Editor's note: This is the follow-up to Look, These Things Aren't Vacuum Cleaners, which ran on November 19.
I've been thinking a lot about
The Shield lately—it having ended its seven-season run recently, joining
The Wire and
The Sopranos in the pantheon of recent television shows that decided to close the door on lengthy runs instead of dragging inexorably toward the end of days when declining ad revenue and a changing cast force networks to come up with a new variety on classic tales like "doctors who have sex with each other" and "cops who have sex with each other" or "lawyers who stand around having 3rd grade ethical discussions before having sex with each other."
Those three shows—whether you liked the way they closed up shop or not—were shows that stuck to their guns, told the stories that the various creators (David Chase, Shawn Ryan & David Simon) wanted to tell, finished them relatively close to when they wanted to, and went off into the sunset like so much Alan Ladd. I liked these shows, I liked them quite a bit—but I'm not here to burn up some words about why, or whether you should. I'm interested in what these shows—specifically, one of these shows—might have to say about comic books.
The Shield was originally created by a guy named Shawn Ryan, who had previously worked as a staff writer on the not-even-mildly-tolerable
Nash Bridges and as a producer on some show I've never even imagined myself watching called
Angel, which I understand is about some guy who used to have to pretend that Sarah Michelle Geller has charisma.
When Ryan went on to create
The Shield, he took on a role that is most commonly referred to as the "showrunner," which is sort of like a producer/writer on steroids. While not the final authority on a television production—that always rests with the money men, often a network executive—a showrunner's role goes pretty far.
The staff of a television show—all the other writers, the hired directors, the actors—are in a position where they are certainly permitted to argue and discuss various propositions with a showrunner, but the decisions, the authority, and the near-final vote is never theirs. For
The Shield, that authority was Ryan's.
He came up with the general arc of each and every season of the show, fought with network executives who struggled to replace his initial casting choices, controlled Hollywood directors like David Mamet, D.J. Caruso & Craig Brewster when they moonlighted on various episodes, and stayed on the set as much as possible to ensure that each and every hour of television that carried his name fit in with the ideas he'd brought other people in to flesh out.
In almost every circumstance that can be imagined, that's how scripted television works—large audiences don't tune into specific episodes of television solely because of a staff writer, or a stunt director, they tune in to a specific television show. (
Law & Order,
C.S.I.,
Grey's Anatomy—some people might know who the various producers and showrunners are, sure, but very few pay attention to who actually wrote the dialog, or who handled the cinematography.)
That, of course, is the way it has to work—with the exception of random heavy lifters like Aaron Sorkin, who make a point of writing as much as is humanly possible of the shows they are involved with, people like Ryan (as well as David Chase and David Simon) hire writers, and give them various lengths of rope in which to play out—but that rope is always attached to something, and the writers are always aware that the rope doesn't belong to them, and can get shortened or changed whether they like it or not.
What's interesting to me about this—and how it comes to comics—is that the approach that
The Shield took worked. Again, it's not about quality: it's about consistency, relative success, and achievement of overall goal.
The Shield won some awards, it won some acclaim, it made FX some money, and—after its continued airing was guaranteed—it told the story that the creator wanted it to tell.
(If you watch the first season, you'll immediately grasp that the season seems to lack the overall sense of long-form serialization that the next six have throughout—that's because neither Ryan nor FX had decided yet how long they'd try to make a show like
The Shield work.)
Super-hero comics used to have something like this, as I've been led to understand. People—editors, usually—would shape the direction of a character's various books, determine who they were going to go after for the various jobs of writing and art details, and then it would be up to them to make sure that the product they received from those teams fit in with what the company was trying to publish.
The problems with that system—problems that still remain, and certainly aren't wholly the fault of editors—included…well, there's no nice way to say it, but pretty much that the hired hands got treated like disposable garbage. If they lost a gig, it wasn't like they had any guarantee that another gig was on the way, if some of their work got changed, it wasn't like they could do anything about it, and if the company went on to make all kinds of ancillary profit that the hands weren't contracted to be included in, they had no leverage to get something back.
Now, times changed, sure—royalties are better dealt with nowadays, the only people who don't know that the system has these kinds of problems figure it out pretty quickly and have a hell of a lot more options now that they can make a living somewhere besides DC & Marvel—but the comics have changed too. Nowadays, they've got a smaller readership that—in many cases—has longer relationships with the characters and comics they appear in than the creators do, and the majority of the profits for the characters comes from their various merchandising and non-comics related appearances.
Meanwhile, the major super-hero comic companies have started pretending that their job is still telling stories and making art, just like all those wacky non-DC/non-Marvel companies. They've started to behave as if the random dudes who they can hire and fire willy-nilly is the business, that super-hero comics are just like
MOME,
From Hell, or
Bone, except they have spandex characters in them. They've started to act like they're in the business of hiring artists, and keeping those artists happy, so that they can all sit around and deliver entertaining art on a monthly-injection fee basis.
But you know what? That's not their job. It's actually pretty simple: it's brand management. It's making sure that Batman, Spidey and the X-Men continue to exist in a vaguely relatable form that can help ensure that both Hollywood and merchandising products remain the lucrative enterprise they currently are.
The thing is that brand management doesn't have to be this ugly. See, if you've got somebody—like
The Shield had with Shawn Ryan—a tightly controlled creative enterprise can actually produce some fantastic art. But that structure has to be built, and it has to be maintained. It has to have someone who is in charge who isn't just there to answer dumb questions and sign checks—that's what you have network executives (or executive editors) for.
If a character—like Batman—has somebody who comes on board the entire line of titles with the same big ideas that a writer like Grant Morrison,
Keith Giffen or Ed Brubaker has, and that person makes sure that the people who handle the scripting/art details are operating on the same wavelength they are, then you might be able to come up with an enterprise that's not only profitable and reliably consistent, but it allows for those under their employ to create art while in the service of hitting specific marks. Those people who work for that editor may have to answer to the corporate dudes in some kind of moneyed capacity, sure—but their job is, at the core, to do the work the overall creative head (the showrunner) has given them to do.
Now, if
The Shield had operated the way the Batman comics do—what would have happened to it? Say that Shawn Ryan only decided to write specific episodes of each season that had to do with his overall idea of a long-ranging "important" story, he'd only vaguely described it to the other writers, and they'd decided to just insert various one-shot stories that didn't match up to the ones surrounding them—characters had sex and then never mentioned it, dead people showed up alive and well with no explanation (just an assumption that the viewer would "figure it out") and each and every episode was directed by directors of varying talent and wildly divergent style, like Yasujiro Ozu for three episodes and Michael Bay for a couple of bookends.
Well, you'd probably have some viewers. But everybody else would just look at that and say "God, what a mess."
It seems to me that you can't get to that point where you can create great art while operating in a controlled environment until you quit pretending that you're in the same business that companies like Picturebox or Image Comics are in—super-hero comics, the ones the big two publish, aren't what people crave when they go looking for art. You stop hiring big name writers and telling them they're free to do whatever they want, and you instead figure out how you get to the point where you've got the people who go into the comic shop every week buying every new issue that has their favorite character in it. It might be fun to cater to the 40,000 of us who want to keep up with Grant Morrison or Paul Dini. But you'd be better off figuring out how you cater to the millions who just like Batman.
Tucker Stone's writing may be found in print in Comic Foundry and online at The Factual Opinion, where he frequently reviews new releases.
This Ship Is Totally Sinking is © Tucker Stone, 2008
