Rules for Marvel/DC

Let's a set of rules we would want people working in Marvel and/or DC to follow. Everybody can add one rule for each company and one for both of them.

I'll start:

DC:

• His Rogues Gallery aside, Batman cannot defeat super-powered characters withour breaking a sweat, prep time be damned - if he wins jsut because he is Batman, he is not interesting or realistic. Jokes are the exception.

Marvel:

• From now on every new ongoing series is safe from cancellation for first twelve months.

Both:

• You can break the rules if you convinces your editor and if he convince editor-in-chief to allow that.

edited 6th Jan '12 5:12:35 AM by PrimoVictoria

• You shall not bury your imprints.
• You shall not tell readers what they are supposed to like.
• You shall stop resurrecting superheroes. We all know how you comic writers are, you can keep it up with villains but something has to give.
• You shall stop hiring talented writers for the sole purpose of wrapping up your failed projects, if they write good work you shall ask them to stick around and write new material they want.
• You will encourage writers to tell stories they have a passion for telling, you shall cease insistence of stories you want on authors with no motivation for carrying them out. For every Priest Panther their is Guggenheim Blade, Claremot Cyclops and whatever the hell happened to the Punisher before his Max series.
• You shall no longer create knockoffs of the other company's properties, especially you Marvel. No one wants to see another Virtue, Gladiator, Hyperion or Sentry.
• You shall promote your imprints. You shall kick yourselves for not putting Sandman, Swampthing, We 3 or anything else form the line in Mortal Kombat vs DC. You will add properties not connected to the shared universe in Marvel vs Capcom.
• When tempted to fix a problem with a cosmic retcon or grandiose space magic, try to think of a more mundane solution first.

Marvel

• You shall set no more stories of your shared universe in New York.
• You shall apologize for never crossing Transformers over with Conan the Barbarian.
• You shall refrain from placing Thanos at the center of any future cosmic events
• You shall cease your abuse of Wolverine Publicity

DC

• It shall be against company policy to draw any character a reader is supposed to take seriously with their underwear outside of their pants. If the costume even slightly resembles external underwear then it must be revised.
• There is a wide gulf between Superman and Batman. All of you super powered heroes don't need enough power to remain relevant in Superman's presence. Blue Beetle did not need WMDs, Fire did not need intangibility, Flash did not need a lot of things. Do not repeat those mistakes.
• Do not turn your cosmic characters into jobbers. Do not constantly remind us of Spectre's power only to present him like commander Worf. Never again introduce a Darkseid into the mainstream line and have everything walk over him.
• Give the Superman and Batman reboots a rest, they do not need constant adaptations to be running. Spend the money on someone else.

edited 12th Jan '12 12:21:36 PM by Cider

Modified Ura-nage, Torture Rack

This one's for all publishers of super-hero comics: When establishing the cast of a team book, strive to make each character interesting and compelling in and of themselves. If a character can only exist within their team framework or is simply not interesting enough to function on their own, either drop the character or radically rethink them.

Seriously, how many members of the X-Men would be worth the ink unless they had "The Uncanny X-Men" propping them up?

If you absolutely MUST do a reboot of your entire universe; ACTUALLY DO IT! Don't half do it.

For Marvel:

• Stop changing everything up all the time. Let us enjoy a status quo for a while.
• Stop doing so many events and Writing for the Trade. Do more single-issue stories, self-contained ones. Look at what Paul Jenkins did on Peter Parker: Spider-Man. More stuff like that, please.

Weird in a Can (updated M-F)

For DC: No more killing characters in disgusting ways, or just to get rid of them.

For Marvel: No Cosmic Retcons ala One More Day. You do NOT need them.

For both: No story should last more than 3-4 issues.

edited 7th Jan '12 8:53:07 AM by Sijo

For DC: Make sensitivity classes mandatory for all writers, artists, and editors. Do I even have to say why?

For Marvel: making your characters relateable is one thing: making them miserable and/or losers under the guise of making them more relateable is inexcusable. Spiderman is your golden boy, and you haven't been treating him well. Cut that shit out.

edited 7th Jan '12 12:12:39 PM by EnglishMajor

With blood and rage of crimson red ripped from a corpse so freshly dead together with our hellish hate we'll burn you all that is your fate

A few points I'd like to make. First, it's "Spider-Man" (there's been a hyphen there since 1963. You'd think people would've realized it by now.)

Secondly, the One More Day/ Brand New Day era ended in 2010. Dan Slott's "Big Time" arc actually has things going very well for our Mr. Parker. It's a great story, even though Peter has a steady girlfriend, a high-paying job, and led The Avengers into saving New York from one of Doc Ock's plans.

To be fair, the story is about a year old now, so things might have changed since then. (haven't read Spider Island yet, though I really want to.) But it's not fair to say that Marvel hasn't given Peter a break lately. (Also, Steve Ditko, Spidey's co-creator, loved bringing him down. Being the Marvel U's Chew Toy is nothing new for the web-slinger.)

edited 7th Jan '12 7:11:40 PM by DrFurball

Weird in a Can (updated M-F)

Ditko also wanted to remove any drama and problems from Spider-man's life once he goes to the college, because he belived that adults don't have problems.

I never knew that. Interesting. It must've been intended to be a gradual shift if so, since Ditko did about half a year's worth of issues with Peter as a college student, and I didn't notice much difference as far as drama went.

Weird in a Can (updated M-F)

For Marvel:

• Please have some fun with Spider-man for a change. People like Spider-man because, among other things, he's a funny guy.

For DC:

• Please keep Dan Didio away from the mike at cons.
• If you're going to include sex, do it with class. Go back and reread Catwoman and Red Hood. Those should be lessons of how not to do it.

edited 8th Jan '12 4:24:27 PM by PennyDreadful

For all comics. Remember, most of the people you make money off of are long time fans. Why do you feel the constant need to make things "new" and "fresh" all the time? Leave a little consistancy will ya? And even so, getting into comics after so much time is not even that freakin' hard. I did it when I was 11.

edited 10th Jan '12 8:43:53 PM by Scotter4077

This mandate won't work. Not under the current comic book business model, and that business model is not something I see as changeable now. If you allow writers/editors to kill off characters "for real", then you wind up with shock deaths and dropped bridges eventually, and there's nothing to be done about it. While yeah, you could "mandate" certain rules for characters (like, Thou shalt not kill off a character without giving them an awesome sendoff), but that won't solve anything. Bad Writing is still going to be bad writing, and nothing will stop bad writers from giving a character an "awesome" send-off that feels completely shoe-horned and by the numbers just so they can kill that character off.

Then, if you make the rules "any character that's dead must stay dead", then how do you draw the line with that? For example, in 52, Booster Gold was supposed to seem dead but the writers had plans to bring him back all along. The readers won't know this, so it'll be just another "resurrection" to them. And then there's Stephanie Brown—her death was so ill-received that people petitioned to have it reversed, and it finally was. Do you tell those fans to go screw themselves?

I'm just saying that, I can't see any good way to resolve the issue with comic book death. The entire institution is so hosed right now that there's no good fix.

This. And if you're soooooo worried about whether new fans can jump in, how about including a synopsis on the first page, as Marvel often does?

Another one:

DC: The New Teen Titans is one of the most beloved series in the history of your company. You have not treated these characters well in recent years. At. All. Now some of those Titans are in limbo and others were subjected to Character Derailment. Only Nightwing and Cyborg are unscathed. The former is part of the Bat-family and the latter is one of Geoff Johns' new pet characters; otherwise they'd probably have the same treatment.

Fans love the Titans. Crap, there was a Cartoon Network series starring the Titans. Find a way to properly use these characters.

PS: Beast Boy isn't a boy anymore. Give him back his Changeling codename.

edited 11th Jan '12 7:12:34 AM by PennyDreadful

No more Crisis Crossovers. Any given character shall be limited to one solo book, one team book, and occasional crossovers in stuff like Marvel Teamup or The Brave and the Bold.

Books shall only reset to issue #1 if a new person is assuming the role of a Legacy Character.

Every character shall have a master design document. Costume, hairstyle, personality, etc. will be set in stone. Deviation shall result in the firing of the artist and/or writer who wasn't paying attention.

DC shall pay Marvel whatever it takes to have the right to use "Captain Marvel" as the name of a comic book. In turn Marvel will never publish a book called "Captain Marvel" unless it is a continuing series and not a blatant effort to retain the name.

You know that people change hairstyles, right?

If a character walks in and says "I decided to change my hairstyle", I have no problem. It's when Artist A draws the character in Book A using a different hairstyle to that used by Artist B writing for Book B, if the two books are supposed to be occurring in the same time period.

I'm especially reminded of the multiple X-Men books where each book uses a different style of costume, when the books are supposed to parallel each other.

People change hairstyles all the time and don't feel the need to announce it to everybody, scene you describes sounds just unnatural and is treating reader as an idiot - "character must announce she changed her hairstyle, otherwise dumb morons reading this comics wont recognize her" sort of thing.

You're thinking way too much about this. Do you at least understand the basic idea I was trying to convey?

While this isn't a bad idea in general (Deadpool needs one, to be sure) it might interfere with character development and lead to less My Real Daddy situations. For example, if Machine Man had a master design document his personality wouldn't have gotten a complete personality overhaul in Nextwave, which made the character a lot more interesting and popular (heck, he was the only thing I really liked about Brian Reed's Ms Marvel series).

Weird in a Can (updated M-F)

The problem is that often a character's hairstyle is totally dependent on the artist, if there's a crossover it can change several times during one event.

Even aside from that, with Marvel especially, the gap between storylines isn't very long, even if a writer puts something like six months later that's going to be implicitly retconned away. So if hairstyles change every few months in the long that's going to be about a week in comic book time. Storm had that mowhawk for half the 80's, probably less than a year in universe.

In general I don't mind frequent costume changes. The exception is when the you have several designs that are so similar they're probably meant to be the same costume, but it's never been standardized.

Rule: Stop trying to put big gaps between storylines, ie if a storyline lasted six issues then the next one takes place six months later. It should be more like the next week, that's why comic book time is allowed to happen.

edited 11th Jan '12 10:15:49 PM by C0mraid

Am I a good man or a bad man?

There's a difference between costume changes and costume inconsistencies.

Consider that Janet Van Dyne AKA The Wasp is a fashion designer. She pops up in a new costume all the time. Whether or not people comment on this, we know where the costume came from and why she's not wearing last month's model.

But if Wolverine appears in four X-books (a healthy underestimation), then his costume should be identical in all four. Unless they explain why he's wearing a new one.

• Corollary: It shall be against company policy to draw any character the reader is supposed to take seriously clad entirely in their underwear or underwear-like garments.
• A group with the word International in their name shall not consist of more than 40% Americans.
• Mega-crossovers shall not occur more than once every four years.
• The inside cover of each issue shall be devoted to summarising salient elements of the story so far and describing important characters and, if necessary, the overall setting.
• No character shall have more than one solo title. Alternate-universe versions of the same character are considered to be different characters for the purpose of this rule.
• At least once a year, each ongoing series shall print a story which lasts exactly one issue.
• Twice each year, you shall randomly select four comics from the previous four weeks and show them to at least 10 people each who are not comic readers. If more than 40% of responses describe utter incomprehensibility, you shall have a long, hard think about your production system.
• You shall keep track of the number of panels per page each writer and artist produces, reviewed annually. If a creator's average output drops below 4.0 panels per page in a given year, you shall call them up and suggest that they might want to consider a less decompressed approach.

Marvel:

• You shall bring in Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and Grant Morrison to sort out once and for all what the status of Marvelman is.

DC:

• You shall return all rights to Watchmen to Alan Moore and/or Dave Gibbons

Ukrainian Red Cross

For both publishers:

• Not everyone is a die-hard Wolverine or Batman fan. You don't need to saturate the market with them. Thank you.
• Comic book events are only EVENTS if they happen rather infrequently (say, once a year during the summer months). If you keep publishing these things back to back, they aren't events anymore. Cut down on these events. Plan them sparingly or not at all.

edited 12th Jan '12 10:58:03 AM by PennyDreadful

• Retcons shall not contradict established continuity.
• In the event of a reboot, no more than 0.00% of prior continuity shall remain canon in the new continuity.

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