If you don’t like this column, blame Warren Ellis.

            Apparently the last person on Earth with a computer and Internet access to go to the Warren Ellis Forum, I’ve spent a certain amount of time recently lurking about during the place’s final days.  And this is how, I guess, I ended up on Warren’s Bad Signal mailing list, getting five or six emails a week about whatever’s running through the inside of his head at the moment.  One night, it might be Ellis writing about what he’d do if he could write a James Bond movie.  Nine hours later, a small little piece about music, and winter, and what it’s like to be young in a cold climate.  The next night, it might be hype for a book he likes, or a blog he’s launched, or the sad state of science fiction websites, or just taking the piss, talking about how much more feared Batman might be if he twisted criminal’s nipples off.

            It’s a shitload of fun, like reading a really good blog without even having to point your browser to the site, and it’s a good read, not just because Ellis is a good writer, but because you can glean insight about a lot of things, comics or television or nipples, to name a few, with a few telling observations.  It doesn’t have to be a magnum opus, it doesn’t have to be a scholarly article, it doesn’t have to be a huge-ass screed, it can just be a tiny, telling point, something that no one’s remarked on before, that puts on a slight spin and makes everything feel new—like a jaunty little pop song (believe it or not, this is foreshadowing) — makes everything just a bit brighter.  And there have been more than a few times where I’ve finished a Bad Signal by Ellis and found myself wishing I had a forum of captive readers with whom I could share all my oddball thoughts.

            Which is where you poor bastards come in.

            So, instead of trying to get you to blow Yoo-Hoo out your nose with some new slander about Paul Levitz or Stan Lee, I decided I would, for this month at least, share with you the realization about comic book creators that has been chewing at the inside of my skull for three weeks now:

            Comic book creators are not rock stars.

            It’s a comparison that Grant Morrison and Mark Millar make all the time, and each time they say it, it makes me slightly more nuts.  Sure, I’d like comic book creators to be well-respected, and even idolized, and seduced by nubile groupies, and commanding big money and open-mouthed awe.  Few things would make me happier to see the beginning of “A Hard Day's Night” with Jim Woodring, Robert Crumb, Daniel Clowes and Ringo Starr (hey, some things can’t be improved upon) happily running from hordes of screaming girls while jangly guitars play in the background.  In fact, one of those few things would be to see comic book creators die in extravagantly gruesome ways rather than just hanging around forever, chasing work and banging out shadow-of-their-former-selves licensed property miniseries:  what a world it would be if there was at least some chance that someday they’ll find Joe Casey dead in an expensive hotel room due to an adventure in auto-erotic asphyxiation gone awry.  Or the Dreamwave crew, along with the Udon crew and Jimmy Palmiotti, all taken out in a tragic airplane crash.  Or Peter David choked to death on a bite of sandwich (actually, that last one’s a bad example because the odds are probably currently even money).  It’s very tempting to think this way, you can tell.

            But dammit, comic book creators aren’t rock stars, and I think to use the analogy is to mistake some crucial ways about how the industry works, and what’s expected of comic book creators, and it’s just a lousy comparison that annoys the crap out of me, even if it’s just a way for Millar to tell the world he would like some free drugs and anonymous head now, please and thank you.

            At best, most comic book creators are sports stars without the injuries and the money.  Think about it.  Just as you have sports fans that follow their favorite players, and sports fans that follow their favorite teams, so too do you have comic fans that are either fans of the creators, or fans of the titles.  You’ve got guys who are going to have every issue of X-Men, and you’ve got guys who are going to buy everything Grant Morrison’s done, and you’ve got guys who are both, the guys whose eyes rolled up in their head when it was announced the Scottish shaman was taking on the mutant team.  This is pretty analogous to the way that a sports fan might feel when one of their promising players ends up on their local franchise, far more than anything I can come up with under Millar’s analogy (“Hey, did you read the latest Rolling Stone?  Bono’s been signed to tour with AC/DC this year!  This is even better than when Bob Dylan joined Metallica!”). 

            You get discovered in the minor leagues, you’re invited to play for one of the big teams.  You write Daredevil.  You draw Superman.  You get to ink an Alan Moore book.  And you’ll get used up, hopefully after a long run, and discarded when you stop performing, when the fans stop showing up for the home games.  If you’re lucky, you get a job as a commentator, or a coach or manager, or you end up doing something else to get by, achy joints and recurring headaches and bittersweet memories that tend to run more bitter than sweet.  I don’t see a lot of former rock stars sitting at cons signing autographs for money but I’ve seen that from both sports figures and comic creators.

            And, as I said, that’s at best, because it implies a certain amount of fame, a certain amount of cash, a certain amount of time, no matter how fleeting, in the spotlight.  The sad truth is, a much better analogy is to that of a chef.  Comic book creators are like chefs, and comic licenses are like restaurants.  Batman, if you think about it, is like an Italian restaurant.  You go to it knowing you’re going to get a certain type of meal, and there are various chefs who are better and worse at it.  But just as most people go to an Italian restaurant wanting pasta, most people open a Batman book expecting shadowy roofs, and thugs panicking as an enormous bat shadow slides over the wall, and like that.  You can’t turn around and start cranking out taco plates at your Italian joint, any more than you can have, say, Galactus show up to take on Spider-Man.  And no matter how big the Chef gets, he doesn’t own the restaurant, and most of the money isn’t going in his pocket, just like he’s not the guy paying the rent and buying the food every week.

The comic writers who get the most acclaim are those who make the food the way you want, or figure out a way to make the food taste like you’re having it for the first time, or come up with some crazy cuisine that has all the reviewers going nuts, and get a crowd outside the door on Friday night.  Grant Morrison is the comics equivalent of the guy who started slapping mango salsa on everything.  Mark Millar is the chef who took over at the struggling Authority restaurant, revamped its menu and got hired away by the successful chain that had fallen on hard times, and is now doing the same thing for some of their flagship restaurants.  They’re not, no matter how they would like to portray it otherwise, Mick Jagger or Liam Gallagher or even Adam Ant.  They’re the guys who give you a good meal, and they’re the guys who keep you coming back to your favorite restaurant for more.  Chefs aren’t the guys who get the groupies, and they don’t get the free drugs.  But they do get all the cute waitresses, and they do get to do coke in the backroom with the dishwasher and the busboy, and maybe the more realistic comic creators are in their appraisal of this field in which they work, maybe the more likely we can actually figure out a way to get people to in the seats again,  and have a vibrant neighborhood where you can get the food you want on any corner.  And I’ll take that over a pop song, played on the headphones of a guy sitting alone on the bus not speaking to anyone, almost any day of the week.