Jean Valjean is Victor Hugo's Mary Sue

[fiskblack]

Obviously, I don't believe the title of this post is a legitimate criticism, but I thought it would be a good example of the overuse of this criticism. In the novel, Les Miserables, Jean Valjean is a reformed thief who devotes his life to charity and piety, and is the central character used by Victor Hugo to make his case for social reforms

Comments

[ext_1781966]

I've read pretty much everything you've done. At first i was, "...seriously?..." when i read about the whole "Who created Lucy?" thing. It kind of sucked of course... Here you have a library of stuff you "get" and really like, only to find this terribly dark thing about it. You think you've found a similar soul in the author, only to realize it might not be so. And from an outside perspective, it is a bit dark you have to admit. Though looking closer, actually reading the comic she came from... I'm at a halfway point between you and your former collaborator. You both agreed you both could use each others characters, with, i'm guessing, zero legal ramifications ever solidified. So even after things went to hell, and even if money's still made on having an (almost) similar looking Lucy, so be it. Breakups, even professional ones, are not always pretty. Likewise, the characters are VERY different from each other. They look similar, but the character design isn't 100% spot-on. Their depth and what I'd say the decisions either would make are very different to me as well. Not only that, but were you expected to add a serious character to what was essentially a very cartoony character, then just erase her from an ongoing story that she's inseparably woven into because you and the original designer fell out? Really, the only criticism people should be having about the whole shebang is your removing him as her initial character designer. He had every right to go on and use Fisk if he wanted, to make money off a story with him in it, which if i'm not mistaken, he also did. If there's just one thing you could do, is to simply add "INITIAL character design by", etc etc. I think a lot of people would respect that. I hate even mentioning the Lucy thing... it's practically ancient history by now.

(Bear with me, this all is relevant to your post.)

Another criticism you are handed is, you get "revenge" on people you don't like by supposedly incorporating them into your comic as douchebags full of FAIL. This is a common thing in many forms of media. It's an author venting. It's an author getting another chance to place how they feel about an event that's taken place into a form that's digestible to others. Even the Fisk your old collaborator was using had been deployed at his end in this same manner... not just a shot in the head, but a clear reference to what was going on with him in your comic. With you and with him, neither is enough to declare either "butthurt"... at least not in any manner more extreme than anywhere else you'd see that in media.

Here's another criticism of you that's retarded to me... when characters start spewing paragraphs of deep, analytical thought. I admit, a 10 year old speaking as if a college professor is odd. But then again, it worked for freaking Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes, didn't it? The alleged "kids" in those spoke at times like they were political speech writers. What people don't get is, this is just a few frames in a black and white comic. Of COURSE a kid usually never speaks in that manner. But, due to time constraints, it's all just delivered at once. It's even more relevant here, because it seems to me at least that you were writing about eras of their lives, wanting to get up to their adult years. I mean, here you're writing about stuff from the early 80s, in the mid-2000s. It's a lot of ground to cover, quickly. Blurting out a tome of text in one comic page also allows more room later for comic pages where words are less important, filled with just humorous events, expressions, sight gags, one-liners. So yeah, if you're getting shot down for that, so should Charles Schultz and Bill Watterson.