I'm pretentious. Extremely so. Due to that, I figured I'd use this blog to spitball an idea I've had for awhile, an auteur look at comic books. Auteur theory is a part of film aesthetics which holds that certain films and filmmakers are remarkable for their completeness of a singular vision, ignoring the other people involved. A classical filmmaker in the analysis is Hitchcock, he's seen as someone who has exerted an absolute and complete control over his work and everything we see on celluloid is essentially Hitchcock. A good contrast would be Green Lantern from this summer where the multiple writer and the lack of vision made the film a bit of a mess, though not necessarily unwatchable (I thought the movie was just oppressively masculine more than anything).
How could this apply to comics? I mean, no matter what, mainstream comics rarely ever are a single vision. Sure, there are indie titles like Scott Pilgrim by Bryan Lee O'Malley to pick something shallowly indie (which is to say a very easy reference) and then you have mainstream writer/artists like Rob Liefeld and Tony Daniel, but the way that I'm going to look at this isn't to suggest that there's something particular to the work actually being done by single person. In fact, I'd like to suggest that we can look at comics with multiple writers for their singular vision. This is not an analysis of the indies. It would be easy to make this argument with comics if we looked at indies or webcomics or early Image. Its also not an analysis of writer's biographies. I don't know them so, while this does apply to auteur theory in film, I can't do it here without just looking at people like Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. Likewise, this won't be a look at the similarities between comics and movies, that's cliche enough to be trite (see, pretentious!). Also, its not a formal or edited essay. I'm just writing as I think it.
The main people I think we should look at, though, are people like Geoff Johns, Brian Bendis and, well, Grant Morrison as far as actual writer, but then someone like Dan Didio (but not his Marvel counterparts) would count under the analysis I'm about to give. Its necessary that anyone I include in this is working in a universe with other writers involved. I want to be able to argue from the perspective of the auteur as controlling story beats.
This actually gives us a fairly firm time to talk about the beginning of the true auteurism in comic books: the crossover. While, certainly, something like Crisis on Infinite Earths is an editorial mandate, it provides the idea of something that's driven by a single vision. In the case of the original Crisis, it was two creators with Len Wein and Marv Wolfman the most responsible, but the germ is planted nonetheless. Truthfully, something like Crisis is far too big to be contained by a single vision. That's one of the main difficulties about building this theory: There are some stories that are too big to be contained to a single artists' vision. But not all of them.
One of the best examples of an auteur storyline, I would argue, is the recent War of the Green Lanterns, indeed the entire Green Lantern corner of DC, that's helmed by Geoff Johns. I do want to acknowledge, first, the difficulty of this analogy in that we saw earlier plot threads hinted at by Johns completely dropped, but bear with me. Also, there will be spoilers. The thing about this plot line that makes it a perfect example of the theory I'm trying to build is that its pure Geoff Johns, even if he has his interpreters. Yes, when Guy Gardner shouts "I love the Corps and hate anyone who wants to destroy it!" we clearly see Tomasi peaking through, and some of the characterization of Kyle in particular is very Bedard, but the overall vision, even in there books, reads as Johns.
The most stunning example of this, to me, is the death of Mogo. Its gratuitous and it continues his recent trend of fucking with things Alan Moore created or was significantly involved in. For other examples of that, look at something like Brightest Day, or even the Sinestro Corps War. The way its done is particular Johns, since its John Stewart harnessing the Black Lantern power as a sniper. It also has a major trademark of Johns, the call back to old stories in a clumsy way. The only story Johns wants to tell with John Stewart would be titled "John Stewart: Planet Killer!" While the Morrison method is to make the references plot significant, Johns is a writer with a mallet who will beat the similarities between his plots and those he liked into you.
The Johns of Green Lantern is the most obvious example of this because Johns, for as fun of a writer as he can be, has a clumsy stumbling over some tropes that he'll bring up obsessively. Its jarring to see Pete Tomasi and Tony Bedard use Johns' voice, but that's what ends up happening. Johns is able to speak through them, though. His story points are his voice on the page. Where Brightest Day, co-written with Tomasi, has a Johns feel, I'd argue against it being an auteur work because he has that writer credit and one cannot say, with utter certainty, Johns begins here and Tomasi here. Something like War of the Green Lanterns has specific parts written by not-Geoff-Johns, and yet he still is in the voice of Tomasi and Bedard.
In contrast, Grant Morrison has the ability to write whatever he wants, and yet he cannot hold up another writer as a hand puppet without every word being garbled. Morrison has auteur qualities, no where is that clearer than his Batman run of the past few years. Yet, the problem becomes that he doesn't give other writers story beats. Nothing Snyder's done with Dick has been because of Morrison except him having Dick as Batman. But again, there's also the problem that its not easy to find characters and concepts that other writers don't kind of have problems with. It only really works when he gives a rough concept, like the Ryan Choi Atom Gail Simone wrote, but in general, with the exception of Damien Wayne, characters like the Doom Patrol and Animal Man end up fairly abandoned or revised once Morrison's gone. Morrison, try as he might, is only an Auteur in the same way Arthur Conan Doyle is. He doesn't exert influence, he's jumbled in metatext and the rule of weird so he becomes inapproachable, or his concepts end up in low level books only a few people read. (Hi, S.H.A.D.E.! Nice to not see you in anything but Freedom Fighters and now Frankenstein, Agent of S.H.A.D.E., both concepts of Morrison). Morrison's simply too weird for anyone to follow up on him and for it to really work. It becomes campy or goes too far. There are exceptions, I am being very broad, but what happened to Zatanna's assistant from Seven Soldiers, Paul Dini?
What am I saying? There are certain comic book writers who exert and influence, usually simply over a corner of their universe, where they provide a thread through all of the associated books in a given crossover, or even an overall metaplot (this is especially the case in the Lantern-verse). This is not to say we could see this in any work by any writer. Seriously, we're dealing with writers and thus to say that one Gail Simone book reads like Gail Simone is a simple statement. Instead, its about level of influence and that, through the influence, we can see the writer's work even when they are only looming in the background. Bendis and Johns are the best examples, though I'd argue Johns is a better example because Bendis tends to writer all of the Avengers books, his particular region of Marvel.
Johns has such a powerful signature over the Green Lantern universe that you can only call it auteurism. Morrison shakes things up, but we only see remnants of that under other writers. Johns truly has a mark in every book he has a finger in. The last time he didn't when he has enough influence over a single given pocket, was Superman, where he abandoned it for New Krypton and that story felt... jumbled. Tomasi and Bedard must account for Johns' influence on their books, and so we see two signatures at play when Tomasi is holding Guy up as a golden god, but still doing the characteristic Johns violence and sense of nostalgia. GL:EW read very differently prior to War of the Green Lanterns, I may point out. So did GLC. But that's what happens when someone else is writing through other writers.
Are auteurs good for comics? Bad? Well, they aren't common enough to be either. We usually end up without the signature of the other writer except for affiliation and a "universe" (Morrison's Batman) or an individual jealously guards their section (Bendis's Avengers and D'n'A's cosmic stuff). Johns on GL is the clearest, but it makes me wonder what would have happened if DC went through with Sterling Gates's Kid Flash or a Flash Family book while Johns wrote Barry in the main title. I would have been interested in seeing if my theory held water with that. Anyone want to read a book about Mera or the Jackson Hyde Aquaman? Eh? Auteur Aquaman?
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