little boy) who's read comics and thought, "If I can't be Superman, maybe I can write him...?"
Posted by orion at October 10, 2004 1:37 PMDon't forget that Kevin Smith also worked on the Black Cat property.
Posted by: Darren at October 11, 2004 11:32 PM