chastmastr asked:

Am I the only person who believes you when you say things? For that matter, am I the only person who believes creators in general when they say things in interviews? With certain of my fellow fans who post on the net, I get the frustrating sense that they think that everything that's said about why stories are written the way they are, characters are changed, etc. is really for some hidden motive and the people who create the stories they read are all lying liars from Liar-Land. it vexes me.

brevoortformspring answered:

There is a tendency among certain fans to view the creators of the comics like the characters in the comics—in other words, to characterize them simply, based on your own liking of their work. So complex human beings become viewed as trading cards, and are either “super heroes” or “super villains” depending on the argument of the day. If there’s say, a Chris Claremont vs John Byrne disagreement of some kind, then one guy must be absolutely right and the other must be absolutely wrong—and often, this has to do with which guy’s work you prefer, and so which viewpoint you want to see be “triumphant.”

But the fact of the matter is that there is a degree of nuance to almost every situation that you’re likely to hear about—nothing is quite as simple as Fantastic Four vs Doctor Doom where everybody sits neatly in their box. Comics are also a collaborative medium, which means that there are going to be differences of opinion on almost any subject you could name. And those disagreements are often not vitriolic. But it’s easier for readers who are at a distance to view them that way—because to most of you, we are all just names on a credits page rather than human beings, with no greater sense of reality than Magneto or Iron Man.

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