When Tim Burton came out with Batman in 1989, it was a stunning success that got people excited by comic book properties and films again. There was a pretty significant problem though: changes made in the film adaptation of the character, such as a willingness to kill people and Bruce Wayne being a rich nobody, completely undermined and ignored fifty years of DC Comic history. In the time since, things have improved dramatically, Christopher Nolan rebooting the franchise and bringing the character back to its roots, but the question still remains, why not let comic book writers have more influence on comic book films? Luckily, that change may be about to happen.
Joe Quesada, the outgoing Editor-in-Chief of Marvel Comics, recently had an interview with Comic Book Resources, at the end of which he revealed that the writers of the comics will start to have a much more influential position in dealing with properties outside of comics, including both film and television. Quesada says that we will slowly start seeing names closer affiliated with the ink-and-paper world credited on-screen, citing the work of Brian Bendis, Paul Dini and Men of Action on the new Ultimate Spider-Man animated series. The failure of some superhero movies is not lost on them, and they believe that getting the comic minds out there will help raise chances of success.
"Back in the day, so many of us in the creative community would sit back and watch someone produce a TV show or a movie based on a comic book and see it flop miserably because those people didn't understand what made those characters work. We'd sit there going, 'Why didn't they hire comic book people?' Well, that's what Marvel is doing."
There are good things and bad that could come with this idea. On the positive side, the people who write Iron Man comics are people that know the character intimately and can give great insight to the psychology of the story. On the negative side, having an encyclopedic brain of everything Marvel could easily clutter things and make certain aspects confusing to those that aren't familiar with the greater Marvel universe. Let's hope we get more of the former and less of the latter.
