MY impression these days is that what gets published is pitch driven... a writer says they want to write 'x' book using 'y' character, and the editor 'in control' of that character says yes or no.

IMO, the editor's job is proof reader, quality control, and continuity cop. That's not what happens today, but it should.

Marvel plans out their direction at their regular creative retreats-what usually happens is editorial says we are doing this..how do you guys think we should go about executing it...like we are having the Avengers vs. X-Men, how should we do it...and then the architects and invited creators hammer out the whos and whys and hows. Sometimes that direction editorial puts on their came from a creator pitch, sometimes not. It's editorial driven but creator participation, however once they hammer out the direction, that's the direction the MU will move in until the next creator summit. Individual books can opt in or opt out of the plan in terms of tie ins and cross-overs, but if you opt out you still don't have full freedom as you can't contradict that direction. Not sure how DC works, but Trinity War seemed to go through several iterations of what it was supposed to be before it got published with Johns having to go back and rewrite it several times, Same thing seems to have happened with Forever Evil. Several creators have left suddenly because they pitched, got approved and then someone changed their mind and said they had to change their story, so it seems a lot less organized, and it seems Didio is the one with final say but he may not be in the loop all the time and things that get approved without his say so seem to be what later gets pulled off the table. Morrison had some freedom but his plans for Action in the new52 conflicted with what DC wanted on Superman and the two never quite synched up and both Perez and Morrison eventually left because neither could fully do what they wanted. Morrison had to do a 2 issue origin story int he middle of a storyline to buy time to accommodate some of the changes and the lack of speed of his artist to make those changes. He pretty much gave up on in continuity books for DC because of it and went creator owned  except for Multiversity and outside of continuity projects like Wonder Woman Earth One. Snyder had some input on the direction of Batman when Mike Marts was the editor, but Marts has left DC for Marvel because of the Burbank move and a lot of aspects of Zero Year seem different or altered from a lot of what was said or hinted at in the hype and interviews leading up to it, so not sure if that was because Snyder had his plans altered or altered them himself. However Snyder seems to have bought into the pattern of one event/x-over after another for his books, so he may just be the good little company man moving things in directions editorial wants anyways, so there may not be a lot of corrective editing needed there. 


But yeah it never happened in the past, not like editorial changed the ending of seminal storylines like the Phoenix Saga...oh wait they did, or told Miller he needed to bring Elektra back from the dead because she was too popular to stay dead, or did things like the Clone Saga or the Crossing or forced artist sto make Gotham and the Bat-equipment resemble the depiction in the first Batman movie, or replaced Kirby's head and face drawings of Superman to fit the DC look, or.....


-M

Depends what you mean by literary publisher-if you mean all prose it certainly does happen-hey writer man we need a Buffy novel where X happens-want to write it? We need a Hardy Boys adventure that features X as the antagonist....or write this Star Trek novel which features Spock returniong to Vulcan for another Pon Farr story, those sell well...

ooh hey, you owe us three books, how about another book in series X as the next one, they sell well, but no you can't kill off that supporting character because it draws a lot of people to the books and we may want to spin them off to their own series of novels form you in the future....

it happens in books that are commodities, and mainstream comics are commodities not literary works. Indies, undergrounds, etc. are more akin to the literary publishers you are alluding to, mainstream stuff, not so much. 

And you would be surprised how many writers who may be good technically (story structure, grammar, good ear for dialogue, etc.) have zero originality or ability to come up with plots and ideas that are not hackeneyed or cliched, and how many people who have ideas lack the technical skills and basic grasp of story structure to turn the idea into a story or to write a coherent comprehensible sentence. When I was starting out writing inthe rgp field, I had an editor take me aside on the con floor and tell me basically ideas are worthless. The have no value. Look at this floor. Just about everyone one of them is full of ideas for stories and games. So much so, they are willing to give them away for free if you give them 2 minutes to listen to them. It's all worthless. I can't sell ideas. I sell finished products so I need writers who can produce competent manuscripts who can execute ideas, whether their own or someone else's. Without that manuscript, we have no story, no product and no revenue. Don't come to me with ideas, come to me with manuscripts. A lot of people have ideas and want to have written, very few have what it takes to write or are willing to put the time and effort in to write and write well. Ideas are easy. Writing is hard. You need to decide if you want to be a writer or just another dude with ideas wandering around a con floor..then I showed him the textbook on writing or incoming college freshman I had done and a copy of the 75K word manuscript I had done for another publisher and he gave me an assignment....

Publishing is a business, not an arthouse. No one has complete creative freedom unless they have a proven sales record these days, and even then, they have rules and editorial constraints no matter what the field. Even your literary books will have been given editorial pointers and rewrite suggestions and gone through several back and forth drafts before it sees publication. Farnsworth Wright regularly rejected or sent back manuscripts demanding changes from the likes of Howard, Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, etc. We tend to romanticize these things and not want to look behind the curtain to see what really happens, but the internet age has torn down that curtain, we just refuse to give up the idea of the lone struggling artist producing his art with complete freedom and getting it published and in the hands of adoring masses. Doesn't happen often, and when it does, it's the exception not the rule. 

-M

The sad thing is, the novelization of TV shows is only a tiny TINY fraction of fiction prose, the tiniest of fractions.

Licensed and corporate owned comics is very nearly the entire American industry though. If it weren't for licensed comics how many indy publishers would even exist?

But all of this is after-the-fact reactions to a creative teams work. There is a huge difference between that and the editor, as you say yourself, telling the creative teams at those Marvel retreats what they'll be doing for the next year. The Phoenix Saga, from conception, was all Claremont, Cockrum and Byrne and was only modified by Shooter after what they were doing gained his attention as something of massive consequence in the Marvel universe.

I will say that it seems to me that titles like Daredevil, Hawkeye and Thor: God of Thunder, and I'd assume David's X-Factor, are some of the titles that have little or no editorial mandates; the creators seem more or less left to their own devices, while the Avengers titles are on the opposite end of the spectrum.

I still wholeheartedly agree that editors are overstepping their bounds today. Denny O'Neil stated in a podcast I listened to a few weeks back (I think it was actually from 2009) exactly what wildfire describes as what an editors role should be. Of course, all that goes out the window when certain properties gain the attention of corporate types. Unfortunately the facts, as they stand, are on the side of the controlling editors and suits since sales do go up with every over-hyped event...in the short term. That's the problem; Marvel and DC execs are short-term thinkers in terms of comics sales. Long-term sales stability would happen if they allowed more breathing room for creators and dialed back on the events. Sure, they'd take some lumps in terms of numbers in the short-term, but I have no doubt that quality would improve. History illustrates this. When did Marvel start its slow decline? When Shooter introduced the massive company-wide event structure with Secret Wars. Look at how many classic runs, that are gold mines for Marvel today, existed just prior to that and then compare that to how many have come after.

As Hondobrode points out, the indies are where freedom's at, but more importantly where the creator participation in the financial rewards is at.  Not coincidentally that indy market was taking hold around the time Shooter was doing Secret Wars...and DC was under the Giordano and Khan reign where they were giving creators free reign and improving creator payments, and we see a golden age of runs there just after Shooter's Secret Wars, but under Shooter sales were still up, it's when Shooter left that the decline began. But First, Eclipse, Pacific, Comico, Fantagraphics and soon after Dark Horse were all a'bornin' at that time, giving creators who had vision a place to go when Marvel and DC didn't fit any longer. Marvel also had its Epic imprint in its heyday then too, where creators owned what they created and had all the creative freedom they wanted.

Creators eventually left Marvel not because they didn't have creative freedom but because they din't have a financial stake in what they created. Starlin had complete creative control of Dreadstar under the Epic imprint, but still left for First because it was a better financial opportunity for him. Chaykin left the big 2 to do American Flagg, not because he couldn't get the freedom to do it there, but because he got a better financial deal elsewhere. 

And modern comics have to have short term thinkers now because they are under the corporate paradigm and people lose jobs if they plan for the long term and don't perform in the short term. Long term plans require stability in the regime, under-performing in the short term in the corporate world results in regime changes and new plans being put into place, so that long term plan gets abandoned for something that gets results immediately to create some sort of job security for the new regime. The pace of the world as a whole has increased and long term plans have little place in the current business environment, for good or ill. 

Those golden runs you point usually occurred on sales dogs and ended when they became good sellers, and once they became good sellers, editorial took a stronger hand in them, like with the Phoenix saga, You can do what you want as long as no one is buying it, but as soon as people do buy it, then we are going to make sure it stays viable as a seller and manage it more closely, which means maintaining that status quo and not letting people (like writers) muck around with it and damage the sales.
 
And O'Neil may talk the game, but when he was actually Bat-Editor he was extremely hands on determining the direction of his books and putting teams in place who would follow  his vision, doing the types of stories he wanted and rejecting ideas that didn't fit what he wanted the books to be, and instituting certain design decisions for Gotham and the Bat equipment based on the designs of Anton Furst, so do we assess him by what he says an editor should do, or by what he did while he was an editor, because he did not walk the walk he was talking in that interview....

-M

edited to add-a lot of creators who work for the big 2 now do so for better page rates/up front money, and for the visibility to create a brand with their name. They do creator owned stuff using that brand recognition where they get better financial rewards on the back end. They are going to save their better ideas for their own brand and creator-owned material no matter how much creative freedom they have at the big 2. Their big 2 work is not their opus or legacy, but a means to an end.