Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Comics, dc, elongated man

So Who Killed Ralph Dibny Anyway?

So there has been a little talk of how editorial works with freelancer creators in putting comic books together. You may have read some of it on Bleeding Cool.

A few days ago, Robot6 ran a quote by Mark Waid on tropes and tone in modern superhero comic books. But in the comments, Waid said something even more interesting.He wrote;

Also, to the issue of 'I think Waid wrote the story in which the Elongated Man was "brutally killed.'"–for the record, no, the entire back half of that one sequence (52 Week 42?) was the one sequence in the entire series that was actually written not by any of the 52 writers; I haven't the time or inclination to get into the whole backstory right now, but after handing in numerous last-second rewrites on "Ralph's End," all of which were 180 degrees from what we'd been telling our bosses all along what we were building to and all of which still allowed Ralph to die with, apparently, too much intelligence and dignity, I gave up. I told the editor I couldn't do what was being asked, and the other three 52 writers (to their credit) stood in solidarity with me and wouldn't touch those pages either.

Those sorts of changes are, of course, absolutely the full prerogative of editorial to make. No argument. Their sandbox, etc. If you're freelancing for any company, they can change the work however they please, their right. I just wish our four names weren't on a comic that, in large part, none of us actually wrote.

So… who killed Ralph Dibney? The editor was Michael Siglain, Assistant Editor was Harvey Richards, Associate Editor was Jeanine Schaefer, Paul Levitz was Publisher and Dan DiDio was Executive Editor…

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