Posted in: Comics, Recent Updates | Tagged: boom studios, Comics, entertainment, Jeff Stokely, simon spurrier, The Spire

When Comic Creators Are Branded – Si Spurrier Speaks Out

Simon Spurrier's name pops up in comics conversations of such a differing ilk and in such different situations that it's a notable feature of his writing persona to be in many places rather than one. He's worked at Marvel, he's done a massive webcomic for Avatar Press, he's going to be taking over from Alan Moore on his created series Crossed +100. He's had enormous critical success with Six Gun Gorilla. We have even had some rumors on the way about a certain high-profile sci-fi property and Spurrier on Bleeding Cool today. He's given fans a heads up that he'll have projects at Marvel, Avatar, Image, Boom, and others this year.

So, what's his deal? Isn't just following the leads of working in comics good enough? Why doesn't he write just horror, or just superheroes and follow that road as far as he can? The easy answer might be that like several writers I can think of, he prefers creatively to be multi-genre, but actually, it's about more than that, as Spurrier revealed in a recent interview with Newsarama, but then in a longer Tumblr post where he got quite pointed about it. Branding is for some a wonderful thing that helps them get work, and today the buzz word in comics seems to be "brand recognition". But it doesn't work that way for everyone, particularly young or newer writers. There's a point at which you better be sure you want to write the same thing for the rest of your life or consciously break away from what could be a branding trap.

Spurrier says:

A clearly-labelled box is both a very strong and a very brittle position from which to be striking out. If a writer's known for doing A Certain Thing, especially at an early stage, it's really difficult to subsequently demonstrate range.

There are plenty of creators out there who really lean into that bend, by the way. People who become so intrinsically associated with a single tone or a recurring motif that they wind up putting themselves at the heart of the reading experience. It's branding, inadvertent or otherwise. These are people (usually writers) who stand in front of their stories rather than behind them. I think that's a perfectly reasonable course to take, especially in a world so sodden with opportunities for creator/audience engagement, but for my tastes it feels a little like a gilded cage.

To play devil's advocate, readers might react by saying "Boo hoo. What a drag success is", and chalk it up to the complexity of working in comics, but if we, as readers, don't care about the future of comics creators, we're part of a problem that undermines creativity and runs pretty deep when it comes to the Big Two as well. Much of the ownership and work for hire controversy at DC and Marvel stems from people getting stuck either working on characters created by others for which they might never gain a great deal of acknowledgement, or creating new characters who are deemed "derivative" within tight continuity, and then they also do not receive recognition.

[Artwork for new series The Spire from Boom! Studios by Spurrier and Stokely]

What does this have to do with branding? In this example, too, the brand has gotten bigger than the creative force behind it and limits a creator's horizons. Are we, as fans, responsible for this problem? The answer is "Yes",  if we are unwilling to try new things and want to see comic creators demonstrate the same story types over and over again. And I daresay that's not very healthy for readers, either. Life is short. Read more widely.

Spurrier, talking about his upcoming series The Spire at Boom with Six Gun Gorilla collaborator Jeff Stokely, says:

The upshot of it is that I'm determined to focus on writing awesome fucking stories first and foremost, across a horizon-wide spectrum, and consciously avoid repetition. The brand can sort itself out.

He's aware of the branding "cage" and attempting to circumvent it in order to maintain creative freedom. Shouldn't we help creators we're impressed by do the same? How many off the wall or out of left field creative or creator-owned projects have you supported lately that are created by people who you also follow in more mainstream endeavors? If you're like me, you think about it, but rarely make that move. It's too easy to just reach for another project you've liked in the past and hope they keep doing the same-old forever. We don't often think about the treadmill aspect of that for comics creators.

[The Spire variant cover artwork]

Spurrier sets the tone and the example for what quite a few creators I really admire are doing this year in terms of new projects. Matt Kindt, Jeff Lemire, and even Scott Snyder, continue to branch out into multi-publisher projects in many different genres, and more power to them. It's the flip side of the coin for those who are mainly creator-owned in their output, but have started working on projects at the Big Two as well while preserving their freedom. For Spurrier, The Spire is going to play a part in that, as well as other upcoming work. His message is very much "watch this space".

His music analogy below is spot-on, too. We let our musicians experiment wildly, so why don't we allow comic creators the same leeway?

It's time to put away comfortable things and start showing people what I can do. The Progressive Second LP, if you like. Six-Gun Gorilla was perhaps the first step on that path, which over the next year or so will swell to include books at Marvel, BOOM!, Avatar, Image, and elsewhere. All of them very different from each other, but cohesive enough to form a fierce demon-ride of an album.

Here's to lots of experimental series in 2015 and beyond, and I hope I'll motivate myself more to support these endeavors by creators who have brought a lot to my life as a reader. Maybe I can support their journeys more as well as my own.

Hannah Means-Shannon is EIC at Bleeding Cool and @hannahmenzies on Twitter

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