Tuesday, June 21, 2011

The Donald Rumsfeld of the DC Universe

"Even when I did have strong ideas, they would quickly be watered down or weakened -- sometimes through editorial guidance, sometimes through my own misguided attempts to produce what I imagined DC wanted. I don't know. Maybe if I'd just said ‘Damn it, I want to write these comics the way I wrote Pickle -- slow and meandering and playful and personal, with very little violence or macho posturing and plenty of sitting around discussing the meaning of life!’ -- maybe they'd have been thrilled. Or if I'd written about Batman as the Donald Rumsfeld of the DC Universe, and his ‘war on crime’ as analogous to the ‘war on terror,’ about the need to end drug prohibition, about the way fetishising violence poisons and corrupts lives and societies -- maybe my editors would have said ‘hooray -- at last he's doing what we hired him for!’ [Spurgeon laughs] But because I never had the courage or wherewithal to do that (and because I'd spent so long struggling financially!), I will never know."
(Dec. 30, 2010, Dylan Horracks, The Comics Reporter)

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