Dorian at Postmodern Barney has some thoughts on the reaction, often negative, to authors from other media breaking into comics. He raises an excellent point about just what tier of the fame barrel these celebrities come from, but I’m not sure I buy his central premise on what the objections are.
I don’t know that there’s anger at the actual authors so much as at the publishers for the credibility grubbing that seems to pervade their marketing. It’s the “comics snag real writer” tinge of their promotions that bothers me, not interlopers from movies or television or prose fiction trying their hands at comics. And if that isn’t the actual thinking behind the hires, Marvel and DC’s press releases often seem… well… pathetically grateful.
And if this trend does, in fact, play off comics’ inferiority complex, as suggested by Paul O’Brien at Ninth Art, I think a certain amount of resistance to the tactic is healthy. If Marvel and DC present themselves as so excited at the arrival of a novelist or screenwriter, if they crow with delight at the snaring of a “real writer” (even if it’s a pose), isn’t there an implicit devaluing of the writers we’ve been enjoying all along? The ones who just write comics?
I agree with Dorian that it is a marketing tactic, ultimately, and probably doesn’t reflect a genuine value system for talent at either of the big two. (Also, Dorian is a comics retailer and interacts with readers a lot more regularly than I do, so there may well be a lot of “who does Meltzer think he is, taking jobs away from comic writers” sentiment out there.) But publishers do market a celebrity novelist who writes comics differently than they do even a celebrity comics writer. And it’s the mixed message of the marketing that I think is repelling some people.
And this doesn’t even get into the issue that Johanna at Cognitive Dissonance has brought up in the past: the skill set required to write a movie or a television show or a novel isn’t necessarily the same as the skill set required to write a comic. Ultimately, I don’t think readers are going to reject good comics based on the resume of the person writing them. (There aren’t enough for fans to have that luxury.) Novelist Greg Rucka is acclaimed for his super-hero and independent work, and screenwriter/television producer Joss Whedon is getting raves for Astonishing X-Men. I really think it’s the marketing that people find off-putting, not the incursion itself.