My goodness, if I ever write something successful, and forty years afterwards people were to go around insisting that writers of that time must treat that successful something with “respect”, I’d just die. Please, artists of the future, disrespect the bejesus out of me!
The work and comments of Darwyn Cooke have raised an interesting question: Must art be respectful to what has gone before, or should the words “respect” and “art” even be used anywhere near each other? Contra Chris Butcher, I’ve got to agree with Dave Fiore and say heck no, at least not when the “respect” in question entails a slavish devotion to the perceived “aims of the original creations” or to the “artistic intentions” of the original creators.
Whenever any artist is fired up or inspired enough by someone else’s work to do something that comments upon it in any way–that’s real respect. It’s the only kind of respect that matters, and certainly the only kind of respect that will engender more good art. Pure conservative homage-paying is about as far from the art impulse as you can get.
And good golly, “ethics” don’t enter into it! This isn’t a company refusing to hand over an artist’s property, or dicking him out of royalties–this is an artist putting a new spin on an old idea. Nobody has the ethical or moral right to have their creations remain unchallenged or unsullied forever and ever, world without end amen. I’d submit to you that most artists wouldn’t want that right even if it were available to them. A revamp or reexamination alters the original work not one iota. It certainly doesn’t violate the rights of the creator of that original work. Go ahead and paint that moustache on the Mona Lisa–so long as you’re not doing it on the original painting and/or destroying all copies of the original in circulation, you haven’t done a damn thing wrong.
This is not to say that all would-be iconoclasts are geniuses, or that all reverential nostalgia-mongers stink on ice–give me Astro City over Rawhide Kid any day. Pisstakes and cheap cash-in revamps can only get you so far (even aside from the “let’s make them all thugs and perverts!” school of kill-your-idols reactionism, I think we’ve all seen enough slick and soulless Hollywood remakes to know that sometimes the original creator’s intent is, in fact, vastly superior to that of his would-be reinterpreters), while sometimes an original work is rich enough to merit all kinds of fairly straightforward re-exploration. But if we decide that the only appropriate way to build upon or comment on the work of artists past is to mimic what we think were their goals and beliefs, how will we ever get anywhere?
PS: Why is it superhero writers who always get called out for this sort of thing? I haven’t heard anyone condemn, say, the Air Pirates for disrespecting the artistic intentions of Walt Disney (aside from Disney’s legal team, that is). For that matter, I’ve yet to see any bloggers wax outraged about how Alan Moore unethically abused poor Bram Stoker by having old opium-addicted Allan Quartermain slip the high hard one to Mina Harker, or how he disregarded the artistic intentions of Robert Louis Stevenson and H.G. Wells by having Mr. Hyde anally rape the Invisible Man.
PPS: On tangentially related notes, Marc Singer summarizes the denouement of Grant Morrison’s emotionally expansive and intellectually brilliant New X-Men run (you know, that dopey corporate spandex book he slummed on to make a quick buck without saying anything worthwhile), Dave Intermittent has some questions for fans of the non-fantastic, and John Jakala writes, like, the best JLA/Avengers review ever.