Which means either their company evolves into a kind of free-for-all where the published comics are the ones whose authors have managed to grab the highest audience…ORRR they don’t even try to open up to this sort of thing out of the horrid phobia of any and all changes to the horrible way in which they make comics.

But yeah, as someone who just looked in on it a little, it seemed dark and dense. Glad to hear it was also clever.

2) Sturgeon’s Law: 90 percent of everything (in literature) is crap, more or less. And fanfiction takes up 73.48 percent. We’re not talking a massive surge of quality story-telling here.

3) Most fan-fic is sex. Slash fic. Damn Slashers.

4) Nobody is gonna pay me .99 a download for “Scully Is a Highlander”. penly cries:

Brian Michael Bendis put Norman Osborn in charge of America, compared Osborn to Dick Cheney in ways that were intended to be COMPLIMENTS to both Osborn AND Cheney, and flatly stated that Osborn was a superhero “hero” to both Spider-Man and Captain America BECAUSE he was evil.

I no longer discuss it, because I do not like myself when I am that angry.

Marvel’s been moving in that way for a while, though. There’s an essay I’ve been meaning to write about the morality of Marvel superheroes in the post-Quesada era, where every single one of them operates in a gray zone that’s all the more striking if you go back to the Shooter-DeFalco-Harras periods.

I don’t get “Big Brother is your friend” out of it, however, as much as I do a sort of left-wing fantasy of effective organization: with characters like Daisy Johnson or comics-verse Maria Hill, it’s almost explicitly the government as superhero.

Oh they do, although it appears in a roundabout way in the description given by Amazon:

World Licensors have provided Content Guidelines for each World, and your work must follow these Content Guidelines. We strongly encourage you to read the Content Guidelines before you commit the time and effort to write.

Without seeing the actual contract they sign, I would assume that it very clearly says that if the “World Licensor” says “this violates the content guidelines, pull it” Amazon will pull it no questions asked.

Also down in the Content Guidelines they say “no porn” and “no graphic or violent material”, and I’ll lay odds there’s a clause in the contract that the judgment on where those lines get drawn is at Amazon and the “World Licensor”‘s discretion no questions asked.

is there some poor fool who has to review and approve everything?

One thing to keep in mind is the staggering amount of editorial meddling and inconsistancy. Before issue 5 they had to do a timeline rewrite story to eliminate Superman entirely, Editorial was not satisfied with just never referring to him, they had to reboot the timeline and purge him.

later Giffen planned to retell the Legion’s early days in a series called Legionnaires but instead had to integrate them leading to the Batch SW6 Legion, clones/chronal duplicates/whatever of the young Legion.

However the SW6 did lead to one of my favorite moments when the older Legion met the younger, it was literally ‘what would your 15 year old self say to your 30 year old self’.