I Think I'm Slowly Coming To Hate "User-Edited Content."

Another day, another user-generated comics project. It's an exciting time to be making comics, with companies like DC and Virgin and Planetwide Media falling all over themselves to give me a new set o' tools.

At the same time, some of these companies are pretty obvious about their contempt for writers and artists. Especially writers. Oh, it's one thing for a company to admit that it wants my comics to be part of their intellectual property farm-- DC, Tokyopop and Platinum all more or less admit this freely. I'll play that game if the bennies are good enough.

It's quite another thing to make professional creators into the puppets of the general audience. I've already laid into Myspace/Virgin's Coalition Comix. Now the makers of ReBoot are commissioning five pitches for ReBoot stories and using reader feedback not only to determine which of the five will get made into an online comic and film(!), but how that fifth pitch will develop.

Most writers know that audience feedback can improve the work. But you've got to know when to ignore the audience's short-term wants and listen to the little voice inside you that made you a writer in the first place. Projects like these silence that voice. And that's a disservice, not only to the writer, but to the supposedly empowered readers.