The Impermanence Of Creative Teams

I was thinking today, though not for the first time, about how creative teams at DC or Marvel don't seem to stick with a book as long as they used to. First off, I guess we should discuss whether that's accurate or not. I'm not really well-versed in comic history, so I'm not sure how true that is, but it seems as though it's more common for a writer to stay with a book for one arc, maybe a year, then move to a different title.

For example, Supergirl's on its sixth writer in 30 issues (once this month's issue written by Will Pfeifer comes out, anyway). Fraction and Brubaker stayed on Immortal Iron Fist for 18 and 16 issues, respectively (I'm counting the Annual, and the Green Mist of Death one-shot in those totals). Wolverine's had at least 7 writers in less than 70 issues, and Greg Rucka's responsible for the first 20 of those.

Of course, it's not all short-term runs. Geoff Johns has been on Green Lantern for the entire current run, and I think the same is true of the Palmiotti/Gray writing team on Jonah Hex. Bendis has been on New Avengers and Ultimate Spider-Man the entirety of their existence, Brubaker's been on Captain America for about three years, Ennis has been on Punisher Max for going on 5 years (and wrote a lot of the Punisher Marvel Knights series before that). And of course, there's DeFalco and Spider-Girl. So it's a bit of both, which is probably the way it's been for awhile now (maybe the last decade or so?)

Still, it seems as though there are always a lot of titles in flux, new writers, new artists, so on and so forth, and I've been wondering about why that might be. The frequent artist switching seems to result from there not being enough artists who can do consistently good work every month. But is there a larger trend? I thought of two possible reasons, not original I'm sure, but it's what I've got. One, more writers have this one story in mind they want to do with a character, what they hope will be a defining story arc, and once they've done it , that's it, they're done, next character. I sort of get that, the desire to write the {insert character} story that everyone remembers and hearkens back to. And if you stick around longer, you run the risk of writing a story everyone thinks of as a dud, that winds up overshadowing that earlier story* .

The other possibility I considered was that frequent creative team changes are part of the larger "event-driven comics" time we're presently experiencing. One of the things I recall getting brought up in those month-to-month sales posts that Paul O'Brien and Marc Olivier-Frisch do for the Beat was that under normal circumstances, once retailers find the level a title sells at, it will decline a little bit at a time from there, just due to a person here or there dropping the title each month. Sales can be boosted (in theory) by crossovers, tie-ins to other titles, or creative team changes. At least, temporarily. So maybe frequent changes are a method for getting fans to notice a title, in addition to trying to find a formula that really works for a title's sales.

Under the second possibility, we'd see more consistency on titles (say, a larger percentage of titles having the same creative team 3 or more years) early this decade, before Diassembled, Infinite Crisis or anything like that. I don't know whether it would come out that way, but it would at least be a testable hypothesis, were someone so inclined**.

* Of course, the reverse could also be true, where after a weak start, the writer hits their stride with the later stories. I'm sure that's happened more than a few times.

** Someone other than me.