Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Dr. Gym'll's Cultural Rarities When Solicitations of Creative Teams Lie

While this has been a practice in the indsutry since its dawn, I can't be the only one who finds it amusing / digusting / alarming that comic book companies continue to falsely credit certain creators on the covers of its comics in order to make them higher sellers. DC Comics seems to be enjoying this tactic the most lately.

"Talon" is clearly written by James Tynion IV, even though Scott Snyder is credited as co-writer. Sure, Snyder invented the character and Tynion's story leaps out of Snyder's...but he didn't co-write the issue.

Meanwhile, "Vibe" has Geoff Johns name all over it...when its cleary that Johns isn't writing it and likely has the barest involvement in the plotting.

DC, whose cleverness reminds me of AIG or Exxon Mobile, clearly knows there are fans out there who will buy anything with Johns name on it. And Snyder is quickly gaining similar fans.

Sure, it's not the biggest deal in the world...but I felt someone should mention it.

Marvel has done this as well with Bendis, Cobester. Case in point was Jonathan Hickman's "Secret Warriors" series. Bendis was listed as co-writer or plotter or whatever for the first few issues, but in interviews Bendis made it clear that he contributed story notes to it at most. This was, of course, before Hickman was a big name.

I believe Marvel did the same when Ed Brubaker was listed as co-writter/plotter with Matt Fraction before Fraction took over Iron Fist and Uncanny X-Men from him as sole writer.

Not saying its not rampant at Marvel, too! Both good examples. Secret Warriors was *clearly* all Hickman.

They could just list all their top-flight writers and artists on the cover of each issue to ensure maximum sales. Comics by Committee.

It doesn't say too much about their confidence in new talent. There are so many sites reviewing comics now, it's not like you're taking a complete flyer when you buy an unknown name. Still, I suppose the big names are still big draws. It must irk the guys who really wrote the stories, though. I wonder if the big names get paid just for using their name, or if it just comes under their contract - we'll toss your name around as we see fit to increase sales.

Isn't this rampant in academia too? The prof takes credit for a paper when the grad students did all the work. Different motivation, same practice.

I complained before about Batwoman and since JH Williams was the co creator they plastered his name all over the covers ... yet only half (less than half) of the issues were drawn by him. And who knows what he contributed to the plot of the ongoing issues. A v X.

you really have to be careful that's for sure. Most Professors I am involved with seem really generous though.

But in academic publishing it is more about name order. I can't imagine a prof would risk not crediting someone's work.

I wonder what the big names think though ... when a crappy story comes out, or even just lower quality, with their name on it.

They must act more like editors ... skimming to make sure it generally fits the company's decided storyline for the book.

Maybe writing is just changing ... editorial decides the general plots for the books now, and hires people to execute them.

I suppose there's also been quite a bit of the opposite phenomenon of not crediting someone even though they contributing significant ideas to a story, but didn't literally write it, over the years.

And then the writing a story and refusing to be credited for it, like Justine Thyme in Threeboot LSH #50!

[Also a good example of lying solicits, since the solicits for the story bore little resemblance to what was released, and the solicits continued to be wrong *months* after the actual story was released to stores...]

Going further back, it seems that Marvel's old habit of putting "Stan Lee Presents..." on the credits of each of their books was a lot like this. In fact I've seen splashy trailers for movies put something like "Steven Spielberg Presents..." and the like to create a false expectation in the audience.

Yeah, the Stan Lee Presents things was always pretty outrageous. Especially since Stan still lies about how much involvement he had in creating so many things.

Half the fun of Stan Lee is that he's such an egregious caricature of himself. The man has no shame, and, like William Shatner, has lost all sense of the man he is and the eccentric role he's been playing all these years.

Set approves of this.

No, from what I understand, him and J. Haden Blackman definitely co-write on Batwoman.

Very timely for this thread, here is an article about perhaps the most dastardly of all cases in comics history featuring false credit. It, of course, is about the greatest villain in comics history, Bob Kane.

Some would say Stan the Man is the greatest villain Cobie...but I guess there is room for one at both DC and Marvel.

Yeah, Stan for me personally is the worst of the worst. But with Kane you have Bill Finger dying in poverty as a lonely depressed alcoholic and that just feels so wrong.