Reacting to Fan Reactions

Originally published March 10, 2000, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1373

I’ve been doing this column for nearly a decade and also having a lousy memory, which naturally presents a danger: I don’t recall whether I’ve covered certain topics or not. So if I have discussed the following, then hopefully I’ll say something new. If I haven’t, then it’s completely new.

Which actually makes me wonder about commercials when they advertise an episode by saying, “An all-new episode.” What’s meant by that? It’s not a rerun? Then why don’t they just say “new”? What’s with the “all?” It particularly annoys me when it’s an episode that’s actually a clip show. You know the type I mean. There’s a framing device of some sort—someone’s looking at a photo album, or one character has amnesia and someone else is filling them in on their life. And there are scenes from other episodes for illustration, which wind up occupying fifty percent or more of screen time. I’ve seen that on Xena more than a few times. So where do they get off calling that an “all-new” episode? Because it’s not. A lot of it’s old.

Am I the only one who worries about these things? Besides Jerry Seinfeld, I mean?

Probably.

God, I need a life.

Mushing on: One of the questions I continually get asked (which leads me to believe that either I didn’t discuss it, or I did but lots of people missed it or didn’t pay attention) is whether I pay attention to critiques and comments from the fans. They’re certainly unavoidable. They’re all over the place, in boards and folders and such.

The answer is, yes, I always pay attention. But how I react to that commentary varies depending upon the circumstances and my mood. Here are the various techniques I’ve used regarding fan comments.

1)               Ignore it.

This doesn’t mean that I didn’t read it or didn’t care about it. What it does mean is that I just kind of shrugged and, in my best Johnny-Depp-as-Ed-Wood attitude, said, “Well, maybe you’ll like the next one better.”

One would think that handling fan response in that way wouldn’t get me into trouble. Think again. There was the instance where a fan posted a scathing review of a Star Trek novel of mine, The Captain’s Daughter (a title that the marketing people came up with and which I hate to this day with a passion. My original title was Demora, the name of Sulu’s daughter.) So I read the review, shrugged, though, “Oh well,” and moved on. I didn’t respond.

Now considering that some people bad-rap me by saying I’m too thin-skinned or to hair-trigger in replying to negative comments, one would think that saying nothing would be playing it safe?

Nope.

A week later, the same poster started a new thread entitled, “Peter David Doesn’t Care About His Fans.” His reason for doing so? Because I didn’t jump in and “defend” my work from his review. Now of course, if I had rebutted his review (don’t get me wrong; I could have) then naturally I would have been assailed by fans stating that I couldn’t handle criticism, and I should have just let it roll off. So it was a lose/lose proposition, which unfortunately happens all too frequently in this day and age.

2)               Adapt a Storyline to Plug a Hole.

Fans can zero in on weaknesses with merciless precision. Like sharks are reputed to do, they can scent blood, zoom in on it and tear the wound. And if I think that they have a valid point, I will do what I can, if I can, to attend to the wound and bandage it.

Case in Point: Young Justice #11. In that issue, the Red Tornado goes before a family court judge in an endeavor to get custody of his adopted daughter, Traya, while his wife is in a coma. But the judge denies it, refusing to accept the Tornado’s status as a sentient being and according him no rights. Basically, the judge was a total, unreasonable hardcase, reducing Traya to tears and having her dragged away by a social worker, shouting for her father… until the Tornado snapped, grabbed the kid and tried to get away with her.

The thing was, at the time that I wrote it, I was in the midst of a court custody struggle regarding my youngest daughter, who was seven at the time. I wrote it right after a day in court that had gone particularly badly for me, and I’d had to endure a scene that was—in many ways—identical to what I had the Tornado going through (although, obviously, I didn’t suddenly kick into my high-wind tornado power and attempt to abscond with her.) Let’s just say that I was subjected to a lot of heartache due to the judge’s ruling, and I had a serious mad on for the legal system in general and judges in particular. So I wrote him in Young Justice as a total creep.

Except that naturally the fans didn’t know or care about whatever agonies were taking over my personal life. All they knew was that they read the issue and the judge didn’t seem remotely realistic. Which he wasn’t; I was flagellating a proxy. Basically, the fans were right and—with the distance of several months, cooled fervor, and subsequent rulings that ran in my favor—I realized I’d done both the fans and the storyline a disservice. There’s been any number of times that I’ve channeled my personal angst into my writing, but this time it got out of control because the emotions were just too raw. Fortunately enough, it was an ongoing storyline, so there was still time to graft in a fix. I wrote a sequence that showed that the judge actually had skeletons in his closet, and was forced into making stiff and unreasonable rulings by another character for manipulative purposes. Not my most brilliant development, but then again, if you put a patch over a hole in a tire, you don’t get a new tire. You just have a tire with a hole that functions better than it did before, which is better than nothing.

So in essence, I screwed up, the fans called me on it, and I did something about it.

3)               Create a story or storyline to fill a need.

When I was writing X-Factor, I made a deliberate decision to avoid writing characterization in the same way that the other X-books did. In those titles, characterization primarily consisted of lengthy, soul-searching, on-point expository declarations of self that possessed no subtext and left as much to the imagination as an Ewan McGregor nude scene. If Storm walked into a room with closed windows, she’d think, “Oh no… the windows… closed… feeling confined… trapped… breathing and heartbeat racing… it’s reminding me of the explosion that occurred when I was a child, burying me in rubble and causing me to lose my parents, resulting in lifelong claustrophobia…” Well, you get the idea.

So I resolved that my guys would talk normally. That I would disdain to use those endless monologues and instead reveal character through dialogue and subtext.

And I did this for close to a year. And the primary negative feedback we got about the book was the perceived flatness to the characters. “There’s no depth to them!” we were told, repeatedly. I was annoyed and puzzled. Because I knew what made every member of the team tick, and that view informed all my handling of them. But none of that was getting through to the readers, because years of pre-chewed character exposition had gotten the readers used to having the characters—not unlike Clarissa–explain it all to them. Because there were no endless woe-is-me, here’s-my-character word balloons, readers felt the team to be superficial.

But I didn’t want to change my writing style. So instead I decided to take one issue, just one, and have the characters do nothing but talk about what was going through their minds. In trying to conceive a circumstance where such an endeavor would seem naturally rather than contrived, I decided to set it in a psychiatrist’s office after a grueling mission. It seemed reasonable. They were a government organization, and it seemed natural that the government would offer/require counseling services after difficult adventures (whether the team needed those services or not.) Naturally the shrink was Doc Samson (why do so many fans write “Sampson?” I don’t understand that.) And that issue, X-Factor #87, became the single most popular issue of my run (aided and abetted, I should note, by an absolutely stellar penciling job by Joe Quesada.). So popular was the issue, in fact, that sometimes I wonder whether I wrote any other issues. And it would not have existed if the fans had not let me know that they felt something was missing from the book.

4)               Do the Opposite.

Fans will frequently try to figure out what’s going to happen next. This can be a tremendously useful guide. If no one comes close to guessing my plans, then I know I’m on the right track. By the same token, if fans do figure out where I’m going with a story, then I may wind up retooling it entirely and take it off in another direction, just to catch them flatfooted.

Which titles have I done that with? That I won’t tell you. After all, why should you get to know which stories you really did have pegged ahead of time?

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705. To the reader who claimed that he had seen, and assessed, the mosaic picture of the Virgin Mary from the Sensations Exhibit based upon a photograph: No one whose exposure to that work was purely through a photo is in a position to make an accurate evaluation. Even the full-color photo in the fancy-shmancy “Sensations” paperback didn’t begin to do it justice. The contrast of the shimmering purity of the mosaic image to the crass sexuality around it is what makes the picture work, and is totally lost in photo reproductions of it. So if the exhibit is in your town, go and support and arts and judge for yourself, in person.)