Gemstone/Authors

[ZeldasTriforce@aol.com]

Hi all!

I've bought every single Disney comic Gemstone has issued so far, from US/WDC 
to the $3 comics and the Take Alongs and Parades. That's probably not a 
financially sound thing for me to do, but I must say, at least I've enjoyed myself 
in the process. :)  Maybe Gemstone will give me a sticker one day like I got 
from Disney Comics when I filled out some survey during the early 90's. ;) 

As far as multiple authors go, it depends on the situation. Most often, 
writers and artists are picked by the company, sometimes with the writer/artists 
having none or almost no contact with each other. I think that way of working, 
keeps the resultant comic from obtaining its full potential. I think that if 
writer/artists know each other, work together fairly closely, the end results 
would turn out better than the usual way. 

And of course, there's always something to be admired about the one man 
working on his comic book/comic strip. Very few people do that. Among comic strips, 
Charles Schulz and Lynn Johnston are the only two that I know of, that have 
done it for any significant amount of time in the past 50 years. Before them, I 
can't really think of any that didn't have an army of assistants at some 
point (there was a woman  from the 1910's-1960's on Toonopedia.com that I read 
about that did all her own work, but I can't remember her name at the moment). I 
know that many of the ones that Don Rosa mentioned, had teams behind them 
(though they may have done the strips by themselves for a time early on in their 
strip's history). That's usually the way with a strip. Get it popular after a 
few years and then hand the job to someone else and get the credit all the same 
(though I realize with Hal Foster, that wasn't necesaarily the case). 

Would a comic strip like Garfield be better if Jim Davis was the one doing 
the work, instead of a dozen people? Maybe, maybe not, but it does seem to me 
that the more people that work on a comic book/strip (especially past the 2-3 
person point) the more 'streamlined' it seems to get. Or maybe diluted is a 
better word for it. It seems like the characters get too stuck into a pattern of 
what their character is, rather than  trying new things. Maybe a single or two 
creator team would be more willing to take chances and try different things 
with a character.

Then again, perhaps there's something in knowing one's limitations. There are 
some writer/artists out there that clearly are way better at one than the 
other. There's a famous Batman artist/writer who would probably do well to stick 
with art rather than writing. So being a writer/artist is only good, if you're 
actually good at both of them (naturally allowing that one maybe be a bit 
better at one than the other). Whatever Don may think of his abilities, he's good 
at both. As for which he's better at, that's opinion, but I'd say he might be 
a tad bit better at art than at writing. Though considering the research he 
puts into the stories and some of the dialogue exchanges between Donald and 
Scrooge, it's hard to really say that he's better at one  than the other.

Derek Smith
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