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Van: I'd like to start by looking at the early days of MV1, which weren't that long ago, really. I know that my view of the thing is probably a bit different than most people's, because to me, it's a tiny little solo writing project I started that somehow grew far beyond my wildest expectations (and pretty much beyond my control). How do you see its beginnings? Was it a good or a bad idea? Where were the first mistakes made? ;-)
Mark: The way I remember the beginnings of MV1, it went like this: you and Mike finished off your Avengers run and Scott Harris took over. Then someone got the idea to do stories besides Avengers and it took off. It was really something great to be working with those original creative minds. There was unabashed enthusiasm and support. It was a wonderful time and trying to create a shared universe that moved these characters forward was a great creative idea.
As for mistakes, I think our first and biggest mistake was in letting the site grow without check. Anyone who wanted a title got one. The great thing about MV1 is that you were just as likely to find a Cloak and Dagger series as you were a Spider-Man series. But the negative side of that is that we had so many titles so quickly that things got out of hand. People stopped working together or even being aware of everything that was going on. We had no kind of expansion plan and we desperatley needed one. We were too nice. :-)
Van: There was indeed no expansion plan, and the reason was simply that I never dreamed there would be so many people wanting to participate. I was quite shocked when emails started rolling in, day after day, from people asking to write a series. And since I felt they had about as much of a right to do it as I had at the beginning, I rarely said "no". But very quickly the project grew to about forty ongoing titles, and it became impossible for me to "edit" and post all the issues (especially once I realized that some folks wrote much faster, or more often, than I did!)
And a note about editing: I rarely performed any actual "editing" on the MV1 material back then, mainly because I felt that this was an informal project, and that the writers' material should be allowed to stand or fall on its own merits, or lack thereof. I always saw MV1 primarily as a sort of "wish fulfillment" for aspiring comics writers, and I was not going to serve as some sort of dream-crushing, overbearing editor who told them what they could and could not write. Now, as time has gone on, and the site has gotten far more complex (and deep), I do see the need for much greater editorial control, and I hope that in the future MV1 will find someone who can devote the time and energy needed to pulling all the threads together and somehow shaping and controlling the path the project is to follow. (But it won't be me doing the controlling.)
But, Mark-- as you are one of MV1's best known writers and editors-- how do you see the role of an editor/branch editor/eic with MV1 and fanfic in general?
Mark: It depends on the site. With MV1, the underappreciated and misunderstood Branch Editors (of which I will soon be one no longer) really do nothing but post material, give the go-ahead to projects and deal with new writers. They don't edit material. To me, that's the way to go, unless you have someone willing to play editor full-time. Most of the BEs see themselves as writers first and BEs only because there's a need for one. They are people who believe enough in the project to put the extra work in to keep it running, and yet some of the writers want more out of them. It's a shame because it makes people who don't love BEing want to do it even less. Especially since being a BE almost inevitably cuts down on a person's writing time and enthusiasm for writing.
Editors (not BEs) should edit.
Branch Editors (and this is what they do at MV1) should function as a way to keep the engine going forward while allowing everyone to do as close to everything they want within the confines of the greater good of the project.
An EIC should be the one plotting the course, the one making the tough decisions if they need to be made. The danger with an EIC is that writers may simply tell you to bugger off and go somewhere else, so you need an EIC who isn't an egomaniac and writers who are willing to listen to him. But most importantly, you need to have a good understanding of the relationship between an EIC and the BEs. The BEs can't be told what to do because they're doing the bulk of the grunt work. They don't get paid, it's a position that requires more work than thanks and the last thing a BE needs is an Overlord sitting above him telling him "Do this" and "Do that".
Of course, writers leaving isn't exactly a bad thing. There are plenty of excellent fanfic sites out there (Marvel Future Shock, DC Futures, FauxDC among them) so that everyone gets a chance to write. It all depends on what you want out of your site in regards to the size of the project and how together you want the projects to be. Do want to be a Archive House or a shared universe?
Van: And all this time I've figured that the MV1 BEs were fed up with me forbeing almost an absentee EIC. It sounds as if I was doing exactly the right thing! Ha!
It's a good question, though-- archive house or shared universe? It's one we probably should have considered early on, but of course, as I've said, no one really foresaw what was coming in terms of MV1 expansion at the very start. We naturally gravitated toward "shared universe" mainly, I think, because most Marvel fans are, by definition, continuity fans.
My position on continuity is well-known. I like a good story with good and accurate characterization, which generally fits into the greater structure of the particular comics universe. But I'm no continuity Nazi. Place me somewhere in mid-1970s -style Marvel continuity, or roughly halfway between current, extremely restrictive continuity, and the old DC virtual lack thereof.
I feel that in a superhero universe, continuity is virtually impossible to maintain over the long haul, because so much time passes while the characters hardly ever change or grow or experience drastic alterations to their circumstances. After a while it just becomes ridiculous to try to pretend that everything you've seen in a particular series really did happen-- Iron Man was in the Vietnam War, or whatever--but yet the character hasn't changed a bit. To me, that starts making the characters seem *less* real, and more cartoony, as opposed to making them multi-dimensional and more interesting.
In recent years I've become much more enamored with the self-contained story-- but I think such a thing can be done on a very large scale. Here's what I mean: Imagine the Marvel Universe, but with growth and change, and with a definite ending to the main story (or at least to several of the main stories). The characters grow and change and experience things and are altered by those experiences. And the story, at least for some characters, comes to a satisfying conclusion. In this manner, I actually do admire some of what DC's done, in drastically changing their main characters. Sure, it's gotten some fans in an uproar, and I can certainly sympathize-- in one of Marvel's only similar acts, they permanently killed off my second favorite superhero ever, Mar-Vell-- but overall, I think it was a healthy move.
Think of it as the difference between, say, Babylon 5 and Star Trek. Marvel's become more like the Star Trek franchise-- you can't kill anyone important, or drastically alter anything, because it's all too important to the "franchise". I much prefer the B5 way of having a large, multi-character, self-contained universe where things routinely change in drastic ways, and characters learn and grow and develop, and reach a conclusion. Marvel's pretty much stuck in the Trek mold, I'm afraid (as is most any superhero-based universe) and after a while, it just gets a tad old.
Do you ever feel this way? Or is it always fresh for you?
Mark: I like stories with endings and characters that change. I do not like the illusion of change that leaves everything back where it was. One of the things some of us were aiming for back at the beginning was to actually change these characters. And that doesn't just mean kill them. Too many people (pros and fans alike) associate change with death, as if there were no other kind. I think MV1 has done a decent job of moving characters forward, though there are some who are determined to keep everything the same so the characters can be saved "when someone else wants to write them".
Fanfic isn't bound by the constraints of capitalism. We don't have any stockholders to worry about and we don't have to worry about marketing. We can write, we can take these characters to places they've never been. If the readers don't like it, they'll tell us.
Now, granted, you have to do all this within the confines of the *shared* universe. Each writer can not be God, you're beholden to the other writers in some aspects because you're all writing in the same place. It's finding that line, that balance that allows for change and keeps the shared universe cohesive without simply mimicking whatever Marvel or DC is doing.
It's my opinion that if you're going to write fanfic than you've got to do new and different things. That's one of the things that makes Marvel Future Shock and DC Futures so appealing - they're doing something new. Why regurgitate 40 years of Marvel storytelling when you can do something different? That's boring to me as a reader and me as a writer. I only ever dabbled in fanfic because I was around when MV1 started up. I had no real want to write stories about someone else's property, but the chance to really do things with these characters, to let them develop and grow, hooked me in.
But as the months roll on, I find myself liking it less and less. There are projects that excite me still, and I hope I'm always doing something at MV1, but you can dabble in fanfic for so long before you want to go back to writing things that are yours.
But you know that, don't you? You've got to feel more proud of Renaissance than you do with your MV1 writing, don't you?
Van: I agree with your sentiments 100%, Mark. For me, MV1 has allowed the opportunity to have fun with well-known characters, and answer lingering questions from the past of the Marvel Universe. But yes,my work at Renaissance Comics with Bobby Politte was vastly more satisfying overall.
With Renaissance Comics, we built (what we hope to be) multi-dimensional characters from scratch, and plotted out the entire course of their lives and careers and adventures, very loosely, before we ever wrote a word about them in actual stories. We know where they're going, and what shaped who they are, and we know that they have definite major changes ahead, and definite endings. They won't go on forever like Spider-Man or Cap. And while I love characters like Spidey and Cap, after a while, as I said before, that sort of approach grows more cartoony, more static, and eventually stagnant.
So, yes, while there are definitely a couple of moments in my MV1 writing where I feel that I really, to borrow Kurt Busiek's phrase, "knocked it out of the park," in general I would prefer to work in my own universe with characters of my own creation, because I'm not beholden to anyone else to eventually turn over to them a character in virtually the same state I received him. I can "play God" with him, abuse him, lift him up and tear him down, as I see fit. And I think the average reader appreciates that. As you said, it makes for a much more appealing story.
I suppose that's as good a place as any to wrap things up, since we've run rather long here. Let me take a moment to quickly explain what Renaissance Comics is-- it's a shared super hero universe created by Bobby Politte and myself, and we published our first text-based anthology volume back in '97, which completely sold out its limited print run within a month. We've been working on Volume Two ever since then, and it'll be along at some point in the next year, I hope.
You can see a preview story from Volume Two at: http://www.lads.com/~plexiva/rc/blinddate.html
I'll let you have the last word, Mark, if there's anything else?
Mark: Just to say that if everyone who's writing fanfic would also write one completely original series - whether it's part of their respective fanfic universes or on a seperate site, whether it's with all original characters or established characters in a new setting - then the state of fiction on the web would be in much better shape. Let's not regurgitate. Let's create.
--Mark Bousquet and Van Plexico
August, 1999
