Letter scanned from Flash #341
I've been looking through my collection at the letter pages of older books to see how some correspondents would reference various characters. This is the earliest example I can find so far, from someone who was acting like Silver Age Flash Barry Allen is a real person and it's his fault for lacking personality:
Now compared to some examples that may have come later, this happens to be very respectable and the writer does speak good of writer Cary Bates. But even so, I just don't get his claim that Barry is "uninspiring", and why he thinks it's his fault for that, which I think is absurd.
And do some characters really "take on lives of their own"? Not literally, obviously, but still, I don't think even this observation really makes much sense.
What this does serve as an example of, however, is of people who either think it's the character's fault for not living up to their expectations, when it's really the writer who's letting them down with any specific story element, and while Bates was certainly a talented writer at the time he'd first worked in comics for nearly a quarter century, if anybody finds a fault in a story he'd penned, they shouldn't have to feel embarrassed to say they're let down by how he handled things.
And do some characters really "take on lives of their own"? Not literally, obviously, but still, I don't think even this observation really makes much sense.
What this does serve as an example of, however, is of people who either think it's the character's fault for not living up to their expectations, when it's really the writer who's letting them down with any specific story element, and while Bates was certainly a talented writer at the time he'd first worked in comics for nearly a quarter century, if anybody finds a fault in a story he'd penned, they shouldn't have to feel embarrassed to say they're let down by how he handled things.
