Executive Meddling/Comic Books

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When higher-ups get involved, sometimes the results aren't so funny...

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• X-Men: The original conclusion for the Dark Phoenix Saga called for Dark Phoenix being psychically lobotomized; however, then-Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter ordered writer Chris Claremont and artist John Byrne to come up with something more drastic as punishment for her crimes, and she was killed off. This is a positive example, as Jean's death is remembered as one of the most poignant and touching moments in all the Marvel Universe.
  • Comic book legend says Claremont's script originally provided proper punishment for Jean Grey's actions; however, when Jean consumed the star for power, John Byrne threw in the planet of plant people that died as a result of the cataclysm. That's why Jim Shooter demanded her death. But they did plan on bringing her back, just not having committed such a horrible crime.
  • It was meddling when writers were forced to kill her off again, even though it had nothing to do with the DPS at that time. They later tried to drop a bus on Jean to make sure she can never come back with "Endsong", but ironically the "final solution" (rumored to be the wholesale destruction of Jean's body) was changed by executive meddling to leave things so that Jean may one day return, assuming editorial changes.
  • Another X-Men example dates from the beginning of the series--Stan Lee wanted to call it "The Mutants," but the bosses said that very few readers would know what a mutant was. Lee's protest that nobody, including him, knew what an X-Man was had no effect.
    • The name change might've been for the best, because Stan Lee was originally going to call them The Merry Mutants, which would've been okay for mid-20th-century, but is completely laughable in this day and age.
  • While on the subject, Chris Claremont returned to the titles in 2000, and since his return he has fallen victim to this trope numerous times. Exiles was re-packaged as New Exiles and Claremont was told he could only use characters he created, or wrote, during his first run on X-Men, as the protagonists. Igor Kordey was replaced as the artist on New Excalibur, while already working on the first issue; nobody informed Claremont, the writer, at the time of the change in artists. During his third, and latest, run on Uncanny X-Men, Claremont had to drop an ongoing plot, namely the formation of a new Hellfire Club, while the story was in full swing. He was told to abandon the story because a different writer at the time professed interest in using the Hellfire Club. Eventually, it turned out to be All Just a Dream, making the forced abandonment of the plot in Uncanny X-Men a jarring example of executive meddling.
    • The polar opposite has occurred with Claremont's X-Men Forever, where Quesada has apparently assured Claremont he can do absolutely anything the title's rating will allow with his characters, starting with rebooting the series to just after X-Men (vol. 2) #3 and killing Magneto and Wolverine permanently -- word of Claremont says they will never, under any circumstances, return in X-Men Forever (indeed, no dead character will come back from same again) -- and having a big reveal that makes the mutant gifts of the X-Men a death curse that will burn them out before they're 50.
  • Another X-Men example, Claremont originally wanted to reveal that Nightcrawler's parents were Mystique and her female lover, Destiny, with Mystique having used her shapeshifting powers to turn into a man and impregnant Destiny. The higher-ups at Marvel wouldn't allow it.
• For a brief period, Joe Quesada at Marvel Comics tried to encourage a "whoever is dead stays dead" policy, in order to combat the increasing perception that character death is meaningless in the medium. It wasn't an editorial mandate as is often mistakenly said (though there probably is some truth that he used the justification not to influence people not to bring back characters he disliked). This policy notably affected several high-profile works for the company: Grant Morrison had to give Emma Frost the diamond mutation to take the place the then-dead Colossus would have played, and Beast played the science-guy role that the then-dead Moira Mac Taggart would have had. Eventually, it was pretty well agreed that this policy tried to close the barn door after the cattle have escaped, and indeed, Joss Whedon, Morrison's successor, quickly brought back Colossus, because he's friggin' Joss Whedon and liked the character.
• Originally, Watchmen would have involved the Charlton Comics superheroes whose rights DC had acquired. They would not permit Alan Moore to do his proposed storyline with the actual Charlton characters, so instead he created Expies of them. Even before The Movie, many more comics readers will have heard of the Watchmen characters than the Charlton originals.
  • Somewhat justified in that Moore wanted to kill off Peacemaker and the Question, whereas DC still had plans for them.
    • Moore himself has said that he agrees with DC's decision, as his story was much more effective as it was written. He was able to do more with his own characters than he could have with the Charlton characters.
• DC Comics executives decided they needed a newer, hipper Green Lantern, so they gave the writer of his series three issues to get rid of the old guy and all related characters. The result was Emerald Twilight, one of the most controversial comics of the Dark Age and a character (Kyle Rayner) who became a Creator's Pet for a good chunk of GL fandom.
  • Emerald Twilight was also a case of meddling. The original storyline was to have made Hal Jordan a Renagade Cop after the Zamorans took over the Corps, but the editors nixed the idea because no one knew who the Zamorans were. The writer quit, they hired a new writer and reused the story title for the storyline we ended up with.
  • Kyle Rayner fans ultimately got theirs, when the makers of the Justice League cartoon omitted Kyle from the show in favor of John Stewart. This move pretty much united the fandoms against John Stewart.
  • The irony of which being that the series introduced Stewart to a much wider audience and lead to the executives at DC reinstating him as a Green Lantern in the comics (he had earlier been stripped of his ring and crippled) and having him replace Kyle on the Justice League. So Kyle ended up not only being completely omitted from the cartoon Justice League, but the comic JLA as well.
• 'SatAM' Sonic The Hedgehog is very different from the games, the titular character being the only perfect match between them. Unfortunately, Sega doesn't quite understand that SatAM is an Alternate Continuity, and so has caused sometimes painful Executive Meddling in the Archie comic based on it to attempt to use it as a merchandising vehicle for the almost-completely unrelated game series.
  • The last issue of the comic's EndGame story arc was intended to be a 40-page extravaganza, with a different ending which left Sally (who was dropped from a tall building by a Freedom Fighter tricked into wearing a Sonic costume and taking out what she thought was one of the gang's mortal enemies) stone dead. However, fan reaction to Sally's fate and Sega's push for using her as a marketing device forced the story to be cut down to the normal 27 pages, and changed Sally's death into a coma. The re-release of the arc in the Super Special anthology rectified most of these problems. Of course, then Sally's Chickification came along, later followed by her becoming a Creator's Pet, both of which may very well be considered a Fate Worse Than Death.
  • In recent years, the layers of Executive Meddling are starting to be peeled away, showing just how screwed up the comic really is. Some notable ones being:
    • Fans complaining that, ever since the Love Dodecahedron involving Sonic and Sally, these two lovebirds don't get back together in the main comic. New writer Ian Flynn not liking the relationship? No, an editorial mandate by Sega refusing to let Sonic have any sort of steady romance.
    • During Ken Penders' run, a storyline involving Eggman and a group of militant Mobians called the Dingoes laid siege to the Echidnas in a devastating war. Unfortunately, it petered out and vanished shortly afterward, leaving readers with No Ending to resolve the issue. Turns out, poor communication between the writing staff and an editor who didn't know what he wanted out of the story rendered the whole thing moot. This, among other similar incidents, are amongst other problems along with Ken getting forcefully "let go".
• The British Sonic book, Sonic the Comic, was brought to cancellation because of Executive Meddling: the publishers did not have faith that the book would continue its popularity, despite selling more than 2000AD at one point, and began decreasing the budget and demanding that there only be one new story per issue, the others being reprints of older stories. Then the comic became 100% reprint, the cover illustrations being just about the only new thing in them, until finally, the comic was axed completely.
  • These publishers operated under the bizarre, nonsensical idea that some comics won't last beyond a certain time despite what all sources and sales figures might say; they even considered cancelling 2000AD, Britain's most popular sci-fi comic and the "birthplace" of Judge Dredd. Fortunately, the computer game company Rebellion bought the title, which continues to this day.
  • Amongst the other comics they did cancel at around the same time was Red Dwarf Smegazine, which was canceled just at the point when a sales spike from the 1993 series might have been expected. It an example of Tropes Are Not Bad, this ended up being the right move, as the 4, 2, and 10 year gaps between each of the next series would likely have killed it off anyways.
  • One of the comics' writers wanted Amy to be a more comical foil with her own flaws to develop upon (essentially an early version of game!Amy) however executives eventually pushed him into making her tougher and tomboyish. In the last arc of the series Nigel was able to mostly write her the way he wanted to, however it came off as almost OOC compared to the previous arcs. To fans this change was a good thing, making her the polar opposite of her other depictions in other series.
• The Spider-Man storyarc "One More Day", in which Spider-Man's entire history for the last twenty years has been Retconned out of existence after a Deal with the Devil, seems to have been written almost entirely on the direction of Editor-In-Chief Joe Quesada for the sole reason of removing Spider-Man's marriage to long-time love interest Mary Jane Watson from continuity, thus prompting a healthy debate (to say the least) amongst fans questioning not only whether this plot development was necessary, but also whether a method of staging it which was less convoluted, ridiculous and both out of character and at odds with the overall tone of the series could have been devised. Writer J. Michael Straczynski agreed with the general idea and had been part of the planning process, but he and Quesada fought fiercely on the execution; when Quesada eventually vetoed him, Straczynski wanted his name out of the credits.
  • To be fair, the end result didn't throw out twenty years of canon: most changes didn't happen For Want of a Nail as it originally seemed, but during a Time Skip. The only actual change to previous canon was that the marriage changed to a very committed relationship -- marriage in all but name. And if Quesada is to be believed, his conflict with Straczynski was because JMS was going ahead with changes that would have altered forty years of Marvel canon. JMS has since moved on to DC and been given free reign to completely rewrite the last 25 years of Wonder Woman continuity.
  • Before One More Day, there was the infamous Clone Saga in 1994. It was initially supposed to be a six-month arc, but after sales were good, Marvel's marketing department forcefully stretched out the story by almost two years, ending in 1997.
    • According to That Other Wiki, it was far more complicated than that. The original plan was nothing like what eventually happened. Unfortunately, it quickly escalated into several meddling executives -- a changing roster of them, too, with some major overhauling of the editorial staff going on the whole way through -- each pulling in their own direction and sometimes changing their minds (in drastic ways, such as going from "make Ben the true Spider-Man and write Peter out forever" to "make Peter the true Spider-Man"), and then you throw in the marketing department, which had more control than the writers at this point (writers' creative control by this point: very little), keeping it going because it was selling well. When you take Executive Meddling Up to Eleven and never, ever have the right hand knowing what the left is doing at any point along the way, you get this perfect storm.
  • One More Day and the Clone Saga are perhaps the textbook examples of Executive Meddling gone wrong on the comics pages; unfortunately for Spider-Man, they weren't the only instances. This three-part essay describes the whole ordeal for those who want a particularly detailed, opinionated history.
  • And apparently One More Day has now extended into the daily newspaper version of Spider-Man as well. Or at least it did, until apparent fan outrage caused them to do an Author's Saving Throw.
  • Recently, "The Real Clone Saga" was written, with the writers telling the story the way they'd wanted to. And it was quite good. (And since then, bringing Ben Reilly Back from the Dead - he didn't die in "The Real Clone Saga" - is at least being discussed.)
  • Another casualty of executive meddling (along with writer issues) was the identity of the Hobgoblin. They did, eventually, reveal the Hobgoblin to be the person who the original writer had intended all along. ( Roderick Kingsley) Of course, recently they wanted a new Hobgoblin...
• Bob Budiansky, original writer of the Marvel Transformers comic book, was continually forced by Hasbro to introduce new characters during his run, causing him to burn out as the quality of the stories took a nosedive. Eventually, a burnt out Budiansky passed the writing duties on to Marvel U.K.'s Transformers writer Simon Furman, who brought to the American title the pseudo-religious/supernatural themes such as Primus, and Unicron being a dark god (the original cartoon version was just something a Mad Scientist apparently whipped up for no discernible reason.)
  • One reason that Furman could introduce the "pseudo-religious" themes were the distinct lack of meddling on the UK title. As long as he didn't directly contradict the US stories, he could write pretty much whatever he wanted. There was one time time early on where Hasbro wanted the UK book to promote the Special Teams when the toys came out in stores, even though the US reprints had not yet reached the story where they were introduced. So Furman wrote a story which basically involves the Autobots looking into the future and seeing these new Transformers in action.
  • Simon Furman later got hit by this. He spent a few years writing a series of epic Transformers stories for IDW publishing that featured Loads and Loads of Characters, as well as interesting new concepts like the Dead Universe and a plausible Decepticon invasion plan that made vehicular disguises relevant to the story. Then, due to falling sales, IDW decided to truncate Furman's twelve-issue Grand Finale into four issues of the Spotlight series (necessitating each chapter focusing on a single character's thoughts in addition to all the action), and a five issue "Maximum Dinobots" series so that they can put their publishing power behind All Hail Megatron. Given the limited page count afforded him, Furman did an admirable job of wrapping up all his far-flung storylines.
    • Falling sales is debatable, while this was Denton J. Tipton's claim, his replacement Andy Schmidt later said that the drop in sales was nowhere as bad as Tipton claimed.
  • In 2010, the Transformers Collector's Club dropped their "Nexus Prime" plotline which had been running for about five years across various continuities. This is because Hasbro themselves have taken charge of stories regarding the Thirteen original Transformers.
  • In another case of Tropes Are Not Bad, the very graphic death scenes in Transformers: Last Stand of the Wreckers were, according to Nick Roche, put in at Hasbro's request, who had apparently grown tired of how easily resurrectable Transformers were starting to be shown and wanted some definitive kills to show that death still meant something in Transformers.
    • That said, according to the trade Springer, Kup, and Perceptor were all going to die in one version. Hasbro vetoed one, IDW another, and the writers wussed out of the last one.
• In the DCU Crisis Crossover Infinite Crisis, Nightwing was very nearly a victim of Executive Meddling, since Editor-in-Chief Dan Didio didn't know much about his character beyond "not Batman or Robin." Eventually he was convinced that a character that had been published consecutively for more than sixty years shouldn't be killed on a whim, so he was spared.
  • Didio is notorious for imbecilic ideas like this, earning him the fan nickname "The Didiot" on the forums. He has other names but there may well be young tropers reading this.
  • The biggest example of this may be that Didio and the editorial staff had complete control over the storyline for Countdown to Final Crisis specifically because Didio hated everything about DC's previous weekly series, 52. Of course, many comic fans liked 52, while Countdown was universally loathed.
    • According to an interview with Mark Waid, Didio declared Countdown to be "52 done right." His tastes obviously differ from the fanbase's.
      • Though it has been said that by 'done right', Didio was referring to the fact that Countdown told the story it was supposed to, while 52 quickly went off in a completely difference direction, hence forcing DC to create a side-miniseries to do what 52 was technically supposed to do (explain the changes that had happened to the DC universe during that one year period). Granted, Didio and the editors backed off that statement and let much of Countdown be erased from continuity because of how loathed it became. Still, it can be argued Didio's frustration over 52 came from knowing that, despite how good a story it was, it wouldn't stop the millions of letters he'd get screaming "Why is Robin's costume different? How did Donna Troy become Wonder Woman? Dammit, DC, you were supposed to TELL US THESE THINGS!!!" (And yes, those letters would have come if not for World War III)
  • What makes this crazier is that, when it doesn't involve controlling storylines, Didio seems to have made quite a few good moves. Yes, he fired Chuck Dixon, but he also hired/retained talented writers like Geoff Johns, Grant Morrison and Gail Simone (and now J. Michael Strazynski). When those writers are left to their own devices, the results are usually positive among the readers.
  • By far the biggest error DiDio made regarding Nightwing was ordering Tom King to have Dick get shot in the head during his Batman run in the late 2010's, have him lose his memory, shave his head, become Ric Grayson for two whole years, and make his living as a taxi driver. The entire story was an absolute train wreck, to the point that everyone started taking shots at the storyline. Very tellingly, shortly after Didio resigned from DC early in 2020, Dick was restored to normal as Nightwing, and the Ric Grayson era has become a frequent target of mockery and insults.
• In the original Batman comics, The Joker started out as a sadistic serial killer; in the first two years he was used he killed close to 30 people. Eventually the editors decided that allowing him to kill so many made Batman look bad -- and not just bad, but incompetent, for not being able to stop him. As a result, for the next twenty years the Joker became a laughing idiot who robbed banks, built wacky gadgets, and pulled harmless pranks. Then in the 1970s Dennis O'Neil revived the character and made him a psychotic murderer again, even more dangerous than he was before.
  • They did and do have a point, admittedly. Batman's inability to permanently stop the Joker while simultaneously fighting gods and demons does make him and the Gotham legal system look bad. There's a thin line to walk.
  • Not mention the Comics Code Authority - perhaps the most Egregious example of Executive Meddling coming into play, which pretty much robbed Joker of any overtly murderous tendencies.
    • It may have been bad for comics but it was better for them than being shut down altogether. The Code was a preemptive action taken by Execs to self police their industry because they knew they were about to be shut down completely thanks to a public outcry led by Wertham and McCarthy. Ultimately, the meddling performed by the execs was a good thing here.
    • An even stronger example is Batman himself. In some early issues of Detective Comics, Batman himself would shoot criminals to death on a regular basis, until DC editorial director Whit Ellsworth asked the writers to tone it down and make it kid-friendly. This sounds incredibly jarring to modern audiences because Thou Shalt Not Kill has been Batman's defining moral principle for so long, rendering this early facet of his character almost unbelievable.
      • • Let's not forget that Batman killed a Russian gangster in those early, pulp fiction days. And I quote, "There is a sickening snap as the Cossack's neck breaks under the mighty pressure of The Batman's foot." The picture is easy enough to find if you do a quick image search on any decent search engine.
          • The Bat-Man's original attitude was "lawbreakers deserve whatever comes their way." In his debut, he threw a thug off a roof to his death and punched the mastermind through a railing into a vat of acid. Not just Batman, either. In Detective Comics #50, when Dick Grayson was about a dozen issues old, Robin throws a murderous jewel thief off of a bell tower.
  • The Killing Joke turns out to be one big subversion: Alan Moore has since gone on record saying that, in hindsight, DC editorial should have reigned him in on crippling Barbara Gordon but didn't. They may have actually gone along with it because they intended to remove Barbara altogether; if one former DC writer is to be believed, Batgirl Special #1 retired Barbara as Batgirl so they could dispose of her entirely in some means like The Killing Joke.
• Cassandra Cain is an irritating example. Her Face Heel Turn was forced by the EiC, which is bad enough, but the story could've been salvaged if the writer of that story bothered to do any research about the character he was about to write at all! After the damage got a band aid it was decided that Cassandra'd get a new mini series of her own. It could've been good, but executives gave the job of writing that mini series to the same writer who flocked up her character to begin with.
  • Which also leads to some serious Fridge Logic: if Batgirl is able to beat Batman in a fight and Tim Drake could defeat Batgirl does that make Robin a better fighter than Batman? Also, how come they chose the one female member of the bat family (who still fights) to turn evil even though she has even less of a reason to than Batman himself?
  • Along those same lines, Gail Simone has confirmed that her "Death Of Oracle" storyline in Birds of Prey was supposed to lead to Cassandra adopting a new identity and joining the team (partly to offset complaints about the Monochrome Casting in the series). She claims she even began writing Cass' debut issue before being told that Cassandra's return would instead be handled in Grant Morrison's Batman Inc. title.
  • Writer Scott Snyder has since mentioned that Cassandra was present in his script for the first issue of the New 52 Batman title, but at the last minute his editors forced him to write her out since canonically, she was still supposed to be living in Hong Kong. He was also barred from using Cassandra and Stephanie Brown in his Night of Owls Bat Family Crossover, making them very notable absentees in an event that involved literally every Bat-book being published at the time except Batwoman.
  • Let's be honest here: this is the "One More Day" of the DCU.
• Most of Dwayne McDuffie's run on Justice League of America. Despite writing what is supposedly DC's flagship title, issues he had to deal with include not being able to use any of the Big Seven, and having to constantly rewrite stories around the plots of other books. In one instance, McDuffie was informed that Hawkgirl was to be killed off in Final Crisis, but at the last second was informed that she wouldn't die after all. The latter news came after a scene reacting to her death was both written and drawn.
  • For the curious, that scene was in issue 31, where Roy Harper and Black Canary are talking about Roy's losing Hawkgirl to Hawkman. The dialogue rework is handled alright, but still inexplicably takes place in a cemetery.
• The entire company of Image Comics is perhaps one of the quintessential examples of why Executive Meddling is not always a bad thing. Image Comics was founded in 1992 by a coalition of former Marvel comic creators, mostly so they could have greater financial and creative control over their work (Marvel's policy at the time was to merchandise the crap out of their characters while only paying artists freelance rates and modest royalties). Now in fairness, the success of Image did lead to a lot of changes in the structure of the comic industry, many of them for the better, and Image itself has changed a lot over the years. On the other hand, the early history of Image Comics in many ways practically personifies all the things modern comic fans despise about the Dark Age of Comics. The company's success only exacerbated the growing popularity of infamous Dark Age comic tropes like Darker and Edgier, the Dark Age of Supernames, and the Nineties Anti-Hero. Many of the more reviled icons of the Dark Age originate from or were associated with Image Comics. And all because someone thought it was a good idea to found a company based entirely on Protection From Editors.
• A Mini Marvels backup feature in an issue of Marvel Adventures jokes that this is what the Skrull invasions of Earth are attempts at -- for the Skrulls, Earth is a popular reality show that they've gained ownership rights to, and now they want to exercise creative control. Unfortunately, Earth has turned out to have rather extreme Protection From Editors.
• The Death of Superman storyline was an indirect result of this. Clark and Lois got engaged in 1991 so 1992's big event was to be their marriage but by that point, Lois and Clark was in development and they wanted the couple to get married at the same time in the TV show and the comics. Now struggling to fill the gap in their storyline, one of the writers, as was often the case during story speculation, joked, "Why don't we just kill him?" -- he was taken seriously, and the rest is history.
• The Muppet Show Comic Book was hit with meddling and an Executive Veto in it's Family Reunion arc, especially on the reintroduction of Skeeter, Scooter's twin sister. Another arc, "Guest Stars" was scrapped by a veto, forcing Family Reunion to be pushed up to fill in the gap; however, the Disney executives had not decided whether to make Skeeter a full cast member, or to bring her in at all, so they told the writers to make the story ambiguous. The arc was framed by two celestial beings, who are NOT Statler and Waldorf, who throw in various characters as a way of livening things up a bit, leaving it open if it was Canon or not.
• Steve Gerber's original idea for Omega the Unknown was about the difficult life of a realistic young man, but Stan Lee insisted he have powers and crossovers with other in-universe superheroes. Eventually, the book was taken away from Gerber entirely, and given to another author who summarily killed the characters off. Then, thirty years later, it was given to yet another author for an update, without so much as informing Gerber.
• Writer/artist Francis Manapul has mentioned that he wanted to work in an appearance from Wally West in his Flash series, but was barred from doing so by editorial.
• Tom King's Batman run in the late 2010's was severely meddled in by Editor in Chief Dan Didio, who infamously ordered that Selina ditch Bruce at the altar after a year of promotion, wrecking the idea Bruce could be with anyone, ordered the death of Alfred Pennyworth, and the above mentioned Ric Grayson saga. The extremely negative reception to the run, in part because of Didio's decisions, led to both King's run, and Didio departing DC early in 2020, to the point all of the decisions have become frequently mocked, even by the characters featured in them.