It's Easier To Haul It Out Of The Muck, Than To Keep It Shiny

Thought for the day: What's harder for a creative team, to take a so-called "third-tier" character, and make them more widely popular and beloved, or to take the "icon" characters, and keep them widely appealing, while still doing your own thing?

With the front-liners, like Spider-Man or Superman, you have a wider preexisting fanbase, and you have certain expectations of the characters you must meet to keep them buying, thus keeping sales steady. In reality, it seems likely the fans would continue to buy even if the team diverged from what the fans considered the core of the character, if only to complain about that, or hope that things will turn around, but I'm going to set that curious trait aside for now. Still, if you just rehash what's been done before, without at least taking a new slant on it, the fans will get bored and possibly wander off. Plus, it's probably desirable that you attract some new readers (not necessarily people who don't read comics, though that'd be nice, but maybe you write X-Men and you try to draw back some people who'd given up on it in the last few years). You're going to face more scrutiny, and be under more pressure to achieve, and likely have less creative range.

Actually, that last one is probably false, given editors would be the people saying "You can't do that with Character X", and at least at Marvel, editors apparently are unaware they might want to do that periodically. And I really doubt DC tells Grant Morrison "No" very often either, but whatever, moving along.

If you take a lesser known character, you face different challenges. There's still a fanbase present (as every character is somebody's yadda, yadda), but it's smaller, and probably just ecstatic that their beloved hero is getting some spotlight, and so as long as the character's given a measure of respect they'll happily buy it, just to support their fave. But that isn't enough. You've got to figure out some way to draw in people who haven't been interested in the character previously, or haven't heard of them, to get sales to the point where the book can continue. At that point, the creative team is probably dying for the scrutiny the people on the A-listers get, if only because it might get them some attention, maybe some critical praise, which can help convince the Powers That Be to keep the book going (that was the case with Priest's Black Panther, wasn't it? It was so positively reviewed Marvel wouldn't risk the bad pub for cancelling it?). You have - in theory - more creative control, because the bosses probably aren't too worried about what happens with these characters, as long as it doesn't bollox Big Event #287 somehow. Of course, big events can help draw new readers to your book (I'd like to thank Civil War for getting me to buy Cable/Deadpool. Well, that and Mallet and Len's positive reviews. Actually, let's not give CW credit.), but they can also hamstring you, and make it harder to do fun stuff that might convince those tourist readers to stick around after.

I got on this topic thinking about how people don't seem too happy with what Marvel's doing with a lot of their A-list people (the Spider-Mans and Iron Mans, Fantastic Fours, etc.), but with Vaughn on Dr. Strange, and Brubaker's upcoming Iron Fist (I'm going out on a limb and predicting it'll be good), Nicieza's use of all sorts of obscure characters in Thunderbolts and Cable/Deadpool, NextWave, and so on, Marvel actually seems to be doing pretty well with some of the lesser known or less high profile stars.

Responses?